Apple Strudel

i love fics that feel so... grown. fics about adults that were written by adults who have years of life experience under their belts who pour that into their writing. fics where you can tell this is a person who has lived through a marriage or a divorce or a child or children or parent death or any number of Huge Life Events because the way they write with an emphasis on the highs and lows of the human experience rather than an emphasis on tropes (not throwing shade) is just so. oh man, it's just so fucking good. if my blorbos are grown men, grown women, grown people, i love it when they feel like grown people, not just extensions of the (young) author's imagination. (still not throwing shade). you know?

The way you get more fics like this, by the way, is by encouraging younger and beginning writers. Everyone starts somewhere, and if you want the beautiful, lived-in, wealth of experience that comes with age authors, they generally need to first be the eager, silly, excited just to be here, more enthusiastic than skilled authors, and then they need to not get driven away from fandom by people being jerks to them or by the weariness of putting out effort and not getting anything back. So yes, appreciate the older authors who bring their experience to the table of the fic buffet, but don't neglect the budding authors who are just starting to grow. That's like wanting the fruit from the tree without watering the sapling.