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Jan. 21st, 2025 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealObviously it doesn't take much for me to look at a work of fiction and be like "hey, I wish it had been different, I'm going to write fanfic about it!" Well, obviously since I learned what fanfic was, which is easy to say now after decades and many orders of magnitude of digits worth of it, but there was a time when I not only didn't have this outlet, so I had a lot of pent-up emotions, and then felt ashamed for having emotions about books of all things, and...that was kind of a vicious cycle, but that's another story.
But yeah, novels, movies, TV shows, etc. They are fictional characters, they don't actually exist, I can write about them as long as I'm not doing anything to violate the canon creator's copyright, which I'm not.
There have been a couple semi-recent "fandoms" where it's like, I have the same intensity and same desire to imagine something different, but there are more internal barriers that made it harder to write down. One is in the context of TTRPGs--like, the "original" version of the character belongs to the game designers, and that's fair game just as a video game character would be. But the version who transpired in our playthrough "belongs" to my session partner(s), am I "allowed" to write about them or are they somehow not "mine"? The other is in the context of "historical fiction but it's what people from my side of fandom would call historical RPF"--the novelist is including both characters of his own invention, and historical figures who actually existed. And, again, I have no problem imagining "missing scenes involving fictional narrator and his equally fictional wife and their family," but "AU interaction between fictional character and real historical character" or "AU where events in historical character's life transpire differently" feels way too self-indulgent, even though...fictional character...never actually existed...so how could his dialogue be "wrong." But it's like, again, that historical character doesn't "belong" to me, so making things go AU is...somehow worse than what original writer is doing.
Anyway, this has somehow led me into wanting absurd/not RL historically realistic in the least/over-the-top fannish tropes for these characters. Even if it's tropes I'm not normally into. (Okay one of them I would kind of be into with a few twists, and in this case, "Fictional Character Is A Pragmatist And Would Not Put Honor Before Reason" is sufficiently different for me to want it.) Which is to say that I might be saving a plot bunny or two for Be the First/later non-exchange ficcing. (Because of course if I'm going to do this silly fluffy trope I first have to do All The Worldbuilding Research to make sure I'm Doing It Right, sigh.)
But yeah, novels, movies, TV shows, etc. They are fictional characters, they don't actually exist, I can write about them as long as I'm not doing anything to violate the canon creator's copyright, which I'm not.
There have been a couple semi-recent "fandoms" where it's like, I have the same intensity and same desire to imagine something different, but there are more internal barriers that made it harder to write down. One is in the context of TTRPGs--like, the "original" version of the character belongs to the game designers, and that's fair game just as a video game character would be. But the version who transpired in our playthrough "belongs" to my session partner(s), am I "allowed" to write about them or are they somehow not "mine"? The other is in the context of "historical fiction but it's what people from my side of fandom would call historical RPF"--the novelist is including both characters of his own invention, and historical figures who actually existed. And, again, I have no problem imagining "missing scenes involving fictional narrator and his equally fictional wife and their family," but "AU interaction between fictional character and real historical character" or "AU where events in historical character's life transpire differently" feels way too self-indulgent, even though...fictional character...never actually existed...so how could his dialogue be "wrong." But it's like, again, that historical character doesn't "belong" to me, so making things go AU is...somehow worse than what original writer is doing.
Anyway, this has somehow led me into wanting absurd/not RL historically realistic in the least/over-the-top fannish tropes for these characters. Even if it's tropes I'm not normally into. (Okay one of them I would kind of be into with a few twists, and in this case, "Fictional Character Is A Pragmatist And Would Not Put Honor Before Reason" is sufficiently different for me to want it.) Which is to say that I might be saving a plot bunny or two for Be the First/later non-exchange ficcing. (Because of course if I'm going to do this silly fluffy trope I first have to do All The Worldbuilding Research to make sure I'm Doing It Right, sigh.)
