In fanfic, suddenly it becomes possible to skip straight to the 'good bits' without going through all the boring exposition and stuff first. The reader already KNOWS all the boring exposition. There is no real need to do all that. You can skip right to the sex part. From a chick perspective, smut fanfic is the heroin of porn. It's admirably quick, to the point, and still strangely satisfying (for the reasons pointed out above).
I'll bite about the quote, because I think the question of why fanfics go towards "NC-17" territory and why people like them is a loaded one. The author of this defends sex for itself based on the framework of a specific series and that's definitely one reason some fans gravitate towards adult fic.
But another is that other readers simply like stories that don't hide anything, be it the fact that people curse, they get hurt and have sex. For instance, I know that when something grave happens and someone writes "shoot" instead of putting in a profanity, the moment for me loses some of the depth and becomes almost cartoonish. Now I can tolerate that from a primetime show, but I don't read fanfic to see the same thing happen in writing as it does in TV, my expectations are for fanfic to go further than that (as my expectations of literature in general are). I realize this varies incredibly from person to person and that's part of why there's diverse array of genres in any fandom.
So it's not just about sex/violence/cursing for the sake of shock value or aestheticism for some, but in seeing how this affects the characters and/or shifts the plot to move the reader.
alcyone
