See I’m just writing about these things because I like them / they interest me. If that’s pandering then I don’t know what isn’t
“Ah, but many of the people you hang out with are also interested in these things!” Yes, I do in fact share interests with my friends, checkmate
(I’d say HPMOR is pandering not because of subject matter but because of things like triumphalist tone, the moral light in which various characters are portrayed, etc. “It’s about rationality, by a guy who is interested in rationality, for people who are interested in rationality” is not sufficient without getting much or even most other existing fiction caught up in the same blast)
HPMOR is pandering because it’s one huge pop culture reference sprinkled with other pop culture references wrapped in a cast of cartoon cutouts who exist solely to advance the arc of the reader insert. But it at least does other things – you couldn’t reconstruct it from nothing more than a list of the ways it panders to its audience. It’s in the genre of… ‘Slytherin fiction’ maybe: insofar as there’s a plot beyond “look how cool the reader insert is”, it’s a pack of people with plots bouncing off each other for some fraction of a hundred chapters. Which is the only idea it introduces that’s even somewhat original within the community that it’s targeted towards, but at least there’s one idea it introduces.
(Yes, Yudkowsky has a justifiction for setting it as fanfiction. The Azkaban thing. But there’s no other need to set it in the HP universe. Speaking of the HP universe, is Hogwarts the only school in wizarding Britain?)
TNC, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be introducing anything – it’s fandoms + scrupulosity + references to authors in the local canon, and nothing else. HPMOR is “reader insert gets surrounded by cartoon cutouts who look up to him and then saves the world”, sure, but it’s more than that. TNC is “a fandom tries to understand C.S. Lovecraft’s bizarre fixation with morality”.
(Unless it’s going to turn out to be about the utilitarian calculation problem, but I’m guessing it’s not, since I’ve been waiting for years for people to say anything about that and no one has.)
I guess I’d say that’s not an unfair characterization of TNC so far. I’m honestly surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t be?) how popular TNC has already become, given how little I have actually written (luminousalicorn has also mentioned this).
Although, as far as I can tell, another cause of that popularity – besides tropes that people like – is the framing of the story as a mystery/puzzle combined with the fact that writing anything interpretive about the story on the internet has automatic meta-joke appeal. People want to figure out what will happen later and are optimistically imagining that it will be more than just “tropes run to their logical conclusion.”
There is also the fact that people seem to like the execution; several people have said something like “this is an authentic depiction of forum fandom culture and I haven’t seen that before.” You could ask how high this kind of thing should really be placed in the hierarchy of artistic virtues – and also ask whether the execution actually is any good, or whether it’s just that the format is novel – but in any case there is more there than “take the concept of ‘fandom’ and add water.” (One could certainly imagine the same concept executed much more poorly, and that would not be as appealing, right?)
A final subtlety here is that my earlier story Floornight has a lot more stuff in it, is complete, and some of the people reading TNC have read it – in particular I remember shlevy saying that he was optimistic about TNC going interesting places specifically because he had read Floornight. Floornight itself is extremely pandering (to myself, and by extension to people like me), in that it’s full of tropes and concepts I like, but it also (I would claim) isn’t the kind of thing that could be reconstructed from a brief trope-based description. I also had a lot more fun writing it than I did while writing TNC, while also basically having no audience (well, an audience of ~5 people, all of whom I knew beforehand). It has many flaws and I’m certainly not mentioning it as some sort of proof that I am a great writer or something (I am not a great writer), but I do think it is novel and sui generis in the way you’re (correctly) saying current-TNC is not, and that is conditioning a lot of expectations.
(ETA: part of Floornight’s plot is about a variation on the utilitarian aggregation problem created by sci-fi concepts, although I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for.)
