Sorry to interrupt the Connor festival, but do any of you have any thoughts on fan fiction? I have started reading some of it lately and it leaves me with an uneasy feeling. Not because a lot of it is x-rated, but because I question my own motives for doing so. Isn't it just weakness to read alternative versions of how things turn out just because I can't live with some of the things the writers do with characters I'm very fond of.

I'm liable to reiterate what Plei just said, but what the hell. Some fanfic tries to 'fix' canon, because the writer isn't happy with the canonical choices. Don't know that I've read any of that myself, and it isn't something that appeals all that much to me - certainly on BtVS or AtS. But I've bought a fair number of spinoff books from shows or movies over the years - I've always enjoyed engaging with texts in different media.

I started out reading fanfic after the end of BtVS Season 5, because I was so damned hooked on the show and the prospect of all those months with no new MEverse narrative was rather hideous. And then I found out about fanfic, and initially was all 'Nah, that's just going to be embarrassingly awful', and then got pointed to some good stuff. And lo, it was good. (Let me point you to Rheanna's site Palimpsest for some very lovely AtS fiction that reads like episodes of the show and slips neatly into canon at the time of writing.)

As a writer the appeal for me is often the loose ends and grey edges - I like playing around with what ifs and trying to paper over cracks (for example, Peasant wrote a gem of a wee story that accounted beautifully for the Who-is-Angel's-sire retcon, drawing upon canon to make both canonical versions true. Spike inadvertantly makes a wish, a la The Wish, and so changes reality - because he's so damned pissed off at Angel that he wishes the bloke weren't his Sire.)

I like the challenge of trying to explore pieces of canon to fit a particular premise (be it Faith fancying Buffy or Spike getting questioned by Wolfram and Hart after the events of In the Dark) without doing violence to canon. I also like AUs in which the road not taken is explored, where the challenge is making the characters recognisably themselves (see Doyle Investigations where the universe from the episode The Wish is explored in a logical manner, positing what might have happened had that Universe continued on its parallel course with Angel and Buffy and co dead - it's Angel with no Angel, putting Doyle and Faith and Wesley in LA fighting the good fight, and exploring their characters as they might have been in those AU circumstances).

There's a long, long history of shared narrative. Within comicbook lore there are hosts of parallel canons and AUs stretched across different media. Even within Buffy there's the One True Canon of the show itself and then there's the parallel (and sometimes contradictory canons) of comic books and novels and the source movie. Fanfic is all about taking the source material and running with it - beyond that it means different things to different people, and some are more invested in the fic part of the equation, concentrating upon writerly stuff, whilst others are more invested upon the fan part of the equation, concentrating upon wish-fulfilment/canon 'fixing'. And of course there's erotica (which is a whole other conversation), and 100-word drabbles in which haiku-like intensity is the whole point, and whopping great big epic novels, and there's writing challenges - it's a whole big universe of interlocking interests and agendas. I like it. YMMV.

Isn't it just weakness to read alternative versions of how things turn out just because I can't live with some of the things the writers do with characters I'm very fond of.

Nope. It's fun. It's only like reading The Iliad, and then reading Chaucer's Troilus and Cresyde (which I can't spell and amn't looking up, I'm afraid - do forgive me) and then Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and then watching the movie of Troy.

t Insert predictable mention of mainstream fanfic like Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead (Hamlet) and Jean Rhys's Dark Sargasso Sea (Jane Eyre)

Playing with a known set of characters and situation is fun, and it's challenging. It's not like Bowdlerising Shakespeare to make it more pallatable. (And, again, my own fanfic reading is not about 'fixing' canon. Or mostly not. Er. [...well, maybe with Smallville. But that's fair enough - the fanfic is SO much better than the show itself.) Certainly not in a "can't live with what they've done" way - sometimes in a "ooh, that was a bit ropey, let's see if we can't round it out and make it flow more smoothly" way.)

I also like slash, btw. fwiw. But that's a whole 'nother conversation.

(see Doyle Investigations where the universe from the episode The Wish is explored in a logical manner

AND written by some of the best in this non-paying biz.

(Like, say, the other insanely talented foamy Yorkshire lass in my fandom, Roseveare.)

DI is great.

The talent in some of this...

Roseveare blows me away on a regular basis. She's... hell, she's been exploring the Birthdayverse, and she looks at every little thing, every possible point that needs to be addressed to see how the characters in "Birthday" got to where they were. Why Angel's crazy, why Wes has one arm and is so very, very bitter. And she NAILS so much.

It's a one-ep AU, but one I want to know more about.

Wishverse fic? Same thing. When Buffy's in Ohio, who's her watcher? (There was a great flashfic about that.) How was Willow vamped? Xander?

There's so much there that you know will never be explored on screen, but then, that's what fic is for.

I'm saying more that his natural naiveity was shored up by a certain internal logic, and that he was so starved for someone to focus on him that he'd go along with almost anything to get that.

I think we're just working on different PoV's on the character, because I don't think of Connor as naturally naive and watching the episode and looking at his reactions to Cordy's lies, especially where he accepts her 'we're special' argument, my gut reaction is consistently 'Argh! So. Stupid!' and while I find your PoV sense-making and plausible, it's kinda hard to argue with your own emotional response, y'know?

Totally, Leigh. There's no one answer here, just the one (or in my case, usually several) that rings true for you.

And in fact, that's another of the appeals of fanfic for me. There are stories that flesh out various aspects of the character that are just touched on or hinted at on-screen. I haven't read much Connor fic, but I'll lay odds there's stuff out there coming from both our perspectives and various others. Playing a sort of what if game - if Connor's just dumb as a box of hair (gets it naturally, hee) or if he's really buried in denial, what implications does that have on how he makes his choices. It can be within canon - delving deeper into his motivations for what we've seen on the show, or extrapolating future events and examining what his mindset is going to lead him into. Or taking things AU and envisioning a world where different choices led to vastly different outcomes.

I don't tend to like "fix-it" stories (and in fact I don't seem to encounter them in Buffy fic all that often, though I know it's out there). To take an example from another show, I can't stand X-Files fic that includes the events of Tunguska and The Red and the Black but gives Krycek his arm back. It feels like a cheat, taking the plot developments and emotional resonance of those episodes while whiting-out the consequences.

Usually you'll find all the warning you need in the author's notes for stories like these, in plenty of time to run away. "My Krycek has two arms! So there, Chris Carter." Or "Canon up to S7 - but in my world, the bullet missed Tara!"

Roseveare blows me away on a regular basis. She's... hell, she's been exploring the Birthdayverse, and she looks at every little thing, every possible point that needs to be addressed to see how the characters in "Birthday" got to where they were. Why Angel's crazy, why Wes has one arm and is so very, very bitter. And she NAILS so much.

Ooh, I'll have to go look for this one. There's another Birthdayverse series out there, Gunn/Wes slash. The parts I've read have been really good, but it's been appearing sporadically in my inbox and I don't think I've gotten them all. Katerina H-something is the author, I think. I'll have to see if I can track it down.

It's taken me a long time to come to grips with fan fiction, and it really took me sitting down and writing a story to see anything more than novelty value in it.

For example, over in the Bitchy Fiction thread, Elena posed a challenge of writing other "Conversations with Dead People" stories--ones we didn't see during the episode. Intrigued by this, I started playing with the idea of a conversation between the First and the ghost of Adam. As I was doing this, I realized I could use it as a method to explore my thoughts on the metaphysics of the show's end, the possible repercussions of events that we didn't get to see. As a mechanism for that, I extrapolated a possible future for the two most "human" Scoobies, Xander and Dawn, and how the events of "Chosen" may have changed them.

It was more satisfying than I thought it would be, and it allowed me to explain views on what was happening on BtVS a lot more clearly than if I wrote them in essay form. Now have ideas for another one...

rubs hands together gleefully.

See, Victor? It's brain gym, and it's fun.

It's also becoming my "clearing exercise," before I write the stuff I'm paid to write. Which may be why everything gets structured in serializations.

Now have ideas for another one...

Heh.

My fanfic motivation was pretty simple. Season 5's end. The incredibly sappy part of me was sad at the thought of Spike and Dawn frozen in time like they were at the end of The Gift. I had to move them on. By the time season 6 started, I was pretty finished with writing, but I did extend the series a bit.

Also -- introspective of a sort. Most of it was Mary Sue. I wanted to think about inserting myself into a different place, in a different form, and to see if it would be true. At least my part was, because my father read one of them and knew it was me without my name being mentioned.

And then there are drabbles -- perfect emotion/character notes. I haven't written any that aren't filling in spots, or canon-compliant speculation. Or just arsing around. Those are a delightful challenge.

I might still finish my Giles-faces-a-succubus-while trying to free his father story after all...the second part got kind of slow so I threw it out.But I think I could do it better now. And I wrote that because Giles' explanation for leaving in season 6 never felt sufficient.Writing Giles was a big challenge and forced me to dust off vocabulary I never knew I had. As well as being a radically different voice than mine.

Not much of a fan ficcer, but sometimes the re-dos are wonderful. I recommend CICATRIX (sp?) to anyone interested in a really dark re-thinking of the post-season 1 Buffy-verse.

Sadly, I don't have a link, but I suspect it should be easy enough to find.