I think taste is a really big factor in this too, though. I mean, I've read fics that people have had stars in their eyes over that I consider to be really badly written. And it's not the simplicity of them at all, or the subject. There's a kind of "blind spot" when it comes to people's favourite ships sometimes that kind of overrules everything else. Like, people will not care that Brendon is changing his personality five times over as many pages or that the dialogue sounds like it was taken right out of an 18th century treatise on the British government, because Brendon and Ryan are having SEX in it, and they are IN LOVE! OMG!!! :-D

And I think those things tend to muddle the waters a little bit. lol. But yes, light-hearted fic ftw. I'll take a hundred Starbucks AU's with smiling Spencer any day of the week.