>>54756071>more about the journey than the destinationThis is a meaningless cliché that people repeat because they've heard it and they think it vindicates them. Yes, the story is about the journey and not the destination. If a fic was just the destination it would be one paragraph long. This excuses nothing. The journey only exists because there's a destination that the author has in mind, and the characters and the audience want to get to it. If you're writing a long journey with no destination in mind, or if you're consistently making no strides to get closer to that destination, then you're just dicking around in the middle of the road for no reason. It's disrespectful to the audience and their time.
Goddammit I've had this argument in this thread before and I don't feel like rehashing it. Look. I was a Homestuck reader from day 1. Actually before day 1, I was reading during Problem Sleuth. Homestuck is one of the longest pieces of english-language media on the internet, and the author openly admitted that he had no idea what the ending was going to be. Experience Homestuck in real time was a years-long agony that I look back on with regret because it just rambled on and on with the "journey" never approaching an end until finally everybody, including the author, was sick to death of the thing and just wanted it to end. And then it went on for another few hundred thousand words for some godawful reason because of the creator's sunk cost fallacy or something. It is not bad written. It doesn't have bad characters. It does have a story. But it's a bad fucking story that should have been a fraction of its length and nobody should have to read it.
I'm done I'm not even spellchecking this post, I'm so mad
