Instability Apparent

[dr_anitacoffee]

So, um...does anyone ever read a fic...or even just the summary of a fic...and immediately warning bells go off because it's pretty obvious that this person really needs to seek psychiatric help? There are a couple of specific authors on both ff.net and here at LJ whose entire bodies of work suggest that they would be unlikely to be cleared for any

Comments

[flippet]

Oh thank goodness, someone else said what I was thinking.

I'm all like - honestly, people are reading this shite? The notes alone are enough to make me step away from the computer. And yeah - how these people can possibly imagine that they're keeping the characters even in the same COUNTRY as 'in-character', I have no idea.

Seriously, peeps. At that point, just write some original characters and call it good, because these are *not* the characters from any given canon. They're just not.

There's the one recent one, which I'm sure we're both talking about, but there's another H/C darling out there who - yeah, I've read a bunch of her stuff, and it's somewhat okay, but there's also a bunch of stuff in there that just sets my teeth on edge. It just goes too far into - I don't know, but the characters end up being these mean, nasty, sex-crazed creatures, and they're also not the characters I know because of that. It's like the author has taken a couple of slivers of personality elements, and blown them up to encompass the characters' entire personality, completely pushing the more sane, reasonable, average, nicer elements out of the picture. Ugh. And yuck. It just gets to be overwhelming, this relentless push of intensity, you know? The dance is in the stillness - and I'm not sure this person gets that.

But yeah. Definitely icky. It's like - work this out in therapy, don't foist it onto fic readers who are just hoping for a little extension of something canon-ish.

Actually, that's exactly it. The characters have their own mental issues. Canon has given us that. What it hasn't done is then given the green light for writers to overlay their own personal mental issues on top of the characters, and call it good. One mental issue does not suddenly equal another one, or all of them. They're not interchangeable, this isn't Colorforms, and the established characters aren't actually a blank slate (the fact that the show's writers tried to treat them that way in S7 and now 8 notwithstanding).

Sigh.

[dr_anitacoffee]

I know exactly who and what you're talking about and am glad it's not just me.

I mean, I'm a liberated, feminist woman and all, and I appreciate creativity, but I'm a canon snob. And I think I get the right to be that because I didn't used to be. I was one of those people who took the slivers and ran with it, and was shamed and flamed into recovery. I don't purport to be the end-all-be-all of in-canon writing but William H. Macy, these are some fucked up stories. I get sexual exploration and the need for sex in a story but I have yet to read a fic where I go, "wow, that was some in-canon sex." And I have no great love for normative behavior - goodness knows I'm an outlier - but there is something to be said when an author's entire body of work is defined by violent perversity and, shall we say, violations of international law.

We should so gossip about this via email. I'm a little liquored up - normally I would not admit to being amused by gossip - but I had a bad fucking day and a big fucking glass of wine.