cimorene

So browsing through back posts of badfic, I've encountered, just recently, a rationale for Cheating Bastards Fic and its rather sweet but horrifically deformed cousin The Wives Know And Don't Mind At All Fic. This is a rationale that never would have occurred to me, personally, but it was voiced by more than one badthor and several badreaders in the discussion post: basically, in essence, they think that an implausible-to-the-point-of-impossibly-convoluted explanation that nonetheless agrees, on the surface, with observable reality, makes for more plausible (and thus inherently "better") fiction than a plausible alternate universe.

This is why it's more likely that passionately political characters with decisively un-homophobic politics would be closeted, or embroiled in years of deception and lies and partner betrayal, than that they would have failed to get together with said partner while otherwise remaining more or less in character. Apparently. (The tone in which this argument was delivered was actually rather condescending.)

I mean. I just. WHAT? These two deformed clichés are some of my biggest RPS rage-buttons (in any RPS fandom, and I include especially bandom because it's my primary right now, but the post in question came from a Daily Show community) - the former much more than the latter in the case of characters who don't strike me as cheating bastards, but the latter can be even more maddening when you get too used to the flippancy with which it's handled.

So by this logic, for example, a genderswap story (these usually conflict only with the laws of physics, and not with the available information about the celebrities we're slashing!) is far more plausible than, oh, a universe where a character was gay from the beginning or even a universe where their career simply didn't take off.

In other words... it's the exact opposite of Occam's Razor! Conclusive proof of the squirrelly twistedness of the badthor mind?