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.

Great to hear all your interesting views on the fanfic thing. I see now that the whole phenomenon is a lot more complex than I originally thought.

I guess I brought it up because the whole nature of intense fandom is a new thing for me -- didn't think it would happen at my age. I aint exactly a teenager anymore. (Though I guess it's no weirder than being obsessed with teams of overpaid spoilt sports mercenaries who just happen to play soccer really well.) There's no-one I know who I can talk to about this sort of thing -- my friend who introduced me to BtVS has now totally gone off it and when I mentioned fanfiction to her, she thought it sounded really icky. Must be my dour Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, but there's part of me that has trouble accepting that I have an obsession with a TV show and that I'm exploring that obsession by reading things that other similarly interested fans have done to tease out the edges of it. But I guess that's why I've ended up here -- at the Buffista Home for Weirdos. Where maybe I belong.

t bangs cup on table "One of us! One of us! Gabba gabba hey!"