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

[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.