There's a Loki/Tony fic thats close to my heart that i was reading as it was releasing that might not be what you're looking for and I don't even remember if it was good or not, but it's essentially an AU where Tony essentially runs away with Loki, who is a rockstar heavily inspired by David Bowie. There's a lot of potentially triggering stuff in there so thread carefuly as i don't remember them all, but i still remember it after 5 years of not really being involved with the fandom at all https://archiveofourown.org/works/752703
Is it unusual to accept horribly unlikely situations in fanfic that one is less likely to accept in a published book? Not like magical things, I mean extremely unlikely turns of mundane events. I feel like the difference is a fanfic is ultimately always a wild what-if, while a book is more likely to be presenting itself as an "it COULD happen" scenario.
Only if you accept the premise that books are presenting an "it COULD happen" scenario. I don't often go into a Lifetime movie thinking that it's anything more than a thin veneer of reality over an overwhelmingly self-indulgent fluff piece. Same goes for most romance novels.
For me, sorta. It depends on the writer—I’ll be far more lenient towards a newbie than I will towards someone who’s written hundreds of fics and should know better—but I’m definitely SLIGHTLY more bothered when dumb shit makes its way into professionally published works, because I expect those to have professional editors.
I was just thinking, in a published book I got annoyed by a trafficking organisation kidnapping rich white tourists who'd be immediately missed, but in fanfic a similar scenario didn't bother me as much. On further thought, though, the fanfic version didn't have said people kidnapped while sober and accompanied on a public street, while the book did, so it's probably more that part that bothered me.
For me at least books have this veneer of 'respectability' that fanfic don't need, for better or for worse. Like books have publishers and editors and at more than one point a whole-ass human being would read this book's dumb premise and go 'yes, several thousand people will pay money for this and enjoy it'. Fanfics are written for like two people, one of whom is usually (but not always) the author. What's a contrived coincidence in the face of Harry Potter/Naruto ABO makeouts?
I might be one of the two people for this tag combination, but I'm afraid of what I'll find if I search for it.
I think my problem may be that I usually hold fanfics to the same standards I hold books--I might be a little more lenient on typos or the pacing issues serialization can have, but I'm not going to be any more forgiving to an asinine plot point than I would be for a Harlequin novel.
whatever my standards are i'm still reading absolutely every fic in my ship's tag unless the fic is like truly well and terrible on a technical level and not in a fun way
God, what a mood this is. I may not enjoy the experience but you're damn right I'm going to chew through every single shipfic I can get my grubby little hands on.
my standards are unfortunately high except for in certain fandoms, where I go to re-experience some of the emotions I had access to in high school
Here's a gripe that's more a self-gripe than a fic-gripe: I keep remembering my Beloved Fics Of Youth as much longer than they actually were? Like, I remember having to take several nights to read them, so I automatically assume they're the same length as fics that take me multiple nights to read now, so 100k+ at the very least. They are not. The last one I revisited was 20k. WHY DID I REMEMBER IT SO MUCH LONGER.
I think I generally care about the likelihood of the central conceit of a story about as much as the story seems to care. I may enjoy asking an excessive number of questions about it for amusement value sometimes, but not because they're likely to be actually troubling me at all. Like, unless the theme of the story is an exploration of the trope of the chosen one, I will probably happily accept that the main character is the chosen one simply because the story said so unless it somehow manages to undermine itself on that point, whether by underthinking it or overthinking it. I'm more forgiving with fan material in all kinds of ways. I'm not sure if realism of story conceits is one of those ways though? The handling of them, yes definitely, but their mere presence is something I would probably see as merely an indication that fiction is happening. If I decide that I would not enjoy a story because of them, it's very unlikely that it's because they're objectively less realistic than other stories I might adore, and way more likely a matter of personal taste.
I don't tend to get as deeply invested in fic for particular ships, though I certainly have opinions and preferences. It's just that unless it's one author, or sometimes works inspired by another work, the dynamic between specific characters is not likely to ping me as the same relationship across different stories. Though sometimes there is one ship in canon that's by far the most likely to have the kinds of stories I'd most enjoy reading, and then I will look for that. But I do get extremely invested in individual characters for some reason, even though they're also not necessarily going to feel quite the same across different stories either. So I dunno what's up with me, really. I will search on characters, then decide if I would like to read about any particular ship and/or premise my search returns. Which of course gives me the background character search result problem, heh. At least it's usually pretty easy to tell from tags and summaries whether any given story is either about the character I was searching for, or if it's something I might want to read anyway even though it isn't. I seem to have reasonable luck if I can guess which content tags authors might put on at least one of their works if they're writing the type of fic I'd most like to read. Monster and horror related tags seem especially fruitful.
There's a character in my current fandom who speaks in Early Modern English for reasons unknown (a few other characters do as well to indicate their age i.e. dragons, but he's just a dude) and I really wish I could turn off my brain and enjoy fic with him in it where authors butcher his speech patterns. I feel like such a snob for this.
I have a deep and abiding hatred for fics where an ESL speaker's accent is explicily typed out. I'm not going to sit my ass through 50k of 'zhe dschörman' In no small part because many people who write that don't speak the original language. Translation fail/what's that Idiom mean??? Can be fun, but not this stuff.
