Livre d'Or

I don't know if I'm right, but I always subconsciously assumed it was an elitism thing. Like, the natural simplest form of a story is "and then all the good stuff happened to the protagonist", so the only reason to write a horrible story is because it's more interesting in some other way -- hence people start to assume that horrible stories _must_ be interesting, because someone likes this thing no-one else likes, it looks like their taste is superior...