*hooks pinky fingers*

[fishpatrol]

I don't visit spnpermanon frequently (more like never), but I've been glancing at the Big Bang threads as a way to decide whether or not to read particular fics. I try not to read the comments too carefully in case I skip out on a gem of a fic simply because a couple of nonnies have different tastes from me. (I'll admit that the comments did save me some time

Comments

[aldehyde]

yeh, i've been looking through the BB threads on a regular basis too, even though i usually don't visit the meme too often. i gave fics that looked interesting a try, but if they got really boring a few chapters in, i looked for comments from people who had finished the story in order to decide if i should bother continuing :D

i was discussing the search-replace topic with a few people yesterday! i've never done that myself, and honestly, i wouldn't want to, because i think it would take away from the fics. for instance, if it's a wincest fic and i want it to be dean/cas instead, i'm pretty sure the search-replace wouldn't fix anything because the dynamics between the two ships are quite different :D

i wouldn't do it even if it's AU [especially rpf AU where we "know" the least canon information about characters]. because there are still qualities we attribute to jared, jensen, chad, misha, etc - and replacing one with another wouldn't read as "true", y'know what i mean?

[fishpatrol]

That's a good reading strategy! :D I'm probably going to stick with authors whose previous works I've enjoyed and read the other fics based on recommendations (so I'm depending on lovely people like you do all the work and tell me what's worth reading! ;)).

because there are still qualities we attribute to jared, jensen, chad, misha, etc - and replacing one with another wouldn't read as "true", y'know what i mean?Mm, true enough. I've thought the whole search+replace thing over since I posted about it yesterday, and since I've never tried the method myself, I can't actually say whether it would work for me. I suspect that switching names between familiar characters wouldn't work for me (e.g. switching a Dean/Cas fic into a Dean/Sam fic -- or even Dean/Cas into J2 because I would know that the fic started out as Dean/Cas and I would recognize certain interactions/behaviours/etc as very Dean/Cas-like -- it might be a different case if someone else sent me the fic with the names already switched and I thought that the fic was actually

[fishpatrol]

I do think even in J2 fics it's possible to write them in character or not.

I agree that there are definitely certain characteristics that are consistent across many fics -- but not all fics. There are a couple of examples that come to mind where J&J could have been replaced by original characters and I wouldn't have even known the difference -- I've enjoyed said fics, but we all have different characterizations of J&J in our own minds and some people have a more defined view of J&J while others have a much looser view (i.e. a wider range of behaviours are accepted as Jensen-like or Jared-like), which is probably why the search+replace strategy works for some people (I've never actually tried it myself, so I can't say if it would work for me ^__^;;).