I Know All The Best People: pet peeves about recommendations pages
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|---|---|
| Title: | I Know All The Best People: pet peeves about recommendations pages |
| Creator: | Destina Fortunato |
| Date(s): | June 2001 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | multi |
| Topic: | fic discussion, fic readers |
| External Links: | I know all the best people, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
I Know All The Best People: pet peeves about recommendations pages is an essay by Destina Fortunato.
Main Discussion Points
See the essay itself for much expansion on these points.
1. Lack of integrity. For instance, recommending a story because you are friends with the author, or want to kiss their ass, and then removing said recommendation when that person pisses you off or falls from grace.
2. People who recommend only their cronies, friends, idols, writing partners, or betas.
3. Being afraid to recommend a story for fear others will think you suck for liking it.
4. Feeling that only perfect stories can be recommended.
5. Discounting all of a writer's work based upon their earliest pieces.
6. Deciding not to recommend a particular writer or story because they are "over-recommended".
7. Disclaiming recs by saying the reader may hate our choices.
8. "The last thing the world needs is another recs page, but..."
Excerpt
I love well-constructed recommendations pages. When I've fallen behind in my reading, I head straight for the places I know I can find sturdy, dependable recs, and I start clicking links. A good recs page is like an oasis in the desert. The ideal recs page, for me, is a diverse collection of stories and authors, with some idea of what each story is about, but no direct plot spoilers. Pages such as these are rare and wonderful, perfect pearls in a sea of muck.Whose pages are like this, you ask? Why, for the mother of all recs pages, go see torch. She reads and recs a variety of fandoms, slash and gen, comedy and drama. She doesn't play favorites. She recs what she enjoys, she does it gently and intelligently, and that's the bottom line. And her recommendations page is legend. Another recs page I can't say enough good things about is Anna's. Diversity is key here also: new, old, little-known, flawed, and everything in between, and she articulates the positives and not-so-positives about everything she recs. And she's not afraid to call it like it is: kink, button-fic, guilty pleasure, whatever.
Now let's talk about muck. What are my issues with recommendations pages? Ah, this is a lovely collection of hypocritical and self-indulgent irritations. It sometimes depends on the time of day or the cycle of the moon, in fact, as to whether or not these things bother me enormously, or not at all. But by and large, these are the things that make me write mental hate mail. Have I done some of these things? Yep. Do the people whose recs pages I adore do them? Most likely. The beauty of this list is, we all fall victim to these frailties, sometimes by choice. Recognizing these things, particularly if we do them unconsciously, helps remove their power to inadvertently overtake your recs page.