Hard to believe it's been 20 years (!) since
I reviewed fanfics submitted for a contest on the late
Michael's Winx Club, and got yelled at by both Michael and TF, the founder of
the also-late LJ group where I originally intended to post the reviews :-\
(I also didn't expect that this wouldn't be the only post to be made this month about ancient Winx fandom content going missing, but that other post is coming later)
Look, I'm not going to re-litigate the central thesis of their complaints: that reviewing these fanfics is fundamentally unempathetic towards young under-18 (at the time, obvi) writers, like that time
30 Rock had Jenna
go all Simon Cowell against young kids at a singing contest (and ironically, I tried citing Cowell as a reason to argue in favor of allowing criticism) That said, reading the reviews 20 years later, I can somewhat see where they're coming from, since some of the reviews look somewhat harsh, even if to nowhere near the same degree as Jenna... (I also think some of Michael and TF's comments were too disproportionately harsh against critiques, but as I said, this is not the place to re-litigate the issue)
The real reason I decided to post about this (other than it being the anniversary) is because one of the main reasons I thought about making the reviews in the first place was that the winning fic, by someone named Eva L, ended up having what I felt was an unsatisfying ending, and I was thinking that perhaps others would feel the same way... But ever since Michael's site went offline in 2019 (wow, 7 years already?), it has been unavailable to read, even on Wayback, even though
the also-rans did get Wayback-ed :-\ But I managed to grab the fic during the site's last weeks of existence, so here it is, rescued from the heap of internet impermanence, the winning fanfic that started this whole mess :-) (Presented as originally posted with no commentary, and I already made it 20 years ago anyway)
( Fic )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
