#i miss the days of staying up til 5am reading gut wrenching stories

[babysundoll]

Is it just me or do fanfictions not hit like they used to?

It might just be my main fandom (or maybe just me tbh) but over the past couple of years they've gotten less and less exciting. All the stories are the same with the same plot and the same characters doing the same boring thing. When I first started reading fanfics in the 2010s there were endless amounts of stories with such good plots and character writing. Now it's just... meh.

Even just a couple years ago there were two writers in my main fandom on Ao3 who posted such good stories (and they were honestly the lifeline of the fandom) but they slowly disappeared and now Ao3 feels like a desert. Idk man maybe I'm not looking hard enough but there's just nothing exciting anymore. Everything is so boring. The stories feel so... soft. Like people are afraid to take risks in writing. There's never anything serious or out of pocket with the characters and what they run into. And if there is something serious its "I had a nightmare" and they need someone to comfort them. Like it's honestly a little lame how many stories I find with that premise.

And it's not just Ao3. It's Fanfiction.net, Wattpad, etc. etc. I used to be able to put keywords in the search bar when I was looking for stories and there would be tons and tons of recommendations (most of which were on FFN) but now nothing comes up when I look at stuff. I think FFN went downhill when they started bombarding their site with ads. There's so many ads and it makes the site all glitchy and slow.

This really could just be me, but I have a hard time finding new stories, and when I do find one that's decently good, it's something I've already read before. Like what happened to creative writing?

This is no hate to anyone this is just an observation I had.