sholio | (no subject)

Somehow it delights me to find out that S.E. Hinton (of The Outsiders) writes Outsiders fanfic (under a pen name), and also wrote to her favorite Outsiders fanfic author to tell them that she liked their work. ("It took her a while to believe that it was really me." I'll bet.) So in case you're in that fandom, the author is probably reading your fic, and some of the fic you're reading might be by her, too.

I finished a writing project today (a side story planned to be a mailing list extra ... though I might end up incorporating it in the main book; I'm not sure now) and I'm feeling somewhat at loose ends, so - you know what I love talking about and haven't talked about lately? Hurt/comfort. :D

If h/c is not your thing, no worries. If it is your thing ... or if aspects of it are ...

What are your favorite things in hurt/comfort? And is there a type of hurt/comfort you love that nobody ever seems to write?

... you know what I've been thinking about lately that you never seem to see in fic anymore? Comas. This was such a huge trope in '80s TV - it's on my mind because there's a great example in Wiseguy. And I remember a little of this in SGA fic, which was so huge it had everything. But I can't really ever remember seeing it anywhere else, even in White Collar which was a very h/c-intensive fandom that did basically everything to Neal - there MUST have been coma fic, but I don't remember any.

Possibly one reason for this, I guess, is that a realistically written coma isn't actually that much fun, because the recovery is so arduous and the likelihood of permanent, severe long-term health effects is so high. But, then, that's also true of concussions and a bunch of other things fandom really loves.

So yeah. #bringbackcomas2K20

It has also occurred to me that nobody ever writes altitude sickness. The only fic I've ever read that deals with it is the one I wrote; it's not even a canonical tag on AO3. And yet it's so perfectly tailor-made for it! It's debilitating, miserable, and life-threatening, and yet, with the right treatment it's easily curable with no lingering after-effects: get oxygen, go back to normal. If you were going to custom-design a fictional disease for hurt/comfort writers, you couldn't really do better. C'mon, fandom, don't leave me all alone here.

Anyway, favorite things - there's a lot that I love, but I think for me the best-of-the-best really comes down to the general categories of "woozy and out of it", and "desperately worried." And therefore, things that produce one or both of those conditions: head injuries, fevers, and drugs (among other things) in the first case, and for the latter, just about anything really life-threatening: getting shot, getting stabbed, being stranded far from medical help, drowning, heart attacks, etc.

(Oh yeah, that last one is another one I really would enjoy reading more of. Heart attacks. It's another one that rarely seems to get written, but has symptoms that lend themselves excellently to h/c. White Collar did have some, since Peter has one in canon.)

I think I like both of those classes of things because ... well, partly because sometimes you just like things and clearly I am wired that way, but there's just so much you can do with it from a character perspective. They both involve a sort of emotional stripping down of barriers -- pushing people to reveal a little of their inner selves without actually being pushed by the people they're around, if that makes any sense.

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Wait, does it count as fanfic if the author is writing it?

I'd say it depends on what they're writing. If it's non-canonical events written under a pen name ... I'd call that fanfic. There's a pretty large gray area though.

But wouldn't that imply that they're a fan of their own... I mean...

It would be kind of sad if they weren't!

I think the point when it starts feeling like fanfic with my own work is when I'm writing things that aren't intended to be canonical. It's definitely the kind of thing where you can make arguments either way, though. I'd be inclined to say "if the author says it's fanfic, it's fanfic", but YMMV. It's the same kind of thing as debating whether stories based on, say, the Bible count as fanfic or not - it really depends on how narrowly or broadly you define fanfic, and what you pick out as key features of it, and to some extent on what the story itself is doing.

I definitely have some friends who are published authors and have talked about writing fanfic of their own work -- one of them did so this year for Yuletide under a sock and talked about how it did feel quite different to her than writing an "official" short story set within the same canon. She said mostly that she felt if she's writing canon there has to be plot and explicit character growth, whereas fanfic she just got to play around with them in the existing setting and kind of letting them be comfortable.

she felt if she's writing canon there has to be plot and explicit character growth, whereas fanfic she just got to play around with them in the existing setting and kind of letting them be comfortable.

Yeah, I feel like this is sometimes a problem for me even with authors who write a lot of tie-in/side stories for their books, because the story always has to do something as a story, but for me, getting to just read 10K of the characters hanging out together, written by the author, would be living the dream. I notice it with Barbara Hambly in particular, because she writes a LOT of tie-in stories for her books, and that's fantastic, but they're always casefic (a little standalone mini-plot-based story) and it's like ... god, woman, I know from reading your books that you obviously like h/c; just write some tag/missing scene recovery stories for your books giving us some aftermath for all the many times your characters got beat to hell and I will be SO THERE.

Hahaha, same.

For me the difference is sort of like that, but also like . . . there's shit I write for my own work that might even HAVE character growth and so on, but it's not . . . real, something about it isn't how things would REALLY WORK OUT, in real life, for one reason or another.

Sometimes it's like "I could see someone writing a fic about this, and I can see why, but I as the author know that actually if you put Bob in a cab and made him have this convo he'd murder someone, because I know Bob, but I sort of have this WISHFUL THINKING version of reality where Bob gets his head out of his ass instead and - " etc.

Sometimes it's all the way thru to fluffy AUs because who doesn't want to see Serious Business people in a high-school AU? :P

Part of that is for me that my stories are very organic and when I try to make them not be is when they break and I stop being able to write them, especially not as Full Stories (as opposed to random scenes), so.

I think that's kind of a fuzzy line. If the author is writing AU material or PWP, especially if it's non-canonical pairings, I'd say it can be fanfic.

On the other hand, if the author is publishing new material that's consistent with the original canon as fanfic because she can't or doesn't want to do through traditional publishing outlets, that's a lot more iffy.

And if the author is now publishing fanfic where she can deal with edgy issues that she couldn't when she original wrote the canon for commercial publication? I dunno what you call that.

I've encountered all three cases over the years (active in media fandom since 1976), and have published at least one back when I was a zine editor. Terminology is always tricky, especially when you get to edge cases.