Guilt? And other pairing issues.
Feb. 14th, 2001 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleI don't like Bon Jovi's music. I don't like U2's music. I find the people of Bon Jovi and U2 utterly and completely uninteresting. Some of my closest online friends now write almost exclusively Bon Jovi and U2 fic. Usually when a story arrives in my inbox with a pairing in the headers that I'm just not interested in, I just use my old friend the delete key. And I've done the same thing with the Bon Jovi and U2 fic written by my friends. The problem, however, is that I feel guilty, or rather, I feel guilty because I don't feel guilty. I feel like I should read them because they're written by friends, and I feel like I should feel guilty for not reading them, for not making the effort to enjoy something my friends are so involved in, but even when I've tried reading them, I get bored after the first few paragraphs. This is not the fault of the people writing, because I've read and enjoyed other stories by them, but I just cannot find the characters interesting. I wonder if it's solely because I don't like their music. I tend to doubt that because I'm not really all that fond of Limp Bizkit's music (I was in the car with a friend last week, and whatever was on the radio was just noise to me, but then I realized it was the Limp Bizkit nookie song), but I still adore Fred Durst as a character, and I can even be interested in Wes Borland.
I was thinking about this further, and I have, in the past, read stories in fandoms I'm not interested in simply because they were written by authors whose writing I greatly enjoyed. I read Te's Sports Night and Buffy fic long before I was involved in either of those fandoms, for example. I think, however, that it's different in RPS. There is just no appeal for me in reading about squeaky clean boybands or resurrected 80s bands. With TV shows, there's a lot of leeway for play on the characters. We know a lot about their characters, but we also have a lot of hints about things we don't know, or that we might know. It is possible to argue that there's more leeway in RPS, because we don't know most of the reality of those character's lives, but I think that if you want to stick to writing about people based on their public persona, which is the canon we have to work with, it's very hard to make boybands and 80s pop bands interesting to me. They're all the same. I find Metallica far more interesting because, although there is an awful lot we do know about, some of what we know are the tensions in the band, the realities of who had to share a bed back before they could afford their own spaces, who they spend lots of time with both inside and outside the band now, all of which are things that make for interesting conflicts, relationships and characterizations in fic. The same can be said about actor pairings. If you take Random Hot Woman/Man 1 and Random Hot Woman/Man 2 who've met before and put them together, there's no interesting canon to back it up. It can be fun, and it can make for a good PWP (Plot? What plot?), but there's nothing from canon to really explore. With closer to canon couples, such as Matt Damon/Ben Affleck, there are a lot of places in canon where a story can make for a completely different twist on the reality.
My idea about the purpose of fan fiction is changing. I used to think it was solely a place for us to have the characters do things that can't/won't be done in canon. If that's true, then why write canon couples? Now I tend to think that fan fic gives us a new way to look at the canon, a way of broadening and deepening our understanding, or even just a way for us to come to a different understanding.
I was thinking about this further, and I have, in the past, read stories in fandoms I'm not interested in simply because they were written by authors whose writing I greatly enjoyed. I read Te's Sports Night and Buffy fic long before I was involved in either of those fandoms, for example. I think, however, that it's different in RPS. There is just no appeal for me in reading about squeaky clean boybands or resurrected 80s bands. With TV shows, there's a lot of leeway for play on the characters. We know a lot about their characters, but we also have a lot of hints about things we don't know, or that we might know. It is possible to argue that there's more leeway in RPS, because we don't know most of the reality of those character's lives, but I think that if you want to stick to writing about people based on their public persona, which is the canon we have to work with, it's very hard to make boybands and 80s pop bands interesting to me. They're all the same. I find Metallica far more interesting because, although there is an awful lot we do know about, some of what we know are the tensions in the band, the realities of who had to share a bed back before they could afford their own spaces, who they spend lots of time with both inside and outside the band now, all of which are things that make for interesting conflicts, relationships and characterizations in fic. The same can be said about actor pairings. If you take Random Hot Woman/Man 1 and Random Hot Woman/Man 2 who've met before and put them together, there's no interesting canon to back it up. It can be fun, and it can make for a good PWP (Plot? What plot?), but there's nothing from canon to really explore. With closer to canon couples, such as Matt Damon/Ben Affleck, there are a lot of places in canon where a story can make for a completely different twist on the reality.
My idea about the purpose of fan fiction is changing. I used to think it was solely a place for us to have the characters do things that can't/won't be done in canon. If that's true, then why write canon couples? Now I tend to think that fan fic gives us a new way to look at the canon, a way of broadening and deepening our understanding, or even just a way for us to come to a different understanding.
Pairings, etc
Date: 2001-02-19 08:23 am (UTC)friends who don’t even know what it is, but that doesn’t mean that they’re weird, or that I am (well…*g*), just that our interests are
different. Nothing more or less. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, you know?
You’re not interested in boyband slash, or U2, or Bon Jovi. That doesn’t make you wrong, just someone different, who's just not interested. To be honest, I don’t have much interest in U2 myself. I couldn’t pick any of them out of a crowd if I tried. One of the reasons I don’t usually read the fic (some I do, if I’m in the mood to, or the title catches my eye,
whatever). As far as Bon Jovi is concerned, if it doesn’t have Jon in it, I’m not interested, though I did read one that had Richie and some
other guy in the band, but even there it was all about Jon at the heart of it. See, I can't even remember the name of the other guy, and I only know Richie because he's married to Heather Locklear and I like her in Spin City, as well as other things.
The public persona thing (I think) is a part of the defence of RPS, but I’m not sure I see it completely as the wholeness of the characterisation. Of *course* there’s going to be stuff the individual author puts in, whether from their perception of the person, the music,
the roles they’ve played (there’s a lot of my perception of Holden McNeil in my Ben Affleck characterisation, and I freely admit it),
their own lives and things more numerous than I can list here.
The job of the author in actor pairings is to *make* it plausible and interesting. That can be difficult when you’re not dealing with
something that's close in RL, like with Matt/Ben or Joaquin/Casey, but it can be done. It’s all in how the *author* approaches it. Sometimes it works for you, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s life. It probably works for the author, and that, to me, is all it needs to do. I’m a great believer in the “write for yourself” approach to fanfic. If it works for the author, that’s all it needs to do. Anything else is a bonus.
I think fanfic can be whatever a fan wants it to be. I want it all. I want to read about non-canon pairings, canon pairings, almost canon
pairings, gen, you name it. I think there are things each type of fic gives to the writer and the reader that the others can’t, and I think
all types should be written and encouraged.