Wish Fulfillment Writing (and Your Kink is Not My Kink)

[cimorene]

I've been reading one of those fascinating writers who seem to have a great deal of talent and no self-discipline.

By that I mean they're writing only for pleasure, yes, but that doesn't indicate lack of self-discipline in itself because in principle writing just to please yourself is a very good thing; but sometimes I just think the author HAS to be having a great time since everything is PAINFULLY obviously driven by wish fulfillment rather than taste, logic or characterization. In spite of obvious talent and skill at writing itself, I mean, where the surface level of writing is good or even great, things like narration and dialogue: this is a writer who could produce stuff I'd rate 110% if they were given a detailed plot outline by someone better at plots than they are and then edited by a sufficiently harsh beta.

As a reader, I... don't really enjoy reading about how all my favorite characters from disparate corners of canon, no matter how remote and unlikely, meet and become the best friends ever and subsequently triumph over every single character I've ever disliked through various embarrassments and humiliations while the world in general agrees explicitly how great my faves are and how pathetic their enemies. I did briefly write a few things like that when I was ten or twelve, and I read the slightly more refined wish fulfillment/Chosen One genre avidly a bit longer than that (Mercedes Lackey mostly), but... for my present enjoyment things would have fewer unpleasant people popping out to be vanquished and the skill and renown of the protagonist wouldn't be continuously increasing so regularly and explicitly. Partly it's just that it's so blatant that it's embarrassing to read and strains suspension of disbelief because I keep noticing the characterization being bent out of shape (hence my reference to the 'slightly more refined' version, ie wish fulfillment that is all about the Chosen One being showered with praise and recognition but without straining credulity as obviously and usually, when published as books like Harry Potter or the Vorkosigan books, broken up with more challenges and problems). But it also just leaves me a bit cold in this form because it's not my particular narrative kink, as it were.

I suppose this kind of wish fulfillment reading must feel for some people like the most engaging and soothing and comforting thing to read ever, so... then the question becomes, what DO I want for my favorite characters?

It isn't something I'd given a lot of thought to over time, but fortuitously, just a couple of weeks ago yvannairie recommended me this gen Transformers series, Xenoethnography by Therrae. And this is pretty much that ideal made real. In fact, I don't have a strong preference for gen, but this is such great gen for such a long time that it's an exemplary opportunity to examine the best stuff that can happen to a beloved protagonist personally as opposed to interpersonally: Therrae's OC social scientist is useful, in fact, crucial for her expertise, and she is introduced to the community of extraterrestrials living in secret and helps them and others in important ways while constantly learning more about their alien culture and psychology and gradually getting to know a wide variety of different characters. (It's Transformers fic, which is hilarious because Transformers, so the aliens are sentient robots, but the genre and register is very classic [second wave or later] science fiction.)

Put like this, the description also explains why I love CJ Cherry's Foreigner series, which was my favorite in high school (I haven't read the last few books mostly because it's so long now that trying to reread it all to remind myself what happened can take months and months each time and I keep getting distracted. I probably need all of them as ebooks in order to manage). But this learning and confidently using extant expertise also pinpoints some of the stuff we in fandom often loved about, say, SGA fic (applying to Rodney but also to John), and also to part of what really entices me about my current favorite book series, Catriona McPherson's 1920s Dandy Gilver mysteries. The found family and alien culture window character applies to popular portrayals of Stiles in Teen Wolf (although this dynamic quickly got overrun with the "pack mom" fanon, which felt weird and kinky for me and kept grossing me out to the point of becoming a pet peeve) and to the Nero Wolfe mysteries that I devoured last year at princessofgeeks's recommendation.

Comments

[james]

When I come across stories like that, I just assume the author is a younger person who has not outgrown that stage and is, for them, living their best fictional life. I did the same thing when I was 12-16, I just didn't have the internet to share it with anyone. (Thank god.)

[cimorene]

Oh yes, that is my first assumption, but in this case the author is only relatively young, I think. Perhaps in her first few years in fandom rather than her first few years of writing fiction. Sometimes the idea is more thoroughly disproven though: there are people who choose to keep writing in that style.

[princessofgeeks]

I'm with you on the pulling back from the pure wish fulfillment.

I would have to think long and hard about how to conceptualize what I really want for my BSOs. I'm honestly not sure I have ever tried to put it into words.

[cimorene]

It's not how I usually approach it when I think about what I want to read, so it could be hard to come up with ideas independently of thinking back over the most soothing, indulgent and comforting things to read. I was lucky that I'd recently read something that therefore leapt to mind and provided a good example of my favorite things. But I've never really gone out and tried to look for, idk, "first contact fic" or anything like that... or "found family fic" although in that case I think it's because while the so-called found family community is often a key part of stuff I most enjoy reading, I'm too familiar with what most people in fandom mean when THEY refer to "found family" fic and most of the time that isn't what I want.

However, I could say that I want to read about a character being a competent expert in something which is useful to the plot and interesting for me to read about because it was written by someone who did plenty of research or is an expert themselves... this is probably true and I usually enjoy reading these, although if I said it when asking for recs it would probably make people disproportionately think of AUs where the protagonist has a career familiar to the writer, and although I like those, that's not really PRIMARILY what I mean. Since, like I said, the amount of expertise shown by the scientists (or problem-solvers, or math-users) in Stargate is enough for me to enjoy, it obviously doesn't have to be REAL-WORLD expertise in the way that, idk, 'taxi dispatcher au' or whatever fics usually are.