Xander's chocolate what now?
May. 5th, 2008 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunabee34ADMIN ANN: I am no longer checking my yahoo email regularly. Your best bet to reach me is through my aol account (same screenname as, well, everything). Terribly sorry, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
executrix; I know you must think I've been ignoring you and heartily apologize and shall email forthwith.
:)
So, I've been retagging my rec entries and re-reading a few things here and there along the way and while I was looking over some entries from the first few months of my fannish days, something god-awful happened.
I realized that a lot of what I used to read and thoroughly enjoy is fairly bad writing. This is not to say that everything I read in those early days was crap (there's the timeless excellence of atabaqui or yin_again or wesleysgirl mixed in there among the drivel), but a surprising amount of it is.
I re-read something this morning that I had thought in the early months of 2005 to be edgy and novel and glorious that now appears to me as very silly and ridiculous. There's pretty much zero motivation for the characters to behave the way they do and Xander's stare is recounted in an ever-increasingly poetic list of candy-related adjectives (his limpid pools of Toblerone indeed) and the fanon--it is thick. To be clear, this is not bad fic. It is not horrifically written by any means and it was well-received when posted and while I find the characterization a little lacking, neither Xander or Spike behave wildly out of character; however, overall, this story is nothing that I would currently rec.
I think the reason for my change of heart is partly because what now I clearly see as a cliche fic wasn't apparently so in those beginning days of fandom. Because I was new and hadn't read thirteen million basement fics, I had no idea this particular example was just perpetuating (or ye gods, maybe even *starting*) all the fanon associated with that kind of story. And I also think I didn't know what I wanted fanfic to *do* for me. I didn't know yet that I was gonna be so fond of canon plausibility or that I would eventually favor the very explainy first time fic over the established relationship PWP every time. I didn't realize that I would ever be so interested in peripheral characters or *mothers* (dude, how many mom fics have I written? LOL) I didn't realize that I wanted fic to give me a new lens through which to look at canon and go, "OMG. *That's* what they were doing during the commercial break. HOLY SHIT."
I wonder if this is the normal trajectory for current fans, or does this radical taste change make me fairly unique? I mean, after all, it isn't as if my profic reading tastes have really changed over the past fifteen years. The books on my highschool rec list (not that I made those in my diaries or nothing) still make it onto this year's edition.
executrix; I know you must think I've been ignoring you and heartily apologize and shall email forthwith.:)
So, I've been retagging my rec entries and re-reading a few things here and there along the way and while I was looking over some entries from the first few months of my fannish days, something god-awful happened.
I realized that a lot of what I used to read and thoroughly enjoy is fairly bad writing. This is not to say that everything I read in those early days was crap (there's the timeless excellence of a
tabaqui or yin_again or wesleysgirl mixed in there among the drivel), but a surprising amount of it is.I re-read something this morning that I had thought in the early months of 2005 to be edgy and novel and glorious that now appears to me as very silly and ridiculous. There's pretty much zero motivation for the characters to behave the way they do and Xander's stare is recounted in an ever-increasingly poetic list of candy-related adjectives (his limpid pools of Toblerone indeed) and the fanon--it is thick. To be clear, this is not bad fic. It is not horrifically written by any means and it was well-received when posted and while I find the characterization a little lacking, neither Xander or Spike behave wildly out of character; however, overall, this story is nothing that I would currently rec.
I think the reason for my change of heart is partly because what now I clearly see as a cliche fic wasn't apparently so in those beginning days of fandom. Because I was new and hadn't read thirteen million basement fics, I had no idea this particular example was just perpetuating (or ye gods, maybe even *starting*) all the fanon associated with that kind of story. And I also think I didn't know what I wanted fanfic to *do* for me. I didn't know yet that I was gonna be so fond of canon plausibility or that I would eventually favor the very explainy first time fic over the established relationship PWP every time. I didn't realize that I would ever be so interested in peripheral characters or *mothers* (dude, how many mom fics have I written? LOL) I didn't realize that I wanted fic to give me a new lens through which to look at canon and go, "OMG. *That's* what they were doing during the commercial break. HOLY SHIT."
I wonder if this is the normal trajectory for current fans, or does this radical taste change make me fairly unique? I mean, after all, it isn't as if my profic reading tastes have really changed over the past fifteen years. The books on my highschool rec list (not that I made those in my diaries or nothing) still make it onto this year's edition.
