FANDOM GOO: BACK OFF, IT STAINS
In a conversation last night about pr0ntober requests (still open! still goin' strong!), I was again spurred to a rant I've made before (via fandomsecrets and a joint ficbit request post mrmoonpants and I did once), and was then encouraged to write it down. And it goes a little something like this:
The weird things you can request from fanfic writers and the weird things you can request from fanartists are not the same.
If you have concocted a weird, 'crack' (read: largely without supporting canonical material of any stripe) pairing, you have gone through a series of mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion. Now, this is technically true of any non-canonical pairing, but in the case of a 'crack' pairing, your gymnastics have been pretty much invisible to the public at large.
This is not to say 'crack' pairings are bad, and indeed, I have a fair share of my own that I hold dear. But the point is, you've made a bunch of leaps of logic that aren't distilled by the final product. Saying that you like to 'ship, say, Marie Antoinette/Cloud Strife (to pick something completely offbeat) ... well, I'm sure this was done through a great deal of thought and reasoning on your side, but to me it's about as random as if you'd put a bunch of characters' names on a spinnywheel, flipped the arrow twice, and put the two arbitrary selections together with a slash.
You can request Marie/Cloud from fanartists, and they may hate you for it, but at the end of the day, it's at least possible. The picture is a single event, and can be rendered entirely devoid of context. Even if it's just putting the two people sitting on a couch together, in a blank room, with moderately blank expressions on their faces, it's do-able. In fact, there are some artists who thrive on inexplicability, and the medium supports this impulse. If you request a picture of Sailor Moon and Rambo sharing a banana split in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the impact is in the immediate (admittedly comedic) visual punch, and the mechanics of 'how could that possibly work?' are secondary.
But when the same request gets to me, the writer, I'm at sea. Text isn't going to convey a single, still image -- unless it's straight description, and how boring is that? -- it needs context, motivation, and, in the end, a reason to have things that are being done, being done. Since by the distilled pairing request, I'm unable to see and/or appreciate your aforementioned mental gymnastics, you're basically asking me to go through the same mental gymnastics on my own and come up with the same conclusions you have, or at least ones similar enough that I can appreciate your original request. This is, in a word, unlikely. Absent any context to provide good sense or reason, there's little to do but create the literary equivalent of two people floating together in deep space, and one turning to the other to say, 'Well, here we are.'
(Alternately, you just want a pretty story of your two characters boinking, in which case I suggest you go pick your favourites from Literotica and do a find-and-replace with names; it'll save us both time and trouble.)
So, really, you can ask for anything you want at any time. But know that when we writers balk, it's not because we're judging you. It's because you have -- intentionally or otherwise -- engaged us in a blind game of 'stump the chump', which is not an exercise in creativity but in frustration, and whatever you're going to get out of it is undoubtedly not what you came in for. And nobody goes home happy.
...Okay, we're probably judging you, too. But just a little.
The weird things you can request from fanfic writers and the weird things you can request from fanartists are not the same.
If you have concocted a weird, 'crack' (read: largely without supporting canonical material of any stripe) pairing, you have gone through a series of mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion. Now, this is technically true of any non-canonical pairing, but in the case of a 'crack' pairing, your gymnastics have been pretty much invisible to the public at large.
This is not to say 'crack' pairings are bad, and indeed, I have a fair share of my own that I hold dear. But the point is, you've made a bunch of leaps of logic that aren't distilled by the final product. Saying that you like to 'ship, say, Marie Antoinette/Cloud Strife (to pick something completely offbeat) ... well, I'm sure this was done through a great deal of thought and reasoning on your side, but to me it's about as random as if you'd put a bunch of characters' names on a spinnywheel, flipped the arrow twice, and put the two arbitrary selections together with a slash.
You can request Marie/Cloud from fanartists, and they may hate you for it, but at the end of the day, it's at least possible. The picture is a single event, and can be rendered entirely devoid of context. Even if it's just putting the two people sitting on a couch together, in a blank room, with moderately blank expressions on their faces, it's do-able. In fact, there are some artists who thrive on inexplicability, and the medium supports this impulse. If you request a picture of Sailor Moon and Rambo sharing a banana split in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the impact is in the immediate (admittedly comedic) visual punch, and the mechanics of 'how could that possibly work?' are secondary.
But when the same request gets to me, the writer, I'm at sea. Text isn't going to convey a single, still image -- unless it's straight description, and how boring is that? -- it needs context, motivation, and, in the end, a reason to have things that are being done, being done. Since by the distilled pairing request, I'm unable to see and/or appreciate your aforementioned mental gymnastics, you're basically asking me to go through the same mental gymnastics on my own and come up with the same conclusions you have, or at least ones similar enough that I can appreciate your original request. This is, in a word, unlikely. Absent any context to provide good sense or reason, there's little to do but create the literary equivalent of two people floating together in deep space, and one turning to the other to say, 'Well, here we are.'
(Alternately, you just want a pretty story of your two characters boinking, in which case I suggest you go pick your favourites from Literotica and do a find-and-replace with names; it'll save us both time and trouble.)
So, really, you can ask for anything you want at any time. But know that when we writers balk, it's not because we're judging you. It's because you have -- intentionally or otherwise -- engaged us in a blind game of 'stump the chump', which is not an exercise in creativity but in frustration, and whatever you're going to get out of it is undoubtedly not what you came in for. And nobody goes home happy.
...Okay, we're probably judging you, too. But just a little.