taking things for granted in the shared universes of fanfiction

[cimorene]

i was reading comments by makesmewannadie and stewardess_lotr in telesilla's post here. the original context is the temeraire books, but i want to take it back away from that into fanfiction at large. one of the things that is most interesting to me about the shared world aspect of fanfiction is the amount of background which isn't included in fanfiction simply because it's normal to assume your readers come from the same canon you do. stewardess_lotr said,

"So I think MMWD is on to something when she says it's a genre problem. As slash writers, we have an audience pre-disposed to like and care about our characters. Frankly, I think we are frequently lazy, or perhaps just blind, about our obligation as authors to make our characters interesting and sympathetic, and to put them through a true character arc."

the thing about fanfiction is that we do have that shared universe, so it's not even inappropriate to depend on it; it's proper to assume your reader knows what you know about canon, to draw on your mutual understanding and make references to canon, two things which you can't do in original fiction and which won't be picked up by a reader who isn't famiilar with your canon. that isn't just being lazy, because when you do read a story that treats fanfiction characters as OCs, as if it were original - setting up background and establishing their canonical character traits and relationships as you would have to - that can sometimes come across as condescending or irritating, and can seem a little weird even when it doesn't.

what good fanfiction does is take advantage of the canon you already know without re-dispensing it as if it were the author's invention. and this does leave a hole in the story for the reader who isn't familiar with canon. but you do also get fanfiction which takes too much background for granted - as if the writer takes the romantic or emotional core of the relationship between the romantic leads as a given, as if it, too, is canon which she doesn't have to show the reader. it presumes a reader who is already wholly convinced of the otp, in other words.

sometimes you get fiction that doesn't bother to build up the emotional connection between the leads at all*. those stories are really unsuitable for any audience who aren't positively eager to be convinced and don't need to be talked into believing in the emotional payoff at all. if you aren't building that romantic connection over the course of the story, it won't feel precisely like a romance story. the thing is, the audience is almost always sympathetic, because in slash, we read pairings mostly according to our tastes; but we still want to be convinced; that's what makes the story good! we want to go through the process of creating the emotional connection with the characters. you can have a story that's technically a romance without it - a story whose plot is about two guys realising they're mutually attracted and having sex - with that convincing-you element still missing. the story's left somewhat cold, as if it misses part of the spirit of romance.


*i think aeslis liked "dead chicken romance: the kind you can only enjoy if you were already completely convinced of the pairing when you started to read." the dead chicken thing doesn't really make sense, but insofar as it can be explained, the explanation is this: doing something like a dead chicken is doing it poorly. after all, dead chickens can't do most things very well, because they don't have eyes. or brains.

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought their comments were really interesting, which is why I reported the post to metafandom, in hopes that people would pick that up. It's a really interesting observation.

I hate when people say that depending on your readers knowing X canon thing is laziness. What!? No matter what you're writing, you depend on your readers knowing something. If I'm writing about Americans, I expect people to know the vocabulary of American English, or else look up words they're confused about. If I'm writing a sci-fi story, I can expect my audience to know generic sci-fi terms. Therefore, of course when I am writing a Harry Potter story, I expect people to be familiar with Harry Potter terminology. If you don't, then it's not my fault, and it's not lazy writing on my part, anymore than it's lazy writing if I use a word you're unfamiliar with.

But I'd never considered it in terms of, as she says, being lazy about the characters having a connection. I mean, I often see fic where it's hard to believe because it's an antagonistic pairing, but they've skipped the getting together stage and gone straight to wedded bliss. Fine for shippers, who've read fifty zillion stories about them getting together already, but less fine for people who are going, but uh...they hate each other in canon, what!?

The convincing element, though, that can just as easily be missing in original fiction as well. Look at how many people were dissatisfied with the Harry/Ginny romance in Half-Blood Prince.

But what is it that's missing? (Not necessarily in HBP, but in general when this happens.) Or, what is it that makes a story successful in that regard?

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i hadn't considered what you say about original romances necessarily, but i definitely think you're right. the harry/ginny one didn't lack metatextual cues perhaps, over the course of ginny's time as a secondary character, but the stuff between the two of them was never built up very carefully. i'm not sure what i'd say was the missing element, though. any idea? i definitely know what i'm talking about - stories that, as you say, jump from zero to established and skip the establishment of the relationship, even when it's a first-time story or a first-time scene. you even see the author's shipper bias appearing on the surface of the text, in things like the pov character saying things like "of course, it was so obvious now that they belonged together!" - without bothering to establish that it was so obvious, at all. i think part of what i need although not in all cases is for the second main character to not be opaque. if the romantic interest's motivations are totally unclear to both the reader and the protagonist, if the protagonist's ignorance of the interest's love carries over to the reader being unable to discern the signs or guess the motivations, it can feel unsatisfying. it can also feel unconnected if there's not a mutuality between the two main characters, somehow, ie, in a hurt/comfort type of situation where all the care is flowing in one direction, from the comforter, and the hurt party seems to accept it passively; you can find yourself wondering whether he's really interested.

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

There's a huge tangle of meta in my head about this while discussion because in addition to reading the Temeraire books, I've been reading a pro story that is a piece of fanfic with the names changed and both experiences have made me think about what I expect from fanfic writers and what I expect from pro writers.

As this is the second day when I've had about three hours of sleep all night, the tangle probably won't see light very soon. Hopefully, I'll be able to come back to your post and say something more intelligent.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah, after your mentions lately of that serial-numbers-filed-off fanfiction i've been thinking lately about it - not about seriously trying it, just sort of "what would be necessary if i wanted to change the names here and try to publish this?" in most cases it would require writing in a lot more stuff, if not (preferably) simply rewriting to work more character development and background in. even with rps you have this problem, and even with, for example, an rps fantasy AU - you can't just change the names and have a fantasy story because in an AU, at least, in one that works, you often depend even more on certain shared knowledge of the characters than in canon - there are winks at the reader in all kinds of ways, kind of injokes about canon or fanon clichés and how those might translate through to another universe.

um. i hope you find a way to make that post!

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

sometimes you get fiction that doesn't bother to build up the emotional connection between the leads at all

I think of these as pairing buy-in stories. Because you have to be heavily invested in the pairing already for the story to work, but once you are, it really does. (Oddly, people tend to rec these as pimp-stories; i.e., the stories that will drag people into the fandom. I've come to the conclusion that it's a lot harder to determine what is and isn't a pairing buy-in story if you are invested in the pairing.)

This - not pairing buy-ins, but just general levels of shared knowledge and emotional connection with the character - is one of those things that contributes heavily to the fascination I have with AUs. Because there, you, yes, are dealing with a shared universe, but you've made changes to it. Even if it's a fusion, you can't really count on your audience knowing both fandoms. So I find it fascinating to track what people do and don't explain - like, cofax7 typically avoids explaining anything, AU, fusion, whatever. You'll pick it up as you go along, or you won't, but the story will work anyway. Whereas with, for example, the Reel SGA challenge, it went all over the board, and we saw a lot of examples of how varying degrees of backstory and assumptions about audience knowledge could work (and examples of how they didn't, too).

And fan fiction by writers whose original writing works for me tends to be different than typical FF (not all of it, but some of it); I have a FF litmus test that determines whether or not I'll read a fan writer's original work (actually, I'll generally read it anyway - it's more of a determining my level of anticipation or trepidation thing). It's proven to be fairly accurate, and it works best if you do it on the writer's FF AUs.

...Um. It just occurred to me that I'm hijacking this post, since this isn't what you were talking about, necessarily. But, yeah: I find the shared-world nature of fan fiction, and the effect that has on the writing style and content, to be fascinating. Obviously. It's just, I shouldn't try talking about it while I'm this sick. *makes mental note*

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i was thinking about aus in a meta way lately because i've come across the idea before that an au is more accessible to someone without canon knowledge - it doesn't use the canon setting, it's ancient rome/ the french revolution/ a generic fantasy setting/ whatever! but i think that's not true. my theory is that a good au, an au that really works, is actually far more dependent on knowledge of canon to understand it; it'll be rife with allegories, parallels, injokes and references for the reader to get which all depend on being able to logically extrapolate from canon and many cases from fanon too. if that isn't the case, what you have is not an AU, in fact, but an Any Two Guys fic with the pairing's names pasted on - one where the writer hasn't even bothered to use the shared universe and is either a bad writer, or simply hopes to draw a larger audience for her work by tapping into the pool of pairing buy-in shippers.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I am procrasting on work and so just came back to read this post to see if anyone else had commented after I had... >_>

Anyway! I do think an AU is more accessible, because it should work on both levels. Of course if you're not familiar with canon, you'll miss the...richness that you would get if you were familiar with it, but it will still be an enjoyable story and you can understand it, where you mightn't be able to understand a canon story for the same pairing.

Using two examples from an AU I've written and one I plan to write... I have a Vampire Chronicles AU where Louis and Lestat are students at UCLA. It can be read as a simple college romance; I think I've set up everything so that it makes sense in and of itself. But if you are familiar with canon, then you can see how I've tried to drawn parallels between their canonical lives from the 18th century in the present day. As it's one of my earliest works, the writing is a lot rougher than I'd like, but I think it stands up both as both a work accessible to outsiders and as a VC AU.

I have plans for a Marauders non-magical rentboy AU set in the early 80s, which hopefully I'll have time to finaly write sometime next year... I think it will be enjoyable on its own; that will certainly be my aim. But for people familiar with Harry Potter canon, there will be all sorts of layers, drawing parallels with canon.

I don't see these as mutually exclusive things.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

but don't you often sense, when you're reading referential work whose references you can't get, the... unattached ends of the references? i mean, personally, i find it troublesome to be sensing the references and not understanding them. and i think because of what i was talking about in the main post, there's also the issue of how much you take for granted about the reader's prior knowledge of the characters. the characterisation in fan fiction [usually] looks quite different from the characterisation in original fiction because it doesn't have to establish for the reader nearly as many things about the characters.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

But with an AU like that, not only do you not need to get the references, but how would you even know they were there? It adds another layer of enjoyment if you are familiar with the canon and do get them, but if not, it doesn't take anything away. I think it would be far easier for someone to read an enjoy that without canon knowledge than it would be for them to understand what's going on in a non AU fic.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i don't know, but i do feel like i get the sense of something being referred to when i read fanfiction in an unfamiliar fandom and that it seems to me that impression isn't altered by whether the story is AU or not, usually. the more "ordinary" the au, the less that crops up probably. maybe that's because the setting itself is familiar (for example an american university, instead of say, an original fantasy universe or a historical period i'm not familiar with), which makes it easier to interpret the characters in relation to it. but even rps aus set in familiar settings seem to me to lose quite a bit if you look at them from the perspective of someone who doesn't know the characters - although this depends partially on the author and isn't true of everyone. i don't really have that feeling about your rps aus, which may just be the way you always approach characterisation - more or less the way people have to for original fiction. but it's quite popular in fanfiction to throw the reader into dialogue and character interaction that will be disorienting and possibly never clear up all the way for someone who doesn't know the characters.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've really noticed that with RPS AUs. Now I feel I should go read some to see, maybe popslash or something.