30 days of fanfiction meme (day 10)
Jul. 11th, 2011 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia10 – Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?
But found you couldn't write it after all, that is? Often. Almost always for external reasons, eg. half my flist vocally dislikes the pairing, the other half loves it: I find this distressing. Or, the canon has said everything there is to say on the matter. This had seemed the case with Madoka, except the series deliberately recognizes any logical sequence of events as canon in potentia. (I'm waiting for some ambitious and blackly-humoured fan to start a fic-a-thon in which each of HUNDREDS of writers gets assigned one Homura Dress Rehearsal, diverging from all the rest at set points, but ending in the same way. It would be the most depressing Big Bang of all time and space... This is a very atypical pairing for me writing-wise, btw: Homura is too self-loathing, and Madoka is even saintlier i.e. harder to reproduce convincingly than Ginji.) Another case: in a series like Mirage of Blaze the entire canonical universe is coloured by Naoe/Kagetora - you are literally not in MoB canon-verse by definition if you are not writing N/K, and if you approximate MoB canon-verse you assume N/K by default. But that rather decreases one's motivation for focussing on N/K specifically.
Alternately, the fandom has said everything there is to say on the matter. There is a generally inverse correlation between the size/quality of a ficcing fandom I read in, and my own urge to write for said fandom. You'll never catch me writing for SPN, or SV, or HP, or any of the massive acronyms. I have to have some sense of lingering unmet demand in my self and/or my immediate circle. (But this is also one of the hard-to-predicts. Sherlock fic is a very consistent drug; eventually I literally got bored with its consistency loooool no question who's subject and who's object there. I read a lot of PoT and Bleach stories that were like "and now everyone is in a wuxia/gangland AU epic". X-Men, which I'm waaaaay more wobbly on canon-wise, rarely ever produces the that's-exactly-it feeling. I don't mean just the last movie, I mean for the past decade. Not fully sure what I'm looking for; some Greg Bear-like detailed SF scenario-building for 750 paperback pages, possibly. Or maybe eventually![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
astolat will do one of her things where everyone grumpily agrees post-facto to aim for ideological compromise and benevolent dictatorship, in the interest of actually having something to show in the got-shit-done department.) At the same time, external demand often outpaces how much I myself have to say; even for pairings I like a lot, I tend to state a thesis once and that's it.
Pairings I don't like... I never try to write them. What would be the point? XD;;
But found you couldn't write it after all, that is? Often. Almost always for external reasons, eg. half my flist vocally dislikes the pairing, the other half loves it: I find this distressing. Or, the canon has said everything there is to say on the matter. This had seemed the case with Madoka, except the series deliberately recognizes any logical sequence of events as canon in potentia. (I'm waiting for some ambitious and blackly-humoured fan to start a fic-a-thon in which each of HUNDREDS of writers gets assigned one Homura Dress Rehearsal, diverging from all the rest at set points, but ending in the same way. It would be the most depressing Big Bang of all time and space... This is a very atypical pairing for me writing-wise, btw: Homura is too self-loathing, and Madoka is even saintlier i.e. harder to reproduce convincingly than Ginji.) Another case: in a series like Mirage of Blaze the entire canonical universe is coloured by Naoe/Kagetora - you are literally not in MoB canon-verse by definition if you are not writing N/K, and if you approximate MoB canon-verse you assume N/K by default. But that rather decreases one's motivation for focussing on N/K specifically.
Alternately, the fandom has said everything there is to say on the matter. There is a generally inverse correlation between the size/quality of a ficcing fandom I read in, and my own urge to write for said fandom. You'll never catch me writing for SPN, or SV, or HP, or any of the massive acronyms. I have to have some sense of lingering unmet demand in my self and/or my immediate circle. (But this is also one of the hard-to-predicts. Sherlock fic is a very consistent drug; eventually I literally got bored with its consistency loooool no question who's subject and who's object there. I read a lot of PoT and Bleach stories that were like "and now everyone is in a wuxia/gangland AU epic". X-Men, which I'm waaaaay more wobbly on canon-wise, rarely ever produces the that's-exactly-it feeling. I don't mean just the last movie, I mean for the past decade. Not fully sure what I'm looking for; some Greg Bear-like detailed SF scenario-building for 750 paperback pages, possibly. Or maybe eventually
astolat will do one of her things where everyone grumpily agrees post-facto to aim for ideological compromise and benevolent dictatorship, in the interest of actually having something to show in the got-shit-done department.) At the same time, external demand often outpaces how much I myself have to say; even for pairings I like a lot, I tend to state a thesis once and that's it.Pairings I don't like... I never try to write them. What would be the point? XD;;
