Compare and contrast.

[randomness]

Thought for the late night, partly inspired by a face-to-face comment by rmd about gay regency romances mostly being written by and read by women, and partly from a post by digitalemur called Fun with YAOI, or things I come across at work:

Is there any similarity in this kind of man-to-man fiction mostly created and read by women to the girl-on-girl photosets mostly being photographed by and viewed by men?

Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi has a useful overview of the yaoi phenomenon.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

My best friend and I discussed this not long ago and he said that when he first heard of the whole slash phenomenon, he checked it out and found that it all sucked. I think this is an over-generalization and continue to mean to dig up some of the pieces I've enjoyed and see if he has that reaction to things I think are well-written, but since everything I've read in slash is within particular fandoms I like that don't interest him, it's a bit challenging.

[dpolicar]

Well, to be fair, to roughly a second approximation all fanfic sucks... more generally, all "self-published" writing sucks.

[marith.livejournal.com]

To a second approximation *everything* sucks. Sturgeon's Law applies to published and non-published writing alike.

Published writing has more filters on it, so the truly dreadful stuff is more likely to get rejected, it's true. But the 10% of fanfic that actively doesn't suck can be as good as a good published short story - it's just harder to find.