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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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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.