My main beef with wish fulfillment is that, at a fundamental level, stories which rely on it generally lack conflict, and I think that conflict is a necessary component for stories to be good. That probably sounds super harsh, since wish granting is kind of your “thing”, but you do a really good job with it, or at least, as good a job as can be done with it.
The issue, with a bit more detail given, is that stories are composed of a protagonist, and that protagonist in generally pursuing something, a desire or goal or what have you. Something puts obstacles in the protagonists way, usually some kind of antagonist, but in a wish fulfillment story, the antagonist usually doesn’t even appear. The stories, especially bad ones, tend to just read as “Character A wanted to be X, and he became X, the end.” There’s no room to develop a story there, all we have is a description of a change. For the most part, wish fulfillment is just window dressing around a description of a change, in order to avoid doing the harder work of constructing a conflict to make the change meaningful.
But beyond that, I also just don’t find it to be all that arousing at all. My stories, at their cold, dreary black hearts, aren’t about people getting what they want–they’re about people getting what they deserve. Punishment, as opposed to reward. My approach has it’s own problems, of course, and can be just as empty of conflict if done poorly. Mostly, it’s a question of motivation–I’m still granting wishes, it’s just the wishes of people who hate Character A instead.
In the end, yeah, I think wish fulfillment is a lot more popular, and there is a ton of it. I’d probably be more successful if I used it more often, but whenever I’ve written them in the past, usually for a commission, they just bore me to tears. I usually just openly reject them now, if people request them, because I have so little interest in writing them.
Bracken's Corner 