~~ art, craft, crap.

Though I wind up enjoying reading (and writing!) crappy stuff often enough-- sometimes it seems like constantly-- I think my critical abilities are somewhat dissociated from that. Sure, I can find it entertaining, but the point is that I still realize it's basically worthless as far as real artistic merit goes, and I believe that's not an entirely subjective opinion, either. And I'm not even going to get into whether you can attach the term 'artistic merit' to fanfiction, one because that's a whole 'nother can of worms and two because I think that's self-evident, seeing as you can get away with attaching the term 'artistic merit' to toilet-paper commercials.

Maybe I'm just tired of almost all fic discussion always coming down to "this worked for me because..." (the 'because' being a rare bonus, mind you) or the opposite, all centering around what that particular person looks for in a fic. And yeah, I realize I get trapped in this mindset also, and most of the time I just ramble on about stuff I like the most anyway because I'm lazy and don't want to think-- but I don't mean to claim I'm being -serious-. Most of what I say about specific stories is me goofing off, really; perhaps this is a major misunderstanding people have about me, I don't know.

I don't think literary critique has to be subjective in the sense that it's entirely idiosyncratic. The merits of a piece of writing can be broken down into categories and various areas of strength and weakness, which can then be compared to other pieces that fit into those categories on a single scale. For instance, you can't judge a biography by the exact same criteria as a fantasy story, yet some markers of quality remain constant.

That said, I think it's important to add that reccing fics or their projected popularity with any one person or group of people isn't directly connected to their critical standing or supposed merit of any kind; that is to say, you couldn't honestly tell me I'll enjoy something just because a) you enjoyed it; b) you think it has great artistic merit, not unless you know me and what I like. However, I might read it and agree or disagree on some specific critical accessment that was made (for fanfic, this is both easiest and hardest to do with the question of 'is it in-character' for various reasons I won't go into).

( So I try to get specific and figure out some critique criteria... )