A Rant of Writing Expectations

[jaune_chat]

So, in December I posted what I had intended to be the final chapter of a series I had started waaaaaaay back in 2006. I got some good comments on it, some great responses from people who'd been with me during the main writing of the long story of the series for two years. And then I got some other responses.

Comments

[aurilly]

Loki is simply the new Sylar. Bad guy played by a very compelling and attractive actor. Same haughty snarky personality, same daddy and "I wanna be special" issues, same "daddy thinks this other guy is more special than me so I'm going to go on a poorly-thought-out murderous rampage". Thor/Loki is totally Mylar. And the same thing happened in Heroes fandom. For every well-written, semi-remembering he's a villain Sylar story, there was a horrible woobified outcast travesty. And sometimes those can be really fun! Sometimes I like to read about a snarky asshole whose badness is somewhat toned down so that writers can explore what his relationships with the other characters would be like if only everyone's first instinct wasn't to shoot. But there's a difference between that and turning the character into a poor little woobie to glamorize your own feelings of misunderstandedness.

And while Robert Carlyle is hugely compelling (without being at all handsome), a similar thing is happening with Rumple/Belle. Like, "Let's have them have babies!" Which... there are a lot of seriously messed up things in that relationship that I don't even know where to start. It's compelling because he's a good actor, but whenever I stop and actually think about it, I'm creeped the fuck out by how this is portrayed as 'true love' and by the particular way in which fandom seems to respond to them. I hope she stays amnesiac for a good long time and they build a more normal relationship from scratch.

Sorry, that was a rant you probably weren't expecting. These things just BOTHER me. They're fandoms I would read more fic for, but it's hard to sort through the badness to get at what might be good.

[jaune_chat]

Hee! Oh, that's some good comparisons between Loki and Sylar. At least with Sylar there was some backstory portrayed before he went entirely off the rails that one could extrapolate about, whereas by the time we meet Loki he's already planning his brother's exile and father's death. Not that that ever stops a determined fangirl!

Rumple/Belle kids? ...eek. That is an astoundingly strange relationship (interesting, but strange and very weird with the power dynamics), but not normal. Not at all.

I guess this means we can only have uncompelling plain guys playing villains from now on! :D