Round 69, Hour 12

[ylla.livejournal.com]

In the last hour I discovered that the list of 'persons in trade' in Carlisle in 1811 included a mathematician. Intriguing!

Do you have strange facts? Strange fictions? More words?

Comments

[agirlnamedtruth.livejournal.com]

Just started writing, 108 words so far. And this one's going to be strange - you know when you see a prompt and the idea runs away with itself and you're sat there going "do I ship this? do I kink this kink?" but it doesn't really matter because your muse has sunk her teeth in? That's me right now.

[purplecat]

Not quite the same, but the prompt I'm working with was basically, "everything you've always argued against doing in this canon" and I read it and suddenly light bulbs were going off in my brain. I'm going to have to write some kind of apologetic introductory note explaining why I've just written a whole bunch of stuff I'm always telling people not to.

[agirlnamedtruth.livejournal.com]

I'm going through the exact same thing with a character I rolepay. I've always hated kid!fic and argued that characters tend to go completely OOC when just dropped into a fic where they're suddenly married with 2.5 kids and everything is tooth-rotting fluff, especially if they've had to change the whole entire canon to do it or have it completely not canon (for example, a canon historical setting made into a modern AU) for it to work.

And now my roleplay character is engaged and their fiancée is pregnant and if I tried to explain it to anybody else they would look at me like I'm mad because it's just so... not canon. Like there's elements that I could grasp at straws with (the other character has always wanted kids/a family but they can't have one for canon reasons) but there's no way to explain it without sounding like the exact people I used to hate and it's maddening because all I could say is we've been roleplaying them daily since March and it makes sense to us in this weird little bubble we've created. But yeah, I could never write it as a fic; "x and y get married, have kids and live the perfect white picket fence life" without everyone I know raining down an apocalypse on me for how anti-kid!fic I am =/

[purplecat]

I don't mind kid!fic in principle but an awful lot of it is written by people who rather obviously don't know kids (particularly babies and toddlers) and I just read through it going "kids of that age, they do not behave like that." Usually they are way too old and wise for their years in a kind of cutesy way, but sometimes they are also way too young. I guess, like the presence of OCs, there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of kid!fic but I do consider it a bit of a red flag so I'm unlikely to read kid!fic from an author I don't know, and I'm more likely to bail early if the story isn't grabbing me.

[agirlnamedtruth.livejournal.com]

I think for me a lot of it stems from the fact I don't want to get married or have kids myself so dropping my ship in that kind of scenario without any build-up is very jarring. Especially if the characters canonically have never expressed a desire to have kids or get married, be it with each other or different characters. Maybe that's because I don't relate to that possibly parental aspect of a character unless it's really explicitly stated but I don't know, I think it's just one of those things, like in real life, you need to work up to, especially if the couple in question aren't canon and aren't the type of people that scream "I really want kids".

OCs is almost a certain no from me. I get that sometimes it's not about self-inserting and that it's for some other reason but I can never not see it as a self-insert thing. Maybe because I was on FF.net back in the day (I'm talking like 2010 here) and every other fic was captioned "Starlight/equally out there name, sister/daughter of one of the main characters is visiting *insert setting of show* when the conventionally attractive male lead falls in love with her and gives her life ~meaning" and I just can't take that seriously in any way. It's like reading one of those books in the "teen" section of the library where some random shy girl somehow ends up the girlfriend of the ~cool kid or the dark mysterious kid that's actually a vampire/werewolf/whatever the latest craze is.

But saying that, I once wrote a fic for a big bang and I was committed and invested in the plot and had enough words down to not want to throw it away when I realised I needed a minor side character to act as a plot device (the plot device that the whole plot span on basically) and canonically, every side character I could have used at the time had been killed off and I was writing it between seasons airing so they hadn't introduced any new characters I could use so I had to bite the bullet and make one up and I honestly felt like writing in capital letters "She's not a Mary-Sue, it's just everyone else is canonically dead, please don't judge me".

Same sort of thing happened with a kid in one of my fics, now I think about it. It was for a reverse bang and it was a really good plot for a ship I could work with and everything about it was perfect but one of the pieces featured the female character being heavily pregnant and the male character holding a baby and it was just pretty far out from the rest of the plot but I had to make it work so right at the end I sort of had to have this "five years later" thing because the plot was about them meeting and getting together and I couldn't bring myself to have them be, a week later, going "oh btw I'm pregnant, surprise". But I felt like putting in a note going "I know, the random flashforward is cheesy and weird but it's not my idea" at the end.

Sorry, didn't mean to write you an essay there, apparently I have a lot of thoughts about it all :P

[purplecat]

My main fandom place is unusual in having enthusiastically embraced OCs early on and has a vast number of shared OCs. It can be a bit off-putting to new people because by now the OCs are almost like a running joke and obviously its deeply weird to have occasional fics that are only about the OCs and yet have half a dozen people commenting on them and talking about them. But it does mean that they are obviously not self-inserts. Though even self-inserts done well are not actually a problem in and of themselves (I generally point to the character of Harriet Vane in the Lord Peter Wimsey novels at this point because she is such a screaming Mary Sue and yet very popular). But yeah, in general, someone needs to be really good to persuade you to be as interested in their OC as you are in a canon character and I'd be inclined to say that OCs are really only justifiable if you are writing casefic (or its canon equivalent) when they are often necessary, they are rarely necessary in romance stories (unless I suppose there is a pressing need to include parents or similar and canon doesn't provide any)

[lolmac]

May I ask (even though I'm time-traveling through the posts that were made while I was asleep) what your main fandom is? That sounds terrific.

My main fandom is MacGyver, where it's a canon trope to introduce one or more new characters into each adventure, including a love interest. It is really hard to steer clear of the Mary Sue waters, at least superficially (although canon also requires that the Lady Scientist of the Week be smart, capable, fully developed as a character, and not interested in a long-term relationship).

[purplecat]

My main fandom is the UK TV show Primeval and the space with all the OCs is primeval_denial. There was a point in time when the OCs were a fairly bitter point of contention in the LJ fandom. There was wank, though considering how bad fandom wank can get it was mostly pretty mild. At the end of the day Denial turned out to be the comm that had sticking power after the cancellation of the show and the "no OCs" comms are dead. All the active participants at denial now either like, or at least tolerate, the OCs.

They happened really, because the military characters in the show were popular in the fandom so people wanted to have a proper unit of military characters for them to interact with and the show simply didn't provide them. They just always showed up with a team of nameless extras wearing black. I think what happened next was more or less a variant on "don't invent your own OC if there is already a suitable character in the show" - basically "don't invent your own team of support soldiers if the fandom already has some and doesn't mind sharing".

[purplecat]

Oh and yes, to inflicting kids on characters who seem unlikely to be that interested in them. In one of my fandoms that happens a lot to a rather prickly character, who comes across as very independent, but also someone with issues about family. It's so hard to imagine her being anything but very cautious and wary about the whole suggestion of kids and its really jarring when a story starts with the whole happy family setup without discussing any worries or reservations she might have had getting there, let alone the day to day stress of having to operate as part of a family unit rather than as an individual.

[lolmac]

Seeing this kind of discussion take place here makes me want to wave my hands in the air and squeal for sheer joy. This comm has the BEST people.

[prisca1960.livejournal.com]

Christmas cards ... I've managed to write some Christmas cards. Does this count?

Just one hour and work is calling for me, I guess I should go now, find something (healthy ?!) to eat and then get ready for the madness. Why, oh why, are customers always acting weird when it starts to get Christmas? **rolls eyes and waves good-bye**

I will be back, maybe this evening but more likely tomorrow.

[purplecat]

I'm sure Christmas Cards count - or at least I always find writing them a chore :-)

[lolmac]

Christmas cards totally count. *waves Official Wand Of Adjudicatory Judification*

[naemi.livejournal.com]

No facts or fictions so far. I'm checking in—not to write yet, but to let you know I'm ready to take over the next hour if you still want me to =)

Until then, it's chores time. Ugh.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

That would be great, thanks - I'm wandering off to the Strange Lands of the Special Reading Room in a bit, and they might look at me funny!

[naemi.livejournal.com]

I think I can imagine that :o) All right then =)