The song's a year long and had been playing for months

[petronia]

And now it's deadlines at work, hackgroan. Bought three more tankoubon of Hikaru no Go in French and sped-read through them (am I the only one who thinks the past tense of speed-read is sped-read?) when my intent was merely to take off the plastic and sticky labels. Am starting to run out of bookshelf space for manga, horrors, they're already stacked two deep... Think I've toggled back to output-mode. There's only so much crackfic one can take at a time. Wrote some D1 over dinner and methinks the challenge is not to let it morph into an essay. [EDIT -- Now that I'm kicking these pencil scribbles into shape, this narrative voice could do with a shot of Pahlaniuk. How ironic XD]

Cryptic notes to self and lj at large re discussion with Charmian--

Strong stylistic constraints on narrative
* noir/"hard-boiled" detective fiction - > "Sam Spade" AUs
* fairytale / allegory - > fairytale fanfics of varying degrees of twistedness
* cyberpunk?? - > not often done
* straight pastiches of 3rd party writers - > case by case, rare

Middling stylistic constraints on narrative
* high fantasy - > even LotR ficcers tend not to bother with style
* gothic literature - > once again, people who write vampire AUs don't bother
* other mystery subgenres (cozy, police procedural) - > not often done
* regency romance??

Little inherent stylistic constraint on narrative
* hard SF - > "characters in space" AUs ^^;
* soft SF
* urban fantasy
* historical fantasy
* romance
* "realism"

...Just tossing it out onto the plate, you're welcome to drizzle dressing. _o_

Comments

[meril.livejournal.com]

There are space AUs? Where? I've only seen one, an Aubrey/Maturin AU. Would like to see HP ones. However, would not like to *write* one. ^^;;;;;;;;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I've read a few over the years, usually for SJ series. XD It's one of the genres the Chinese ficcers tend to do more than the Westerners - I mean Legend of Galactic Heroes is a bona fide ficcing fandom in Chinese, so.

[typhoid-mary.livejournal.com]

When you say pastiches of third party writers, do you mean something like all the fics that try to borrow Terry Pratchett's voice? Difficult, as you say, to say for every case, but I'd say that can be a fairly lose constraint, as it touches mostly attitude and not action.

Might be neat to see "write as someone else" day on the web or something -- I think a lot of people learn to write by consciously imitating someone's style while they are still feeling out their own.

-Mari

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I don't know how clear I was in the post (not very *sweats*): I was talking about genre constraints on narrative style/"voice", not tropes. Charmian and I were discussing why it was that I felt Chinese fanfics were more literate, and I posited that Chinese AU fics tended to adopt stylistic conventions whereas English AU fics tended to go for plot/character conventions only (oh geez, that's better than how I said it in the other thread :P). In other words, English fen mostly do these vampire/fantasy AUs that don't really have to be written as more than flat realistic prose to attain their goal. OTOH, if you wanted to write a fairytale or a pastiche of Raymond Chandler, you can't do it in flat prose by definition, because style is the marker of what you're trying to accomplish.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

I think a distinction needs to be made between adoption of style as form of parody (humor, sending up, conscious), and serious adoption of the style. It's not a hard and fast boundary, but most very strong adoptions of a specific genre style have a strong parodic tinge to them. I can't say I really detect much identifiable style in fanfic.

High fantasy: Many find the mood not conducive to fanfiction (because after all, the plot of most fanfictions is character interaction, not plot centric epic quest). All that description, all that narration (in general fanficcers are not too fond of extensive narration and marathon paragraphs), all that sententiousness (and all the worldbuilding); if consciously adopted, say to TeniPuri, it would be parodic. It's unlikely that the style would occur unconsciously, that one would just happen to think that the style of high fantasy would so suit a PMK fic. [Rikkai as sword and sorcery protagonists=teh disturbing. Sanada, is of course the swordsman hero, who's going on a quest to get a mystic artifact that can cure his comrade Yukimura from a mysterious illness.]
Gothic: I think the gothic style (as opposed to the gothic style) might come unannounced to those self-consciously trying to be decadent, but it depends on whether this can be done without laughing. (Yeah, gothic works with Yami no Matsuei, for example). I suppose it's a question of wondering just how the narrative voice in the manga/anime would sound if it were a novel.

However, the 'characters in space' AU idea is scary... On the good star battleship Seigaku: Tezuka: captain. Oishi: second in command. Ryouma: hotshot mecha pilot, along with Momo and Kaidoh (or maybe we could make Kaidoh a space marine). Inui: either the scary doctor or the head engineer. Fuji: drawing a blank. Must stop now. >_<

[petronia.livejournal.com]

A distinction between parodic and serious adoption of style probably does need to be made for the sake of discussion in general. In my particular case, however, what I like to read in the Chinese fandom is precisely the fics that apply the sententiousness and intricate worldbuilding of high fantasy to something like TeniPuri. XD You may also replace "high fantasy" with "wuxia" or "military space opera", and the particular characteristics and writing styles of those genres. Of course it comes off as parodic, and you're laughing at the idea of - say - Atobe as a Qing-dynasty Chinese duke and Gakuto as his ninja retainer - but at the same time it's written with as much care and literacy as an original, so you can also read it as a story/novel on an entirely serious non-meta non-intertextual level. I like this a lot in English fandom too, but relatively fewer people in English attempt it. The first example that comes to mind is Mooncalf's "Go Wyverns", which is essentially the script of a (very good) 80's cult teen movie starring the cast of Vagrant Story. In fact this is a good way to put it in general: what I like is to read Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon type stories that happen to star the cast of Prince of Tennis, as if it were one of the dorama they star in when they all become pop idoru in the Band of Princes AMV. XD

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the RPG link. I am ROTFLing. All possible alternate worlds, indeed.

I think that PoT fandom just isn't large/literate enough for this to occur; it's sort of that the people who take their fanfic really seriously feel that realism is the highest genre, and angst is their biggest cup of tea; they go in for serious character study, not literary intertextuality serious parody (so, in other words, like Jfanart in textual form? 'The style is serious, and the art so beautiful that we forgot that TeniPuri is not a series involving people dressed in black leather toting Uzis'). IIRC HariPota fandom might do it, but I can't be jiggled out of my indifference to HP fanfic to be bothered to check for sure. And plus one shots are what people are doing these days.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

High fantasy Playstation RPG Rikkai (and everyone else), by the way:

http://www.geocities.co.jp/AnimeComic-Cell/8497/pri/index2.htm

You see that Jfen is way ahead, as usual. XD

I'd do Good Star Battleship Seigaku myself, if I had the time for a sustained multi-chapter AU fic. >_> I'd mash up Legend of Galactic Heroes and the Vorkosigan Saga with a fork and steam it into soufflé. I'll tell you if I ever find art for that.

[typhoid-mary.livejournal.com]

Fuji as ambiguous diplomatic (proabably spy) character only dubiously loyal to same country as the GSB Seigaku? Sort of the role of the Cardassian clothes maker on Deep Space 9, complete with mutlilayered idle conversation of the sort to give chess masters headaches?
-Mari

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Fuji as Garak? Now you're making my head hurt (ahh, DS9, my favorite Trek series, I'm afraid. I think I liked it for all the reasons people hated it. :P )