Highlander Chronicles - Day

12:57AM

Has anyone been following this discussion (Something's lost in translation) on seperis's LJ? It's over 253 comments and I believe still going on, and it's absolutely fascinating, particularly in light of writing in Highlander -- because while I can see a huge and distinct difference between stages in old and later writing in HL, I can't see it progressing the way the other fandoms are described here, which makes me feel -- let's say, odd.

The discussion is wide-ranging and hard to summarize: basically, it began with seperis saying that some stories she read recently struck her as odd, as working from unfamiliar premises, and she couldn't quite put her finger on why and how they were odd. And possibly a different style or a different era of writing on LJ had something to do with it? And then the discussion began. A real discussion, most of it, mostly free from academic stances and language, about waves and changes in writing styles across different fandoms. About different styles on lists, LJ, and ff.net, and where old styles persist.

But it seemed to me that most of the descriptions and summaries there, of waves of writing styles and intent, never really engaged Highlander the way they did SV or SGA or popslash or now bandom and SPN.

musesfool defined LJ "house style" in this thread as:
"I think LJ-fandom as a whole - across various fandoms - has an aesthetic that is readily identifiable: tight third person limited POV (and often only one narrator per story), present tense, shorter paragraphs, character-driven even in heavily plotty stories, heavier on dialogue and sex than on action. Less likely to be an endless WIP."

And later, someone described contemporary writing as "ironic detachment" -- and shayheyred remarks here that:
"We live in the land of meta and irony now.

I came to DS and wrote one story on the lists, and then was on LJ, so I'm kind of a post-Cesperanza-wave person. The diffence I've found is this: old-school slash might have a story in which the characters are, say, a were-unicorn (Man from UNCLE) or an elf (pretty much every older fandom pre-LJ) or the boys are pregnant. They were SERIOUS about this,even if there was an element of whimsy. But today writers routinely give characters wings, tentacles, pointed ears, impregnate them, change their gender - whatever.Now they're chockful of irony; sometimes they're labeled crackfic. We've gone post-modern. We're winking at the reader more these days, something that I don't remember seeing often back in the day."


I don't really see HL as conforming that rigidly to LJ house style as defined there; and I certainly don't see the majority of fic containing ironic detachment. If anything, in this past year we've seen a rollback to old styles. Or no styles.

What do you think?