Rec, but really an excuse for meta: the Anti-Fixit

[b_hallward]

House - The Meaning of Marriage by Gigi Sinclair // House develops new empathy for Wilson's wives.This story has a quality I absolutely adore, but when I try to describe it, I end up with a series of embarrassing hyperboles -- which is so wrong because this style is so precisely anti-hyperbolic -- but I'll try anyway

Comments

[p_zeitgeist]

This is something of a tangent, but I wanted to note it down before I completely forgot about it (or didn't completely forget, but remembered I'd meant to mention it in six months, when it would be too late to be practical). And my tangent has to do with the nature of fixit stories, as I conceive it to be.

Speaking as a writer who seems to specialize in fixit stories, without ever quite having intended it, I would agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with those charming marshmallow-like fantasy stories where everything goes beautifully for everyone -- they're fun, or can be, in the way that any repetitive genre piece can be fun -- but I wouldn't call them fixit stories, exactly. And that would be because to actually fix anything, a story has to take those bits of immutable reality into account in some way. Otherwise, you can feel the degree to which it's paper-thin wish fulfillment; you know that the characters are going to wake up, as it were, and whatever the story has set out to fix will still be there, as ugly and

[b_hallward]

Well, the way I see it soft-focus marshmallow fluff aspire to be genuine fixits, which are indeed far more satisfying since one doesn't have to work so hard at suspending one's disbelief, while parallel kinds of angst should (in my not particularly humble opinion) aspire to be anti-fixits. Personally I find unrealistic angst far more ghastly to read than fudge-the-details fluff. But either way I don't care for anything which has characters being less themselves for the sake of making the story conform more easily to a predetermined plot, genre or ending. And the difference in each case is whether the story has this clear eyed discernment and a fundamental grounding in the reality of character and situation

Fixit I think is good

[eileenlufkin]

"unconventional, a little messed up, slightly callous, but functional and ultimately satisfying to both parties, and even in its way oddly sweet and offbeat charming"

Made me think of this story:
http://www.intimations.org/fanfic/house/Distancing.html

Re: Fixit I think is good

[b_hallward]

Wow, yes, that's pretty much exactly what I meant. Thanks for the rec.

Kind of like a cat bringing home its prey.

*g*

[lady_ganesh]

Lovely rec and excellent meta.

[b_hallward]

Thanks! Glad you liked it ^^

[tonko]

Randomly in from metafandom. Hi! And glad I just started watching House (they're airing it on the Mystery channel!) so I understood enough to know the story was a good one.

I'm a huge fan of fluff and fixit myself, but I agree with your point here. I mean, it's generally the ones with the pointy bits of realism that stick with you (or me, at any rate). I can't write that because I write self-indulgently, but I still savour the fics that have that rope-jerk quality to them. Knock knock, shit happens.

[b_hallward]

Hello! One thing that fascinates me about anti-fixits is that they work only if the reader does want things to get fixed. So if people didn't like fluff, anti-fixits wouldn't have that particular bite. And maybe it's a form of the underlying tension between realism and fantasy, writing as the opportunity to create something better than reality, ameliorated, vs the desire to remain feet firmly fixed on the ground, working only within the spaces of what's probable and 'realistic.'

[tonko]

You know, that's true, I hadn't thought of that--if people didn't hope (or expect, due to the nature of fanfiction) that the conclusion was going to be a good one, then the punch woundn't land at the end.

I mean, fanfic is often a fantasy of a fantasy (real doctors probably could never get away with what House does. Real CSIs don't run around after suspects. Real people with superpowers--uh, well you get my point), where the characters are already so cool because of whatever special traits they have. So the fixit stuff lets us give our favourites a nice, comfortable ending. Anti-fixit brings back the reality of canon into what could be a fixit (like Wilson's fidelity issues), or even just more realism into a normally fluffy canon (like the book Wicked, the retelling of Wizard of Oz).

[elspethdixon]

*here via metafandom*

that dreamy, charmingly forgetful soft focus that anonymizes characters and situations just enough so everything will work out

As someone who both reads and writes fixit fics, I can state with certainty that no real fixit anonymizes characters. That would defeat the purpose, which is to restore order to the fictional universe, and, yes, to make the characters you care about happy. But in order to be a real fixit, it has to be in-character, since the anonymized, soft-focus filter version isn't the character you actually care about