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December Meme: Fannish reading and writing overlap
Today's prompt comes from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling, and is technically Tuesday's prompt: Do your fannish reading and writing interests always overlap? If not, is there any pattern to their intersection or lack thereof?
This was tricky, because I find it hard to think of myself in the context of "writer" - on the one hand, yes, I write! And I think about writing, and I want to write well, and I certainly have a lot of roughly drafted story fragments lurking around my hard drive. On the other hand, I have a total of four fics to my name, I'm lucky if I publish one thing a year (this year, for instance, I've posted about three-tenths of a thing), and all of those story fragments are very incomplete; I can't think of myself as a writer in the same way that I do the fic writers I admire.
Ahem. Digression aside: the answer here is both yes and no. There are certainly things that do always overlap (or 99% of the time, anyway); certain characters, fand sometimes certain tropes, do seem to be perpetually on my subconscious whether I'm scribbling into an OpenOffice document or scouring the AO3 for something to read.
In just about any fandom there will be certain characters I latch onto - or that latch on to me - and about whom most of my reading and writing centre around! In Harry Potter fandom it was Severus Snape and to a lesser degree Remus Lupin; in Homestuck the focus is broader (Karkat, Dave, Terezi, Tavros, Sollux, Rose) but still relatively constant. Way back in the mists of time, it was Duo Maxwell and Chang Wufei; and then Qui-Gon Jinn. If fic doesn't involve them in some way, I'm much less likely to want to read or write it. Though there's no guarantee: I have two thousand words of Loveless fic about Nisei to prove that sometimes my brain takes odd detours off the beaten path!
Tropes are harder to sum up, because to really sum up my favourite tropes would take a month's worth of posts all to itself, but I'll try. In general, fic that I adore or write will feature, on the PG-rated end of the scale, personal grief/emotional turmoil and the ways in which it can be amelioriated, or not, through other people. On the R-rated end of the scale, expect lots of power differences/exchanges/negotiations, relationships that manipulate the reader's perceptions of healthy vs unhealthy attachments, and/or exploration of attraction/pleasure, or relationships, which doesn't conform to the social norms of the characters. (Perhaps oddly, given some of this list, BDSM doesn't do much for me as a kink; neither does the Alpha/Beta/Omega trope.) One day I ought to go through my bookmarks and put ticky marks under each of those three headings for every fic in there... I suspect the results would startle even me by their sheer numbers. :D
This is a HUGE topic, and I'm trying to keep this entry from becoming so large it collapses under its own weight, so jump in and ask for clarifications if I've muddled something. Or tell me what your own reading and/or writing hot-buttons are, and whether they share certain features and how they diverge!
edenfalling, and is technically Tuesday's prompt: Do your fannish reading and writing interests always overlap? If not, is there any pattern to their intersection or lack thereof?This was tricky, because I find it hard to think of myself in the context of "writer" - on the one hand, yes, I write! And I think about writing, and I want to write well, and I certainly have a lot of roughly drafted story fragments lurking around my hard drive. On the other hand, I have a total of four fics to my name, I'm lucky if I publish one thing a year (this year, for instance, I've posted about three-tenths of a thing), and all of those story fragments are very incomplete; I can't think of myself as a writer in the same way that I do the fic writers I admire.
Ahem. Digression aside: the answer here is both yes and no. There are certainly things that do always overlap (or 99% of the time, anyway); certain characters, fand sometimes certain tropes, do seem to be perpetually on my subconscious whether I'm scribbling into an OpenOffice document or scouring the AO3 for something to read.
In just about any fandom there will be certain characters I latch onto - or that latch on to me - and about whom most of my reading and writing centre around! In Harry Potter fandom it was Severus Snape and to a lesser degree Remus Lupin; in Homestuck the focus is broader (Karkat, Dave, Terezi, Tavros, Sollux, Rose) but still relatively constant. Way back in the mists of time, it was Duo Maxwell and Chang Wufei; and then Qui-Gon Jinn. If fic doesn't involve them in some way, I'm much less likely to want to read or write it. Though there's no guarantee: I have two thousand words of Loveless fic about Nisei to prove that sometimes my brain takes odd detours off the beaten path!
Tropes are harder to sum up, because to really sum up my favourite tropes would take a month's worth of posts all to itself, but I'll try. In general, fic that I adore or write will feature, on the PG-rated end of the scale, personal grief/emotional turmoil and the ways in which it can be amelioriated, or not, through other people. On the R-rated end of the scale, expect lots of power differences/exchanges/negotiations, relationships that manipulate the reader's perceptions of healthy vs unhealthy attachments, and/or exploration of attraction/pleasure, or relationships, which doesn't conform to the social norms of the characters. (Perhaps oddly, given some of this list, BDSM doesn't do much for me as a kink; neither does the Alpha/Beta/Omega trope.) One day I ought to go through my bookmarks and put ticky marks under each of those three headings for every fic in there... I suspect the results would startle even me by their sheer numbers. :D
This is a HUGE topic, and I'm trying to keep this entry from becoming so large it collapses under its own weight, so jump in and ask for clarifications if I've muddled something. Or tell me what your own reading and/or writing hot-buttons are, and whether they share certain features and how they diverge!