[Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.]

[reenka]

Man, I just read a quote somewhere about how when you come back & reread your favorite stories [or just good stories], they're always different. You always learn something new from them, or see something you didn't before, or feel things differently because you are at a different place in life & different things ping you. And I was like... yeah. That's why ideas or stories stay interesting to me at all; it's certainly surprising even to me, but I still see new things in like, Harry/Draco all the time or I really -would- have stopped by now. (Honest!) It's weird how that's also especially relevant to me as a writer [who also reads fanfic besides writing it].

    What's actually -more- weird is the concept that other [most?] people -don't- do that... that they have this constant stable response to a fic, or a type of fic, or a pairing, and then they either stop (liking or reading that fic/pairing) or they have a singular revolution, like the person in sistermagpie's latest H/D post who said they only started liking Draco post-HBP [when he went through an abrupt change so it was a shock to the system], whereas he was just "the nasty Slytherin" before. And, I mean... I can't look at a story I like and say any character is "just like that". I mean... really, that's a pretty big insult to JKR, if you think about it. o_0
    Any halfway decent character is going to have at least several faces or facets, and a really good story will have dozens, maybe hundreds. I mean, if you're talkin' Darth Maul or whatever, okay (he's just a nasty Sith lord! yep! fer sure!), but.... Yeah. :>

Okay, so like, I don't have a point, really. :/ But... it's just something I noticed being important for me to enjoy a story or an idea, even. That constant dynamic motion, you know? The sense of discovering myself along with the characters-- having them mean something to me, and not just about my ideals/projections but my emotional realities. I don't want love or stories or anything I spend emotional energy on to be like... too certain, too much like bedrock, maybe.
    Like, there are people who say they like a pairing [or a character] 'because they represent X', and they're fully certain they like X, so they're following some party line & liking whatever little 'x' reminds them of the big 'X', whether or not little 'x' even objectively exists in the narrative [and here we have Harmonians, ladies & gentlemen]. Isn't that just bloody SCARY? (Well, to me anyway.) That's cookie-cutter thinking, right there (even though I'm an idealist so I have to be careful or I'll slip into that sort of thing myself... which is prolly why it's so disturbing to me).
    Possibly it's why I'm so avoidant of fan-think like 'I like X character therefore I shall like any and all fics which mention/contain X character in a starring or positive role', etcetc. I can just feel my brain grinding to a halt & stumbling sloooowly, slowly into a deep dark RUT right there. :/

Right, so I have to disclaimer this & say that I realize that 'purchasing bewilderment' (as per that quote by Rumi) is something that's heavily dependent on one's personality preferences. Some people are 'judgers' & some 'perceivers' (according to the Myers-Briggs Jungian typology thing, anyway), and the judgers will be much more likely to make a snap decision and stick to it, while the perceiver will keep on keeping on gathering new information to use in decision-making till the cows come home. So like... I'm being very typical, saying 'I can never have too much new information!! :O!' while most 'J' types will be like 'just shut up & produce something already!! :O!' hehe :D (Especially considering that yeah, my post-HBP Death Eater!Draco novella keeps on changing depending on every new thought/insight I have about his characterization & H/D... so at this point, it may go on being written like, FOREVER, ahahaha... ha... *coughs*)

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I like. It's not that they objectively have stuff in common, necessarily, but there's stuff I see in them (pick out or spotlight or whatever) that's got a common thread.

Oh yeah, I know just what you mean (obviously I am obssessed with why I like what I like too!). But then I wonder, do these patterns really exist in the pairings themselves or is it that I make myself see those things? I mean, I believe the things are really there, but am I missing other pairings that fit the pattern but turn me off for some reason of which I'm unaware?

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Huh, that's a really weird thought~:) However, I bet there's a pattern in 'things that turn you off things you otherwise might have liked a lot' if you think about that specifically! Sometimes I do think about that and go 'wow, it's really important that X circumstance exists because this sort of thing always gets me!' or something :)) I even get a feeling of 'almost but not quite' about some pairings, which is interesting (or maybe a product of an overly-fixated mind, I dunno). Like, I sort-of like a lot of pairings in the Potterverse in a theoretical sort of way, if I squint at them right or whatever, but they don't take over my brain-- why? Because when I do have something that just overwhelms me with glory, I like that a lot more! I don't feel like messing about with the 40-65% stuff floating around, or I'd just dissolve into pure chaos :))

I was actually thinking about why I like-but-not-love Q/Picard, y'know, and it's difficult to even get a handle on it because I simply don't feel passionate enough to have the flow of ideas I usually get with things I love :> I feel so meh & halfway-interested that my brain sort of flits away to do other, more interesting things :> So I wind up knowing a LOT about things I really love and not paying as much attention to things that have missing components, even though if I -did-, I'd actually have a much truer/more objective picture, obviously :D