Yes, it does make sense to me. I think you and I might be on different (but adjacent?) points of a continuum that xparrot is a little farther along. I DO actually really like behind-the-scenes things and don't have too much trouble with the double-vision thing you're talking about in most cases -- though I am aware of it -- but it's an "up to a point" thing for me, and this is why I can only handle so much negative discussion/dissection of things I'm really into. I think my tolerance for it is probably higher than yours just based on how I relate to things like Iron Fist, but there is definitely a NOPE, TOO MUCH, LOSING THE SQUEE point for me that might hit a bit sooner than it does for xparrot.
I think the way you describe fanfic, that the craft aspect doesn't interfere with the idealized version, is actually somewhat more like how profic/movies/TV work for me, but there still IS a tipover point where it's too much craft, not enough idealized/fictional reality. I also relate to my own work that way. I can handle analyzing/editing my own craft up to a point, but I do hit a point where it's just like "nope, I have reached the "good enough" point beyond which I'm going to start destroying my own belief in the fictional reality of my world, NOPING OUT NOW." XD
And fwiw, it's taken me a lot of thinking and analyzing and accidentally crossing the line to figure out where that nope-out point actually is for me. I shall now tell you a tragic story of a younger me circa 2015. XD I made a conscious decision to quit writing in early 2015, and genuinely might have quit for good if not for rachelmanija getting me into the Zoe Chant project. And what made me quit writing was rereading my old SGA stories, not because I thought they were bad, but because I thought they were good! Look, the general consensus in fandom these days, as far as I can tell, is that SGA is terribly written. And I look back sometimes on me circa Jan. 2015, rereading and rereading my SGA fic and trying as hard as I could to find the terrible in it, and crying my eyes out -- like, literally sobbing for days -- because I couldn't find it, and I thought that made me unfit to be a writer because I literally did not have the discernment to figure out why what I wrote was so terrible - because I still really liked it! And this resulted in me trying and trying to redefine myself because when it came right down to it, I'd always thought of myself as "writer" and if I wasn't good enough (to be fair, I'd just spent the last five-ish years working my ass off to publish a short story in a pro market and/or get agented and had been crashing and burning since 2009, so at that point I had reasons to think I wasn't any good) - but if I wasn't a writer, I literally didn't know what I was.
The eventual tl;dr is that I'm making six figures off my romance writing now, so I was wrong; I just hadn't found the right outlet for my writing to be, all of a sudden, incredibly commercial. And the thing I really should've also considered then (but didn't, at the time, because I was hung up on objective concepts of good vs. bad writing) is that it's incredibly difficult for a show to go for even two or three seasons now, let alone five, so latching onto a five-season show as a source of writing inspiration is not actually a bad move, no matter what other people say about its objective quality. I mean, at this point I kinda just want to turn to every person who scoffs at "50 Shades of Grey" and thinks they have nothing to learn from it, take them gently by the shoulders, and say, "If this is terrible and you know how to do better, then go out there and make even more money than it did. Come back and tell me all about how bad it is after you've done that." Easy, right?
..... Well, no. Of course not. (If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. AS THEY SAY.)
The thing is, yeah, I analyze craft. I do it all the time. But you can also do it too much, if you lose sight of what the craft is trying to convey, and the fact that it is actually doing it well. I think people can get really hung up on the details of objective writing/acting/fx quality and lose sight of "does it do what it set out to do" which, you know what? Sometimes shitty porn that just gets you off is much better for that purpose than well-written porn. Sometimes relatively clumsy writing that is just trying to punch you in the feels has a much more effective punch than something with better writing. And if you get sidetracked onto detailing the errors of its writing, you get lost in a "can't see the forest for the trees" kind of mentality, and lose sight of what it did most effectively in the first place, which was grab you by the neck with feels and drag you kicking and screaming into FEELS COUNTRY. And that is genuinely good writing! It's not the kind that wins Pulitzer prizes, but it is also something that a lot of Pulitzer-winning writers literally couldn't do if their lives depended on it.
no subject
I think the way you describe fanfic, that the craft aspect doesn't interfere with the idealized version, is actually somewhat more like how profic/movies/TV work for me, but there still IS a tipover point where it's too much craft, not enough idealized/fictional reality. I also relate to my own work that way. I can handle analyzing/editing my own craft up to a point, but I do hit a point where it's just like "nope, I have reached the "good enough" point beyond which I'm going to start destroying my own belief in the fictional reality of my world, NOPING OUT NOW." XD
And fwiw, it's taken me a lot of thinking and analyzing and accidentally crossing the line to figure out where that nope-out point actually is for me. I shall now tell you a tragic story of a younger me circa 2015. XD I made a conscious decision to quit writing in early 2015, and genuinely might have quit for good if not for
The eventual tl;dr is that I'm making six figures off my romance writing now, so I was wrong; I just hadn't found the right outlet for my writing to be, all of a sudden, incredibly commercial. And the thing I really should've also considered then (but didn't, at the time, because I was hung up on objective concepts of good vs. bad writing) is that it's incredibly difficult for a show to go for even two or three seasons now, let alone five, so latching onto a five-season show as a source of writing inspiration is not actually a bad move, no matter what other people say about its objective quality. I mean, at this point I kinda just want to turn to every person who scoffs at "50 Shades of Grey" and thinks they have nothing to learn from it, take them gently by the shoulders, and say, "If this is terrible and you know how to do better, then go out there and make even more money than it did. Come back and tell me all about how bad it is after you've done that." Easy, right?
..... Well, no. Of course not. (If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. AS THEY SAY.)
The thing is, yeah, I analyze craft. I do it all the time. But you can also do it too much, if you lose sight of what the craft is trying to convey, and the fact that it is actually doing it well. I think people can get really hung up on the details of objective writing/acting/fx quality and lose sight of "does it do what it set out to do" which, you know what? Sometimes shitty porn that just gets you off is much better for that purpose than well-written porn. Sometimes relatively clumsy writing that is just trying to punch you in the feels has a much more effective punch than something with better writing. And if you get sidetracked onto detailing the errors of its writing, you get lost in a "can't see the forest for the trees" kind of mentality, and lose sight of what it did most effectively in the first place, which was grab you by the neck with feels and drag you kicking and screaming into FEELS COUNTRY. And that is genuinely good writing! It's not the kind that wins Pulitzer prizes, but it is also something that a lot of Pulitzer-winning writers literally couldn't do if their lives depended on it.