Let's talk meme

[petronia]

From fahye:

Pick a character I write, and I will give you the top five ideas/concepts/other I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting them accurately. This includes both original characters and characters about whom I write fanfic.

Actually, you can extend that to any character I've read a lot of fic about... not that you'd know necessarily, of course. XD My voracious and not-particular-picky fic consumption is (among other things) a way of honing my own ideas of characterization against Fandom, like window shopping or a card-sorting exercise. Right, right, wrong, right, hmm, wrong, poor taste, right. Reading is what creates the model. Writing only introduces quirks.

Or, pick up the meme so I can ask you.

Or-or, I was taking Ask Me Anything questions on my Tumblr the other day - click link, ask me a question?

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm not XD - well, there's almost always something that interests me above and beyond the others, theories still being formed. Possibly I lose interest somewhat once there are no more theories, actually.

[narie.livejournal.com]

I think that happens to me with some fandoms, but not with all - I read some Inception fic last year and it was ok but ultimately I got tired fairly quickly, because the only character I was interested in was Robert Fisher, and he was not enough of a protagonist to merit lots of fic on any of the memes/comms. The fandom felt rather centred around the kink meme, also, which I think is a function of its age - it tends to be the first thing that pops up, and then, if you reach critical mass, you get all the splinter comms and the shipping comms and the gen comms and the fic challenges, but I came into it at the wrong time, at least for my interests, so the love affair was brief and ultimately unsatisfying.

Now every second of my time has been taken over by Glee, which is a much bigger fandom, both in terms of canon and fan works, and much better established. So there's plenty to read, and I do derive some intellectual satisfaction from watching ideas spread through time and (virtual) space and their ebbing and going, even if I am very surprised by how... tropey fandom has become. It makes me feel old and crochety, but as far as I can recall from my HP heyday, there was just a lot of fic and while there were obviously tropes, people were less blatant about them, tho I remember the emergence of comms like pervy_werewolf, which at the time I found rather strange. But nowadays it's all 'wing!fic' or 'apocalypse!fic' or 'facebook!fic' (not that I am hating, I can link you to rather superb examples of all three) and I find it a bit bemusing.

All that said, I tend to lose interest in reading the bulk of what is out there fairly quickly, as soon as I have crystallized an impression of the characters I like in my head - this happens mostly because of prose quality issues. But because it takes me a while to seek out the fandom attached to a particular canon, I tend to be rather invested in it by the time I'm actually lurking in comms and reading fic, which in turn means I tend to stick to it for a long haul, as it does become rather all-consuming. I either follow some authors for ages if they write good fics along the lines I like, or lurk in comms and grumble about how the kids these days are doing it wrong, and this will more often than not lead to my own writing of fic, as it has in Glee. My writing is mostly reactionary, born when I get annoyed by a certain canon/fanon point being repeatedly handled in a way I would not deal with it.

Especially in a fandom as active as Glee, and where new canon is rapidly forthcoming, I think I'll find things to gripe about for a while, so I suspect I'm in it for the long haul. Unless Ryan Murphy et al lose the plot too badly and the show goes downhill faster than expected, anyhow.