~~ bleary fic wibbles.

It's an obvious sort of thought, but.... I wonder if the stories we love best affirm to us the ways in which we were already picturing the workings of the world. The things which continuously upset me in any story or even piece of non-fiction are things which I don't want to believe in, even if they're possible. There's a resistance there, a sense of vulnerability. Like, if I let this idea inside me, it could ruin me.

Maybe this is related to what someone's comfort-zone of emotion is, too. Mine had never been so rigid before I began to care about characters too much. I mean, usually I meet them in a story and it's for the first time, and while it hurts to see them come to a sticky end, it's self-contained sort of thing, and the prose could easily overwhelm the characterization difficulties. The characterization is what it is, and there's rarely "right" or "wrong" to it, as long as it's well-documented.

The more time I spend reading fanfic in a single fandom, the more sensitive I seem to become to characterization over style. The characters (and secondarily, their world) have attained so much definition in my mind that it just hurts me to let go. I want them to remain consistent. I want them to retain some sort of compass of behavior more than anything-- not so much in-character in terms of actions, but more in terms of a sort of emotional range, maybe.

I was reading yet another rec of olympia_m's `Tale of the Shining Prince' & sequels on veelarecs, which is what brought me to this. I think that is one gorgeously written story which I can probably talk about more than any other set of fics in this fandom. I mean, no other work except perhaps the Draco Trilogy, would seem to sustain that sort of comprehensive analysis. I couldn't read it more than once, and I have all these conflicting emotions about it, which is what makes it interesting to me.

( And yet this isn't actually a review or anything. No, I'm just. Well, I have a headache, honey. )