To me it doesn't mark it as fanfiction; it marks it as a very specific kind of Mary Sue-type story. As I said above, I read 90% fanfic (and I read A LOT, lately) and I can't think of anything I've read all year that was first person.
No, that's wrong. I haven't read any first-person fanfic, or whole works that were first-person. But I read Racing The Dark and The Burning City (Part 1 and 2 of the masterful and sadly unfinished Spirit Binders series by Alaya Dawn Johnson) and there's a book-within-the-book that's first person and no less amazing than the rest of the story. It doesn't feel limited, at all. Care was taken in the choices about how to be in a character's head and still include a lot of detail of the wider situation. And of course, it's not the whole story. By the time we get into Aoi's head, we've already seen the world, even if it's a thousand-years-later version, so we can fill in a lot of blanks.
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No, that's wrong. I haven't read any first-person fanfic, or whole works that were first-person. But I read Racing The Dark and The Burning City (Part 1 and 2 of the masterful and sadly unfinished Spirit Binders series by Alaya Dawn Johnson) and there's a book-within-the-book that's first person and no less amazing than the rest of the story. It doesn't feel limited, at all. Care was taken in the choices about how to be in a character's head and still include a lot of detail of the wider situation. And of course, it's not the whole story. By the time we get into Aoi's head, we've already seen the world, even if it's a thousand-years-later version, so we can fill in a lot of blanks.