[the shame! the horror!]

[reenka]

Fandom Shame Meme (or: Things I'd Be Ashamed of If I Had Shame)!

1) I (used to, when I read much fanfic) constantly read (and enjoy) oodles of H/D porn on ff.net & aff.net as well as lj that I never feedbacked and I thought had little to no 'redeeming value', not even with a 'hohoho, how charmingly ironic, I shall now mock silently to myself', but with a high willingness and ability to suspend all critical judgment-- sometimes I literally went through every R-and-over H/D fic I could find linked, in vain hopes it was remotely readable. I really have no practical standards to speak of; it's only when my eyes started bleeding from sheer pain that I stopped. Also, the great majority of my favorite HP fics are pretty OOC and I don't much care.

I've liked cutting fics, goth!Draco fics, Veela!Draco fics, gender-bender fics, poor-little-abused!Draco fics, top and bottom!Draco fics-- you name an H/D cliche, I've probably liked at one point. I am proud that I've never liked a nice!Draco or an abusive-and-evil-omg!Draco fic, never ever never, because mommy THAT'S GROSS.

A list:
- Draco in a skirt or girl!Draco; also usually rentboy!Draco
- almost any fic where Draco resents his lot in life as Harry's boyfriend and sex slave (yet sekritly loves it omg!) is fine by me; it's also fine if he's just a sex-slave and is yet so tragically in love with clueless-yet-sekritly-attached!Harry, aww.
- fics where Snape or Ron or whoever has some tragic unrequited lust for Harry and there is some combination of Invisibility Cloak, Astronomy Tower and naked detentions.
- Snape/Draco/Harry/etc is in lust against his will, pines away, wanks, happy ending.
- Harry getting all violent on Draco's ass; basically, Slytherin!Harry but not-- not!-- evil!Harry
- friendship fic where they learn to slowly get along and Draco is really genuinely cool
- fics where Remus always wanted Sirius (and hell, vice versa). awwww.
- Draco is pretty, oh-so-pretty... pretty and witty and briiiiiight... he's also a total flaming queen, clearly.
- meaningless drunken sex except they wake up and realize OMG I CANNOT LEAVE YOU (maybe there's angst first, though).
- lust/love/binding-potions done remotely well; I AM A SUCKER. there is nothing quite like do-I-love-you-or-is-it-the-DRUGS-I'm-on angst. I also love it when they can't move like, 2 meters away from each other or it huuuuurts, oh it hurts. Er. I might also have a slight telepathy thing.
- I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED YOU, HARRY. (*cringes* but he's in denial...!)
- ...Draco angsts and goes to clubs and is slutty and has piercings; Harry is a sincere sort of bad-boy, disillusioned with the war. Angry sex in back alleys, anyone?
- angsty, Sirius-obsessed Remus. It has to happen, mmkay.
- woobie-yet-headstrong!Harry meets prissy-yet-needy!Draco (...or is that canon??)

...But I still take H/D fic and writing quality way too seriously because (in spite of??) all this.


2) I spent my first year in fandom writing HP meta and fics and stuff without actually reading the HP books 'cause I really really didn't like the first one. On the bright side(?) this was not a secret at the time, either. There was wank, however.

3) I've only actually edited one of the 60+ fics I've written in fandom, though on the bright side I do proofread (...after I post, because I have an itchy trigger-finger). I've had several others betaed for me, but I was too lazy to implement the edits so the fics have never seen the light of day, and one of these is actually one of my best fics, I think. I'm just that lazy.

4) I've often contemplated writing 'sell-out plebefic' on ff.net about Veelas and hot!Draco and what have you just so I can get like, 1,000 comments (oh, would I but could I). I really can't write engagingly/poppishly enough, and I totally angst over that a lot. I wish my writing was more accessible and 'fun' and eh, it wouldn't matter if it was stupid if I was like OMG UBER POPULAR even among teenies. Yes, wild ff.net power-trip fantasy, yes. I constantly sekritly compare myself to others and wind up feeling inadequate just 'cause my fics on ff.net only get like, 2-3 comments unless you count het porn(!).

5) I totally wrote all sorts of pairings I thought were ridiculous or personally distasteful on request to please my audience and prove to myself I could, all part of some sort of need to pretend my fanfic writing was 'serious' and I was really learning something.

6) I've read a goodly amount of H/S porn though it totally conflicted with my OTP and I didn't even find Snape hot, just because the sex was written so well. There's a lot of good porn in H/S-- well, if you can stomach it. The word 'Snarry' needs to be shot repeatedly, however, as do fics where Snape uses fragrant shampoo. Let's get one thing straight: I'm at war with Snape's flowery, sweet-smelling and magically-delicious shampoo.

7) I usually avoid feedbacking fic for pairings other than my OTP just 'cause I'm lazy, even though I was known as Fandom Reviewer Person for a while. It sort of became a burden after a point; also, I often reviewed at length and inventively just to get praised for it and continue the vicious cycle of boot-licking. Though on the bright side, I was sincere.

8) I'm not, in almost all ways, a canon!whore, and I never have been. My huge, wildly proliferating pet peeves are mostly a result of a sekritly bitchy temperament and preference hardened by reading lots of crappily done fic that used certain characterizations or plot-devices so that I started to have knee-jerk biases against them. I think I wound up using 'in-characterness' as a way to justify myself and appeal to some sort of standard. Any standard. Please god, a standard.

9) I love (my favorite) Dracos. Just... not necessarily your Draco, random fandomer. No, your Draco I probably hate way way more than is possibly healthy. However, the types of Dracos I like tend to be contradictory and aren't divisible into 'canon' and 'fanon'-- more like into 'Reena's idea of crappy fanon' and 'Reena's idea of nifty fanon'. So there. Love me, love my contradictions of myself.

10) My sekrit OTP is really Tom/Hagrid. [And I think pointless in-jokes are fun, fun, fun!]

Comments

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Heh-- yeah, these are the sorts of complaints most people (who don't especially like him) have about Harry, so I'm used to it. The only thing that I find an actual misconception and try to disprove is that Harry is boring or typical or 'nice'-- because he's not, and I don't actually think he was before OoTP either, though it was more subtle. I don't think Harry was a necessarily likeable character in OoTP by the usual definition of that term, but then I don't find Draco likeable either. At all. He just makes me want to smack him all the time (well, sometimes I want to giggle at him and pinch his cheek)-- so I don't get stopped by a sense of 'ewww, stinky stupid annoying bastard boy' or anything, if I know where they're coming from. And with Harry, where he's coming from is completely spelled out, so it's easy to see (for me?)

Anyway, I've noticed that people do go for the 'underdog' a lot in terms of characters they like, moreso than any character trait they use to justify it. And it's only if you use Harry's pov that he's the underdog. Well, he sort of is anyway, but... on a more meta level of course he isn't, whereas Ron & Draco are sort of doomed in a way, just as Harry is bound to always win in the end. I think I love Harry not because he's so sympathetic but because he's so meaty as a character-- like, he has all this darkness, all this inner conflict, all this power. And at some point I think I got fed up with Draco, also-- no one has yet written him out believably getting out of the hole JKR has placed him in and really developed him as a character from as-is in canon. That's a nearly 100% failure record, whether or not I love a particular characterization-- and I can't get away from the idea that Draco needs development beyond either canon (like he's sometimes written by say, Miss Breed or Aspen or what have you) or uber-fanon. I want the in-between, the missing link, and there is none. So I'm super-duper bitter, and I believe at some point that's driven me to writing over reading and Harry over Draco, as well as canon over fanon (and at this point, I think it's driven me out of fandom, mostly). It's frustrating, and I admit I'm uber-picky with Draco, but... 99% of the things I like about Draco-fics have nothing to do with canon!Draco, and at some point that started to make me sick. And man, what the fandom does to Ron is almost worse.

I agree Draco's obsession doesn't need to be sexual, of course not-- it's just that I'm super-romantic girl, and if I read a pairing, even a strong non-sexual obsession on the side like that would mess with me and unbalance things. I think my idea of love is heavily biased towards following one's greatest need/focus-- and it's not that it's sexual, it's more that whole soulmate idea where you go with the person you're most linked with or you go alone, because otherwise things would be... incomplete, I guess?

I don't think I'm thinking about canon!Draco so much as the way he is if you're going to slash him at all. That's why I'm okay with het Draco pairings (though the problem there is that he's so gay, but what have you). It's pretty meta, in other words. The best illustration would be how I feel about Draco Veritas!Draco-- I mean, I don't think it's slash, so there's no (overt) sexual element, right-- but in my mind, they're so bound together that having either of them get together with anyone else feels... empty, like they're cheating their partner because they could never give all of themselves. So I'd rather neither of them got with anyone. Like I said, painfully romantic :>