I’m gonna ramble quite a bit, so I might as well structure my comment for the sake of everyone’s convenience.
Other comments
I don’t know where all the talk of “dark stories” comes from, but a lot of stories that I gave up on reading had to do with just being poorly written. The characters either weren’t engaging, or even interesting, there wasn’t a hint of any actual writing skills, because a character was about as interesting as a sock puppet or a world was about as engaging as a blank wall, or, overall, the stories were just extremely generic.
those are what I call garbage fics, or the not-as-lucky-as-[insert incredibly famous / popular story here]. I could care less about which type of fiction is more prevalent, I had fun with a lot of really funny stories and one shots, but if the writing makes you gradually lose more and more interest in reading, to the point where reading it feels less like a joy and more like removing a needle from your finger, I’m fine with skipping those and I would prefer they did not receive the reception they have, if at all possible.
It’s not for me, it’s more for all those modest writers having great works go underappreciated, simply because there are some things that are easier to read, not because they’re dark, but because they’re much simpler and take almost no effort to understand or follow.
On topic
also, there’s that problem of overrated fics, which I’m glad we’re not actually discussing and I’m sure you might have caught on to what I’m talking about right now..
On a whole, what I really think is the worst culprit here Isn’t the massive praise that MLD got, even though that did help make things worse and I’ll get into why soon, it isn’t the story itself, or the writer, It’s not even the fact that a lot of copies / style / quality of that story came out so many times over, it’s the poor maintenance and approval system for features in EQD, as well as FimFiction. I will argue that did the most damage realistically speaking, mostly because of the reasons stated above, but overall, because they made poor decisions at very early stages of the site when interest towards MLP:FIM was at an all time high.
and no, I don’t mean 2011 when there wasn’t that much interest in writing fan fictions, I mean later on during the 2012-2013, when stories were coming up at an all time high and the features grew more and more questionable, most features made by both sites.
Simply put though, the damage was done and was attributed from one side to another, not one side is solely to blame for any of this even though the ones responsible can be debated, but what is true is that there is absolutely no use crying about it now. Damage control, better direction as writers, talk with the source (being writers or the admins of either sites responsible for featuring stories), as well as inciting some interest in readers, that’s what can actually help.
Arguing between one another whether you’ve formed a standard on one side of the readers’ section or you stand with another banner to the other left side of the readers’ position, will only waste more time and energy from everyone pointlessly.
To writers
If you’re a writer and your stories go underappreciated, you might want to get involved a lot more into group discussions on Fim fiction, from what I’ve been following, those are quite active and offer quite a bit of help for writers, depending on whether you’re in the right group or not that is, by which I mean one for discussions that are meant for writers and writing purposes. Sometimes the problem isn’t very obvious and having more opinions as well as listening to them doesn’t help, because writing, filming or recording/composing music isn’t an obvious work with a set of working instructions as well as obvious needs, your stories could be lacking in some areas you never even thought about previously, like the characters could be more interesting, the scenario needs a little more going on, or you probably can improve what you have good by making it much better, such as scenery not being Just convincing as 100 and 1 other stories have decently and almost identically written sceneries, but they could be much better and much more developed, helping much easier draw in the reader into the world you’re creating..
There’s a lot of things about writing and plenty of room to improve before you can call it quits, if you are very serious about writing that is. Talking to more people about what you can do doesn’t hurt and learning more about writing isn’t unheard of, even for the most experienced that’s
You don’t even need to go as far as to read into other writers’ experiences, you can better inform yourselves on better sources through the internet of how to improve your writing in areas that it is lacking severely, it’s just that I personally think Fim fiction groups can better help you find said problems easier.
Conclussion
on a whole though, I don’t think that fan fictions for the MLP fandom are completely ruined, they could be Far worse than right now and for what it’s worth, a fair number of the really good works do get the credit they deserve.