But that isn't what horizontal lines are *for*...

[mousetourmaline.livejournal.com]

Y'know, once upon a time when the world was young and I thought the world revolved around Matt from Digimon, I wrote the way I'd been taught in school. I started a new paragraph when one needed starting, and when I wanted to divide scenes, I hit the Return key twice. That was simple enough.

Then for some reason paragraphs weren't supported any more. Not a problem. Now I hit Return twice for each new paragraph, and used asterisks to divide scenes. Not what I'd been taught in school, but the way most published authors do it. 'Kay. No big headache.

Then for some reason single asterisks started getting stripped out of my fics. Double-break for paragraphs; increasingly bizarre strings of asterisks, dots, hyphens and tildes to divide scenes. An atmosphere of "oh those crazy ffnet admins, but what can you do after all?" The character strings became almost an in-joke. 

And now those aren't supported either. Right. No big deal. Except...

we're now supposed to divide scenes with the horizontal line function. 

Why is that an issue? Because I already use the horizontal line for its only legitimate purpose: dividing author's notes and headings from the actual fic. Because that is the only possible reason you would need a horizontal line.

There's a thing called getting immersed in what you're reading, and I don't know what miraculous super-reading powers the ffnet PTB have, but if I run into a whacking great BLACK LINE in the middle of a fic, I am sure as heck going to get pulled out of that immersion in that moment. This site is supposed to be about giving free space to the message in as simple and unobtrusive a medium as possible. It has remained admirably free of coloured enormous fonts, glittery graphics and other such bells and whistles. However, this does disturb the reader, and does make him or her look at the medium over the message.

I like ffnet, I really do, but it seems they're detached from what their writers actually need. There seems to be less and less unleashing of imagination and freeing of souls, and more and more worrying about format quibbles. I'm sorry, but I'm beginning to think it's time they got a new slogan. "Fanfiction.net: police your punctuation and lose your mind".