Fanfic blather
Mar. 22nd, 2012 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetSome ficcish things I've been thinking about, in no particular order.
I've got the terrible urge to write a self-insert fic. Except it wouldn't be your conventional self-insert fic, in which the author goes to visit whatever universe and wreaks chaos on the assembled masses. It would be the one where the author gets accidentally shunted into whatever universe and is mostly incidental the plot.
I've been wanting to write it for a while now, and I knew almost instinctively that there were all these rules I/"I" would need to follow - except I wasn't entirely sure where I'd come up with those rules in the first place, or why they were so arbitrary, or why I was so certain they'd even work (which, wow, I am pretty certain for some reason). And then it hit me one afternoon that it was basically my self-imposed CFUD Audience rules (long story if you don't already know it), except implemented "in person" rather than through the mysterious fourth-wall of the internet as was the case with CFUD. And I spent rather a long time being very conflicted over that, because - well, I loved CFUD. I devoted quite a bit of time and attention to it. It eventually grew too big for me, though what exactly the arbitrary size limit for my attention span is I doubt I'll really be able to pinpoint, and I drifted away, but I guess this was part of me realizing I missed what I used to do there: the teasing of characters, the fourth wall shenanigans, terrible jokes and art and the entire community that went with it. But I don't think I can go back; I've tried a couple of times, but I don't think I can manage it, for all I sometimes wish things were different.
Anyway, the point is that it sent me into a weird spiral of "Is this just me trying to re-live my 'glory days'?" and "If this is what I'm missing, why can't I just go back to being Audience and live with that?", but a few weeks of not thinking about it has mostly gotten me over it. Good riddance to that angst, really. There's no reason I can't miss doing something I enjoyed, and no reason I can't find a new way to make it work now that the old one isn't really feasible for me any longer. So I'm pretty sure I still want to write the ridiculous self-insert fic, in which I get stuck in another universe and do my level best to keep out of the way and the plot in general, though whether it will ever appear anywhere other than my computer I doubt I'll know in a hurry.
Maybe I could just write that prologue I've been thinking about. Just set up the basics of how I got there and what the characters would be doing while I was attempting to stay out of their way without even touching on what fandom(s) I've been contemplating visiting.
Also, what it says about me that I don't actually want to be a central focus of a self-insert story I'm not entirely sure I want to know.
...And now I'm going to avoid thinking about this fic for a few more weeks, since I've just mentally talked myself out of writing it again. *sigh* We'll see how I feel about it in April, I guess.
I think I need to introduce this one with a Fanfic Flamingo.
Read it? Okay, good.
See, that whole pre-destined love/mate trope is a guilty pleasure of mine, especially with the incredibly overt macguffin that makes it extra obvious somehow (biology/pheromones, magic, whatever). Pleasure because, well, I rather like to indulge in the fantasy that the characters in Whatever Ship are Meant For Each Other, and yeah, I do like to read about them torturing themselves over whether the other character feels the same way or not; it leaves a lovely knot of pain in the area of my heart, bittersweet and strong, and then the relief and joy are so much more when the inevitable Happily Ever After is achieved.
Guilty because just how is it possible to give consent in such a relationship? Is consent even still meaningful when you're pre-determined to end up with someone?
So I kind of have the urge to write a fic exploring the consent-related aspects of the mysterious Fated Forever Love Bond, while simultaneously indulging in whatever ship I feel like embracing at any given moment. Also, Melissa Marr kinda already explored a good deal of that sort of thing much more seriously in Wicked Lovely, which I have totally been meaning to write at least a brief review of for a while and have been putting off for no good reason, so I don't feel obligated to (wait, shit, that's a spoiler, uh) ...write about original characters. Again, guilty pleasure here.
Anyway, I have no idea what fandom I'd go for, though I'm leaning vaguely towards Homestuck if only because it's what I've written in most recently. I figure I can explore things like Bond Blockers, so characters can get to know each other outside of emotional/biological/magical/pre-destined hand-wavey whatever and decide whether they actually want to give this a try; and how there's totally people who end up in terrible, abusive relationships because of the stupid bond and now there's therapy and Bond Breakers for that; and can characters A and B (and possibly C, which would put a really great spin on things, I'm certain; om nom nom polyfic) make this work without the Bond?
It wants to end up being way longer than anything I normally write, which is already a mark against it, but that doesn't stop me from toying with the idea a little.
Oh lordy, Communications. If that fic were a child, it would probably be attending grade school now, and I still haven't finished it.
I still kind-of want to finish it, though I tell myself that about all my WIPs. I've learned to let a lot of them go, but certainly not all, and this one has been with me for a lot longer than most.
My current problem is that I'm so far from up-to-date on canon, I may as well be reading an entirely different comic. Hell, I'm not even entirely sure I want to get up-to-date; I never read the whole thing in the first place, picked up most of what I knew via fanfics - it was pretty much my first fandom for doing that, actually - and then briefly dipped my toes into canon later as it suited me. I was never interested in the murder mysteries, and frankly a lot of the "solutions" were starting to seem contrived to me even within the first twenty books, and it's over sixty now. I loved the characters and their relationships, though, and was more than passively interested in the plot that occasionally reared its head between random murders. I just... have no idea where it is now.
So there's about five more things I want to do in that fic: Kazuha, Heiji, and Hakuba read newspapers; Akemi makes/meets friends in America; Ai becomes a sorceress' apprentice and hot carbon plus liquid oxygen = CO2; a showdown between the bad guys and the authorities for once; and the end, where Shin'ichi's life has basically been run by science and magic for years now and he's not going to escape it any time soon. The newspaper bit is actually within a few hundred words of being finished, but the one with Akemi is giving me a bit of trouble, if only because I'm having difficulty juggling all the characters I want to include and remembering where they are at any given time.
IDK; I don't suppose anyone out there is willing to be a sounding board/cheerleader on this front?
And that's where my brain has been in terms of fan-writing lately. State of the Fanfic Union, I guess.
Anyway, bed time.
I've got the terrible urge to write a self-insert fic. Except it wouldn't be your conventional self-insert fic, in which the author goes to visit whatever universe and wreaks chaos on the assembled masses. It would be the one where the author gets accidentally shunted into whatever universe and is mostly incidental the plot.
I've been wanting to write it for a while now, and I knew almost instinctively that there were all these rules I/"I" would need to follow - except I wasn't entirely sure where I'd come up with those rules in the first place, or why they were so arbitrary, or why I was so certain they'd even work (which, wow, I am pretty certain for some reason). And then it hit me one afternoon that it was basically my self-imposed CFUD Audience rules (long story if you don't already know it), except implemented "in person" rather than through the mysterious fourth-wall of the internet as was the case with CFUD. And I spent rather a long time being very conflicted over that, because - well, I loved CFUD. I devoted quite a bit of time and attention to it. It eventually grew too big for me, though what exactly the arbitrary size limit for my attention span is I doubt I'll really be able to pinpoint, and I drifted away, but I guess this was part of me realizing I missed what I used to do there: the teasing of characters, the fourth wall shenanigans, terrible jokes and art and the entire community that went with it. But I don't think I can go back; I've tried a couple of times, but I don't think I can manage it, for all I sometimes wish things were different.
Anyway, the point is that it sent me into a weird spiral of "Is this just me trying to re-live my 'glory days'?" and "If this is what I'm missing, why can't I just go back to being Audience and live with that?", but a few weeks of not thinking about it has mostly gotten me over it. Good riddance to that angst, really. There's no reason I can't miss doing something I enjoyed, and no reason I can't find a new way to make it work now that the old one isn't really feasible for me any longer. So I'm pretty sure I still want to write the ridiculous self-insert fic, in which I get stuck in another universe and do my level best to keep out of the way and the plot in general, though whether it will ever appear anywhere other than my computer I doubt I'll know in a hurry.
Maybe I could just write that prologue I've been thinking about. Just set up the basics of how I got there and what the characters would be doing while I was attempting to stay out of their way without even touching on what fandom(s) I've been contemplating visiting.
Also, what it says about me that I don't actually want to be a central focus of a self-insert story I'm not entirely sure I want to know.
...And now I'm going to avoid thinking about this fic for a few more weeks, since I've just mentally talked myself out of writing it again. *sigh* We'll see how I feel about it in April, I guess.
I think I need to introduce this one with a Fanfic Flamingo.
Read it? Okay, good.
See, that whole pre-destined love/mate trope is a guilty pleasure of mine, especially with the incredibly overt macguffin that makes it extra obvious somehow (biology/pheromones, magic, whatever). Pleasure because, well, I rather like to indulge in the fantasy that the characters in Whatever Ship are Meant For Each Other, and yeah, I do like to read about them torturing themselves over whether the other character feels the same way or not; it leaves a lovely knot of pain in the area of my heart, bittersweet and strong, and then the relief and joy are so much more when the inevitable Happily Ever After is achieved.
Guilty because just how is it possible to give consent in such a relationship? Is consent even still meaningful when you're pre-determined to end up with someone?
So I kind of have the urge to write a fic exploring the consent-related aspects of the mysterious Fated Forever Love Bond, while simultaneously indulging in whatever ship I feel like embracing at any given moment. Also, Melissa Marr kinda already explored a good deal of that sort of thing much more seriously in Wicked Lovely, which I have totally been meaning to write at least a brief review of for a while and have been putting off for no good reason, so I don't feel obligated to (wait, shit, that's a spoiler, uh) ...write about original characters. Again, guilty pleasure here.
Anyway, I have no idea what fandom I'd go for, though I'm leaning vaguely towards Homestuck if only because it's what I've written in most recently. I figure I can explore things like Bond Blockers, so characters can get to know each other outside of emotional/biological/magical/pre-destined hand-wavey whatever and decide whether they actually want to give this a try; and how there's totally people who end up in terrible, abusive relationships because of the stupid bond and now there's therapy and Bond Breakers for that; and can characters A and B (and possibly C, which would put a really great spin on things, I'm certain; om nom nom polyfic) make this work without the Bond?
It wants to end up being way longer than anything I normally write, which is already a mark against it, but that doesn't stop me from toying with the idea a little.
Oh lordy, Communications. If that fic were a child, it would probably be attending grade school now, and I still haven't finished it.
I still kind-of want to finish it, though I tell myself that about all my WIPs. I've learned to let a lot of them go, but certainly not all, and this one has been with me for a lot longer than most.
My current problem is that I'm so far from up-to-date on canon, I may as well be reading an entirely different comic. Hell, I'm not even entirely sure I want to get up-to-date; I never read the whole thing in the first place, picked up most of what I knew via fanfics - it was pretty much my first fandom for doing that, actually - and then briefly dipped my toes into canon later as it suited me. I was never interested in the murder mysteries, and frankly a lot of the "solutions" were starting to seem contrived to me even within the first twenty books, and it's over sixty now. I loved the characters and their relationships, though, and was more than passively interested in the plot that occasionally reared its head between random murders. I just... have no idea where it is now.
So there's about five more things I want to do in that fic: Kazuha, Heiji, and Hakuba read newspapers; Akemi makes/meets friends in America; Ai becomes a sorceress' apprentice and hot carbon plus liquid oxygen = CO2; a showdown between the bad guys and the authorities for once; and the end, where Shin'ichi's life has basically been run by science and magic for years now and he's not going to escape it any time soon. The newspaper bit is actually within a few hundred words of being finished, but the one with Akemi is giving me a bit of trouble, if only because I'm having difficulty juggling all the characters I want to include and remembering where they are at any given time.
IDK; I don't suppose anyone out there is willing to be a sounding board/cheerleader on this front?
And that's where my brain has been in terms of fan-writing lately. State of the Fanfic Union, I guess.
Anyway, bed time.
