Fic commentary as per meme
Jan. 20th, 2004 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaDemi / Demi 2
Demi! Okay, two things you have to realise about this story that pretty much explain everything:
1) It was written for the sole purpose of amusing T.
2) It was ripped off someone's Mandarin Chinese Slam Dunk fic arc.
One: T is my best friend as well as my best fellow fangirl. She's currently doing a master's degree in Biochem; at the time I wrote Demi we were freshmen, and I had just enough college biology left in me to make the d00fy reference jokes. She's also the biggest 1x2/2x1 WAFF fangirl in the world. Seriously, I know many have laid claim, but in terms of longevity... >_> Six years and she's still going strong reading these 50-chapter GW epics. Dunno how she does it (albeit I left GW when I finally realised the canon politics didn't make sense, so maybe my perspective isn't the best to be going on). My GW fic - and in a wider sense all my anime fic, as I had no intention of writing any until she wheedled me - is entirely her fault. I would've written Yuki x Shuuichi for her sake too, but the task proved beyond me.
Two: I used to read a lot of SD fic. And by a lot I mean a lot; like, if I had to rank the actual quantity of fic I've read for my monster fandoms, it would be HP -> XF -> VampChron -> SD -> GW -> WK. All of it except for hase's was in Chinese. (I bet hase wishes I and everyone else in the world would forget her SD fic, but I can't. XD Her site taught me the meaning of yaoi - literally, as in the definition.) Was a good but in retrospect rather odd ficcing fandom, all with the Taiwanese SD fen's fetish for Prin's SenRu dj series, going up to R-rated only rarely, full of things like 30-chapter wuxia AUs. At any rate there was this one mostly-WAFFy fic arc by a couple of college students (can't even remember their handles, which is one of those things that mildly torture me when I have time to think on't), in which Rukawa has a mad biologist mother - you know the sort of mum that Inui gets given in fic? like that - who makes Kaede and Akira a test-tube baby. ^_^;;; Which happened, y'know, to be really well-written for babyfic. It had this interesting non-chronological narrative structure, that began with the Fateful Phone Call and flashed backward to the beginning and development of Main Pairing's teenaged relationship, and forward to their life Together With Baby And Granny Who's Utterly Bonkers. (For lack of a better example it actually read a bit like Una Musica Brutal, except with a baby and not the tango. Um.) Insightful, subtle character development, great humour. I thought the world of it, and Demi was basically a lightbulb going off to the effect of "Hey - you could do this in Gundam Wing! It's got mad scientists already! Tania would love it!" The bones of the plot are exactly the same. One guy showing up with the baby, misunderstanding, phone call that clarified matters. After which it was just a question of making sure the characters didn't sound too OOC.
To summarise: ficcing for the sake of brainless fangirl entertainment, and plagiarism! No wonder I was so anxious to avoid accusations of mpreg. Ahahaha. Seriously, though, I discovered very quickly that ficcing fandom is gung-ho about plagiarism only if you're seen to be ripping off other English-language ficcers or relatively current genre fiction. No one cares if you rip off so-called Real Literature; no one cares if you rip off fic in other languages; and people will stand up and applaud if you re-write doujinshi. I've done all three, but there's an ethical bullet that needs biting. (Discussion for another time, perhaps...)
Never actually intended to write a sequel to Demi. But it did that thing that stories sometimes do when one's satisfied with them but the ending is open, i.e. keep going in one's head and refuse to stop. Demi 2 diverted from the original template, and right away that ran me into trouble, because I put politics and computing into it, and neither the politics nor the computers of GW makes any coherent sense. ^^; It took writing Demi 2 to drum this into my head, though... Also, back in the day I treated the fanon-canon dilemma with a much more elastic attitude than I do now, which allowed me to indulge in flights of fancy like Wufei getting twitchy over a purple dinosaur animation, Zechs being there for no better reason than because I the writer personally liked Zechs, et cetera. Basically it's supposed to start light and develop more seriously. The relationship between Heero and Duo, everyone and Demi, the scientists (still some of my favorite sketches), Schopenhauer-teh-OC, Relena - Demiverse has a rather interesting Relena, actually, who like tLoN!Miaka is a version of the character I don't hate. ...In the epilogue, she says offhandedly, Trowa and Quatre have an exquisite little blonde ojousama named Tierce. I may never finish the thing but you'd probably like knowing that.
***
Velocity Over Time
What is a weblog good for, my friends? A weblog is good for exactly this.
December 17, 2000: I kind of feel obliged to add this... The day before yesterday Tan-chan sent me 200k worth of Weissfic in a .zip file that turned out to have the same spacey effect on me as it did on her: read for 3 hours -> draw fanart -> read for 3 more hours. So I begged the archival link from her, for the edification of my visitors. [ed. the fic in question is Jean D.'s "Dysfunctional Series", which is a bit of a cult item in these parts. It's the purest example of bad goodness, or possibly good badness, that I've encountered, at least until TeniMyu. I'd been offhandedly poking at WK fandom for at least a year before said fic, reading all the classix that DS - to be honest - kind of gacked off, like Sunde or llamajoy's Schadenfreude or That Incredibly Ace Schu x Youji Of Talya's I'm Blanking On The Name, but this was the unholy blender-juice thereof that made me develop my own fanon to compensate.]
December 29, 2000: Yeah, I'm not dead. It's just that Weiss, or perhaps more accurately Schwartz, is taking me over to an extent that's becoming ridiculous. I've written several pages of a story I hadn't even remotely considered two weeks ago, and since I'm unused to working in the flush of enthusiasm, my critical sense is even more shot than usual. Not to mention that editing NC17 is 'hazukashi-sugi'... one of these days I'll have to figure out what I have against writing sex in a *bed*, for cripes' sake. [...] I just played through the Wutai sidequest in FF7 again. As my sister says: "Schwartz is cool; the Turks are cool. Why do the bad guys get all the good lines?" Out of the mouths of babes. [ed. Yeah, in case anyone was wondering about Open/Close... that's a very old idea as well. XD;;]
January 1, 2001: You're getting a story soon! I hardly believe it myself, but there it is. The terror of withdrawal is a great motivator, and I read so fast that I *will* run out if I don't start refining my own crack uhh I mean write my own Weissfic. [...] I dunno about you, but I find that polished language gets in the way of a sexy PWP. Like it's too lacquered to be really hot, or something.
January 13, 2001: Twelve pages! ^_^ Over less than a month. Not a record, but something close. Now I have to edit this story to something *approaching* reasonable. The structure is so suspect that it will probably never be entirely comprehensible, but never mind. Read it for the sex or something.
Was a fun exercise, though. Slip the leash on the writerly id and what does one get? Murder, rape and hurt/comfort up the wazoo - that is to say I made my fave character walk home along the highway in the *snow* in his dress shoes, and if you're Canadian it doesn't get much lower than that.
January 18, 2001: In case of wondering, the readable part of my fic is in beta. I am... still writing it. *blinks and checks own forehead for fever* I think the whole Schwartz ESP powers angle plugged into some disused penchant in me. The X-Files fic I never wrote, perhaps, because when I was into the X-Files I wasn't a fanfic writer and didn't see my way to becoming one. Or the parapsychology studies I read when I was twelve. I don't know how otherwise to explain the two hours I spent today happily making up case studies and medical documentation for 'precocious invasive telepathy' and 'tactical precognition' and 'optico-manisfestational psychokinesis'. ^^; [ed. At this point I'm writing what would later become tBD - the whole thing was in fact conceived as a sort of novel in parts, and VoT merely a chapter of the middle section, which is why it has no real beginning and no real end.]
January 24, 2001: [...] To top it off, I write "method" - and Schuldich does not handle these kind of situations with grace. Maybe I should switch and write a chapter from Crawford's POV or something. ^^;
(To be totally honest, the chronology as it is stands as two separate stories: "The Berchtesgaden Debriefing" and "Velocity Over Time". I can't call them chapters, because they're written in utterly different styles. TBD is the more interesting from a writerly POV, but I think VOT is more fun. :P)
January 31.2001: Maybe I'll jump the trend and post my story later today. *Only* on my site. First! Draft! First! Draft! T_T The problem with writing straight from the id is that my intellect feels so *used* afterwards... I keep on trying to fix it but I fear it may be beyond fixing. And I don't know what to do about the *other* one. Horrible feeling I'm going to be stuck putting it together bit by bit for the next six months à la 'Dawn'. [ed. Ahahahahahahaha. Haha. Ha.]
What else? Well, there's actually more to VoT - the fic, not the series, we all know about the series. I've never been able to figure out whether it worked better with those two-three pages at the beginning or not, though, so true to moi I erred on the side of leaving them out.
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Date: 2004-01-20 12:52 pm (UTC)-Mari
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Date: 2004-01-20 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-21 04:15 am (UTC)-Mari
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Date: 2004-01-21 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-17 12:50 pm (UTC)天野嵐的家居生活 by天野和and天野平, in case it's still torturing you, uh, five months after the original post. XD I think they moved on to HP fic after finally finishing the Relationship arc...? And you must have concealed the plagiarism well, because I was deeply in love with these authors and their works while they were active in SD fandom, and still I never would've connected that story with Demi if you hadn't 'fessed up. (Speaking of which, Demi! Ah, nostalgia. I think I even sent you some acutely embarrassing feedback for it. XD;;)
Don't mind me, just passing through.
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Date: 2004-06-17 01:44 pm (UTC)*has had day decidedly brightened*
Honestly, I borrow all the time, but that's how I think of it in my head. I think the end result must be unnoticeable or otherwise irrelevant to the people who actually read my fic, because no one ever takes me up when I babble about my influences.
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Date: 2004-06-17 03:18 pm (UTC)Slam Dunk Academy (http://www.sdacademe.com) is the place to go for Chinese SD fic these days, in case that wasn't Google's first choice, and is, I suspect, responsible for the continued prosperity of the SD ficcing fandom -- in what other fandom, Chinese or otherwise, will you find an easily navigatable central archive with an archivist who kindly marks out the more notable stories and actually HAS GOOD TASTE?
天荒迴廊 (http://we-sea.51.net/) is a smaller multifandom archive with high quality guarantee, and hosts a number of older SD stories that seem to have otherwise vanished from the 'Net. (創作 for gen, 花火 for BL, and 專欄 accomodates those authors who are prolific enough to warrant their own page.)
Between these two, you should be pretty well set for the next few months. XD