On kinks, indulgence fics, LJ and stuff like that there

[thebratqueen]

Okay, I'm up, I'm avoiding housework, I've just had a big breakfast of pancakes, I'm feeling meta. Let's get into it:



So I'm feeling a bit meta on the whole kink/indulgence fic issue lately since I'm writing yet another one and since Strategy apparently got recced on Better Buffy Fics.

I found out about the last bit when somebody sent me some nice feedback about the story, citing BBF as the reference. This immediately made me go "Yipe!" and race to my website to make sure that the hyppogriff warning was on it, but I then sent a little note of thanks back to the original feedbacker and went on my merry way.

Now to make a long story short, I've got BBF on nomail so I'm fairly oblivous to the goings-on there, but I later find out that apparently somebody had put down the Strategy rec. This made me somewhat morbidly curious and I fired up the BBF archives to see what was what.

I gotta say the girl (assuming it was a girl) really isn't that wrong.

I mean not that I memorized what she said, but the gist of it seemed to be that she didn't like the overwall structure/wah of the story, plus she wondered why I hadn't focused on other characters.

Now the last one kind of throws me because to me stories have main characters and said main characters get called so for the screentime and that's why, for instance, the show is called Angel and not Knox: Master of Highlighters and Microscopes but beyond that her comments to me seemed fairly spot on. Strategy, much though I love it, isn't what I would call my "best" story. I wouldn't trot it out as the thing I would use to recommend my writing to someone, for instance. I would kind of cringe a little, actually, to somebody stumbling across it as their first exposure to me and how I view the characters.

But it's still, in its own way, a good little fic.

So here's where I go all thoughtful-like. Pardon me as I ramble.

Strategy got written because of some specific circumstances. One was wesleysgirl's story which had inspired the bunny. But another was the environment in which I could write it. I would not have written Strategy for a mailing list, or an archive. I might not have even written it for my own website as a stand-alone.

But for LJ? Why not?

LJ, it seems, has inspired a new level of fic-writing. One where we get the chance to scribble down random ideas that are floating through our heads. It is, after all, a journalling system and therefore lends itself to our unfiltered thoughts. I can write a passage like "I'm totally obsessing over Wesley in a prisoner situation, and this is what it might look like" and everybody takes that passage for what it is. They know it's me playing with ideas and rolling them and reshaping them like clay and not, instead, me going off into a corner for about a week and then coming back with the "Ta da!" of a finished product.

I've been writing fanfic for - as far as anybody can prove (*cough/hiding of embarassing early efforts*) - going on about a decade now. In Angelverse I've been working for going on three years. Since LJ is a system by which nobody sees what I'm doing unless they make the effort to do so, I can post in my journal and remain confident that people know what I'm talking about. They know me, in other words.

I do something like this with Epiphany. The thing's 50+ stories long now. Anybody still reading at this point - and God bless ya for it - knows how I handle the characters and how I write the stories from one to the next. I can take advantage of that, then, and create stories where I hint at something and then not follow up on it until many stories later. People can read that and not freak out when they see what looks like a loose end. They know I put it there for a reason, and that I'll tie it up later when it'll have a better impact.

So by the same token, most of the people reading my LJ know my stuff. They know how I see Wes as a baseline - either by my previously done fics or my obsessive comments over the episodes - and I can plonk a Wesley like the one in Strategy down and they're not going to have a heart attack and wonder what the Hell I'm on about. They're going to know that it's not my Platonic Ideal of Wes [tm] that the boy be a prisoner and a rape victim and blah di blah. They're going to know that TBQ is a kinky bastard at times and sometimes she wants to see Wes get all mentally and physically bruised so that Angel can make it All Better [tm].

But let's be fair though - that's all shorthand. I'm asking you guys to do the work instead of doing it myself. Or, barring that, asking you to at least understand that I didn't want to do the work. I wanted to skip over all things work-related and get on to the pretty.

I did it again in Pet. In the first part I go from zero to "Da" in .05 seconds and I did it knowing that I'd be asking the audience to just please be on board that that was the Angel/Spike dynamic.

Would I have done it it for a "real" story? No. In a archive/mailing list type story I would have put that background in and made it clear that's where I was coming from. But for an indulgence fic, posted to my LJ, where possibly at least some of you have seen me do the Spike/Angel "Da" thing before I knew I could leap over it to get to the good stuff.

Nobody's watching porn to actually find out if the copy machine's going to get fixed, in other words. To me in an indulgence fic the backstory on "Da" was the toner being out. I can either focus on the Xerox manual or I can get to the naked boys. Hmmm...

Of course the flip side of this is that nobody as a rule watches porn for the Oscar-winning dialogue either.

Which is why I've been starting to think of kinkfics like this as a genre unto themselves.

When I write Epiphany that is, as some of you know, the closest I get to baselines of Wes and Angel. My only big reality shift when thinking about how the characters act is the fact that Angel and Wes are having sex and there's a lot of swearing (sometimes even during the sex). But beyond that I try to stay close to the tone of the show. I may not plan out season-long arcs the way the real show does, but in terms of how the characters react I'm very happy if I can keep them close to their originals.

When I do a Cat & Mouse or A Million Miles Away I've shifted genres. The first is dark, the second is schmoop. This, then, influences everything the characters do. Wes in C&M isn't going to suddenly veer off and spend quality time with orphans, Angel in AMMA isn't going to snap Connor's neck. But, beyond that, the boys are still hopefully acting in character. AMMA Angel is still some form of Angel, he's just a form of Angel that's a bit more snuggly than we get to see for huge stretches of time.

This is why the stories are labelled as such. People can pick up the stories and know exactly what they're getting into. And then, hopefully, they won't be reading AMMA and wondering where all the death and destruction is. Truth in advertising and all that good stuff.

Bringing this back - somehow - to kinkfics, I think that kinkfics fulfill a need in the same way h/c, angst, schmoop and other categories do. Again they do it much like porn, though I want to make it perfectly clear here that not all kinkfics are about the sex. The kink could be sex but it could also be a situation. As a case in point, Strategy hit a lot of my kinks and one of those was characters doing things in code. When Wes and Lorne are having their little Pylean discussions over the Scrabble table, yours truly was having a happy kink moment that in no way involved one handed typing. I just liked seeing it.

So what I'm saying is, much like the sex in porn, kinkfics serve to let us zero in on the various little things that have just been burrowing in our heads and demanding that we write them without worrying too much about the setup. Porn can do "Pizza delivery, well okay let's have sex" and Kinkfics can do "Angel and Spike in a story that constantly involves both of them wearing red shirts and talking about history" (or whatever your kink of choice is). And because we have the medium of LJ, which allows us to post our unbetaed unfiltered thoughts so that they can be taken, good or bad, on face value, I think we get to share this a bit more often. Which turns out to be nice because then we find out that there's apparently billions of other people out there who share those exact same kinks too.

But of course there's the flip side, which is that, like porn, it is reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllly easy to do a kinkfic that's eye-stabbingly bad.

I mean think of it: by definition we've got something where we're skipping over plot and/or characterization as needed in order to get to our point. Rarely is this something that leads to a good fic. Rarer still good fanfic, since we tend to need at least some glimpse of the characters in order for the whole story to be worth our while.

So when kinkfic works, why does it work? Or maybe I should be taking a step even further back and asking: wait, kinkfic works? since all signs would seem to point to that not happening.

Take Strategy for instance. I was actually very surprised that it got the BBF rec in the first place. I was seriously surprised that it got the amount of feedback that it did. I got more feedback for each chapter of Strategy than I do on average for any of my other fics. I'm here to tell you I have no idea why. Not that I think my other fics are that much better than Strategy or anything - obviously that's an excerise for the reader to determine - but I couldn't see why Strategy itself was managing to speak to people more than my other stuff was, particularly since you would think the opposite would be true for many reasons.

Now granted possibly some of this was the LJ format. Post the story on LJ, it makes it easy for people to hit "reply" and do feedback, so there's that aspect to it. But I've posted other stuff on LJ too without as much feedback so we're back on "huh?"

Now again, I wouldn't have posted the thing at all if I didn't think it was some form of readable, but it's a present-tense, kinkalicious fic that skips over all the pesky plot details and goes straight for the good stuff. I get the "good stuff" part but you'd think the "plot" thing would still be a hang-up for people. I mean if good stuff was all that counted couldn't I or anyone else simply write a story that said "Angel and Spike are together. Rough kinky sex is hand. Whips are involved. The end." and call it a day? Clearly something has to be going on here.

I've got no clear answers. I do think, though, that some form of quality of writing counts. Take two examples of what I would call kink/indulgence fics: Anna S's Subtlties and Nauti's Crash and Burn. These are two stories that, going into it, both authors made it fairly clear that it wasn't that they were planning the story so much as the bunny was there and it wasn't going away anytime soon so - oh Hell why not? And then both stories blew up into huge things that neither author seemed to have anticipated going into it and at the same time got tons of feedback in return from people who were just as happy to read it as they were to write it. Both stories also had a starting premise which affected the situation of the characters enough that it really could have handicapped the authors in writing a good piece - Nauti, for instance, doing a "what if all the Buffyverse people were human?" senario which removes a lot of the backstory that makes the characters who they are.

But the writing is good so that balances it out a bit. At bare minimum there's a good story to be had, whether or not it's getting the characterization spot-on enough to be good fanfic.

Which I'm not saying, btw, to mean that Nauti or Anna had bad characterization. I'm just saying that these are senarios in which that could have happened. Again to pick on Nauti since she's got the most extreme example, but a human AU like that is leaping over a Grand Canyon's worth of two steps to fanfic. AUs are often like that. Nauti has her setup and then presents the reader with a story of "Okay, if this was Buffy's past history then this is what Buffy the character would be like." Buffy's fic self may or may not have a lot in common with her TV self beyond that of her appearance. That's part of the fun of AUs. The filters get adjusted and we get to see the characters in a new light. This can be a lot of fun, if you know what you're getting into. Somebody coming into it without warning, however, might find a bit of a shock.

People like Nauti and Anna have written enough of the characters before that somebody who knows them can look at a C&B or a Subtltties and go "Oh yeah, I know where she's getting that Spike from." We know the point A they started with so we can jump ahead with them as they head on over to point Q. Kinkfics, I guess, being an AU of sorts in their own way. The authors have their baseline versions of the characters that they've now shaken up somehow and put into a whole new area. And to a certain extent they get a bit more leeway to do it because people know them.

Which is why I sometimes get squinky about people looking at, say, Pet and that being their first exposure to me. I feel this need to assure people that no, really, I don't think the most realistic interpretation of the show involves Wesley being Angel's little fucktoy. I'm just saying that the imagery such a senario presents is pretty and therefore I'd like to write it down. Would somebody, who didn't know me, look at Pet and think it was the finest Angelverse fanfic out there to be had? I'm not so sure. I'm lucky in that I get to rest a bit on my reputation, and on what y'all know about me. It's the same thing for, say, the fic-avoidances that Anna's been writing lately. She and I don't share all the same kinks, but I know her well enough to be at least interested in how her brain works so even if the fic doesn't push my buttons all the way I still get the enjoyment of watching her think. If she was a newbie author I might not get past the cut tag.

In a way it's kind of like movie reviews. I don't always agree with Roger Ebert but I know his likes and dislikes well enough to be able to figure out if I'll like a movie just based on what he said about it. Other reviewers not so much. So just as I don't spend time reading the essays of Rex Reed, I don't often seek out the kink/indulgence fics of people I similarly don't know well. If I don't know their baseline, their "what ifs?" off of that baseline aren't going to do much for me. It may or may not be good, but I won't necessarily be able to judge it with any accuracy.

So what all am I saying here?

I think LJ and the like has been a good thing for encouraging a place where we can post these fics, especially because it can be a fun writing exercise to just let loose and write what you're thinking instead of having to yank yourself back and worry about every step and word. I think kinkfics speak to people because they allow for pure, unadulterated kink-stroking in a way that's not likely to happen elsewhere. I think a certain amount of quality definitely helps, whether that be in writing or characterization. Knowing the author can be a big asset in appreciating a kinkfic at all. And I still don't know why that many people liked Strategy. ;)

There. I think that pretty much rambles me out for right now. Guess I actually have to do some cleaning then or something =/