January posting meme: new fannish genre
There are still plenty of empty slots for this meme, if you want to join in.
Today's request is from
enemyofperfect: If you could wish a new fannish custom or genre into being, what would it be?
This is actually really hard to answer, since I've come to assume that fandom has already invented just about anything I could possibly think of. I'm sure there are holidays that have been missed for potential gift exchanges, but at the moment that just seems to add more burden to an already heavy weight of oh god not going to get this thing done on time, and it would be rather self-serving to say "gee, I wish there were more venues to advertise original fiction by fan writers who aren't BNFs."
But you asked me to come up with something, so… I'm not really a huge fan of changed-situation AUs or whatever you call them (coffee shop, high school, etc.), because they often lack the charge and peril of the original and tend toward cliches, but they can be really entertaining, and… sometimes I want my fandoms to cross over more comprehensively, you know?
So… the gardening AU. In some of the fandoms I've written in, this is easy or unnecessary: in the Vorkosigan Saga we already have Ekaterin, and I don't feel the need to wrap everyone else into an AU around her (and I've written a garden design story and an essay to support her profession); and Lewis is going to canonically work his allotment in retirement. I feel fairly certain I could make up some Ben/Juliet/Locke stories set in a university botany department, and I could see Peter Burke as the manager of a large public garden plagued by outbreaks of rare plant theft. And I have written my Neville Longbottom story already, as well as one about devils and heirloom locally-sourced souls.
But what would a Gardener of Interest story look like? Well, they'd have to be guerrilla gardeners, to start with. I'd keep the Man in a Suit, because discussions of what one wears to garden are always interesting. Finch would of course dress way better than P. Allen Smith, though he'd be doing little of the planting himself, instead plotting safe and strategic locations on the computer, and buying everyone ridiculously expensive gewgaws from Williams Sonoma (Reese would order a totally unneeded broadfork just because he thought it was cool; also makes an interesting weapon). Root (who is appropriately named for this AU) would insist on designing the gardens just so, and they would all be part of a larger design. Shaw would say "Shut up and dig" a lot. Both Reese and Fusco would have dark gardening secrets they don't want unearthed (well, Finch would already know all of Reese's). And Finch would have dark secrets of his own, perhaps a background in which he and Nathan had bred lovely and poisonous plants that ended up being used by the government to kill people (including Nathan). Grace, of course, would be a botanical illustrator, and Carter would be park police, slowly coming to realize the beauty of the illegal enterprise.
Well, there you have it. *waves hand* Propagate.
This entry was originally posted at http://hedda62.dreamwidth.org/73670.html. There are currently
comments there. Comment here or there.
Today's request is from
enemyofperfect: If you could wish a new fannish custom or genre into being, what would it be?
This is actually really hard to answer, since I've come to assume that fandom has already invented just about anything I could possibly think of. I'm sure there are holidays that have been missed for potential gift exchanges, but at the moment that just seems to add more burden to an already heavy weight of oh god not going to get this thing done on time, and it would be rather self-serving to say "gee, I wish there were more venues to advertise original fiction by fan writers who aren't BNFs."
But you asked me to come up with something, so… I'm not really a huge fan of changed-situation AUs or whatever you call them (coffee shop, high school, etc.), because they often lack the charge and peril of the original and tend toward cliches, but they can be really entertaining, and… sometimes I want my fandoms to cross over more comprehensively, you know?
So… the gardening AU. In some of the fandoms I've written in, this is easy or unnecessary: in the Vorkosigan Saga we already have Ekaterin, and I don't feel the need to wrap everyone else into an AU around her (and I've written a garden design story and an essay to support her profession); and Lewis is going to canonically work his allotment in retirement. I feel fairly certain I could make up some Ben/Juliet/Locke stories set in a university botany department, and I could see Peter Burke as the manager of a large public garden plagued by outbreaks of rare plant theft. And I have written my Neville Longbottom story already, as well as one about devils and heirloom locally-sourced souls.
But what would a Gardener of Interest story look like? Well, they'd have to be guerrilla gardeners, to start with. I'd keep the Man in a Suit, because discussions of what one wears to garden are always interesting. Finch would of course dress way better than P. Allen Smith, though he'd be doing little of the planting himself, instead plotting safe and strategic locations on the computer, and buying everyone ridiculously expensive gewgaws from Williams Sonoma (Reese would order a totally unneeded broadfork just because he thought it was cool; also makes an interesting weapon). Root (who is appropriately named for this AU) would insist on designing the gardens just so, and they would all be part of a larger design. Shaw would say "Shut up and dig" a lot. Both Reese and Fusco would have dark gardening secrets they don't want unearthed (well, Finch would already know all of Reese's). And Finch would have dark secrets of his own, perhaps a background in which he and Nathan had bred lovely and poisonous plants that ended up being used by the government to kill people (including Nathan). Grace, of course, would be a botanical illustrator, and Carter would be park police, slowly coming to realize the beauty of the illegal enterprise.
Well, there you have it. *waves hand* Propagate.
This entry was originally posted at http://hedda62.dreamwidth.org/73670.html. There are currently
comments there. Comment here or there.