possibly I'm overthinking this
Recently I decided that as something of a fic writing experiment, I should break out of my habitual mold and try to write a sort of fic I usually do not write: fluffy ship fic. The idea was spurred primarily by running into a couple of pairings that I wanted to read fic about but whose fandoms had a dearth of the sort of thing I wanted to read. If
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But for the pairings that do hit my buttons, I have very particular tropes that I like to see in fics: I want to read the same kind of thing over and over again for these pairings. I'm not being dismissive; that's just what I like to read. It doesn't mean I can't appreciate the occasional better-written fic that gives a different spin to the same characters--that's always a great find--but honestly, I'm thrilled with my predictable shippy post-eps where Mulder and Scully or Elliot and Olivia or Booth and Brennan or Mac and Stella are forced to confront their feelings for each other in the face of mortal peril. And sure, Mulder and Scully are going to do it a little bit differently than Elliot and Olivia, who are going to do it differently than Booth and Brennan, but it's a much smaller difference in degree than, say, Mulder and Scully vs. Lee and Kara (which would be an entirely different kind of fic, and one that I have no qualifications to judge, not having read very much of it).
So my fault here was in not specifying that. I don't have a preconceived or dismissive notion of shippy fic--I have a notion based in years and years and years of experience reading a particular kind of shippy fic of what I, personally, like in that particular kind of shippy fic. But it's only through this experiment in writing it that I'm coming to acquire a vocabulary to talk about what I've been reading and why.
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You seem to know what you like so all the more power to you. If you want to write fic that features one specific scenario then you should. I still think that it should be unique to the specific characters in that fandom and that there are definitely ways to do that even while playing with certain tropes that you like. I think the key is what you say here, obviously Mulder and Scully are different than Booth and Bones, and isn't that the part we like best about these kind of fics and why we're able to enjoy reading the same plots over and over again (or watch the same TV episode setups)?
As far as it being out-of-character to write characters that only ever flirt with romance on TV as actually going for it in fic...well I think it can go AU but not necessarily be out of character. If the characters still seem to be acting in their usual modes, but organically come to a place where they are more vulnerable/confiding/open to love it usually works. Or you can go total trope and have any kind of romance come about because of temporary amnesia/truth serum/drunkenness or some other altered state of being! hee. It works on TV.
(Just as an example of what you're talking about--I think--someone asked me to write "mushy Lee and Kara" fic not that long ago, and they are not mushy people! Well definitely not Kara! So the challenge was in coming up with a scenario where they would be. I ended up having them lose a bet where they had to call each other by cutesy nicknames for 24 hours. They spat them at each other and were sarcastic and fought a lot, but the end of the fic, I gave them a genuine moment of shippy emotion (after a near-death thing) where one just said the other's name and it was meant to be more romantic than any of the silly "honey, baby, precious" that they said all day long.)
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