beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I have been reading fanfic and pondering the nature of time.

Movies often (usually?) cover only a short time, say an intense few days.  If relationships are formed they're often shaped by shared survival pressures.  You get to the closing credits and wonder what they'll do on rainy Sunday afternoons, or if they can actually watch the same kind of movies, or if indeed they can stand each other.  It's easy to decide you don't want someone to die or you quite like it when someone saves your life, but then what?

TV series are more my speed.  Especially if they're planning to stretch the relationships over 100 episodes.  People get to know each other sloooooowly.  They share the intense times and learn they can rely on each other in an emergency, but then sometimes there's also fishing, or opera, or introducing someone to Star Wars.  You do in fact see what they do on Sunday afternoons, though usually only in one episode where the boredom gets interrupted explosively.  There's a lot of 'then what?'

Fanfic can do either.  I've read a lot of fic that tries to fill in around episodes, so you know it has been weeks of story time across the length of the fic, or you at least know these people know each other well already.  But when it is fic based on movies, or when the story is about the first time someone meets, then the conflicting models of relationship formation crop up again.  Sometimes you'll get people focusing on the long term, working together for years, connecting over coffee and diner food a little at a time.  Other fics write the movie of their relationship, love at first sight, intense explosions and rescues and declarations all fitting in one weekend.

I end up feeling like that sort leaves all the work ahead of them.  Like, they might be having sex, but they don't yet have a relationship.

Of course actual humans work every which way.  And are a persistent mystery.  So I guess everything is plausible.

I just like the long term, the way I like TV better than movies.  More depth.

Of course comics have this weird thing where they go on forever and also cover an intense couple of years where four months our time is often about one night their time.  You end up not knowing how long people have known each other, even outside of retcons, cause on the one hand they've reported to every president since Kennedy and on the other they've aged maybe enough that their teen sidekicks made it into their twenties.  I know the arguments for the sliding timeline, but the impact on relationships frustrates me.  Plus I want to see people grow up.  Green Arrow in my head is the story of one ageing bowman, his protege, his bio son, and his granddaughter, plus a bunch of others.  How the world has changed around him and the changes in self image required by becoming basically a grandfather are interesting and important parts of his character.  Except apparently not, because comics want to play with archetypal figures, and changing happens only cyclically.  It's fine for them to die and return, lose and gain powers, like seasons changing, but it's somehow not fine for years to actually pass.

So comics time is both really, really long term and really, really short.

Frustrating.

But it do take a bit of a long while to build up that kind of deep time in story layers, and the stories aren't being told to the same people every time.  Like with Doctor Who, they have to assume a lot of the audience hasn't seen previous seasons due to not having been born.  There's probably not many of us who stick around and dig long enough to see that it goes back so far.  If stories have to be sold every month, they probably can't be sold only to the fans of the long term.

Also, you can't start from scratch while marketing the story to people as a fifty year deep endeavour.  You'd have to start with people who like new things and acquire people who like story archaeology.  Tricky.

Or, of course, you start a new story about three generations of hero, and just act like the back story in your head is all in really rare back issues, or throw in flashbacks and recaps and references as needed.

Or, you start with the whole multi decade kaboodle of canon, and then just go lalala nu what nu and just keep writing it the interesting way to you.  Fanfic doesn't have to sell and if you make one person go eeeeeee then you've won.

There are things fanfic can do that canon does not and orig fic cannot.  And I don't just mean porn.  You can borrow all that deep time to do uncommercial things that simply can't be done from fresh.  Even if you call it an AU and change really substantial things, you still have so much to draw on, it works different than you could ever manage without.  Because these characters have been part of the conversation for so long, and because archetypes are part of how culture gets built and hang around for the using, and because everyone added their own idea of cool and only remembered their good bits version, the result is just different in kind from a single author original.

... but I still want to figure out how to do it from blank page, because most canon has so thoroughly frustrated me already.  *ponders*