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reenkaI'm obsessively watching Alias at the moment-- only half of first season so far-- and really enjoying it. I dunno why, 'cause it's not fantasy/sci-fi per se, and it's not quite romance adventure either, but I do like well-done spy-fi shows 'cause maybe you could see it as a sort of sci-fi anyway, right?
So I'm wondering why I'm really not interested in Alias fanfic (well, slash especially seems difficult at this point as none of the attractive males even know each other). If it was anything, it'd have to be canonical-pairing, and most likely this is the type of show I might read post-ending fic for if it ended badly, since that sort of curiosity and level of investment applies to most shows I like.
The only thing is... they say one of the main reasons people read fic is to 'get more of the show', right? Okay. Well. I've read a lot of fic in a (modest, but significant) number of fandoms, and I've never felt I was getting more of the same thing. It may even be better, but it's always different. Although sometimes it comes close... if I'm looking for series-continuation fic after the end, it's been a blinding, horrible disappointment, mostly.
Now I'm wondering if anyone actually had a positive experience looking for 'more of the same' after the end of a TV season or after... oh, say GoF or OoTP and been successful. Because oh man... I've really been burned, both with the sort of post-OoTP fic I was looking for and post-anime-series fic for my first mini-fandom, Hana Yori Dango. I've only had one success, and that's Herself's post-Chosen Buffy fanfic, Disenchantment, which perhaps may give me hope for the whole idea, come to think of it. It really satisfied me after the horribly unsatisfying ending (for a B/S shipper). Well, in that case, it probably helped that things revolved at least partly around Spike's last words, which were what bothered me, so maybe the specificity of the issue helped a lot. It's probably a lot harder to satisfy a fan's more ambiguous half-realized desires.
For instance, I just realized what I wanna see is a sort of semi-slashy AU of book 6 that still somehow manages to turn the whole thing into more of what I envisioned in my dreams post-OoTP-- like... not the horrible set-up where Harry 'sekritly' had sex with Malfoy during HBP & didn't crush on Ginny at -all-, but just where certain things didn't happen to do with plot threads other than Draco's-- and also, I think it'd help the H/D cause a lot if Dumbledore didn't die and Harry didn't leave school immediately 'cause he had inside info or something. Of course, this would mean severe messing with Snape's whole plot and actually the whole plot of HBP, but still-- it's good grist. Plus, you could beef up Harry's reaction to the bathroom scene a bit, heh.
Not surprisingly, no one has written this to my knowledge, and I doubt they would, simply because that sounds like a hell of a lot of work, doesn't it? But it just hit me that a H/D-slashy and Draco-centric rewrite of HBP is seriously the only HBP-era fic I'd be actually interested in reading. And sure, people have written several 'slashy' fics set within the HBP timeline, but that's not the same: it's one thing to mess with the timeline and alter a few events wantonly for slashy gratification, and another to reroute the whole shebang seriously, trying to achieve the same plot end-goals as JKR while going slashy.
So maybe the whole genre of series-continuation fanfic is undermined 'cause fans would tend to bring both too much specific expectation and too much ambiguous 'unresolved issues' to it which depend on pov anyway, and it's sort of a 'write it yourself' type thing by nature because of that. It really is so much easier to just dispose of a spouse or even raise someone from the dead if that's what it takes, because at least we can agree that other lovers and dead protagonists = bad. *sigh*
So I'm wondering why I'm really not interested in Alias fanfic (well, slash especially seems difficult at this point as none of the attractive males even know each other). If it was anything, it'd have to be canonical-pairing, and most likely this is the type of show I might read post-ending fic for if it ended badly, since that sort of curiosity and level of investment applies to most shows I like.
The only thing is... they say one of the main reasons people read fic is to 'get more of the show', right? Okay. Well. I've read a lot of fic in a (modest, but significant) number of fandoms, and I've never felt I was getting more of the same thing. It may even be better, but it's always different. Although sometimes it comes close... if I'm looking for series-continuation fic after the end, it's been a blinding, horrible disappointment, mostly.
Now I'm wondering if anyone actually had a positive experience looking for 'more of the same' after the end of a TV season or after... oh, say GoF or OoTP and been successful. Because oh man... I've really been burned, both with the sort of post-OoTP fic I was looking for and post-anime-series fic for my first mini-fandom, Hana Yori Dango. I've only had one success, and that's Herself's post-Chosen Buffy fanfic, Disenchantment, which perhaps may give me hope for the whole idea, come to think of it. It really satisfied me after the horribly unsatisfying ending (for a B/S shipper). Well, in that case, it probably helped that things revolved at least partly around Spike's last words, which were what bothered me, so maybe the specificity of the issue helped a lot. It's probably a lot harder to satisfy a fan's more ambiguous half-realized desires.
For instance, I just realized what I wanna see is a sort of semi-slashy AU of book 6 that still somehow manages to turn the whole thing into more of what I envisioned in my dreams post-OoTP-- like... not the horrible set-up where Harry 'sekritly' had sex with Malfoy during HBP & didn't crush on Ginny at -all-, but just where certain things didn't happen to do with plot threads other than Draco's-- and also, I think it'd help the H/D cause a lot if Dumbledore didn't die and Harry didn't leave school immediately 'cause he had inside info or something. Of course, this would mean severe messing with Snape's whole plot and actually the whole plot of HBP, but still-- it's good grist. Plus, you could beef up Harry's reaction to the bathroom scene a bit, heh.
Not surprisingly, no one has written this to my knowledge, and I doubt they would, simply because that sounds like a hell of a lot of work, doesn't it? But it just hit me that a H/D-slashy and Draco-centric rewrite of HBP is seriously the only HBP-era fic I'd be actually interested in reading. And sure, people have written several 'slashy' fics set within the HBP timeline, but that's not the same: it's one thing to mess with the timeline and alter a few events wantonly for slashy gratification, and another to reroute the whole shebang seriously, trying to achieve the same plot end-goals as JKR while going slashy.
So maybe the whole genre of series-continuation fanfic is undermined 'cause fans would tend to bring both too much specific expectation and too much ambiguous 'unresolved issues' to it which depend on pov anyway, and it's sort of a 'write it yourself' type thing by nature because of that. It really is so much easier to just dispose of a spouse or even raise someone from the dead if that's what it takes, because at least we can agree that other lovers and dead protagonists = bad. *sigh*
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Date: 2006-05-17 12:43 am (UTC)wait, you haven't gotten there yet. when you do, you can read my fic.
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Date: 2006-05-17 12:53 am (UTC)also: hee, your icon :D
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Date: 2006-05-17 01:28 am (UTC)THANK YOU!!!!
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Date: 2006-05-17 05:39 pm (UTC)....though I probably should've written 'do not open till the 18th' in retrospect ^^;;;
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Date: 2006-05-18 04:20 am (UTC)&hearts
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Date: 2006-05-17 03:15 am (UTC)Personally, I've never seen fic as "more of the same." Rather, the appeal of fic to me is that it fills in blanks and answers questions that the source material doesn't have the time or inclination or ability to explore. I think this is especially true for media fandom -- however good an episode of Alias is, it's not going to give you the story of what happened between Sloane and Jack 30 years ago, or a monologue giving Marshall's POV on Sydney or Sloane. It's precisely because TV and fic are different media that I can enjoy both.
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Date: 2006-05-17 03:24 am (UTC)Same here. I don't watch TV, but like with Harry Potter, I'm really not interested in reading speculative fics about what might happen in book seven. I'm much more interested in filling in the cracks of what's already there, or writing a complete AU (because I do love AUs). I'm struggling with wanting to write Fullmetal Alchemist fic, because a friend was wanting some, but I'm running up against the same wall, where I just can't write futurefic because I just don't feel like I can speculate about what will happen. Whereas if the series were over, I'd have no problem writing futurefic because I'd have all my canon to work from. Um...I think that kind of went OT, but anyway, yes! For me it's about filling in cracks for the most part.
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Date: 2006-05-17 05:48 pm (UTC)Anyway, you're right that fanfic can do these specific pov things best, but I still believe there's a large contingent of fans who're actually looking for the stuff they liked in the show-- if anything, there's the official book tie-ins for varies series which support that theory. It's just these are the gen & het, not the slash fans, generally. Also, 'the story of what happened between Sloane and Jack' could be written in the style and manner of the series, that's the point. It could be any theme or subject if it's treated with those biases (or lack thereof?)
And even though I've never read 'episode-like' fic nor wanted to, a number of the Star Trek tie-in novels read like a really good movie script or plot or whatever. Especially after a series ends, there -is- demand for that.
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Date: 2006-05-17 03:18 am (UTC)P.S. Wowww, Alias gets so. much. slashier. :x
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Date: 2006-05-17 05:52 pm (UTC)And, well, at least I have that to look forward to, then :D
What I'm usually looking for in fanfic...
Date: 2006-05-17 11:06 am (UTC)Re: What I'm usually looking for in fanfic...
Date: 2006-05-17 05:56 pm (UTC)In any case, I realize there are people who look for different things in fanfic, that's why I said 'one of' the main reasons. I myself don't necessarily look for continuation, though I used to with things like Star Trek tie-in novels before I even entered fandom as such.
Re: What I'm usually looking for in fanfic...
Date: 2006-05-17 06:53 pm (UTC)Hmm. I must admit I actually do not quite understand what you mean here. Are you saying that people mistake the aspect of a show/book/film that constitutes their emotional hook for what the show/book/film is all about? That they mistake a part for the whole? And that because their favourite aspect is there in a fanfic, they do not notice the differences from the source material so much, and just assume that the fic they're reading is a perfect 'continuation' of the source? Or am I misunderstanding you here?
The impression *I* get from my eight or so years of reading fanfic is that people tend to extract one aspect from a source - say, a favourite character, favourite pairing, favourite relationship, or favourite feeling - and expand on that aspect. So, you could probably say that in some sense it *is* a continuation that's being looked for - but a continuation not beyond the end of the story, but rather, sort of 'sideways', on a tangent. Or perhaps even, hm, not really sideways but sort of 'inside' - like turning a magnifying glass onto the aspect you like, however minor it is in the larger picture, and discovering a whole new world of stories in that one square tenth of an inch magnified times a million.... This is what most fanfic seems to do, and hence I usually assume it is what I assume most people (including me) want it to do.
Now, how closely the resulting fic is going to resemble the source material, and whether it could also be called a 'continuation' in the strictest sense, depends a lot on what the original aspect that the fic set out to expand on was. Maybe for some people the main hook is an entire show or book, not just an aspect, and someone like that, I'd imagine, would be likely to write fic that resembled the original a lot. For me, my main hook for becoming fannish about a source text, and seeking out fanfic, is angst, and more specifically a particular kind of 'estrangement angst', usually caused by a fundamentally world-view-changing event/trauma (so something like, say, relationship angst usually does less than nothing for me). This kind of angst is a minor to major aspect in many original works of fiction that get used as a source for fanfic, but it is rarely the *main* aspect. In fact, it is an element that is often rather glossed over after its intial introduction in a story. So fic that expands on that aspect will probably not resemble the source all that closely - at the very least it will be different in emotional tone, namely, a lot more angsty. *g* And if your main hook is angst, there are endless ways in which to deal with that in fic; angst has nearly nothing to do with form or style.
The same argument could of course be made for almost any kind of shipping (except perhaps the most canonical pairings from sources where the relationship actually *is* the focus of the source text, as well), and for slash, and, well, for pretty much any kind of fanfic, really. In fact, very little fanfic I've encountered in my 'career' as a fanfic reader seemed to try to sound and feel 'like an episode/chapter' from the source at all. The characters should ring true, yes - but everything else is pretty much up for grabs.
>Any fan always looks for the 'emotional hook' on some level, but a story can go for the same 'feel' as the original or strike out in a whole fresh direction or type of story with that hook.
Yes, exactly. And I would argue that *most* strike out in a fresh direction (even if it's only 'fresh' in comparison with the source material, not other fanfic, because most fanfic is formulaic in its own ways - but the formulas are definitely quite a bit different from the ones used in most source materials. Although in recent years some shows etc. have become more 'fannish' in feel, so maybe that line's becoming more muddied now).
Hmm. *rereads your original post* I think I sort of forgot what this discussion was about while I was typing, and went on a rather unmotivated ramble here. Sorry! ;-)
Re: What I'm usually looking for in fanfic...
Date: 2006-05-17 07:34 pm (UTC)In the case of the Buffy fic, all I had were my central issues of Spike's last words and his death (and Buffy's projected reaction), but since I focused on those things so much within the episode itself, a fic dealing with them became 'attached' to the show. Not so much creating 'new' canon but directly commenting on it-- that sense of connection, I think, is enough. The readers could 'plug in' the rest of the atmosphere themselves even if the writer didn't make it explicitly there in the fic.
I do think that for fans, fanon can influence their conception of canon same as canon influences fanon. It's probably especially clear when there are solid 'issues' in canon that don't get resolved for some reason-- certain questions to be answered, dangling threads to tie up, characters to bring back from the dead. It's something of a more canon-centric approach for fanon, even though it's still fanfic like any other on some level and therefore going 'sideways'.
Maybe for some people the main hook is an entire show or book, not just an aspect, and someone like that, I'd imagine, would be likely to write fic that resembled the original a lot.
See, this approaches what I meant closer than 'feeling like an episode', which is different. Caring about a range of issues from the source text, or at least some issues if they're specifically from the source-- the more aspects that drive the show you talk about, the more it feels like 'more of the same' to fic readers, I think. It's all pretty fuzzy. I think to make something 'feel' like Buffy, it's pretty important to have the characters speak in California-style slang and be tongue-in-cheek and snarky. If they don't snark, it just doesn't feel like Buffy-- and if they do snark and say, Spike does his thing with Xander and antagonizes Buffy (to what degree?) and is nice to Dawn, the fic 'feels' more and more like a specific point in the show (say, Season 2 fic should 'feel' rather different than Season 6 fic).
Even so, you can strike out in a new direction-- it just depends whether you're going in that new direction with a significant percent of the show's past baggage dragging along behind you. The more baggage, the more the fic feels a part of the mythos of the original 'verse. And for most fans, all they'd need are central 'key points' that feel important to them and that interest them most, because it's what they focus on in the show to start with.
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Date: 2006-05-18 01:33 am (UTC)I think something else to take into consideration is what 'type' of fandom you're looking for continuation fic in. I've found (in the fandoms I roam) that older fandoms are far more likely to have major continuation fiction, and newer fandoms are far more likely to have crazy challanges and drabble communities and all the new and shiny bits of fandom that we've come to love. Really, if I date my fandoms, the one that's old enough to have a majority of the works on personal sites and mailing lists is the one with loads of 20+ chapter epics trying to decide what comes next, the next youngest one, has about three non-focused continuations, and then what I consider a modern fandom has one continuation that I can think of, and it's not true to the tone of the series at all.
I kinda like how they've organized themselves though- the older fandom is the one I can't afford to carry around with me (student's life) and so I can still have 'more of the same' when I want to revisit my roots. The modern fandoms have all their material online anyway, so I don't need to go elsewhere when I want more of that kind of story.