As part of the the Mini Meta Fest, some thoughts on the second of two prompts:
1. The slash vs het wars. aka: won't someone please think of the multishippers?
I definitely feel sympathy for this POV. As a reader of gen, het, and slash, I really don't understand why there should be conflict there. Perhaps because of my reading preferences, many of the writers I read repeatedly also write in more than one of these veins, so I have to wonder who it is who is having such problems with it?( Read more... )
For a while now, I've been curious what people see as the common stories in SPN. Some time ago I wrote about the types of stories I tended to see in Spike/Xander fanfic in BtVS. Now that I've been reading around in SPN fic for a while I think I can identify a few categories, but I'm interested in other ideas. I'm not focusing on what typical fanfic plots tend to get used (first times, spell goes awry, bodyswapping, amnesia, etc.), but rather, how canon and characters tend to get repeatedly reshaped.
In my fic reading for Supernatural, I only sometimes read summaries because I'm usually there from a rec and the reccer has already given some basic information about the fic. In one case I was rather glad of this. I read a fic that I really liked (despite the glaring need for someone to proof it). I had no idea where it was going or what it was really about, but the story was like a road trip. It was just interesting to sit back and travel along with it. (And it did have a good payoff). I should clarify that obviously a lot of stories in SPN are about road trips but the feel of this one was just right in that sense. It wasn't because it mimicked all the road trip elements either but because it seemed like a mental road trip through Sam's head and memories.
It also, I might add, had a contradictory feel to it. I felt, really, like I was reading original fiction. I even thought about reccing it to a non-fic reading friend of mine because I really liked the tone of it, but (aside from the errors which I knew would drive her crazy) it had too many references and placements in the SPN verse to really go over smoothly without all the "Huh?" road bumps. And I'm not sure how to put my finger on just what it was about it that didn't seem like the show to me. I wouldn't say either Sam or Dean was unusually out of character. In fact I thought the opening vignette was great. There was just this gauzy overlay on it which was very not like the series but which seemed pulled from literary conventions.
And this niggling feeling made me wonder about the change in mediums and how perhaps all fanfic is AU -- not because it doesn't closely follow canon but because the change in medium automatically imposes a different set of conventions on the story and characters that works like a filter ( to subtly change who they are and how the stories come across )