"Eight Days A Week" Commentary Track
Jun. 2nd, 2019 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleThe backstory for this post is that usually I write something and then move on with my life and don't think about the writing process again. However, from what I can tell, a lot of people saw my fic post for "Eight Days A Week" and decided it must be a story that sexualizes a three-year-old without any proper warnings or tags. (I know; this is neither logical nor kind, but is the kind of thing that happens to me.) As a result of that, I've thought a lot about my thought process when I was writing the story, with an emphasis on all the ways I was conscious of making sure it wasn't weird about the three-year-old.
The reaction to this story surprised me. I think fan fic has two kinds of shorthand. One is the nature of fan fic itself: the reader and writer generally have a shared knowledge of whatever fandom the fic is about so there isn't a lot of setup and explanation of the world. The other is tropes. As a reader, I can drop into an omegaverse, coffee shop AU, or fake dating story in any fandom, even one I don't know well or at all, and know more or less what to expect from the story. Similarly, as a writer, I can generally expect my audience to be familiar with fic tropes and not have to explain them. I was (possibly foolishly - more on that in a bit) expecting people to recognize the de-aging trope and know what to expect from it.
The de-aging into a small child trope as I know it: Person A turns into a small child. (In a magic-based fandom it's the result of a spell/potion/magical being, in a sci fi fandom it's the result of some sort of technology, in RPF it frequently just happens with no explanation because the how is less important than the what happens next.) Person B takes care of them for some period of time. During this time, they form or strengthen some sort of (age-appropriate!) emotional connection. Maybe Person A tells Person B some sort of secret, like they come out or admit to being scared of something they wouldn't admit to being scared of as an adult or tell someone that their grown-up self has romantic feelings. Maybe they get the cuddling and snuggling they didn't get when they were a child in the first place or that they don't know how to ask for as an adult. Maybe they get to know that Person B is warmer/gentler/kinder than they knew. At some point, Person A gets turned back into an adult. At the end of the story, the adult versions of Person A and Person B have a closer relationship. In a gen story, this generally means they become closer friends/teammates. In a pairing story, it generally means they get together at the end of the story. Bonus note: according to Fanlore, the first known piece of fan fiction where someone gets de-aged into a small child is from 1969.
This goes with the previous point but seems worth pulling out on its own: the de-aging aspect of a de-aging story in general and this story in particular doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not like Harry meets Louis for the first time when he's a three-year-old. The de-aging happens in the middle of a relationship (in the broadest terms) in progress. "Eight Days A Week" starts with the de-aging, but their history and time together starts before that. The de-aging isn't how they get to know each other; it's the catalyst that changes their relationship. That's one of the reasons I thought it worked to have the story end the way it did - their interest in each other doesn't start at the beginning of this story.
Months and months ago, this post about how Louis is basically a three-year-old crossed my Tumblr dash. In October, I sent an email where I said:
I wrote a second email the next day:
I tend not to be big on timelines and planning - I'm generally more of a start writing and stop when I get to the end (which I may or may not have decided about when I start writing) person - but one of the things I'm currently focused on in my writing is story structure, particularly when it comes to even section lengths. (There's nothing wrong with uneven section lengths, but this is something I want to work on.) I also, for this story, needed to remember where they were on each day, so my notes email draft also had a timeline that started out with just the concert or not and where they're staying notes and got filled in a little more as I went along. The spaces between days were added later when I was figuring out where to put the art.
I really started thinking about how to make the story work in December:
In February, I sent an email to one of the email threads I have with friends asking for help because I was stuck:
I tend to be a little bit of an undertagger, so when I posted the story, the only freeform tag I used was "Age Regression/De-Aging." Someone suggested I tag for the sex scene at the end, which I didn't do because the story being rated Explicit is the indication that there's a sex scene, and also I think basic sex scenes don't generally need specific sex act tags unless (a) that's the whole point of the scene and something someone who is looking at the tag for that sex act might want to find or (b) someone looking to read the story will need a warning about it. One of the mods contacted me and said people had been asking for it to have additional tags, but no one had any suggestions for what tag(s) to add, and their suggestion was "adults interacting with children." Since that is not at all what the story is about, I didn't want to add that one. (It's also not a canonical tag.) I poked around AO3's tag search a bit to figure out what would make sense to add instead. I started by adding "No Underage Sex" even though it seems redundant because "No Archive Warnings Apply" should already cover that. Then I dug into the tags already synned to the main de-aging tag (because I believe in using canonical tags whenever possible) and added both "Age regression/De-Aging is general and non sexual" and "But it's really just a good ol' de-aging fic." That satisfied the mods.
As a general rule, I stayed away from most of the hullabaloo about the story, and certainly away from the people who were saying terrible things to/about me, but I did read a few things here and there. My favorite of those things might be the person whose tag commentary was something like, "#I didn't think it was a good story #but it was just a basic de-aging story." There's something about that combination of relatable and reasonable that's still making me laugh a month later. For my part, I still love the story. It was fun to write, it turned out to be the kind of formulaic story I couldn't find, and I think it's completely adorable.
The reaction to this story surprised me. I think fan fic has two kinds of shorthand. One is the nature of fan fic itself: the reader and writer generally have a shared knowledge of whatever fandom the fic is about so there isn't a lot of setup and explanation of the world. The other is tropes. As a reader, I can drop into an omegaverse, coffee shop AU, or fake dating story in any fandom, even one I don't know well or at all, and know more or less what to expect from the story. Similarly, as a writer, I can generally expect my audience to be familiar with fic tropes and not have to explain them. I was (possibly foolishly - more on that in a bit) expecting people to recognize the de-aging trope and know what to expect from it.
The de-aging into a small child trope as I know it: Person A turns into a small child. (In a magic-based fandom it's the result of a spell/potion/magical being, in a sci fi fandom it's the result of some sort of technology, in RPF it frequently just happens with no explanation because the how is less important than the what happens next.) Person B takes care of them for some period of time. During this time, they form or strengthen some sort of (age-appropriate!) emotional connection. Maybe Person A tells Person B some sort of secret, like they come out or admit to being scared of something they wouldn't admit to being scared of as an adult or tell someone that their grown-up self has romantic feelings. Maybe they get the cuddling and snuggling they didn't get when they were a child in the first place or that they don't know how to ask for as an adult. Maybe they get to know that Person B is warmer/gentler/kinder than they knew. At some point, Person A gets turned back into an adult. At the end of the story, the adult versions of Person A and Person B have a closer relationship. In a gen story, this generally means they become closer friends/teammates. In a pairing story, it generally means they get together at the end of the story. Bonus note: according to Fanlore, the first known piece of fan fiction where someone gets de-aged into a small child is from 1969.
This goes with the previous point but seems worth pulling out on its own: the de-aging aspect of a de-aging story in general and this story in particular doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not like Harry meets Louis for the first time when he's a three-year-old. The de-aging happens in the middle of a relationship (in the broadest terms) in progress. "Eight Days A Week" starts with the de-aging, but their history and time together starts before that. The de-aging isn't how they get to know each other; it's the catalyst that changes their relationship. That's one of the reasons I thought it worked to have the story end the way it did - their interest in each other doesn't start at the beginning of this story.
Months and months ago, this post about how Louis is basically a three-year-old crossed my Tumblr dash. In October, I sent an email where I said:
I really need a tropey de-aging story where Louis gets de-aged to a toddler and then runs around doing his usual Louis things and also sometimes getting cuddled and since he's a toddler, sometimes he goes over to someone (all of them, but Harry most of all) and holds his arms up so they'll pick him up and cuddle him, and at some point Harry is like, "You know you don't have to be a toddler to ask for a cuddle," and then once he's back to normal they live happily ever after with lots of cuddling. Surely someone has to have written this, right?I tried looking for something like that! And then I tweeted about the results:
Me: ... I can't believe that if you filter out age play, there are only 6 complete English language directions de-aging stories, and at least two of them appear to be age play from the summaries. Surely more must exist. Maybe they're just not tagged properly?Maybe I should have known from this that One Direction fandom wouldn't recognize the de-aging, but it's a fandom with an unusual relationship to tagging, so it wasn't out of the question that such a thing exists and wasn't tagged properly.
Me: Update: I read the one that sounded the best, and it was time travel, not de-aging. (Look, I saw that Tumblr post about how eldest direction is basically a three-year-old yesterday, and now I just want fic where he's de-aged and alternately wreaking havoc and getting cuddled.)
Me: I'm not over this. I need tropey de-aged eldest direction child fic, and I don't want to write it myself.
Friend: I have questions about who exactly you think is going to write this and also what they tell the audience when Eldest is unavailable to perform.
Me: I mean, the person who isn't me that I have the best chance of convincing to write this is you. Maybe they're still in tour rehearsals. Maybe they say he's ill. Maybe it's a very weird thing where he's an adult during concert time and de-aged at all other times.
I wrote a second email the next day:
I really don't want to write de-aging fic myself, but I am going to spend a lot of time thinking about what would be in it. Like the scene where Louis and one of the other directions are racing up and down a hotel hallway and then the other direction says, "Lou, look who it is," and Louis looks down the hallway and yells, "Mummy!" and goes running down the hall to her and she scoops him up into her arms. And the scene where Louis throws a temper tantrum and he's yelling and crying and someone (probably either Harry or Liam) picks him up and just holds him and rubs his back while he keeps yelling and then quiets down to just crying and then falls asleep still red-faced and tear-stained. And the scene where Zayn calls Harry from the other bus in the middle of the night and just holds up the phone so Harry can hear how loud Louis is being and when he puts Louis on the phone, Harry offers to sing to him as a bid to get him to quiet down but Louis just wants to keep running around and being loud, so they get the buses to stop so they can switch and Louis won't go with Harry because "This is my bus," so Zayn goes to sleep in Harry's bunk on the other bus and Harry stays up with Louis until Louis tires himself out and they go cuddle in his bunk and fall asleep.I did not have any luck talking my friend into writing the story, but I did make a deal with her that if she signed up for the big bang and wrote the space AU she was kind of thinking about, then I would also sign up and write the de-aging story. When I did that, I copied and pasted the above email into an email draft that I used to keep track of my notes, and you can see that all of those things made it into the final story.
I tend not to be big on timelines and planning - I'm generally more of a start writing and stop when I get to the end (which I may or may not have decided about when I start writing) person - but one of the things I'm currently focused on in my writing is story structure, particularly when it comes to even section lengths. (There's nothing wrong with uneven section lengths, but this is something I want to work on.) I also, for this story, needed to remember where they were on each day, so my notes email draft also had a timeline that started out with just the concert or not and where they're staying notes and got filled in a little more as I went along. The spaces between days were added later when I was figuring out where to put the art.
Thursday - happensEarly in November, I went to a pajama party where a number of people were in costume onesies, and reported back to my friend:
Friday - Archie & footie, concert, bus
Saturday - concert, bus
Sunday - temper tantrum, concert, bus
Monday - interviews, stay in one place
Tuesday - loud on bus, concert, bus
Wednesday - Jay comes to see them, concert, stay in one place
At yesterday's party, someone said, "We have two dragons," and one of the women said, "I'm not a dragon! I'm a dinosaur!" which I'm telling you because I need to remember that tone and possibly that entire moment for the de-aging story where three-year-old Louis definitely needs to be upset that someone has guessed wrong what he's pretending to be/dressed up as.I added that to the notes email draft too, and also ended up using it in the story.
I really started thinking about how to make the story work in December:
Okay, I really need to start writing my de-aging story for big bang, but I need to figure out how this works. Like, I really want them on buses because I think it would be more fun to write it with buses and hotels, but then there's the issue of they have things to do like interviews and shows (where they can't just have someone else sub in, like in hockey), and then is it too weird if he's only de-aged part of the day? And then would it makes sense if he evades all their efforts to get him to talk about it during the times of day when he's not de-aged?In December, we had to submit our summaries for artists to choose from. This was mine:
...
I don't know how I became a person who wants, like, structure for things I sign up for, but I think I'm going to have the de-aging story take place over a week (and then whatever happens at the end could be outside of that). I'm at about a thousand words and still in the first scene, so around 3,000 words per day of the week would get me over 20K, and also then my summary can be [whatever] "or: That time Louis was a three-year-old for a week."
Louis turns into a three-year-old for a week - literally. He's his normal self for anything they really need him to do, like shows and interviews, but the rest of the time he's a toddler who runs around getting into mischief, cuddling with everyone (especially Harry), and throwing the occasional temper tantrum. The week Harry spends taking care of Louis gives them a chance to be close again, and to figure out that they want to be even closer when Louis's back to his normal adult self.In January, I had this conversation:
Additional notes: Zayn era. Not canon compliant in that it doesn't follow a specific tour timeline. I chose the highest possible rating it might be, but I haven't figured out yet if it ends with just kissing or a sex scene.
Me: The problem, or a problem, with this story is that I keep thinking about the adorable toddler shenanigans and forgetting that I need to add some leading toward romance feelings too (and not just make it the hedgehog story but with de-aging and Harry instead of animal transformation and Nick).I did not go read a bunch of de-aging fic, but I did think about how to work the lead-up to the romantic ending into the story. My answer to this was to incorporate more scenes that take place during the time periods when Louis is an adult as the story goes along. There are also a couple of places where I had to wrest it back from becoming a Harry/Zayn story.
Friend: Ruth, don't forget to add some leading toward romance feelings too! Who is romance-ing? How are they romance-ing? Are there places besides hotels/venues they can shenanigan at for more words?
Me: I'm okay on words! (Except I don't know what should happen in the next section. Maybe it should have some of Louis being an adult for work things.) It's supposed to be Harry and Louis, and I think part of my hangup about the romancing is that I keep thinking about someone's complaint back in the hockey days about how weird it is to take care of your teammate as a tiny child and then be in love with them. Maybe it needs some Louis as an adult avoiding talking about it but maybe hugging Harry a little bit more to help get to that point.
Friend: Maybe if someone addresses the fact that it's weird to take care of your bandmate as a tiny child while you're in love with them as an adult (and Harry knows it's weird but he can differentiate just fine and loves Louis-as-an-adult anyway)?
Me: I don't think he's wholly in love with Louis (or at least doesn't know it if he is). I think he loves him and they both miss spending time together (this is nebulously in the they couldn't stand next to each other time period) and being together while Louis's de-aged reminds them how much they want to spend time together and then somehow there is kissing. Maybe I need to read some de-aging fic to remind myself how the trope usually goes.
In February, I sent an email to one of the email threads I have with friends asking for help because I was stuck:
Friends, what are your favorite things in de-aging stories? I need to get six thousand more words out of the de-aging part of this de-aging thing I'm writing, but I only know what I want to happen for, like, two thousand of it. The character has been de-aged to three years old, so if you have general toddler shenanigans/adorableness things you like, I will take those ideas too.My friend who most loves de-aging stories sent me a list off the top of her head:
Shopping for new clothes, crying when they sneak a taste of something they usually like (like coffee) and it's terrible, bedtime stories, bath toys, roping everyone else into playing with them because they are so cute and it makes everyone calm down, Sesame Street, kids music dance party.This was an excellent list of fun de-aging trope things! My approach to making it useful for my specific story was to look through it, eliminate anything that wasn't going to fit with my story, and then pick from whatever was left for the story. For example, shopping for new clothes doesn't work because they can't go out with Louis as a toddler and because I had already written the part where Paul just takes care of clothes for them. I specifically rejected bath toys because I didn't know how to go from nonsexual toddler bath time (especially at the end of the story) to adult sexytimes. You'll notice that any time Louis might be naked as a toddler - bathing, using the bathroom, getting his clothes changed - is covered in one or two brief sentences that just tell you it's happened. I wrote an email to another friend who offered to read along and help if I needed another set of eyes:
Aww, thanks! I think I'm okay unless you really want to read it as I go along. [Friend]'s email was really helpful, and I think I can get 3000 words out of coffee tasting gross and dancing (I was thinking about dancing anyway because I needed a Niall and Louis scene), and then I can do 3000 of the being very loud on the bus (since it could be after midnight and technically the next day) and his mum showing up for the last as a kid section. Then I think it's going to get just one last section where Louis's an adult and they have sex. I was maybe going to have some more feelings/talking about it/whatever, but I couldn't figure out a good structure for that since the rest of the story is 3000 words per day, and decided this will be fine.This is interesting to read back now, because when I think about what I was doing, I keep thinking that the structure piece was only half of this decision. The other piece is that this was a deliberately formulaic, cliched de-aging story, and those don't usually have a lot of space between the person returning to adult form and the getting together part. This doesn't, however, mean I wasn't willing to stray a bit from the trope:
Hmm. Since this is basically a cliche story ending, I kind of feel like they should have anal sex. But really I want to just write a blow job and some jerking off. Maybe they can just talk about anal in the afterglow.The last thing I had to work out about the story was the title:
Me: I wanted to call it "Eight Days A Week" (since there are eight days in the story), but there's a Harry/Liam story with that title and a Nick/Louis one called "I love you eight days a week," so maybe I need to come up with something else. Or some other variation from the song lyrics.I finished my rough draft on March 7. On March 12, Louis was on the radio where they asked him what his favorite dinosaur is, and he said the T-Rex, which he referred to as "the big lad." I had long since chosen a T-Rex as his stuffed animal friend in the story, and I was super pleased to have my choice justified. I had named the T-Rex Archie based on some of the options on a popular UK baby names list, and I was also pleased when Meghan and Harry named their child Archie and I discovered I'd been even more on trend than I thought.
Friend: I doubt anyone will really notice/care that that title has been used before! There have been a few instances where I've discovered after posting that someone else has also used that title but - it's fanfic, who really cares? If it works for your story, it works for your story!
I tend to be a little bit of an undertagger, so when I posted the story, the only freeform tag I used was "Age Regression/De-Aging." Someone suggested I tag for the sex scene at the end, which I didn't do because the story being rated Explicit is the indication that there's a sex scene, and also I think basic sex scenes don't generally need specific sex act tags unless (a) that's the whole point of the scene and something someone who is looking at the tag for that sex act might want to find or (b) someone looking to read the story will need a warning about it. One of the mods contacted me and said people had been asking for it to have additional tags, but no one had any suggestions for what tag(s) to add, and their suggestion was "adults interacting with children." Since that is not at all what the story is about, I didn't want to add that one. (It's also not a canonical tag.) I poked around AO3's tag search a bit to figure out what would make sense to add instead. I started by adding "No Underage Sex" even though it seems redundant because "No Archive Warnings Apply" should already cover that. Then I dug into the tags already synned to the main de-aging tag (because I believe in using canonical tags whenever possible) and added both "Age regression/De-Aging is general and non sexual" and "But it's really just a good ol' de-aging fic." That satisfied the mods.
As a general rule, I stayed away from most of the hullabaloo about the story, and certainly away from the people who were saying terrible things to/about me, but I did read a few things here and there. My favorite of those things might be the person whose tag commentary was something like, "#I didn't think it was a good story #but it was just a basic de-aging story." There's something about that combination of relatable and reasonable that's still making me laugh a month later. For my part, I still love the story. It was fun to write, it turned out to be the kind of formulaic story I couldn't find, and I think it's completely adorable.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-03 11:39 am (UTC)It's so odd that this fandom seems unaware of the trope. OTOH, why have I been assuming all fanfic tropes are universal? That doesn't actually make sense, and it's good to be made aware of this! Many "new" fandoms seem to have little crossover with other fandoms, and are thus probably relatively unaware of the standard tropes developed in older fandoms.
As you say, age regression really can be a tricky trope to pull off, and requires some thought and care - both of which you very definitely put in! But if the fandom isn't used to the trope, that would explain the uninformed kneejerk reaction. Which is still not truly justified, seeing as reading the story would have cleared things right up, but, yeah.
Where did this discussion take place...? I'm now rather interested in seeing what this reaction looked like, and I haven't been able to find any relevant commentary on DW/AO3.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-03 05:52 pm (UTC)It was really the choice to decide this must be something terrible rather than assuming that maybe there's something there that they don't know about is really the baffling part of it.
This mostly happened on Tumblr, maybe a bit on Twitter too. I don't read anonmemes so I don't know if there's some sort of discussion of it on FFA or something similar. You can see some of it in the replies/reblogs of my original fic post if you scroll down to the notes. (I linked to the DW version here because the Tumblr version no longer has the picture. People who were upset about the story reported the post, and Tumblr deleted the picture but not the text in reblogs because Tumblr is amazingly useful for how technologically incompetent they are.) My favorite of those is the one that's something like, "How did you think this was going to go?" because, uh, given my 20+ years in fandom, the answer to that is, "Well, not like this." This is an interesting post by someone who wasn't familiar with the trope who went through the story to point out all the ways it isn't sexualizing the three-year-old. It's very interesting to see how it seems to someone who isn't familiar with the trope. You can see some more of the discussion in her fandom wank and purity culture tags. Like I said, I stayed clear of most of it, so I'm not sure where, exactly the rest of it was, but in the future I will definitely refer to this as "that time I wrote a deliberately formulaic, cliched, tropey story and caused a segment of an entire fandom to implode."
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-03 03:52 pm (UTC)I remain O_O at this entire debacle.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-03 05:52 pm (UTC)The part I'm so O_O about is the part where instead of thinking, "Wait, maybe there's something here I'm not getting," so many people chose instead to leap to, "This must be bad!!!11!" But then again, with such a strong culture of still tinhatting something that doesn't bear up under even the lightest scrutiny, I guess a lack of logic isn't that surprising for 1D fandom.