A Nightmare on Essay Street, part 5.2

Rereading my July 20th post reminded me that Mediaminer.org has recently posted an email from a reader discussing the quality of fanfiction on that server. Mediaminer defended itself by replying: "We agree that, unlike what many smaller sites are starting to do, we do not disallow fiction based on its quality or lack thereof. That has been considered unfair to writers who are just starting out" (a 7-28-95 Homepage News post). The rest of Lady MacBeth's, one of mm.org's moderators, response points writers to their Beta/Pre-readers and Writing Help Forum as well as the FanFiction Author Review Guild. Lady MacBeth and company do not want to discourage younger writers, but, as moderators, also want their web site to have quality work. By posting this reader's "flame" of the website at the start page, the moderators are effectively directing the attention of anyone reading or writing on mm.org; the prominence of this message on the page cannot be ignored.
The rhetorical strategies behind the flame and the response could be analyzed here; but it is not the near admission of bad writing which caught my attention. Instead, it was a brief apostrophe in the last sentence of Lady MacBeth's reply: "The point of this Guild is not to give empty praise, which has lately become the meaning of 'review', but rather to give honest reviews - including critiqes - of submissions."
The second clause "which has lately become the meaning of 'review'" is the one that is of importance to my "study." The "bribes" I spoke of in the July 20 post are part of this problem: Writers refuse to write more until they are given reviews, and thus meaningless praise--even for somewhat bad writing--is dished out quickly. Other times, "celebrity" fan fic authors will receive praise because no one wants to be accused of "flaming" the well known writer. Some reviews for the more famous writers are pages long, exalting every description, and moving on to praise the personality traits of the writer him/herself.
These well known writers become well known by winning awards from various fan guilds or even the fic host itself. That is not to say these awards aren't merited--there are some truly talented writers in this genre--but that once the writer is recognized as being "one of the best" he or she is unlikely to receive constructive criticism. The reviews, as vast as they are, are not there to improve such writer's skills, but to become part of the strange entourage--a fan of a fan--forming a community with its own unique hierachies and seniorities, friendships and arch enemies, none of which seems to have much to do with either discussing good writing or the original text.
side noteOn checkmated.com (Harry Potter Fan Fiction) some of these relationships do extend into the writing; there are many more fics written by multiple authors, and readers continue or do "outtakes" of their favorite fics, with the permission of the original author. This style of communal writing reminds me of when we did writing exercises in elementary school, and one person would write one sentence, pass the paper down, the second person would continue that thought, pass the paper down, etc. By the end, the story was everyone's and no one's. And they usually made no sense. The importance of these communal "fan fic universes" is that they do make sense, and are expansive, excrutiatingly detailed to the point where the original text seems very far away, and that distance does not seem to matter one bit.