(no subject)

[cimorene]

i feel like coming out as a detester of crackfic.  it's somewhat ironic, actually, because i often enjoy badfic and read it for amusement.  and i've always liked crackfic before.  i enjoy it as crack and not as normal fic, but in general i've been fine with that.  what's been making me cranky lately is that i prefer real fic, dammit, and the ratio of crack:real is getting too high for me.  now i can't enjoy the crack properly because it's just boring by comparison to the real fic which i can wistfully imagine enjoying. 

i'm mostly talking about sga fandom, here, which is the one i'm principally involved in.  and my preferences are different in every fandom, so it's not like i've actually gone off crackfic as a whole.  but wow, am i past fed up with it here.

it may be that there's something specific about the canon that lowers my crack tolerance.  as i said, my preferences are different in every fandom.  i wonder if it has something to do with the hefty dose of fantasy that's already inherent in a canon that's stuffed with star trek-esque pseudoscience and has a very deep fount of potential deus ex machinae in the form of the ancients.  i love my pseudoscience and the mixture of fantasy and hard sf elements and the cynical contemporary reactions of the main characters when they're stuffed into these plots and situations.  i'm right there with everyone else on the coolness of the fact that, with this canon, you can believably pull off almost anything.  perhaps what makes it especially annoying in this fandom is that going even beyond canon's levels of improbability seems, to me... unnecessarily greedy.  i mean, it's so improbable already--can it be that your thirst for the improbable (or your reliance on the large wiggle room provided by the expansion of probability) is so great that the quantity of it in canon doesn't satisfy you? 

Comments

[astolat]

But, dude! There are, like, 1,000,000,000 stories, so even if the ratio were 100:1 crack:real, that would still be more real stories than would fill an entire other fandom twice over. *g*

[cimness.livejournal.com]

that's true! i had a paragraph about my reasoning that it couldn't just be the ratio that was bothering me, but it seemed less than wholly relevant (and kind of boring) so i deleted it. there is certainly no actual shortage of not-crack in this fandom, and not even a shortage of good not-crack. it's more like there's been a rising trend of crack lately.

[trinityofone.livejournal.com]

I'm personally confused as to what the actual definition of crackfic is. I mean, there are some stories where it's pretty cut and dry, and I've written some of those myself--"Coming Soon to a Galaxy Near You!" comes to mind. But then there are things like, well, the priest!AU that I still can't quite believe I wrote; that's an extremely cracked idea, but the fic itself is pretty damn serious. And then there are stories like cesperanza's fabulous "When in Haldoria," which she self-identifies as crackfic, but which is one of my favorite stories in the fandom, cross-genres. So, uh, yeah. Maybe I'm just bad with labels.

That said, I do get what you mean about being "unnecessarily greedy." With so much there to exploit--a) alien planets b) alien peoples c) huge, deserted city full of wonders d) Ancient technology e) Earth-based pseudoscience (gene therapy, retroviruses)--yeah, we're really not lacking, are we? So I have to agree that we don't really need any more madcap-everyone-has-superpowers-and-Atlantis-is-a-brothel-and-also-there-are-elves AUs. Still, I can't really begrudge people them especially since I seem to keep writing them myself.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I have trouble with the label, too, as it seems everyone has a different definition. Generally I tend to think of crackfic as being humorous. So an AU about a brothel is just an AU, but if it's written as humor, it's crack.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah, i can't think of any that isn't humorous. there's often a kind of deliberate exaggeration going on, kind of like parody. the most famous crack overall involves main characters secretly being centaurs or vampires or having wings. and probably the most famous one in sga fandom involves a piece of mysterious technology they stumble upon which turns the two slash objects into adelie penguins for a few days.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Penguins...

Yeah.

I've seen a lot of LotRiPS fic labelled crack where I would just have called it AU. Penguins is defo crack, though.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah... and when i say crack... there's been a trend in the fandom lately, probably based on that, of commentfic in which the team members get turned into various baby animals. eliade's current journal title is "rodney the cranky turtle".

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Um...ew? Also I think I just felt all my teeth rotting away just from the thought.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

hahahah. that wasn't at all the sweetest one from that set of fics, either.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

no, i wouldn't have categorised the priestfic as crack. an au can be wildly silly, but i still just categorise it as au. i mean, once you're out of the canon universe, all bets are off. you're not necessarily matching tone and believability and usually the entire point is that you're making some change to the character.

as for "when in haldoria", i guess i'd count it as crack--partly because she self-identifies it that way, but it injects a bit more silliness/improbability beyond the usual level (playing unashamedly with clichés, sticking in the cutoff blue jeans and whatnot) too, and that's one of the things i was talking about above. that said, really good fic like that which just happens to have some qualities of crack is a bit separate in my mind.

your example, though slightly exaggerated, pretty much hits what i was talking about on the head. if the fic depends, in the initial suspension of disbelief, on the reader being willing to make a big additional suspension beyond canon--on the reader willing to be 'in on a joke', if you will--that's what i'd call crack. and of course that's why we love crack in the first place, because who doesn't love to be in on a joke? and who doesn't love to joke about their favourite characters?