This. I'd read his Harry/Gabrielle story around 6 years ago, I think, and that was the only story with this pairing I could tolerate at that time. However, all his other stories had too much angst and romance for my taste.

 

Your post highlights something that's bothered me about DLP over the last few months. It's the way we call so much "Bad." But, I think we mean very different things by the one term.

Many call Jeconias bad, when what is meant is that there's nothing technically wrong with him, but he just hasn't progressed and writes what many here don't like because they've seen it numerous times over.

And yet, many call a fic with bad grammar and little characterization "bad" without any more definitive separation from the above. But they are at vastly different levels.

Don't know if this post is really trying to say anything, or if it's just a self-awareness thing that I just realized, but at least it's helped me see the difference between bad and bad.

 

Jeconais is BAD. Not grammatically, but in every other way. Just because he writes like an average author doesn't mean that average is good. The average fanfic is really, really bad in at least one way. In Jeconais' case he is a horrible story teller, he is the James Patterson of fan fiction, a title he stole from Kinsfire. Its been stated previously but he found a formula that worked in '04, realized that he could get a shit ton of reviews by writing a fairy tale and bashing everything about Hogwarts, then copied that formula a half dozen more times. And even though every story is the same, it still takes him roughly four months to shit out a chapter.

As for the point of your post I tend to think that the average DLPer, myself included, has become disenchanted w/ everything HP.

 

I wouldn't say Jeconais is bad as a fanfiction writer, but that his work is bland and static, particularly nowadays. Our collective standards have evolved to where we don't tolerate this style anymore. I remember years ago when his latest "castle in the sky" fic (Happily Ever After, if I recall right, though I don't care to look it up) was eagerly anticipated on DLP, a few of us (myself included, though nonjon was probably the biggest Jeconais fanboy at the time) holding a torch, hoping he'd come up with something transcendent and transformational, now that he's got a couple million words and many completed novels under his belt. Then he doubled down on the formula, turning it quickly into a trainwreck.

My beef with Jeconais as a writer is that I'm sick to death of his formula, one where Harry overcomes all major obstacles to success in the first 25k words, then spends the next 250k words doing the whole "Harry as cool dude, his love interest(s) as unattainably perfect females, enemies as cartoonish idiots" routine as the story marches to its foregone conclusion. It's fluffy pablum that risks nothing and gains little by the telling.

His quality of execution let him coast back in 2004-2007, when there wasn't all that much fanfiction of quality to read, but it doesn't now, as we're a community a whole lot more discerning and less tolerant of bullshit.

*As a person, Tim Joy always struck me as a decent sort. I'd buy him a pint if I met him in a bar. And not to get into his pants.

 

Aren't everyone's standards at DLP just unreasonably high regardless?

It's the nature of FF. We could be reading actual published fiction, so we get annoyed when we opt for FF and it's below that standard.

That's me anyway. I could be grossly generalizing.

 

They're high, but that's hardly unreasonable.

 

I'm sure there is plenty of stuff in the archive from before 2009 that simply wouldn't past muster now-a-days.

 

Definately. It makes the archive almost worthless for actually finding good stories. Someone should really clean that up.

 

You will end up thrashing almost every fic before 2007. I doubt even a fic like Bungle would make it into the library today , given its huge number of cliches and OOC characters.

The only pre-2006 fanfic that still remains epic is The Phoenix and The Serpent by Sanction.

The Hero trilogy is still pretty good as well.

 

This is a bad thing because?
I want to use the library to find good fics I want to read. Not stories people read back in 2007 but are terrible.

 

A reader new to fanfiction would still love that stuff. Cliches are used for a reason , and its only after reading the same shit a million times that people start avoiding them like the plague.

Fics like The Reign of Power and The Awakening Power are still of very good quality and deserve to be in the library, they are just not suited to someone who has been reading fanfiction for years.

 

The problem with a lot of them is that they were the fics that started clichés, so while they were new and original when they came out the myriad of copycat fics jaded us until we could no longer find enjoyment in the trope itself.

 

One thing is to understand that these fics were good at the time they were put into the library. No one should pretend otherwise. These are fanfics, not classics by Dumas Pere. Of course, if someone has the patience and time, one could probably go and list each trope a specific story contains. That would probably solve both problems. We'd keep the stories and have warings for people who don't appreciate specific tropes.

 

OOCness, to a point, is something you are simply required to tolerate in fanfiction, simply because so much of fanfiction is based on the premise that so and so does something different or follows a different path, or is thrust into a different situation and such.

Now of course, when OOC behavior outside of the premise is both laughable and makes little sense, there are some issues, and some strong issues when this behavior forms keystones of the story. Like for example, Albus Dumbledore being explicitly a manipulative BASTARD. Manipulative yes, hell yes is he manipulative, and for good reason, and in many ways acts simply from his own personal flaws. Yes Albus Dumbledore isn't perfect, but to think that most if not all of his manipulations and withholding information were of malefic intent is foolish.

Unless the fic is basically an Alt Verse Fic that alternates extremely early on, and describes the world that Tom Riddle grows up in with Dumbledore and Grindelwald running it.

Now, an oddity of these is A Well-Groomed Mind. A simple explanation of that is the old rule of Quantum Mechanics, which means to observe something is to change it, and its possible that whatever changes occurred were unintentional and possibly unconsciously done. Which would mean everytime Harry felt himself being Xray'd, Dumbledore was performing Legilimency. Which is quite likely in and of itself. But that another subject entirely.

 

You think wrong.

HP itself shall live on.

It is things like Canon Rehash and stupid Fanon Cliches that need to be purged from existence.

 

Came across another reincarnation of "Knowledge is Power" this morning and one thing that always pissed me off was how he just made Harry two years older and made the setting modern day Britain and since "Knowledge is Power" was so popular it spawned who whole bunch of authors who copied that idea. Was the author really motivated enough to write nearly 300k words but lazy enough to not want to challenge himself at all?

 

You're pissed of the original made him two years older, or that everyone is copying it?

 

Both. Making Harry 2 years older is a way to make him friends with Cedric and old enough to date Fleur (or Tonks/Bella/Narcissa) without having to worry about the age issue. Other authors ( like Z-Bond) have since used this strategy for any number of reasons.

 

There were plenty of things wrong with that story.

Making Harry two years older so a relationship with Fluer would be more realistic was not one of them.