you better make her raspberry swirl

[lunabee34]

So I just finished The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (which I highly reccommend; it's a well told story) and I've caught up on fannish gossip with Sue and I'm thinking about reading some Snape fic, but before I do, I wanna talk to you guys. I miss y'all. I'm making myself crazy with this reading regimen. Like scary crazy. I'm a have the vapors eeeeeny second now.

So here is a talking point, gentle flist:

What keeps you reading a piece of fanfic despite a horrific abuse of the rules of punctuation and grammar or rampant OOC-ness or weepy!Ron who weeps and weeps all over the place? What sorts of things in fic keep you reading when you'd have backbuttoned out of another story? In other words, what are your bulletproof fanfic kinks (and I'm defining kink here as that which you can't resist, which satisfies you deeply, which you are drawn to, which gets you off in some way (not necessarily a sexual one))? What are your narrative kinks (ex. mpreg, epigraphs, lots of dialogue, aliens made them do it), your character kinks (ex. Inara has a secret, Giles is a closet fan of Blakes 7, Sam is jealous of Dean), your fanon kinks (ex. Buffy smells like vanilla, Xander's parents are abusive)?

Comments

[possibly-thrice.livejournal.com]

Hurt comfort, healing cock.

*SIGH OF SHAME*

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Hee! I don't tend to backbutton at all. If it's really bad, I'll just try and skim to the end. Unless it's really long, in which case I will give up and click out, but it bugs me not to read to the end.

I don't have any bulletproof kinks, though. If a fic is bad, I will, as I said, keep going out of bloody-mindedness, but I won't enjoy it.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for the VGifts! I didn't know because, well, LJ notifications and all.

I don't think Giles would be *ashamed* of being a B7 fan, although if he had, like, Victor Herbert records he'd be ashamed.

For me, fanfic is all about characterization, so I'll keep reading if a) I agree with the characterization, or b) it's way out in Deep Left Field, but it hangs together.

Probably because I stutter slightly when I'm nervous, I like characters who are not inarticulate as such, but can take a while to get to the beginning of the sentence.

I'm convinced that, although both Avon and Simon are terrible dancers (this is, I think, a reasonable extrapolation from canon), they like to dance. This is one of my few MarySue points.

ETA: even though I have *read* The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and therefore know better, it sounds like there should be sex slaves in there somewhere.

[ariadne83]

I looooove dialogue. I can't stop writing it, which does not a fic make.

One of my major character kinks is when a person really struggles hard (whether they succeed or fail) to connect with someone. I've never found that easy to do personally, or to maintain (before I got together with my husband none of my relationships had lasted longer than two weeks), so seeing characters have the same difficulties and having to consciously learn how to communicate really resonates with me

It was my favourite thing about Cam in tzzzz's mpreg series: he wanted so badly to settle down, there was nothing really *wrong* with him that was a reason he shouldn't have found someone, but still it was an uphill battle.

And a really interesting story premise will keep me reading even if the punctuation is terrible. By interesting I mean something that takes canon and adds another layer to it that fits in seamlessly - something that could be going on just outside the camera frame. (Bad grammar in a complete AU will have me out of there like a shot, just so you know ;-)

I don't have much patience for OOC behaviour unless I get the sense that something is Not As It Should Be, either because of the plot or the world-building i.e. these are the canon characters but something's gone wrong (like that Neville/Draco fic), or this is an AU and things here are fucked up. Sam Carter in The Wealth Of Our Nations Fed On Angel Blood is a good example of the latter: the way she behaves and how she reacts to the rest of the team are deeply affected by the AU-world she's been brought up in.

P.S. Thank you for my puppy *hugs*

[zillah975]

So, this only applies in a few of the fandoms I read. There's so much Supernatural fanfic that I can get my narrative kinks met by good stories, and will pretty much always back out of ones that are crappy, but there's not as much Ronon-centric or Teyla-centric SGA or Boromir-centric LoTR, so I'll take worse stories to get my fave character needs met.

* If the writer loves Teyla, Ronon, or Boromir as much as I do. Like, if you can tell they think s/he is 1,000,000 kinds of awesome, and will totally save the day. (This is predicated on No Character Bashing, which kills my squee. S/He can't be awesome at the expense of someone else.)

* Ronon- or Boromir-whump where he's still a totally bad-ass and awesome character.

* Teyla rescuing Ronon. Actually, Teyla/Ronon, though I can't be sure as I don't recall having read a bad one.

* Smart, savvy Ronon.

* Ruthless Teyla -- not evil. But ruthless, willing to do what needs to be done in order to accomplish an important goal, like saving Ronon her people. (Struckthrough because I haven't read one like that, but I TOTALLY WOULD.)

* Boromir Lives! And is not evil!

* Boromir Lives! AUs in which ruthless!Aragorn (but not evil! exactly) is paired with alpha!Boromir. *quivers*

(I'm looking for a pattern here. Maybe I'll be able to articulate it later, but I'm getting the sense there is one....)


Strangely, while I would think that all these narrative kinks would apply to Leverage/Eliot, they don't. I don't see them very often in Leverage and would love to, but I wouldn't read them if they were badly written. I wonder why.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

I wandered over from the discussion about Mary Sues, skimmed your first 20 entries and am OMG meta! And cool stuff! And and and I shall friend you!

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

Amnesia. Unrequited feelings (bonus points if both sides experience said unrequited feelings and do lots of pining). Arranged marriages/marriages of convenience. Long-term pairings that are going through severe angsty communication problems.

Miranda bottoming. Faith completely aware of the fact that she's in love with Buffy and all fatalistic yet nonchalant about it. Hermione being Hermione (she's rarely in character enough in fanfic for me: let's not forget that Hermione is annoying).

And then there are the bullet-proof pairings, the ones that are rare enough and that I love enough that I'll read anything featuring them, even when it's crap. Especially if it's crap featuring one of my bullet-proof kinks.

[lyr]

I miss you, too, hon. But I'm glad you're getting your reading done!

As for what keeps me reading a story despite horrific writing, well, I can't say as I have any bulletproof fic kinks. There are a number of things I'm drawn to, but they're all still vulnerable to bullets. Except! I will keep reading something awful if it's in a really rare fandom or pairing. If I simply can't do any better, I'll settle for whatever there is if I'm desperate enough.