You're all quoting the wrong bible passage, people.

Living with my parents at 31!

Another vote for not ridiculous.

"Pick and choose who you tell emotional things" is actually pretty excellent advice I'd dole out without hesitation. (Caveat - as I mentionned in a comment above, really important people in your life might sometimes need to know certain things whether you think they can handle them or not, but otherwise…)

I was actually about to write something similiar - "Any utterance in conventional social interaction should be expected to be read as a request to do something about it and will cause pointless frustration if there's nothing to be done. So utterances that are purely intended for the level of self-expression are better…

Good luck!

One of the best parts of Atonement dealt with the same material. People see it as just another one of this stuffy period dramas about British poshos repressing their feelings, but I mostly remember it for the Dunkirk scenes. The book too. There was a bit of a controversy about McEwan maybe cribbing too much from the…

Well, in most versions of the tale, Athur tries pulling out the sword on a whim. Much tends to be made of his shock when it actually works. Even the eager heroes usually don't start out terribly pro-active about their quest. They tend to more or less stumble into it - some are more eager about it than others, but…

Thor's hammer, Arthur's sword, etc., etc. It's really Standard Operating Procedure.

He's more the "my precious trash-baby"-type. Some people like a fixer-upper.

Nah, it's always pretty crude. Being so super-special that the magical entity only reacts to you/reacts to you in a special manner is the bread and butter of all Chosen-One-plots. Thor's hammer anyone? Tale as old as time.

Complaining about Mary Sues in _Star Wars_? Really? Adolescent wish fulfillment is the whole point of this kind of thing. And always has been.

Yeah, I like lots of art from people who are more morally questionable than Adams. (Eliot, Larkin are two big ones for me as well; would recite large chunks of their work at the slightest provocation, but probably not advertise that fact on an OK-Cupid profile, since I strongly feel that should rightfully disqualify…

Oh, I bet he'd resist that association, because I 'm sure he thinks he's way too original to be part of a pattern. But they're all so very special, aren't they?

Absolutely. My additional point is only that it's a matter of traditional publishing vs self-publishing, not necessarily fan-fiction vs original fiction. Although, to be fair, I've certainly read self-published fan-fiction that was better than Fifty Shades of Grey or Dan Brown or Nicholas Sparks. But in general,…

Exactly. The good stuff tends to be an outlier. With published stuff, there's at least some sort of gatekeeper (although those have often questionable tastes). But that's way more of a factor in terms of the quality-to-shit-ratio than the question whether it's fan-fiction or original.

Have you ever read self-published original fiction?

And I'm just not as sure as you are that the quality-to-shit-ratio in fan-fiction is that much worse, once you start counting things like Hannibal and Weird Sagasso Sea.

But that's all I was going for - that you can't dismiss entire art-forms based on genre/type, which of course also applies to fan-fiction. There is _always_ a certain quality-to-shit-ratio, and it's always pretty unfavourable. 90% of everything is crap.

What makes one type of art more necessary than the other? And anything that finds an audience, per definition has its uses for that particular audience. Just as anything that gets made must have some use to its creator.