I was stalking LiveJournals the other day – as I've a wont to do – when I came across a post from someone who was essentially making the point that Rose Tyler is the Lana Lang of Doctor Who. The post is of the, "And if you like either… you're an idiot!" variety, but that aside, it got me to thinking. Because I don't think that comparison is a valid one, so I was trying to think of a reason as to why (other than, "… but I kinda like Rose!").

Ultimately, I decided it had to do with the format of the respective shows. See, as far as I can tell there are roughly three categories of serials on TV (let's have a list; I like lists):

1. The protagonist show focuses predominantly on the experiences of a single character. Sure, they will and do interact with a cast of regulars, but the only ones who are In On It are the main character and the audience. These shows are pretty rare, and in fact I can only think of two; Dexter and the early parts of Millennium. It's a more common format in movies and novels, and either way expect to hear a lot of voice-over narration. An anti-hero is a must.
2. The buddy show ups the ante to two. Supporting characters still float in and out, but the main focus of the show is the two protagonists and how their relationship with each other affects the world around them. Examples include The X-Files, Supernatural and Doctor Who (post-revival especially so, but also certain parts of the old series).
3. And finally you've got the ensemble show. This might be a Power Trio or it might be a whole office block, and even though you probably have a "main" character (but sometimes not) it's the interactions between all the main cast (read: people in the credits) that makes the show. Torchwood, Buffy, Angel, any show set on a spaceship, police procedurals in the Law & Order mould, daytime soap operas… in fact most shows on TV fall into this category.

Before I get back to Rose, you'll notice I left Smallville off the list. That's because I just don't know where to put it. SV is arguably an ensemble show that plays half as a buddy show (Clark/Lana or Clark/Lex) with a dash of single protagonist (Clark). But I think it pitches itself as ensemble, and the confusion comes mostly from the crappy writing, so that's where I'm going to put it.

And that's why I don't think Rose is analogous to Lana. Lana's problem in SV is that she dominates space that really should be allocated to developing other relationships; particularly between the Power Trio (Clark, Chloe, Pete) who are, let's face it, the least powerful Power Trio ever written for TV. Meanwhile, DW – with the occasional exception – is a buddy show. S1 and S2 were all about the Doctor's relationship with Rose. How she serves as a conduit for battle-scarred Nine to reconnect with "humanity" (used in the loosest sense of the word). I mean, there's a reason David Tennant talks with Rose's accent as Ten and not his natural Scottish brogue. The Rose/Doctor doesn't interfere with the rest of the show because it is the show.¹

I think where the comparison is valid, however, is that neither relationship is going to work if you don't like the characters. The Doctor and Rose "work" for me because I like Rose; sure, she's a chav, but she's strong and clever and adaptable, too. The Doctor needs extraordinary people and Rose is extraordinary. Plus, their relationship is a positive one; they adore each other.

This is the main reason Clark/Lana doesn't work for me (except for very early S1; like the episode where they're screaming on the football field together, that was nice); their relationship isn't positive. They aren't good for each other (though, admittedly, on SV no-one is good for anyone… except maybe Martha for Lionel and, um, ew), and because we are what we are We The Audience tend to blame Lana for that. I mean, I like Lana but I don't like her with Clark and any relationship I don't like I don't want to see take up 99% of my screen time.

Anyway, the point of this was for me to point out how someone can be a Clex fan and also enjoy [the Clana-like] Doctor/Rose. Nutshell: Because the context just isn't the same.

While I'm on the subject of TV, this is the paragraph where I talk about Dexter. I think I like it; ask me again in a couple more weeks.

I was, however, interested to note the extensive first person narration. randomredux, what did I always tell you about anti-heroes and first person narration? Heh. (Also: Unreliable narrator. Rah!)

1. I should point out here that I haven't yet seen S4. It's entirely possible that I may, indeed, reconsider my opinion of Rose in light of her no longer being The Sole Companion but, well, ask me again in a few months. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

If there's one thing that Corner and the DCU conspired to teach me, it was that canon really doesn't matter. I'm still trying to decide whether that's a good thing or not.

See, I was reading some more responses to Moffat's latest Doctor Who run, and the following line slapped me in the face:

I find RTD brilliant in his own right; he's written my favorite eps of the series and he's got a great gift for characterization and dialogue. He's pretty weak with plot, though, which is a major flaw in this sort of scifi writing, and I'd like to see him return to more character-focused drama like Queer as Folk. Or else he can come write for SGA, since plot is hardly their selling point anyway!

Quoted From: xparrot: Who-ing it up

Some more background: About six months or so ago now I was sitting in the foodcourt at Woden with my mum, talking about me-as-a-writer. One of the things mum said to me was that she thought I had a strong grasp of dialogue and characterisation. I thought about it, and after a few self-involved moments agreed that she was probably correct. My grasp of plot has always been tenuous at best; to me, the plot is something that happens in the background to give the characters something to react to. It's not a 'thing' in and of itself. The reason I love Terry Pratchett is because I adore his characters; think they have depth and nuance and feel alive to me. The reason I can't stand J.K. Rowling is because I loathe hers; think they're thin, flimsy and unreal.

Corner really hammered this home for me. The plot there is about characterisation; it's all about Loki's identity crisis. Chainbreaker is more directly plot-driven but you can blame randomredux for that one; anything that moves the story is probably his. That was the other thing working with randomredux taught me; he's scoped the plotlines for Urban Mythica out to a degree that just makes my jaw drop. Corner's plot is pretty much: "Book One: Loki fights Baldr, meets Sigmund, has identity crisis, possibly with end-of-the-world. Book Two: Loki fights Ed. Ed is or is not Odin. Book Three: Profit!" The chain of set-pieces is there, but the filler tends to change every time I think about it. The canon is mutable, in other words (which causes all sorts of fun with Chainbreaker, let me assure you); the point is more about the characters' experiences than the actual events that happen.

And when I read fanfic, it's the same deal. I like some plot, but only inasmuch as it gives the characters something to rail against. One of my favourite fic series right now is The Identical Series (and I will link this as soon as I get home, honest). It's very plot heavy, but the plot itself isn't what makes the fic worth reading. Actually, the plot is kinda, well… silly. Which isn't to denigrate the fic at all (like I said, I think the damn thing's brilliant), only to say that the premise – Lionel clones Lex's more-eviller replacement, disinherits real Lex – has been done so often that it was old in the Silver Age.¹ The thing that makes this fic great is the characterisation.

I think this is probably where my extremely high tolerance for off-canon, AU² and crackfic comes from. So long as you can write my characters in a way I can believe in, I don't care how crackish or clichéd your plot is. In fact, I think the main reason I like clichéd fics (I have a regrettably serious kink for "fake boyfriends" style stories) is because it all-but forces the author to concentrate on the characterisation in order to pull them off. Because, seriously, you plot is not your drawcard.

To be honest, I think the vast bulk of slashfic is written this way.

But people still cling to the idea of canon. I used to, as well; I remember sitting next to reams and reams of printed FFVII background for Untitled 5. I made the newbie mistake of writing Rinoa out of Futureloop in the very first chapter. But my time in the DCU taught me that, well, it's just really not that important. The DCU's canon is a twisty and treacherous thing at the best of times, and it's not at all uncommon to see what I suppose you could think of as "combined canons"; the most common is the "Smallville-to-movieverse" setting. And, sure, this makes no sense whatsoever (the relationships between Clark, Lois, Lex and Jor-El are too all over the place) but the stories written here still work because they take liberties and gloss over the rough bits. And I like that. I like that fic writers in the DCU feel free to pick-and-choose; the fanon of one individual story is more important than a strict adherence to canon because, let's face it, half the time not even the canon knows what it's doing (or, occasionally, is so criminally stupid that you wish it didn't).

And somewhere between then and now, I've found myself writing more-and-more off-canon fic. When I construct a fanon to write against, I go through a process of picking out major canon events. Mostly these are things that are in some fashion character-defining and, yeah, when I take canon I try to take canon as accurately as I can (Wikipedia, Google, damo-in-japan and randomredux are my very good allies in this endeavour). M[y sins against canon are almost exclusively sins of omission; events that didn't happen, characters that never showed up, words that were never said.

I admit that this laissez-faire approach probably bothers some people. I mean, I know the standard procedure is to follow canon religiously up to a point then deviate off from that but… meh. I don't necessarily want to write my story from that first deviation; maybe I want to skip lightly across canon and write my story twenty years from that now (as is the case with, for example, Déjà Vu). Fics like this are really common in any serialised canon, of course, but most of them were written years ago and their discrepancies are the result of having been jossed in the interim. I figure that if people can manage to still enjoy those fics that they can still enjoy "faux-jossed" stories that were written later but as if they came from earlier.

So maybe this is a broad-stroked disclaimer. I'm not writing "DCU!movieverse" or "Authority" or "Smallville" fic; I'm writing "movieverse-ish" or "Authority-ish" or "SV-esque" fic. What I mean is that I'm taking approximations those characters and doing my own thing with them; if I don't like something, consider it retconned. If you're lucky, I might even tell you about it. The enjoyment is not so much playing in someone else's sandpit as it is stealing their sand and making my own.

And I'm good with that.

Long live the derivative work.

1. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, DCU canon!Lex Luthor is – or at least was, at some point, for a while – his own clone. I believe the story in question was called something cheerful like "They Saved Lex Luthor's Brain!". Oh comic-book brain transplants, never change okay? ^
2. The difference? Well, I'd think of a "Clark isn't married to Lois" fic as being off-canon, while "Bruce is a dashing space pirate" as an AU. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Good ol' metafandom. I think goodnightsong's entry on the problems with slash pretty much sums up a whole bunch of my current feelings.

It's not that I'm bored with my delicious slashy goodness; far from it. With the exception of Loriah, fandom het just doesn't do much for me.¹ I can get that sort of thing in real life, man; I don't need fandom to fill it in for me.

I just don't like PWPs. Well, okay, not all PWPs but for the main part what I really crave in my perusal of fandom are epics. Long is good, of course, but I'm also talking about what I suppose I'm going to call the "condensed epic". That is, short- to mid-length stories that cover the same sort of emotional and plotish ground as an epic. Because, me? I've always been about the characterisation. I don't much care if your plot is completely off the wall – I read DCU and Smallville for godssakes – so long as you can feed me some characters that 'work'.

And, thinking about it, this is a kind of porn, too; like the Identity Porn we talk about in the DCU fandom (and that I assume permeates all hidden-identity fandoms, as well as amnesia fic). Unless you're a really talented erotica writer – most people aren't, and that's okay, seriously, some of my favourite writers write crap porn – sex!porn can get, well, dull. People admitting that they "skim sex scenes" in fics is surprisingly common. Hell, I do it too; especially if it's getting in the way of some other type of porn.

Identity Porn is one of my favourites, but it's only one of many (and excuse me while I use the word 'porn' extremely loosely for a moment).

There's Emotional Hurt/Comfort Porn; it's the sort of Cindarella trope where one character (or, occasionally, both characters) think that they're not "good enough" for the object of their affections. Character B is almost always a) completely unaware of this, and/or b) thinks Character A is the best thing since Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.² It's sort of a trope subversion in fandom; a re-writing of the more mainstream Character A loves Character B but Character B doesn't know they exist thing, which has always sat a bit uncomfortably close to stalking for a lot of people ("I'll make them fall in love with me!"). I call this "Emotional H/C", incidentally, since the primary function of Character B is to reassure Character A that they're worthy of love; Character As are almost always people with deeply divisive personality flaws, often to the point of outright villainy (leading to "soft" FoeYay). A and B almost always have an existing friendship or one-sided antagonism (Character A towards B), and A will spend at least a few paragraphs fretting over B's reaction to A's love. I'm sure it will come as a surprise to approximately no-one – since this is, in fact, the story I write every time – that this is my favourite type of porn. I sure do love my Character As.

It's not my cup of tea, but you've also got the ol' Physical H/C Porn. I don't really 'get' this type of story. I do like H/C, but it's the emotional H/C that goes along with the physical injuries that I'm reacting to.

Then there's Family Porn; the hit here coming from watching a strong family interaction, almost always between parents and children (see, I told you I was using the word loosely). Half this genre is kidfic, and I'm especially partial to that one where the person you think would make the worst parent actually ends up doing well. Which is kinda odd considering how anti-children I am in real life but, well, I'm a sucker for a good single father story; what can I say? The other half of this genre involves the Prodigal Son's (probably the Character A in an E-H/C story) experiences being accepted – or not, or grudgingly – into the family of their lover.

And the other one I can think of off the top of my head is Buddy Porn. You get this one in, a) pre-slash, b) when-they-were-kids fic and c) canon. This is just a hard hit of good old fashioned non-erotic love. It's not quite platonic, either, but these stories tend to focus on the non-sexual-non-romantic aspects of relationships. Maybe your characters are going to the movies. Or are stuck in a lift. Or meet each other as young children in order to become BFF. Or fighting a monster. Expect quips, lulz and HoYay, and combine liberally with the other porn-types mentioned above.

Hell, it's Friday afternoon and I'm sure I'm missing heaps here. In fact, why don't you tell me about them.

So: What's your fandom porn? Or are you all about the PWPs?

1. Interestingly enough, neither do relationships between characters who are canonically gay. Apollo and Midnighter excepted. ^
2. … what? ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

Why is doing what you like – rather than what other people like – such a threatening idea?

Well, that's a bit vague, isn't it? You could apply that one pretty much anywhere; I've personally had arguments along those lines about everything from webdesign to life in general, so let's narrow the field.

Why is writing what you like such a threatening idea?

Hi, my name is Alis and I write badfic. I even named my fic site that, just in case anyone was unsure. I love badfic or, rather, I love bad ideas. Clichés. Gender swap, time travel, alternate universes, mind control, fake marriage, first times, those million and one things that are specific to a particular fandom; I love them all. I love to read them, I love to write them, and I have no shame in my adoration. Nor do I think I'm alone, even if for others it's a secret shame. So here's where I make my stand, where I stick up for the most reviled thing in fandom, and say; it's okay to like what you like.

And I like badfic.

What I don't like is bad writing. Well, bad characterisation, really, because I can tolerate overly-florid or awkward prose as long as my characters remain in character. Fanon or canon, I don't care, just make me believe it. And I think that this is the crux of the matter, because – like I told someone today on fanficrants – anyone can write a good story around a good plot. It takes skill for a writer to take an idea that is old and tired or just plain batshit and weave it into something that works beautifully above and beyond the sum of its parts. These are always my favourite fics, the ones that stick themselves into my brain like glue, maybe because they emphasise the author rather than the idea.

And this is why I write them, too. Because there's nothing that gives me a deeper secret author's pleasure than someone saying something like, The prompts aren't new ideas, but your delivery […] always feels honest. (With apologies to dandysora.) I think maybe it's the authorial equivalent for me of scaling a cliff without ropes. Sure, you can do it with ropes (an 'original' plot), but that almost feels like cheating, somehow.

Of course, it softens the blow when you fall, but… well. Where's the fun in that?

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

I loved Chainbreaker, and I think you're both brilliant writers for your own individual writing styles.

Quoted From: 'Chainbreaker' review #1

I think that this was a great book, I truly enjoyed the trip.

Quoted From: 'Chainbreaker' review #2

Ooh yeah, Chainbreaker rocks dA! Yes yes, I'm excited over our news post placement. So shoot me.

I think the suspense on this damn book thing is truly gonna kill me. We've had our first two private crits come in, of which I have shamelessly appropriated some key marketing phrases from and posted above. You'll have to forgive me for the pimping, but right now I am my marketing department.

Plus I'm, yanno, excited.

And even though it's only been two people so far, we've had some really invaluable feedback. Places where the story seemed slow, plot twists that maybe needed some more foreshadowing… interest in a sequel.

Oh yes, there is a sequel! It's called Dead on Arrival and is about two thirds written. I need to get off my butt and get back to work on it, but first I've gotta get my brain in the right gear; it's still stuck in Smallville at the moment, but my usual Obsession Interest Cycle is about due to kick over and when it does it'll hit the ground in Pandemonium City running.¹ The page at the site is a placeholder for now, but DoA kicks off exactly where Chainbreaker leaves us, so for those of you who're wondering what happened to Loki and Sigmund, what's wrong with Miriah and what the deal is with Tara… don't worry, we've got it covered.

One of the things that gets mentioned a bit is the way the book switches between first and third person POV. I guess the style is a bit jarring if you haven't encountered it before. I picked it up when I was in high school after reading Waking the Moon, and it's also the style favoured by my super-favouritist author of all time, Michael Marshall Smith. The reason I chose it for Corner – and therefore carried it over to Urban Nordica – is flat-out a cheap trick to get Loki to be more sympathetic to the reader. Because from an outside POV he's not sympathetic at all which is kinda rough for a hero protagonist. Luckily for me, he's also an extremely flawed narrator and the first-person also kicks down his alienness factor a lot because his in-head narration is pretty human, even if his outside actions aren't. When I deliberately want to play up Loki's otherness, I write him third person; and he can get hella Other. Stuff that Loki takes for granted in his head – everything from the way his appearance changes to how certain things just 'work' for him to his actual Godly Godness – is all a goldmine of WTFness from the point of view of a third person observer, and this is where the series slips into horror territory as opposed to the modern dark fantasy action romp default state.

So the POV-switching is a risk, and I'm still trying to decide in my head whether it's a justified risk or I'm making up excuses for something that really doesn't work. Heh.

1. With profuse apologies to everyone waiting on UIP. I haven't forgotten it, I swear! ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.

I've already stuck this into my del.icio.us list, but yanno what? I think it's so special it needs its own announcements post.

So, everyone, I insist that you go right now to read fandom: it is all coming together in my head! Even if you're only mildly interested in fandom or gender issues, go now; it's some of the best meta I've read for a long time.¹

Endless wanks about OOC aside, it is not only cool but celebrated for women who make fandom to assume men are open to any sexual experience that piques the author's interest. This is way more important than the original canon story […]

And fandom porn isn't just sexual. Fandom is full of emotional pornography. A male character is open to any emotional experience that is convenient (and pleasurable) to the writer. When people talk about fandom aesthetics, or slash aesthetics, it's emotional porn rather than sexual porn that's the litmus test. Fandom takes the idea of arousal and pulls it past the line marked sex, and drags sex along with it.

Quoted From: fandom: it is all coming together in my head

I'm just lamenting the post's not on LiveJournal so I can't pimp it out to metafandom, because, yeah. Needs more exposure IMO.

1. And I'm not just saying that because UIP gets a mention. No, seriously. ^

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