~~ the battery's leaking...

i know i've ranted quite a bit about my sore spot about characters made too perfect or too pretty (read: bland and boring) in fanfic, but just today it occurred to me that perhaps it would be impossible to convince me that a character's really "in character" unless they're portrayed as significantly unsympathetic. now, this isn't the same thing as the people who say stories should be written with the assumption that snape/lucius/draco is a bastard or ugly or a miserable awful wanker or what have you, especially after ootp, where harry has become significantly more unsympathetic to many readers. his actions and reactions aren't clear-cut: you can read them in widely different lights. this ambiguity is, i think, the hallmark of a "realistic" character, and i would say it would have to be preserved to keep them "real" in fanfiction.

    ( wah. yet more fanon/canon draco-centric characterization blather ahead. )

~~

    ( on to the requisite bit of reccing and rambling on my preferences in humorfic as a genre. )

~~

having seen a rec list with a lot of angst and death-fics on it, the nature of my ongoing issue with a lot of them struck me. i'm particularly thinking of olympia_m's, amalin's and cinnamon's fics, as compared to maybe weatherby's `contrition' and maya's `dark side of light', which are probably the only fics i can think of that significantly break form, mostly because their emotionality could almost be called subtextual. as well as aja's `every second', which i feel is honest and raw and -real-, because it doesn't flich but neither does it dwell on either the pain or the ecstasy of death-- it merely transcribes the emotional maelstrom in no uncertain terms.
    interestingly, i think what i would consider the most `realistic' and honest death-fics have been the rash of post-ootp sirius fics. those have been absolutely brilliant, particularly ivy's and fyredancer's and amalin's and bow's. i think the bleakness of ootp has really inspired some brilliant interpretations.
    obviously, i love all the fics mentioned, so. er. yeah. salut. this isn't con-crit, just me thinking along these lines.

( this is somewhat incoherent and in no way final, as well as not really centered on any particular fanfics, actually. )