Going For The Look

[rufeepeach]

Title: Going For The Look
Fandom: Community
Rating:  PG-13
Genre: Romance
Characters/Pairings: Jeff/Annie, Troy/Britta, mentions of Abed/Annie
Spoilers: Up to the end of S2
Summary: Jeff is going for the ‘Han Solo’ look during their third year Halloween Party. Annie calls him out on it.
A/N: This was written for a Ficcy Friday prompt on Milady/Milord,

Comments

[stephanierb]

This is serving as general feedback since I've loved all of your stories but I'm only now just getting around to comment on them.

I like your characterization for the whole group, but specifically for Annie. Too often her naive side is played up in fic with little acknowledgment of just how adult she really is. This is a girl who was forced to go to rehab with no emotional or financial support from her family when she was 18, for heaven's sake. And she pushed through, got herself together and is now supporting herself and succeeding at GCC. Not a lot of people her age, or even older, could manage that, yet she's still portrayed as a child. Annie's uptight and a romantic, but she's still an adult and it's refreshing to see you write her that way. Particularly when it comes to sex. I'm sorry, but the whole not being able to say penis thing was early S1. There's no way I believe that she's still that repressed after dating Vaughn AND giving that performance during D&D. And Annie's a classic overachiever: there's no way she wouldn't approach sex the same way she does everything else - with the determination to excel. So bravo for that.

I enjoy, too, the way you portray the Jeff/Annie relationship. There is an emotional connection between them that goes beyond sexual attraction. If attraction was all that existed between them, we wouldn't have scenes like the bathroom one in Asian Population Studies. I like the complexity of the Jeff/Annie relationship and I think you handle that very well in your fics.

So, enough with the word vomit. Great work. I'm looking forward to seeing more from you.

[rufeepeach]

Thank you so much! And yay for detailed feedback!

It annoys me when people (and the show itself) portray Annie as a little kid, because she has more life experience and maturity than most of the rest of the group. Troy is only a year older than her, but his youth is never focused on, whereas it often seems to be one of Annie's defining traits. She's been through a lot, and by season two, I refuse to believe she'd still be as naive as she was in the Pilot. That's probably one reason why I love to write her: there's a lot more to her than people think.

Jeff and Annie have such a large fanbase because of that connection. There's attraction there, of course, but even in episodes before Debate, before Jeff ever considered her as anything more than a little girl, you can see that they connect on an emotional and intellectual level as well. Plus: they're really pretty :P.