Anthologies: Yay or Nay?

[blueyeti]

I keep getting the urge to create anthologies. Collect a few ficlets and such which would each be <20 minutes, and make an anthology. Preferably something which otherwise feels a little silly/indulgent, like John Sheppard/Blowjobs = OTP, with three or four fics of John giving blowjobs. Or fics which are so odd and so short that if I were downloading them I would spend more time trying to figure out where to save them than listening. But mostly I'd feel pretty ridiculous posting multiple blowjob ficlets, and a multi-author anthology seems more downloadable.

I did one anthology before, with 30 minutes of Sam Storyteller's Lord Peter Wimsey ficlets. But that's a single author, in a single fandom; it's just convenient. Would you download (or hey, create) an anthology of multiple authors with a single theme? For me, it's a (theoretical) personal preference. I rarely download anything which is under 15 minutes or so unless I already love the author, or am completely enamoured of the reader, because that way they'll have company on my ipod. Little ficlets which aren't a useful amount of time get lost and I either stumble across them too often, or never.

But I've downloaded anthologies which I've disliked. Sometimes they feel jarring, because although there was a theme from the reader's pov, there wasn't a theme for me as a listener, because I listen to the text with a different emotional or intellectual inflection than the reader does. But I've listened to The Portable Minim Calibre probably five or six times, because I get a few moments of fandoms and pairings I don't usually read, even though the progression of stories isn't really *logical* to me.

But the type of anthology I keep planning is what usually annoys me. I'm thematically linking things, but that creates/colours part of the experience. I haven't listened to Three Desperate Acts yet because it's thematically linked. I haven't felt in the mood for desperate acts, because I've been warned that is what I'm getting. (Read by Deltacephei, but not archived under that anthology name. Archived as Mercy, by Astolat; Assent, by Kylie Lee; In Decision, by Torch. But I downloaded it from the LJ post as an anthology. Weird. But it sort of implies something about how people download or don't if it's an anthology.) And, honestly, if I titled mine John Sheppard/Blowjobs = OTP it would be pretty misleading, as for all that I've been reading pwps, I'm interested in them because of the non-flippant military/DADT contexts.