The 5 Things Meme and Related Thoughts

[alixtii]

Only wisdomeagle has asked for a Top 5 list so far, but if you want one don't hesitate to sign up here.

Things That Are Shiny
5. Dimes. (I like dimes because they're the smallest U.S. coin, but they're worth more than pennies or nickels. A handful of dimes is worth more than a handful of any other common coin.)
4. My name when sparkly.
3. The college ring I got "for Christmas" (there was a picture in my stocking) and will be waiting for me when I return to campus!
2. My flist.
1. Having a girlfriend.

I switched from the literal to figurative meanings of "shiny" about halfway through. Shiny?

I left a request for the top 5 Jossverse fics even she wouldn't write in wisdomeagle's journal, but she detected my evil plan:

This is clearly a trick question, because as soon as I start listing them I'll think, "Oooh, actually, if I set it then and changed that, maybe it could work!

But her ultimate answers (found here; scroll down a little) are food for thought, methinks. She says "no" to Summerscest, and I have to agree with her; while I'm not squicked by sibcest (far from it, God knows!), I just can't think of a way to make Buffy/Dawn work. They just don't have a relationship which is remotely sexualizable for me, no matter how much I would want to in principle. (And as to what principle that is exactly--well, I have meta planned on the subject, but I have a lot of meta planned and I haven't really written any since August.)

Her next "no" is "any threesome involving three guys and no girls" and again I'd agree with her, although again very possibly for different reasons. While I could see myself writing m/m if the right story idea came up, I still wouldn't write to excite. And while not all 3some fic is written to excite (kink versus literature mentalities, I still haven't excised that dichotomy!) a lot is, and the odds that I would randomly come up with an idea that, for purely story reasons, needed to be both m/m and a threesome--well, I would think they would be pretty low odds.

"Flat-out rape fic where the perp is not one of the Fanged Four or similarly soulless. Twisty semi-con, yes, rape, not so much." I'm interested in her qualifications here, because of course rape is squicky. The only straight-up on-stage noncon I've written has been with Dark!Willow in Divine Interventions because, logically, that is what she would do. (It wasn't fun to write, either, but I couldn't think of anyway to get out of it.) "Twisty semi-con" is more common in my ouvre, but still the perpetrators tend to the evil side (unsurprisingly): post-Illyria Fred, Illyria, ficlet!Amy (who is much more a power-hungry caricature than Watcher!verse Amy--see below for more on that subject.

She won't write anything where "Kaylee gets hurt without comfort." Ari adds that she feels "very strongly about this!" Kaylee is certainly the type of character who would inspire this type of feeling, although I think its less strong in me due to my position (I identify with Mal, Simon, and River more than Kaylee, whom I love but mainly see through my het male gaze). It's odd that there aren't really very many other characters who inspire that sort of feeling, thought. Perhaps Willow would have if BtVS had ended after its first eleven episodes and had been followed by a movie in which Willow got Xander even though he was more interested in Buffy (it's scary how well that maps, actually), but later-seasons Willow changed all that.

I abuse my favorite characters on a regular basis, after all. One of the major themes of the Watcher!verse is how Dawn's dark side allows her to be ideally suited to running the Council, after all. She's self-destructive and emotionally troubled. (Which is how I get away with her being a huge slut--see below.) Facing the Shadows--one of my favorite fics that I've written--was originally intended to be a Faith/Kennedy hurt/comfort, but I ended up spending over 3,000 words hurting Kennedy and giving her only a couple sentences' worth of comfort:

“Faith?” she asked. “Hold me?”

Faith found a clean spot on her forehead and kissed it, then wrapped an arm around Kennedy. “I’m here,” she said. “I’m here.”

And Kennedy smiled, and let unconsciousness take her as she lay in her lover's arms.

Ari's last "never write" is Zoe or Wash being unfaithful. I probably wouldn't write this either, but note that while Saffron and Dr. Mathias are both on my Firefly Character Index, Wash and Zoe aren't; I've never written fic with them in it. While I approve in principle of having a happily married couple on television, their relationship never engaged me all that much (which is probably why there aren't very many happily married couples on television, and even less in the Jossverse). So this is another case of my agreeing with Ari for completely different reasons.

But the sentiment of not letting anything break up a beloved canon pairing is one with which I can sympathize: I don't like letting anything short of death break up Willow/Kennedy and Willow/Tara. I had Willow/Kennedy break up after Kennedy cheated (or did she?) for my Buffy/Kennedy femslash_minis fic Into the Woods, but I don't think I would do it again. I need to put up a strong front to resist all those who would bash Willow/Kennedy.

In the Watcher!verse, Willow and Kennedy stay together (mostly) in domestic bliss for five years until Willow finally goes dark again and Kennedy has to kill her. Which actually poses a problem as Kennedy walks out on the relationship (thus the "mostly") after the Dark!Willow noncon in Divine Interventions--I still haven't quite figured out how I'm going to get them back together again, but it will involve Dawn having a one-night stand with Xander. (Watcher!verse Dawn is a slut, you know? By the time she marries Giles, she has already slept with at least Faith, Ethan, and Xander, and I'm sure the list will only get longer as I flesh out the universe more. During her marriage with Giles she sleeps with at least Giles, Faith, Kennedy, Beatrice, and Amy.)

Indeed, one of the reasons so many people die in the Watcher!verse is so that I'll have an excuse to switch around pairings without having to make people unfaithful.

All this thinking about characters and pairings is more or less continuing in the same vein from my last post in which I answered the "What characters/pairings can you write with your eyes closed" question. glossing asked "So would you say that your pairings are the same people across different stories?" and the question made me think and write about my writing process enough that it seems worth reposting here:

The Faith/Kennedy and Dawn/Giles dynamics are definitely the same people, since they're all set in the same universe (or else I've written a lot of unconnected stories in all of which Dawn has a niece name Madelyn) even if many of them were written to be read by themselves (since a lot are ficathon stories, although I think the femslash_minis people have gotten a grasp of my personal fanons). Those two pairings aren't pairings that I love for their own sake so much as pairings that made sense within the Watcher!verse (a lot of Dawn/Giles, for example, is set up by the Dawn/Ethan in Divine Interventions).

As for the miscellaneous stories, I think there might be slight differences in the way I characterize them. A lot of my ficlet!Amys are less three-dimensional than my Watcher!verse Amy, being power-hungry caricatures. The Eve that seduces the Scoobies in The Game isn't quite the same Eve that answers the 70 questions meme, because the first is an AU and the latter takes place in the Watcher!verse (don't ask me why). But the former Eve is somewhat OOC for Eve, so I would still think of it in terms as a "right" Eve and a "wrong" Eve, instead of several equally valid interpretations of the same character (as I might several different writers' Eves). ("The Game" was written for buffyverse1000, and I loosened my standards for OOC somewhat when writing that fic.) Despite living in drastically different universes, Watcher!verse Eve isn't all that different from the Eve who is working in a diner in Funeral; they still work from basically the same motivations, i.e. love for Lindsey, fear of the Senior Partners, fear of her own mortality, etc. I'm trying to do my best to simply pick up canon!Eve and drop her into these new situations with as little change as possible, while telling a story which reflects my values and the themes that I am interested in.

In general, I don't think my characterizations are drastically different even between unconnected fic. I try and get a "least hypothesis" of the character and motivation--what makes them tick in the closest possible world in which canon could be true--and only make changes if it serves the story (or my agenda) in some way. In my unconnected stories I have greater freedom to make such changes but don't utilize it indiscriminately.

Comments

Re: re: Simon/River (and ambiguity)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

when we write fanfic we open Schroedinger's box in some sense.

Exactly! And that's the perfect analogy as well; be prepared for me to use it in the future. And yes, you're very good at keeping potentiality intacy, and it's pretty clear--both from the fics and extratextual sources like comments from the author--you're making a deliberate attempt to preserve ambiguity in the source texts. I know that you, like me, dislike writing AtS characters post-"NFA" because then one has to open the Schrödinger's box of whether they lived or died.

But the fanfiction impulse is to fill in the blanks, to produce more canon-like fanon, and that always clears up some of the old ambiguities even as it creates new ones. But because one (including me) values canon over fanon, the ambiguities in fanon are hardly ever felt to be as interesting as those in the source text.

So when Joss finally answers the question eventually of what happened in that alley during "NFA" that'll be okay (and he may have done it already if comics are canon; I haven't been keeping track). But, as you point out, Simon/River will always be ambiguous, and both karabair and myself will be upset if he attempts to revisit the Immortal, a character who was deliciously defined by his ambiguity, thanks to the genius decision to keep him and Buffy off-stage. But when we save Illyria (which I have done, in my virtual series) or Spike or whoever, it's not the same, because there aren't Joss-created ambiguities to replace them, only ambiguities in fanon.

(However, due to the liminal state of fanfic, we're capable of saving Spike without really saving him, because its fanfic and only one of a million possible directions canon could possibly go. You're really good at taking advantage of that aspect of fanfic, for example; my skills lie elsewhere.)

Also, I'm not sure people in fandom generally find ambiguity to be as aesthetically rich as you and I do. I blame the intentional fallacy, for one: if the text doesn't answer a question, then of course the solution is to go to JKR's website and find out the answer. It also comes from confusing what's canon with what is a least hypothesis of the source text, because admittedly the line between the two is extremely blurry: Does Giles canonically have a reproductive system?

But wherever whence the impulse comes, there's a lot of people who want to have the One True Interpretation of the source text. (The very far-gone want to use that One True Interpretation to beat everyone else over the head. Rabid shippers fall into this category.)

I seem to remember there was someone not to long ago who claimed that Simon/River was clearly canon (which goes beyond the least hypothesis claim; to me, to claim Simon/River would require at least somebody, you know, explicitly mentioning it). Practically no one agreed with her, because she was confusing text with subtext, but the reason the suggestion drove me batty was that it was erasing the ambiguity from the text.

Indeed there is a part of me which is glad that 'cesty and f/f pairings can't be shown explicitly (not as strong as the part that is outraged that we can't have positive gay rôle models on the screen, but there nonetheless), because it forces television creators to rely on subtext rather than text, to create ambiguity when they might have (programming for the lowest common denominator) might have been explicit.