![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fanfic thoughts
Jun. 25th, 2012 01:42 pmI feel fairly certain that my astonishment every morning when I wake up and actually go to work means something. Not necessarily something good.
Happy Monday! It is foggy here and they're back to doing loud buildy things on the path they've been constructing outside my office since early May. They appear to be resorting to digging parts of it up (again) to prolong the work.
( Cut for some woe is me stuff )
During my weekly Skype with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
historyterry yesterday we were trying to figure out why fanfic is often way more appealing than novels.
I have to admit, I have no conclusions on it. There are times when I go weeks (months) without touching fanfic and then there are times when I read way more fanfic than books.
My standards when it comes to fic have changed over the years: I'm less tolerant of basic writing idiocy than I used to be. If the first couple of pages of a fic are littered with basic punctuation problems and poor spelling or incorrect words, I will turn back even if the basic premise sounds interesting. Yesterday's "Oh god, delete!" fic included random apostrophes and some very unfortunate word substitutions.
Ridged <> rigid. Thankfully it was in the context of rigid/ridged arms rather than ridged anything way more unfortunate, but still. It threw me out and then I couldn't get back to it, which is good because I was already irritated at the OOC-ness. Yes, it's an AU. No, you still need to try with the characterisation. If Clint is sounding like Thor, there is a big problem.
I'm not expecting Tolstoy, but I like to think that I have standards :-D
Anyway, the why is fanfic more fun than novels at times question is confusing. Partially I think it's because we get the chance to return to spend more time with familiar, favourite characters. Most of us don't read fanfic for fandoms we know nothing about, after all.
Getting to see new ideas and interpretations of those characters is also a part of it. There is a lot of fic out there that is written as part of a conversation or reaction to the canon that is a different way to discuss that stuff and I love it.
Wish-fulfilment is a lot of it, I suspect. We know that certain things will never happen in canon - most of us don't even want them to - but it's still a lot of fun to read about them. Yes, I suspect that this is a big part of the popularity of the pornier end of fanfic :-D
In some fandoms, I'm far more interested in the non-main characters in my fanfic. I adore Harry Potter and his friends to pieces. My fanfic tastes, though, run more to characters like Sirius and Remus because they're great characters who only get a small amount of book time.
As much as a short fic is fun, I'm a huge fan of the long, novel-length fics and I can never quite put my finger on why. It's partially that I get to spend more time with a particular set-up. That's not completely it, though, and I'm not sure that I'll ever figure it out completely.
Right now, I'm in a "read all the Avengers" fic kind of place after over a year of barely reading any fic. It's the shiny new fandom stage of fic reading. I'm definitely in a "fic is more fun than books" place and I have no idea why, except maybe it's because all my current books are deeply serious and intense and fic...doesn't have to be.
In conclusion, I have no conclusion :-)
Happy Monday! It is foggy here and they're back to doing loud buildy things on the path they've been constructing outside my office since early May. They appear to be resorting to digging parts of it up (again) to prolong the work.
( Cut for some woe is me stuff )
During my weekly Skype with
historyterry yesterday we were trying to figure out why fanfic is often way more appealing than novels.I have to admit, I have no conclusions on it. There are times when I go weeks (months) without touching fanfic and then there are times when I read way more fanfic than books.
My standards when it comes to fic have changed over the years: I'm less tolerant of basic writing idiocy than I used to be. If the first couple of pages of a fic are littered with basic punctuation problems and poor spelling or incorrect words, I will turn back even if the basic premise sounds interesting. Yesterday's "Oh god, delete!" fic included random apostrophes and some very unfortunate word substitutions.
Ridged <> rigid. Thankfully it was in the context of rigid/ridged arms rather than ridged anything way more unfortunate, but still. It threw me out and then I couldn't get back to it, which is good because I was already irritated at the OOC-ness. Yes, it's an AU. No, you still need to try with the characterisation. If Clint is sounding like Thor, there is a big problem.
I'm not expecting Tolstoy, but I like to think that I have standards :-D
Anyway, the why is fanfic more fun than novels at times question is confusing. Partially I think it's because we get the chance to return to spend more time with familiar, favourite characters. Most of us don't read fanfic for fandoms we know nothing about, after all.
Getting to see new ideas and interpretations of those characters is also a part of it. There is a lot of fic out there that is written as part of a conversation or reaction to the canon that is a different way to discuss that stuff and I love it.
Wish-fulfilment is a lot of it, I suspect. We know that certain things will never happen in canon - most of us don't even want them to - but it's still a lot of fun to read about them. Yes, I suspect that this is a big part of the popularity of the pornier end of fanfic :-D
In some fandoms, I'm far more interested in the non-main characters in my fanfic. I adore Harry Potter and his friends to pieces. My fanfic tastes, though, run more to characters like Sirius and Remus because they're great characters who only get a small amount of book time.
As much as a short fic is fun, I'm a huge fan of the long, novel-length fics and I can never quite put my finger on why. It's partially that I get to spend more time with a particular set-up. That's not completely it, though, and I'm not sure that I'll ever figure it out completely.
Right now, I'm in a "read all the Avengers" fic kind of place after over a year of barely reading any fic. It's the shiny new fandom stage of fic reading. I'm definitely in a "fic is more fun than books" place and I have no idea why, except maybe it's because all my current books are deeply serious and intense and fic...doesn't have to be.
In conclusion, I have no conclusion :-)
