Conservation of Expectations, or: auto-adjustment of reading standards in different fandoms

[cimorene]

I was reading in a het fandom located primarily at fanfiction.net for a couple of days last week and I started thinking again about something I've thought about before.

After reading consistently in just one fandom for a while, we start to adjust our expectations to the body of work. In a large, highly active media fandom, we may reject out-of-hand a story which is exactly as well-written as another story that might, being one of the best-written in a smaller fandom, become one of our favorites.

As we read, we automatically map what we've read (a bell curve?) and adjust our reading habits accordingly. I don't mean to suggest this is an irrational behavior, or one that we're unaware of. It's totally expected and rational. It's just that sometimes, this automatic Conservation of Expectations (can anyone give me a better name for it?) leads to my overall standards getting a bit lost in the noise to the extent that I actually have difficulty comparing a particular story outside its own fandom, as illustrated by this bit of conversation from a 2007 post called profound truths about the healing cock:

cimorene: It's funny how when you're reading a bunch of stories in a row, something that's really weird can seem not that weird, and then when you come back to it later you're like: "Summary: Blair goes undercover in a mental hospital as a gay teenager with nothing else wrong with him and is nearly raped and killed by an evil ex-con orderly under orders from the evil hospital director, and Jim goes berserk and turns into a caveman without the power of speech and pulverises the orderly, and then they have soul-bonding sex."
waxjism: And next thing you know, you're like, "Did I print that out?"^[1]
cimorene: See, I was looking back through my del.icio.us, and my notes on one of the Pros stories were... "Prose rather elegant but suffers from Bodie having epileptic fits and a history of childhood sexual abuse."
waxjism: But you were like, "It's still totally readable!"

It's interesting how that works. I mean, in the situation referenced in that conversation, I didn't even think there was anything ludicrous about the obvious crack element in that story (i.e. non-canonical epilepsy + history of childhood sexual abuse in the background of a story) until I reread the bookmark years later, because the overall level of crack in the fandom in question was apparently high enough that my brain didn't classify that as cracky. (Is Pros really that cracky? Or maybe I failed to notice the crack because I was focused on something else - the prose being "rather elegant" or the lack of clichés which I was tired of?)

1. She totally did. We have it bound around here somewhere.

Comments

[lotesse]

I'm not sure if I should be amused or horrified by the fact that I could mentally identify that Sentinel story by that summary alone. Oh dear.

[cimorene]

I think almost everyone in the fandom's probably read it. I mean, Wax actually printed it out! And I've read it several times by accident (and only remembered how crack it was when I got to that part)!