It's A Terrible Thing For

You Didn’t Get The Quest You Wanted, You Got The One You Could Do.

I Have No Doubt There Are Magician Psychopaths, And Magician Serial Killers. I Doubt Brakebills Admissions Is Very Good At Screening For Those.

The Idea Of Some Kind Of Objectively Constant, Universal Literary Value Is Seductive. It Feels Real. It Feels Like A Stone Cold Fact That In Search Of Lost Time, By Marcel Proust, Is Better Than A Shore Thing, By Snooki. And It May Be; Snooki Definitely Has More One-star Reviews On Amazon. But If Literary Value Is Real, No One Seems To Be Able To Locate It Or Define It Very Well. We're Increasingly Adrift In A Grey Void Of Aesthetic Relativism.

Fanfiction Is What Literature Might Look Like If It Were Reinvented From Scratch After A Nuclear Apocalypse By A Band Of Brilliant Pop-culture Junkies Trapped In A Sealed Bunker. They Don't Do It For Money. That's Not What It's About. The Writers Write It And Put It Up Online Just For The Satisfaction. They're Fans, But They're Not Silent, Couchbound Consumers Of Media. The Culture Talks To Them, And They Talk Back To The Culture In Its Own Language.

It's Time To Live With What We Have And Mourn What We Lost.