fanfic good stuff cycle
Oct. 23rd, 2011 07:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo I have been figuring out what I get out of reading fanfic. I would usually say I get more like the show I'm a fan of, only different, with more of the good stuff. But I'm currently reading - obsessively and at a rate of knots - stuff from a show I'm not a fan of. So, theory go boom.
Part of it is romance stuff. Queer romance, which I know there's a whole genre of, but my usual reading habits don't find much of it. I don't so much like the ones that just start with porn. They should start with yearning. I've been reading according to word count, decreasing, and there can be many thousands of words of yearning. And then, getting! Happy! And then on to the next fic. Yearning, getting, yearning, getting, ever decreasing length so ever quicker cycle. I figure it works nicely for the addictive more-quicker-now aspects.
But I don't just read romance-romance. I read my favourite genres, F&SF, urban fantasy, stuff like that. And I get fed up when my urban fantasy turns out to be paranormal romance. So why am I reading so much SF defined by its pairing? *big shrug*
One essential ingredient though is watching them fit it all in with their regular lives. Er, their highly irregular missions to other planets lives, that they do every day. Because the point isn't just smoochy romance stuff, it's trying to fit a romantic relationship and a work relationship and a friendship and a whole lot of rules and consequences and hey, maybe some near fatal jeopardy, a few interstellar wars, imminent apocalypses, political machinations and all that good stuff in together. All at once. Without dying or breaking up.
Because really, that's a pretty good trick. Is hard enough fitting study and lives together. Add monsters and it's all metaphors.
So I was reading a story about John and Rodney taking a holiday together, and they didn't know what they'd do once they got back to Atlantis, and then the story just ended when their holiday did. And that was not what I was looking for. They hadn't got to the good stuff yet. But one of the stories about Jack and Daniel I still remember from my Stargate binge was about figuring out how to fit Jack and Daniel's work together once they were married. There might have been sex, I don't remember or much care. It was more cool watching them learn to juggle.
So there's probably stories that aren't fanfic that do this kind of thing. But fanfic does it all the time, because it's trying to fit in the gaps on all this big plot stuff. So that's what I'm getting out of fanfic, even for shows I don't watch: the stuff about striking a balance.
Also, stuff goes boom and there's monsters. I likes those bits too.
But that I can get from gen. And I've not been reading a whole lot of gen, just of late.
*goes back to reading Just One More Story Before Sleeps*
*wonders where I'll go when the SGA runs out*
Part of it is romance stuff. Queer romance, which I know there's a whole genre of, but my usual reading habits don't find much of it. I don't so much like the ones that just start with porn. They should start with yearning. I've been reading according to word count, decreasing, and there can be many thousands of words of yearning. And then, getting! Happy! And then on to the next fic. Yearning, getting, yearning, getting, ever decreasing length so ever quicker cycle. I figure it works nicely for the addictive more-quicker-now aspects.
But I don't just read romance-romance. I read my favourite genres, F&SF, urban fantasy, stuff like that. And I get fed up when my urban fantasy turns out to be paranormal romance. So why am I reading so much SF defined by its pairing? *big shrug*
One essential ingredient though is watching them fit it all in with their regular lives. Er, their highly irregular missions to other planets lives, that they do every day. Because the point isn't just smoochy romance stuff, it's trying to fit a romantic relationship and a work relationship and a friendship and a whole lot of rules and consequences and hey, maybe some near fatal jeopardy, a few interstellar wars, imminent apocalypses, political machinations and all that good stuff in together. All at once. Without dying or breaking up.
Because really, that's a pretty good trick. Is hard enough fitting study and lives together. Add monsters and it's all metaphors.
So I was reading a story about John and Rodney taking a holiday together, and they didn't know what they'd do once they got back to Atlantis, and then the story just ended when their holiday did. And that was not what I was looking for. They hadn't got to the good stuff yet. But one of the stories about Jack and Daniel I still remember from my Stargate binge was about figuring out how to fit Jack and Daniel's work together once they were married. There might have been sex, I don't remember or much care. It was more cool watching them learn to juggle.
So there's probably stories that aren't fanfic that do this kind of thing. But fanfic does it all the time, because it's trying to fit in the gaps on all this big plot stuff. So that's what I'm getting out of fanfic, even for shows I don't watch: the stuff about striking a balance.
Also, stuff goes boom and there's monsters. I likes those bits too.
But that I can get from gen. And I've not been reading a whole lot of gen, just of late.
*goes back to reading Just One More Story Before Sleeps*
*wonders where I'll go when the SGA runs out*