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.