in a very blue moon

[ailis_fictive]

This is not the Big Intro post. (I'm procrastinating.) This is Random Thoughts.

Speaking of procrastinating, I'm putting off finishing The Queen of Attolia because I don't want it to be done. And I'm kind of hating everyone I know who didn't sit me down and tell me to Read This Dammit. I've read three-volume epics that didn't pack as much Good Stuff in as this little 250-page YA book. I have The King of Attolia on a shelf looking reproachfully at me, and I'm almost scared to start it. For QoA I was rather thoroughly spoiled, and have actually read most of the rest of the pages, just not in order. (A book has to get me really worked up to make me do that...) For KoA...I know the basic plot-motif, but none of the actual plot or the end.

But what I actually wanted to say was...I came (finally) to this series after being reminded by a Vokosigan crossover. And in my head, the minister of war is Aral Vorkosigan. Just is. I've no idea what he's doing there, or, contrarily, how he ended up on Barrayar later, but...same person. (And now I really want Eddis and Gregor to sit down and have a natter. Though I'm not sure Gregor and Attolia would do as well. Or possibly they'd do even better, and I'm just scared to bend my brain that way.)

Second random thought of the day, pulled over from a comment else-journal and refined a bit. Even though I'm still not writing the essay. Though I may go hunt up some of the academic work out there on fanfiction.

One of the things I find really fascinating about fanfic is that we can tell the same story--not just the same core theme/idea ("becoming a parent changes your relationship with the future") but the same basic plot with the same characters ("Gregor learns the truth about the Escobar invasion")--in many different ways. It becomes a prism, light coming through in different ways, reflecting and refracting. As soon as I hit that image, though, I was reminded of the way I describe Criminal Minds--it's a fugue on certain themes, hung on an episodic crime drama. They repeat and reverse and refine a set of themes about good and evil, about survival and recovery. There's a little more variation in the actual storytelling but...not much. Now I wonder if *really good* episodic TV (and crime series, both TV and book, since they have *such* a defined structure) aren't doing something very close. Of course, any sufficiently large body of work by a single author will usually start to show something similar--we all have our elephants--but there is something different--and, I think, richer--about multiple people telling the same story.

I'm starting to get really interested in looking at the various fandoms I've read extensively in and brushed against, and figuring out what stories tend to...ah, develop the largest prism, and isn't that metaphor becoming unwieldy? But...there are stories that get told once or twice, and then there are the ones we converge on.

And I'm stopping now, or this will turn into that essay I'm not writing. Or possibly a thesis.

(and, post scriptum, if you happen on this or any post of mine months or years from when it's posted, feel free to comment anyway. I'm happy to get blast-from-the-past commentary!)

Comments

[hedda62]

the way that certain shots or images, say, will crop up over and over again in a TV show

Or the way that TV shows do clever takes on classic movies (or TV shows), like (to use two "Person of Interest" examples since they're in my head) a long pan down a bank of mainframe computers that's much like the end of "Citizen Kane" or the referential scene in "Indiana Jones," or a gunfight set on a carousel a la "Third Man," a genre self-referencing that ends up being not quite so much like the communal holding and retelling of myths as like the use of quotations from Shakespeare, sometimes in and sometimes slightly out of context. I think fanfic does this too (I mean, it quotes from Shakespeare if I'm writing it, but more along the lines of being self-referential), but it also does the full-out mythology retelling-and-shifting.

But yeah, it is a PhD thesis. And I'm sure a number of people are out there writing those, but of course they all watch different shows or read different books than we do!

I agree with the whole plot-in-service-of-romance thing, generally, although it is always hard to compare specific examples. The Vorkosigan novels are such a sweeping saga with such a lot of plot that even if you just want to write romance, and you have any kind of duty to context at all, you're going to end up with a chunk of plot hanging on the romance anyway, even if it isn't actually in your story. Whereas Lewis is sadly episodic (I wish they would manage an overarching plot and continual snippets of backstory and such, but they don't) so whether you write a casefic or a character study or a domestic interlude, if you want to do romance that's where the focus will be; there's nothing else to grab. No matter how compelling a plot you come up with, it's going to feel like this week's episode or something that went on backstage of that.

Canon dictates form; form follows function; something like that. :)

I do like romance, too. I just sometimes feel like "so? Is that all there is?"

[hedda62]

Oh, and ha - I have to share that a brave Lewis writer has been reading my thoughts and has just posted here the story where they don't get together, where Hathaway wants and can't have. It is brilliant and I am so glad it's been written and most people will comment "so sad, oh why can't it work out, can I bribe you to change the ending." But again, context, because it's all about how love and loyalty are not enough. Aral and Simon in reverse with completely different baggage.

[ailis_fictive]

Oh, ha! I have it open in another tab to read tonight. (And then I will, I hope, comment happily against the prevailing opinion.)

Baggage, yeah. I have had a line in my head for...must be a decade now, and I don't know if it wants to be in a story or a poem or a title or a song or what!

"These are the things we carry. These are the things we leave behind."

Baggage.

[hedda62]

Hurray, and yep, haven't looked at the comments recently, but there was already the one saying "Beautifully done and I am never going to read it again" from the same person who said that to me on my post-LBoF story. I do want to say "Woman up!" but everyone is entitled to approach fiction in their own way, of course.

[ailis_fictive]

I read, and liked, and commented.

But, in the perverse nature of such things, what it mostly did was show me the story I actually *want* to see, which was that one up to about 2/3rds of the way through--when it doesn't work, but it ruin everything, and they don't fall apart. (I may have said to the screen "Lewis, don't be an IDIOT!") They learn to work around the break, and find a new balance. That may of course say as much about some of my own history (been there. Or at least somwhere in the near neighborhood. Have the t-shirt, took the hit, lost some things and kept others and just kept on) as about my take on the show, of course.

And no, I can't write it. Combination of too close (the story in my history bending out of shape the one in my head) and too far away--I don't, in general, do much with visual fandoms. I'm a reader. I only react in...writery ways to words on the page--and I have trouble with getting voice from screen to page. I'm perfectly happy with Hathaway (I've met him. Hell, I've *been* him, aside from the British, policeman, male, and religious angles...you know, superficial stuff...) but their relationship is a little more ambiguous to me, and...I like watching Lewis. But there's no way I could write him.

[philomytha]

Ha, I thought I was the only one who couldn't *do* visual fandoms! Words on a page are what my brain responds to, as you say. Though I can get to a visual fandom by reading a lot of fic for it, which helps create the characters and world as words in my head. But I don't find it easy or natural to translate pictures into words, somehow.

[ailis_fictive]

Oh, me too, absolutely.

One of the reasons the story I just finished was so hard to write was...I was working from a (small) written description of an imaginary visual fandom. And the characters came in written forms, shapes--graspable, which is why I started writing them. But the world and a lot of the action felt closer to a visual fandom--that is, to the imaginary show my source was describing--and I struggled mightily with it. (And with a number of other things; I've just spent two days and a lot of words going back and forth with my first beta reader, and...it's better, but I'm still not sure where I am on the line between "doesn't work at all" and "doesn't work for this reader" with some of the things I'm trying to do. Or, I suppose, how much it matters; this is as 5000-word episode tag for an imaginary fandom that was supposed to be an excuse for Teh Sex and somehow developed a story-shape and a lot of other things going on around (and in) the smut.)

[ailis_fictive]

1) Stupid typo correction: 2nd paragraph, 1st sentence, is missing a "doesn't" before "ruin everything." Argh.

2) Sometimes I'm fairly self-aware. Sometimes I'm smart like rock. I typed the above, shut my computer down so I could acutally eat during my nominal "lunch" break, and about halfway through my burrito realized...

The Simon/Aral story I'm working on has about a 3/4 overlap with the Lewis/Hathaway story I described, after accounting for genre and world differences. I've moved S/A...far enough away from the blast zone of my own history to keep it from skewing the story, but...apparently "Some things can't work out, and you find the way to keep on going" is one of the stories I tell. Oh. Thank you, brain. Could you have waited until my life settled down a bit before springing that gem on me?)

[hedda62]

And there are some very interesting comments to that effect up on the story now. (No, I didn't write them. I'm equal parts "this is great, if sad, the way it is" and "they can still turn it into something that works, just not sexual" but mostly I am holding back and watching the fan response. *g*)

I posted something this summer on how weird it was to be going from writing fic based on books to fic based on visual media - in some ways I find it easier and in some ways it's much harder, but I was glad to find I could do it! The hardest part for me is the memory part - books you can flip through when you have to look up that wee bit of detail you've forgotten. Such a pain to do it with TV shows. But voices, I can do.