Compromising compromises
Mar. 1st, 2010 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I wrote a yay! life! post over on Wordpress. I've also got the first of my (spoilerific) commentary posts for Romanitas. It's on the first chapter, 'Embalmed'.
I've been reading a lot of post-Deathly Hallows, 'next generation' Harry Potter fanfic. Serious Harry Potter fans on my flist are probably horrified (one of them has been known to remark that since we don't know anything about Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione etc's children, writing fic about them is like writing about original characters). For me, that's part of the appeal, I suspect. I don't know about you, but one of my favourite things to do as a child was imagining what happened to characters after the last page was turned (Presh, Leeward, Allyman, Fenja, Eduardo and Mariam ended up working for Cirque du Soleil, dammit!), and that's exactly what the better next-gen fic-writers are doing.
I like fanfic in such a qualified way. I can't read it for things that I truly adore (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cereswunderkind aside, I'm incapable of reading HDM fanfic, and I wouldn't dream of reading Buffy or Firefly fic either), and I'm much more interested in reading longer, novel-length fic where the focus is less on pairings and more on the story itself. (That's not to say I'm anti-shipping, more that for me, the point of fic is the same as in any other storytelling medium - telling a story. I certainly don't say this out of any perceived superiority, just that it is a matter of taste, and my taste falls much more on the gen side of things.) Then again, I'd never want to read fic for something I don't care about at all. Harry Potter is one of the few texts that sits comfortably in the centre of the divide between 'I adore it without qualification' and 'I couldn't care less about it': I like HP more for what it symbolised than what it actually was, more for how it brought my friends and me together to talk about books than for what the books themselves actually said.
We all have particular stories that we can hear told again and again, same same but different. (For me, it used to be a particularly Montague-and-Capulety across the barricades love story.) Next gen fic, with its emphasis on the Potter/Weasley and Malfoy offspring tends to appeal to a particular favourite story of mine: people who detest/fear one another being forced to work together despite mutual dislike. It's gone beyond any Romeo and Juliet trappings it once used to possess. I'm interested in compromises: who makes them, why, and what it does to them. That, for me, is the appeal of the best next-gen stuff. At the moment, I've been enjoyingjenwryn_fic's novel-length story 'Black is the Colour'. I suspect it won't appeal to the Potter purists, but I like it quite a lot.
I've been reading a lot of post-Deathly Hallows, 'next generation' Harry Potter fanfic. Serious Harry Potter fans on my flist are probably horrified (one of them has been known to remark that since we don't know anything about Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione etc's children, writing fic about them is like writing about original characters). For me, that's part of the appeal, I suspect. I don't know about you, but one of my favourite things to do as a child was imagining what happened to characters after the last page was turned (Presh, Leeward, Allyman, Fenja, Eduardo and Mariam ended up working for Cirque du Soleil, dammit!), and that's exactly what the better next-gen fic-writers are doing.
I like fanfic in such a qualified way. I can't read it for things that I truly adore (
cereswunderkind aside, I'm incapable of reading HDM fanfic, and I wouldn't dream of reading Buffy or Firefly fic either), and I'm much more interested in reading longer, novel-length fic where the focus is less on pairings and more on the story itself. (That's not to say I'm anti-shipping, more that for me, the point of fic is the same as in any other storytelling medium - telling a story. I certainly don't say this out of any perceived superiority, just that it is a matter of taste, and my taste falls much more on the gen side of things.) Then again, I'd never want to read fic for something I don't care about at all. Harry Potter is one of the few texts that sits comfortably in the centre of the divide between 'I adore it without qualification' and 'I couldn't care less about it': I like HP more for what it symbolised than what it actually was, more for how it brought my friends and me together to talk about books than for what the books themselves actually said.We all have particular stories that we can hear told again and again, same same but different. (For me, it used to be a particularly Montague-and-Capulety across the barricades love story.) Next gen fic, with its emphasis on the Potter/Weasley and Malfoy offspring tends to appeal to a particular favourite story of mine: people who detest/fear one another being forced to work together despite mutual dislike. It's gone beyond any Romeo and Juliet trappings it once used to possess. I'm interested in compromises: who makes them, why, and what it does to them. That, for me, is the appeal of the best next-gen stuff. At the moment, I've been enjoying
jenwryn_fic's novel-length story 'Black is the Colour'. I suspect it won't appeal to the Potter purists, but I like it quite a lot.