Suffering Gen Angst Today

[niko]

On a "gen" fanfiction mailing list recently, there's been discussion about trying to increase the traffic on the list with doing theme weeks or assigning people to do fic recs a la crack_van.  I started feeling guilty and wanting to participate more, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I don't really have that many "gen" fics among my favorites these days.  I might come up with a handful of "mostly gen" Weiss recs, I guess, but all my other fandoms are either so small that there's barely any worthwhile fic out there at all, or else so committed to one or two pairings that the concept of gen-fic barely enters the fandoms consciousness (or, more often, a combination of both of those issues.)  

I think I was so spoiled by my first fandom (The Sentinel had a fairly iron-clad divide between the slash and gen sides of the pool, and the gen side had enough quality writers contributing to it that you didn't need to go hunting for slash to fill the need for good fic.)   Thanks to TS, I still go into every new fannish love subconsciously expecting to find big pointy arrows saying "Gen This Way--->" and am always rather surprised when I find out that the reason there are no pointy arrows is that there is no gen-fic to speak of.  :(

It's not that I don't do slash.  I wouldn't give up my Aya/Ken for anything.  But there are times when you just want something more than another shipper story, y'know.  *sigh*

(*cough* This has nothing to do with my complete failure to find any decently written Riley h/c in National Treasure fandom.  Honest.  *cough* )