*flashbacks to that one fic YOI Badfic Friend found that started with a table of rates of soulmate bondings in different countries that remains arguably the worst chart I have ever seen in my entire life*
In a perfect world there would be as many multi-canon Sherlock Holmes crossovers as there are Harry Potter crossovers in the SH tag. But this is not a perfect world, and there are like three drabbles, and Harry Potter continues to spread its grasping fingers across this fandom as it has so many others, and I will never get to read about ACD Holmes being horrified by BBC Sherlock’s entire personality and all the other Watsons being at first uncomfortable but eventually infatuated with Joan
That one damn fic from the watchmen kinkmeme gave me a thirst for multi-canon-same-characters crossover fic which has never been satisfied anywhere else It’s such a rich vein of character study and drama potential ;_;
I get really annoyed when I open up a fic with a promising premise and it's just nothing but zero-effort exposition and telling on a character's mental state or the author's headcanon backstory for this minor character or whatever, instead of trying to show this stuff through action or imagery in a way that is actually engaging and memorable (and there are so many ways! snapshot fics, for instance! those are really great for showing lots of stuff in small bites if you don't wanna write a ten-thousand-words-long chaptered fic!) please if you wanna write analysis and essays either just do that and don't dress it up as fanfic, or at least tag the thing as meta or something if you're gonna post it to the fanfic site for whatever reason
That's honestly another reason I prefer writing my fanfiction as poetry. Since I can just sit there and tell mental states and such and it's considered an acceptable thing. Like I can use imagery and I have, but I can just sit and ramble about a character being sad for twenty lines. I was never quite satisfied with the effect of that sort of thing in prose, though I do think you could potentially make it work. Potentially? At least where it regards the idea of a thing that is just rambling and telling about a mood.
yeah, it seems to be something that works better in poetry than prose. I guess because you can use the structure and rhythm of a poem to make up for the otherwise bland-ish exposition? but that's not quite something you can do with prose as easily unless you get really fancy with imagery and sentence/paragraph structure... (and tbh at that point, shouldn't you just be writing a poem anyway?) but my problem is that the exposition-dump fics don't even do that. it's just all this bland stating and telling and I'm just so bored. I came here for character interactions and interesting explorations of the stuff canon failed at and etc--if I wanted to be simply and straightforwardly expositioned on about a character's mental state or the author's headcanons or such, I'd go and read some tumblr analysis instead
Part of it I think is that we have certain expectations of the mediums and also of genres. Poetry has a long history of work that is basically just rants about how someone is feeling, with very little if any action. It's acceptable there because of convention, at least in part. While I think that I do think that there are certain strengths poetry offers that make it easier to do in interesting fashions? The focus on aesthetic qualities above everything else in terms of how sounds fall and flow makes something that might otherwise be boring as fuck interesting. Because there's more going on with the presentation there. Kind of like how first person diary type stories can get away with that sort of shit because it's someone's diary and it's offering us a deep and intimate look into this person in a variety of fashions. Also your mention of at that point shouldn't you be writing a poem is funny because I've actually written prose like that before. And there's the whole medium of prose poetry. Which is interesting but I've not studied it much so I can't say too much about it. Other than that it's interesting and my last attempts at prose were influenced by that idea heavily. And aaaaaaah. That's what you meant. I was thinking more of like...uh...This fucking prose poem thing I wrote I guess? Things like this. If it's really just straightforward exposition than hrmmmmmmmmm. HRMMMMMM.
This is why half my fics are a series of tiny fragmented minimal scenes. Because it's something I want to show, not tell, but making words is hard and stringing things together into one connected narrative is even harder.
maybe I was unclear...but yeah a fic like that isn't what I was talking about; it's still a bit tell-y but it tells things in a way that is engaging and memorable through emotional imagery and language. I was talking more like those short fics which are just like, "this character saw y, thought x, and did z". not really so much written like that, but still extremely low-effort bland exposition across the board. I could pull up examples but I don't really want to point fingers at particular authors or works stuff like genres and conventions as you said likely has something to do with it--I can expect a lot of exposition from a diary format because diaries often revolve around stream-of-consciousness exposition and all that, but I often go into simple prose fanfic not expecting a whole lot of exposition, largely because most of the basic stuff to write exposition on has already been provided by the canon, even if the fanfic might be specifically on the subject of something the canon didn't touch on. so it's annoying to click into a fanfic and be faced by loads of and/or nothing but flatly-told exposition which would read much better and be more engaging if the framing or formatting was different, but instead the author is going with simple prose so there's nothing to distract from the blandness of it all, and all the ways I can think of how this would be so much more interesting if it was shown through action and imagery or done in another format instead (also I didn't even know prose poems were a thing, huh)
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense now. Just got confused I guess, yes. And yeah they are a thing! They're a neat thing that I need to learn more about at some point. That and plotless nonsense prose.
another thing i hate is when fic writers appear to have absolutely no fucking theory of mind and their characters just do things for reasons that make no sense no character has any interiority except, maybe, the main character. maybe. if youre lucky. thats the worst and i feel gross for weeks after
Spoiler: nsfw also when writers dont understand consent so you get no ratings on a story that's 95% a rape fantasy but at the last second theyre like "oh haha they unintentionally agreed to do bdsm with the stranger before they got blackout drunk so it was just a misunderstanding!" like that's not horrifying
There are only two kinds of fic titles. Either you get an obscure Italian musical term which subtly reflects the character arc, or you get "JOTARO GETS RAWED BY HIS STAND".
Spoiler: Nsfw-ish Whenever I run across one of those, I can only assume the author wanted to write noncon but chickened out at the last second. The last-minute “Oh it was actually fine” makes it so much worse than it would otherwise have been.
i was about to say, no theres also Mountain Goats lyrics/titles but yeah that covers it Or poetry fragments
(I have a hard time with names so if I ever write something long enough to have named chapters they're probably gonna be Mountain Goats lyrics, tbh.)
i title most things on my ao3 vague two or three word phrases that seem apt at the time, what does that come under? ('Inductance' absolutely comes under the 'vague italian musical term' heading though, even though it's an electrical term and not a musical one. in my defence, that was to fit in with someone else's titling scheme...)
