Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-24821182-20141009101133

I'm a sheep; I obey and enforce the rules of this site without entirely understanding some of them. Particularly, I'm having trouble with some of the things in the QS, and I feel like this would be a good place to comment on it and hopefully get some feedback from the community.

An argument I often see when users try to defend stories that have been deleted for being "too cliché" is that cliché is in itself a cliché word, one that has been used to cover such a wide span of redundancy within stories that it has lost meaning. They argue it has no inherent meaning, and that what's cliché for you isn't necessarily cliché for everyone.

I have recently started wondering about that myself, and to be honest it's getting harder for me to understand why clichés are ground for deletion. It goes without saying that the users who originally wrote the Quality Standards are experienced in the horror genre (or literature in general), but does this always work in their favor? Don't they remember what it felt like to be at that age where you would just read anything, not giving a damn about clichés?

When I was younger and had just started reading novels, I read literally anything without questioning the quality of it, and not once did I in those days read a book I truly thought was bad. As I started reading the works of more renowned authors, it became clear to me that not all books are equal, and that some aren't worth reading. However, I was still entertained while in that innocent state of ignorance. It was fun reading junk literature, much like how it's fun to watch a Michael Bay movie as long as you're not expecting cinematography at its greatest.

But this is not just for fun, is it?

We have an image to protect as a fine literature site, and our stories are supposed to be original and enlightening. But why can't they just be entertaining?

An anecdote: In my country there's a book publisher named Lohses, specializing in Protestant Christian literature. Some decades back they were running a series called the Zion-books. These Zion-books weren't brilliantly written, nor did they have all that much relevance, but people loved them! Do you know who loved the Zion-books? The answer is simple: people who usually don't read books.

Lohses wanted to discontinue the Zion-books, but they knew that if this was to happen, all of those readers would just go back to watching television and doing pretty much anything but reading. While these books were junk to any person acquainted with proper literature, they were gold to the average couch potato, and they served as the stepping stone to start reading other, more refined books.

The Twilight series - though its lack of quality is apparent to most - serves the same purpose: it gets people who would otherwise never experience the joy of reading to put down the phone and pick up a book. They're not good in themselves, but they serve as an introduction to the world of reading and whet the appetite for something better.

To sum up: Junk literature can serve a purpose. Erasing clichéd stories will not guarantee that readers go look for something better (think about how many come here just to read video game pastas, for example. If you take those away, what do you think will happen then?).

And that was just about it. I apologize if my criticism of the cliché-rule offends the people who wrote it. I will of course continue to enforce the rules even if I don't know why they are the way they are. I have always been a good, servile sheep. 