"Every baby has to leave the cradle eventually" yes, no shit, thanks for stating the obvious

Apparently Scott Greer - and numerous other conservative "influencers," "podcasters" and other assorted fauna - need this explained to them: fanfiction is the garden in which potential writers first cultivate their talents. Fiction writing is an incredibly difficult art to master; which is why the average age of debut novelists is 35, and the average age of an author releasing their first best-seller is around 50. It requires intellect, life experience, well-honed technical mastery, and the ability to hold an entire world in one's head, complete with a full cast of imaginary friends that have lengthy conversations with one another. Jumping feet-first into the deep end is effectively impossible; which is why the vast majority of writers start with fan-fiction - even many "original" works are just filing the serial numbers off something else and leaning heavily on genre conventions. It allows the nascent writer to develop their skills in an otherwise stable framework; affords them an opportunity to crawl before they walk. The "Malfoid" phenomena stands out because Harry Potter is the first long piece of fiction (seven books!) that an entire generation read in young adulthood, and perhaps the last work of fiction that achieved nigh-universal readership among an entire generational cohort. For that same cohort, having a story written (or re-written) *for them* is like tasting chocolate for the first time in thirty years, given the publishing industry has been, like so many other institutions, completely captured by the DEI left and has relentlessly purged white male authors from its ranks; leaving what few remain struggling to rise above the churning ocean of half-assed trash that chokes Amazon self-pub. That you and so many other "conservative influencers" knee-jerk response is to sneer at this development reveals a thunderous and damning ignorance on your part of something the left understands innately - the power of narratives. As @Devon_Eriksen_ has explained before, narratives are fundamental to how we mentally model the world. Motives and desires, emotions and reactions, even basic physical cause-and-effect requires a narrative; even if it's as simple as "if I push on this door hard enough, I can open it, and get at the grain that's in the tack room." My goats have figured out that much; which is why they break into the tack room daily even if they can't see the grain, or even the bag that usually has grain in it through the wire mesh. Because of this, narratives are incredibly powerful influences on our thinking - and this is precisely why the left wing is utterly obsessed with controlling every narrative they can get their hands on. It's why they go well out of their way to hunt down anyone in the arts with even the slightest conservative thought and drive them out by any means necessary. Its why they take pains to fill elementary school libraries with sordid books explaining masturbation techniques - they understand that narratives are how children learn almost everything they know of the world; and why so much of their attempts at "serious" art are about as sophisticated as aesop's fables for left-wing values: they absolutely view it as a tool for controlling minds. If you doubt the deliberate intent behold the majority of what they produce, look no further than the coercion California's state government applied to video game giant Blizzard and the results thereof - video games are the one major media form leftists don't have a total stranglehold on, and they're trying to change that. And *why* do leftists have total control of film *and* the publishing industry? In large part thanks to people like you. People who see the first licks of flame among folks who might not have read any fiction in years, drawn in by fond familiarity and a re-write promising a *very* conservative kind of tale; of the power of herteronormative love and good overcoming evil - and promptly unzip and piss all over it. People who can't tell the difference between the synopsis I just gave and 200 pages of lesbian romance featuring a Donut Steele self-insert mary sue. People who can watch normies, desperate for a good story that isn't more DEI wankfest slop, organically pursuing something similar to what leftists do via cold calculation when they infest a previously-great franchise, gut it, and wear it like a skinsuit, but can't appreciate the downstream political implications of that. People who can't grasp that the average normie doesn't want to read your 187 IQ political essay, but just want some honest-to-god entertainment. People who actually think "This is John Gault speaking" is the best part of Atlas Shrugged and wish the rest of the story hadn't been wrapped around it. I suspect people like you are not ensouled. You have no sense of wonder; no imagination, no ability to lose yourself in a great story. You never stayed up as a child reading under the covers with a flashlight well after your bedtime; transported by the tale. And so you cannot recognize that quality when you see it; can neither understand how "kiddie stuff" can contain it, nor recognize true art in its larval form. And indeed, this would dovetail well with how podcasters and influencers act in general; not true believers in anything they say, but grifters, who've figured out that the stupid screaming rubes want their biases confirmed and all you need to do is push the button to make more money come out of the 'chute; viz. Tucker Carlson. And above all, what you can't understand is that good art is, by and large, conservative. Because conservatives write stories, not aesops; they concern themselves with human characters and thus care about the truth of humans' character, rather than treating truth as a blank slate that can be filled with any arbitrary lie desired, and wiped clean and re-written on the spot as desired. People like you seem to think that "conservative" art is a character stopping, turning to the camera, and saying "women's rights," except maybe it's "gun control bad." This borderline-sociopathic lack of empathy leaves you unable to grasp fiction at its most basic level; you might think the classics are important because something something conservative values something something basis of western civilization, or because that one dude sounded real convincing playing a mafioso, but nothing more. And so you sneer out the side of your mouth at creators; confident that you're the Big Serious Adult having Big Thinky Thonks on your podcast, while the youth that will be voting in three years are glued to whatever they can find on Netflix and having that beamed straight into their cerebellums. Art is a vehicle for thought, and most art is not War and Peace by dint of the basics of supply and demand - it takes a year to write a *good* novel and a day to read it. But because it's not Serious enough for you, you cede that ground to the collectivists, willingly, and merrily piss on anyone inspired to change that. Stay in your lane, Scott.