Oh, god. The comments, they will kill me with their length and depth.
You know, it is very weird, but I was nodding for musefool's comment there about the way it is set up. Not every element, of course, but most of them are the ingredients for a fanfic recipe. And someone (I think it possibly was you?) was commenting just a while ago about how there's less experimentation in HL fic than in other fandoms. That the writers here don't color outside the lines as much, that we aren't trying odd povs, or whacking about with timelines, or repeating a chorus twice with different effect.
The question would be, of course, *why* aren't we more experimental? As long as the question isn't, are we really not just as experimental as other fandoms?
And if HL isn't conforming more rigidly to LJ-house-style, is it because a big chunk of writers were coughed up out of yahoo-lists and list-serves? Not the harp on the crossover thing, but those seem to be the newer writers -- are they writing LJ-style or old-school (pretend I spelled that in some hip way)?
In a fandom where we can go backwards and forwards in time and where our characters die and come back, and we've got canon demons and whatnot, is it needed to have some more rigid way to tell a story because of the fluidity of the fandom? Or are we clingling to a false sense of security?