Have navel, will gaze

[flambeau]

Overnight, in my sleep, it seems thete1's meme about last five stories met bettyp's post about pairings, and I woke up thinking what do the pairings you write/have written have in common/say about your preferences?

Actually, that's not quite true. I woke up thinking, argh, I overslept, I'm going to be late! It took at least five minutes before I started

Comments

[flambeau]

That's definitely a good point--with those two, you don't have to warp the fictional universe they inhabit out of all recognition, whichever end of the spectrum you prefer, you can just choose your point of entry with care. Handy, that. *g*

[birdsflying]

Oh. That was tres interesting.

I like the tension of enemies who are unwillingly attracted, and better yet, have to work together

I get yah here, one of my first couples was Spike/Xander (I still like the *idea* but 90% of the current following bores me to tears.) and they had the whole "I hate you but we have to work together and I think I might be a little attracted oh help me god" vibe to them. Especially when Xander had Spike tied up in a chair in his basement flat. Mrrow. But I digress - the whole vibe they had going was great for for the snark, they were both big with the pretty and they had the whole enemies thing going. The perfect antagonist couple in theory.

Pity about practise. :g:

[flambeau]

Oh, it's really sad, with those pairings that should work really well, and then no one writes them that way. *g* I have to admit, I only saw Spike and Xander as a possibility for about five minutes, but all those five minutes were in that basement.

[flambeau]

Mmm, velvet.

I definitely think people are influenced by what's already there, especially in a fandom where so much characterization is created by discussion, construction, and consensus. And I've been told repeatedly that there is a lot of bad JC/Justin out there; although I'm not completely sure how it's bad, I feel no urge to go looking for it, but I know there's good stuff, too.

I should make an effort to write the velcro boys in at least one of the interesting ways I see them. *g*

And if you're saying what I think you're saying, I agree that the same story can be very different told from another character's POV, and also a lot more interesting.

[flambeau]

I'm kind of partial to the sweet and the domestic, a lot of the time, I admit--with pairings that have a reasonable chance of pulling it off. (Not so much with the Mulder and Krycek, and so on.) One of the reasons I was attracted to *nsync fandom was the affection, the feel that these guys really like each other. I know zip about lotrips, but saccharine curtainfic is probably one of the universal constants of fandom... the thing is, in other fandoms I've been less keen on high levels of domesticity because it's seemed to me that the guys should be out saving the world, not making brownies, whereas with *nsync, not so much.

I think I've gotten myself all tangled up here. *g* What I'm trying to say is that I probably have a much higher tolerance for sweetness and domesticity in this fandom than in many others, and I'll cheerfully admit that what I've written of JC and Justin so far is waaaay towards that end of the scale. But there's... other stuff I'd like to do, too.

And wow, lj spellcheck rises to new heights and suggests replacing

[wickedcherub]

I think I can define my likings even broader than that. I like pairings that aren't impossible in the canon, but aren't in the canon

[flambeau]

I can be persuaded to believe a great many things, and pairings, for the duration of a story, if the writer makes her case persuasively. That said, I can think of a great number of pairings that I don't particularly want to be argued into believing. *g*

Yes, there are a lot of examples of non-subtle writer-created conflict that relates to the characters and the canon universe a bit like a flame-thrower relates to a Japanese paper screen. There's also the interesting habit of removing a canon conflict and replacing it with a different, writer-created conflict ("I don't care that you killed my father, but you flirt with other men, so I'm going to cry and be jealous for fifteen chapters now!"), and I haven't quite grasped the amusement value of replacing good, specific angst with the bad, generic version. But doubtless it makes someone happy.

[ramblinround]

I have fond memories of discussions with slimslash about the Paris/Kim relationship versus the Chakotay/Paris relationship and what we liked about them.

I have been thinking about those days a lot lately, what with all your fannishly retrospective posts. It was fun, wasn't it?

I have to admit, I hardly think about such things at all anymore -- why I like the ones I like, why I want to write the ones I want to write. But I write a hell of a lot more than I did back then (although still not that much), so maybe it's healthy. :-)

Even with Eminem, I didn't second-guess myself much. I figured it was just another one of those fightin'-n-fuckin' things like M/K and C/P were for me too. Although now that I think about it, writing SDBs is something like I imagine writing P/K might have been like, at least for me, if I had ever tried it. That is, a lot of wondering about where to introduce the angst? Because (IMO) there's not a whole lot there inherently.

But they're sooooo purty. ;-)

[flambeau]

Well, you don't have to have angst. *g* I think there's quite a bit of conflict that can be built into *nslash that doesn't deal with things being tense between the pairing characters because they're, you know, mortal enemies or anything.

I think I have a much less clear pattern of which pairings I like and why, these days, though maybe that's because I write so many different pairings more or less concurrently. Also, I'm relatively sure "so pretty" comes into it a lot.

[ramblinround]

Well, you don't have to have angst.

BWAH!!!

Heh. Okay. Maybe that was that funny only to me? *snerk*

I see a goodly amount of conflict there too. Potential conflict, I should say. But yes, as you say, there is a big big difference between "Why doesn't Joey ever get to sing?" and "That fucking bastard fucking killed my father." I mean, there's angst, and there's angst.

I don't feel compelled to introduce angst. But I do like to ferret out a little bit of conflict or, y'know, something to keep it from being all fluffy and stuff.

*giggling*