~~ aesthetics babbling & yet more otp woes.

    i don't know what use it is to say this, but i like thinking about the nature and shape of my own aesthetic biases.
    i tend to admire the things i think i'm not, i think. or at least, admire especially much. thus i find myself in awe of precise wording, elegant structure, concise intensity in imagery. it's like with romantic love, kind of-- i love it because it completes me. my very favorite art is an art of condensation, smooth corners and density and brilliant color. and i mean visual as well as verbal. when the top of my head comes off and i'm screaming with delight, it is almost always because something is so brilliantly multifaceted and intense with meaning. this is why i am especially drawn to symbolic work-- directly visually symbolic and metaphorical as well as verbally symbolic. symbols and good metaphors can't help but embody the height of this density. you're imbuing something with meaning at both polarities-- both verbal and visual and an overlay of the ephemeral, bound together.

    ( why yes, i did take an aesthetics class this semester, why? -.- )

~~

one of the best things, to me, about reading fanfic is that you have this huge investment in the characters. every story with them-- at least, with the same pairing-- is somehow united, and builds on top of all the ones that have gone before it. so that it's a given (if it's well-written at all) that even if there's only a small amount of heat, one's emotions easily come to a boil. all one needs is a small bit of tension, a fleeting kiss, something that gets the pov character's heart pumping-- and one can feel it through a vicarious link, so that one simultaneously feels breathless or angry or sad along with the character.

this is such a great shortcut-- you get your kicks and you don't need to discriminate as much. what you could usually get from only one source (ie, the original), you can now get from multiple sources just because they use certain cues (in this case, a pairing). i suppose it could be something -other- than a pairing, but that would be tricky-- for example, if one was attached to a certain character. people write them so very differently from fanfic to fanfic. there is no one dependable fanon of any character that's in a majority of fic. with pairings, you will always get these two people (hopefully their personalities retain some measure of decent constancy), always doing the same sorts of things, because they're together. kissing, fighting, groping, angstying, and so on. so you can depend on something-- a predictable rush of endorphins when one's favorite pairing gets their first kiss, for example.

naturally, good fiction can do this (affect the reader on a basic level), with any characters or pairings (or lack thereof). but this is really rare. i don't see how you would read fanfic as a hobby, if you didn't discriminate based on pairing, unless you were at least somewhat indiscriminate towards quality in general. i used to read (commercially published) fanfic in elfquest and star trek, but there was quality control there. so i read het and gen and so on indiscriminately, but i had assurance of solidly unified world-building (to some extent) and a certain minimum of talent and comfort with that world.

anyway. i was just surprised (yet again) at the difference it makes, reading about the same thing (a kiss) in the same story, by the same author, with different pairings.

    ( blah blah exposition blah. )

~~

EDIT - salima's `quiet intensity' reminds me of the first blush of my (h/d) love. awwwwww, the angst-ridden woobies. (she writes so well, too!)