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Five things make a post.
Been awhile since I've done one of these. Let's see:
1. I am mostly better! Or rather I'm at the point of being better where I am going around thinking "Is this as good as it gets? Did I regularly feel this cruddy before I was sick? Probably yes? But what if it's incrementally worse every time I think I'm back to baseline??" Anyway there went January; at least I have made a lot of afghan. Thanks to the people who added me on Ravelry! I was not planning to log my hooks or anything but then I accidentally anyway. Who wants to take bets on how long it takes me to cave and start logging stash?
2. TFW you mistype a URL and discover that in the last several months someone has made you a Fanlore entry, and then you see things listed as your important fanworks that you have 100% zero memory of (like, 'had to click through because I'm pretty sure they misattributed it' 0 memory, but nope that was def. me.)
3. I'm still working on a books of 2019 round-up, but looking over my Goodreads category, it occurred to me that nearly all modern fiction could be sorted, if one want to do that sort of thing, into A) books that have the thesis "No matter how different a character's external circumstances are, when it comes down to it deep inside they're all people just the same" and B) books that have the thesis "even though these characters' lives seem very mundane, deep inside they're very different from everyone else", and that books in category A I will probably like, and books in category B I will probably hate with a deep hate. (And that when I separate books into "genre" vs. "literary" that is roughly the division I am making.)
Discuss.
4. Wow, it seems like this is the Year of the Badass Adoptive Dad in fandom, between Baby Yoda and Cirilla and A-Yuan (and Jin Ling) and all their dads. It almost makes we want to go back to my old Valjean wips!
5. Oh, right: I have been reading SO MUCH MDZS fic. So much, y'all. I was going to add a bit here about how odd it is that I've read canon and read a ton of fic but have zero fic bunnies for it, which is super unusual for me, but turns out I'm writing psychic wolves AU for it suddenly, so who even knows?
(okay, I still don't have any other fic bunnies, but the two fics I want someone else to write and haven't found yet: WWX/LWJ PWP in which WWX's fondness for chili oil goes very wrong (you know LWJ would just grit his teeth and not say anything if WWX grabbed the wrong lube); and post-canon where WWX really tries to come to terms with MXY's legacy [the one where he's pregnant with MXY's kid only half counts].)
1. I am mostly better! Or rather I'm at the point of being better where I am going around thinking "Is this as good as it gets? Did I regularly feel this cruddy before I was sick? Probably yes? But what if it's incrementally worse every time I think I'm back to baseline??" Anyway there went January; at least I have made a lot of afghan. Thanks to the people who added me on Ravelry! I was not planning to log my hooks or anything but then I accidentally anyway. Who wants to take bets on how long it takes me to cave and start logging stash?
2. TFW you mistype a URL and discover that in the last several months someone has made you a Fanlore entry, and then you see things listed as your important fanworks that you have 100% zero memory of (like, 'had to click through because I'm pretty sure they misattributed it' 0 memory, but nope that was def. me.)
3. I'm still working on a books of 2019 round-up, but looking over my Goodreads category, it occurred to me that nearly all modern fiction could be sorted, if one want to do that sort of thing, into A) books that have the thesis "No matter how different a character's external circumstances are, when it comes down to it deep inside they're all people just the same" and B) books that have the thesis "even though these characters' lives seem very mundane, deep inside they're very different from everyone else", and that books in category A I will probably like, and books in category B I will probably hate with a deep hate. (And that when I separate books into "genre" vs. "literary" that is roughly the division I am making.)
Discuss.
4. Wow, it seems like this is the Year of the Badass Adoptive Dad in fandom, between Baby Yoda and Cirilla and A-Yuan (and Jin Ling) and all their dads. It almost makes we want to go back to my old Valjean wips!
5. Oh, right: I have been reading SO MUCH MDZS fic. So much, y'all. I was going to add a bit here about how odd it is that I've read canon and read a ton of fic but have zero fic bunnies for it, which is super unusual for me, but turns out I'm writing psychic wolves AU for it suddenly, so who even knows?
(okay, I still don't have any other fic bunnies, but the two fics I want someone else to write and haven't found yet: WWX/LWJ PWP in which WWX's fondness for chili oil goes very wrong (you know LWJ would just grit his teeth and not say anything if WWX grabbed the wrong lube); and post-canon where WWX really tries to come to terms with MXY's legacy [the one where he's pregnant with MXY's kid only half counts].)
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this is an excellent summing-up of my feelings about lit fic.
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I'm sure some of it is cases where the author and I just deeply disagree on what people are like deep down, but I think most of it's on purpose.
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I'm pretty good at pre-filtering for 1, and 2 tends to get called out as just bad writing early enough for me to steer away. But last year I appear to have pulled several works of litfic on the basis of it was short and it had been getting good press about queer/poly/neurodiverse/disability/etc content, the kind of things I love to read in fandom and SF characters. But in litfic it still seems to fail back on "look at this weirdo, aren't they weird." :( Even the ownvoices ones - I guess when you combine 1 with queer/disability stuff you are very likely to hit not-great tropes pretty fast, and the non-ownvoices ones still seem to go to freakshow most of the time.
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turns out I'm writing psychic wolves AU for it suddenly, so who even knows?
*GASPS*
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I think that's a sign of growth as a writer. :D
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I think that's a sign of growth as a writer. :D
Sounds plausible to me! ^_^
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My sleepy analysis of this, based on throwing across the room the last literary fiction book I tried because every single one of the characters was a terrible person and not in the fun "excellent villain" way, is that group A is written by people who got told "you're different and that makes you bad" and they're responding "we're all the same beneath our differences, stop it", but the second group is by the people who either bought into or internalized or were part of "everyone who is different is bad" and are now responding "but... what if we're just different from everyone else DEEP DOWN, is that still bad??? Don't worry, we will never be different out loud."
It's like, the second group think being different = being special = a good thing, whereas the first group is thinking "dear god please stop being mad at me for being different".
AKA that time someone wrote an op-ed in my local paper saying that she went to a Lady Gaga concert and while she figured that whole "if you were a freak as a kid, this is for you" message was okay I guess, why oh why wouldn't Lady Gaga have added a line in there saying "but if you were normal as a kid, if you always fit in, if you always belonged, you're also fine!" I recall there were some letters to the editor about that one.
Because what's the level of different? "I'm an alien robot but I'm still a person" is a very different kind of thing than "I may look and act like Everyone but I'm different! I'm special! Everyone else is a sheeple but I exist as a thinking person and I want that recognized!"
The manic pixie dream girl is quirky but never too weird, after all. She'll collect snapple bottle caps. She doesn't do anything that get routinely mocked in tv shows as fair targets. It's not like she writes fanfiction.
EDIT: finding that op-ed was literally the first response for my google search result, thanks google. It was even worse than I remembered.
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But yeah, I think you're right - part of my belief that everyone is the same deep down is that everybody is afraid that they're too different one way or another. It's harder for some people than others, obviously, and some people (LIKE THAT OP-ED WRITER) are so terrified of the mere concept of "different" that they aren't ever able to conceptualize it that way, but it's there.
So you get the authors going "I have successfully learned to pass as normal, but in my ART I shall secretly argue that in fact I am better than normal!" and you get the authors going, "But what if it turns out that passing as normal was the wrong choice all along? WHAT IF? Have you ever considered this new revolutionary concept I came up with on my own? hahah just kidding obviously that's a bad idea" and the ones that go, "Look over there, that person is even less normal that I am! So I'm safe!" and it's all fucking terrible books.
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Yessss. "better than normal". Because is normal the thing you need to strive to (because you're not normal), or is normal something you need to excede/overcome (because you are normal). It's like, are you starting from normal and wanna become a demigod, or are you starting from somewhere else and need to work up to passing as normal? Is normal the goal (either to be achieved or rejected as a fallacy) or the mundane everyday that must be left behind on your quest to be the superman. How dubious is your claim on normal? Is it the status quo you can easily default to if your quest to Climb A Very Tall Mountain fails? Or is it something you need to elbow someone in the head to cling onto desperately?
Also, like, how self-aware is the narrative? "I'm an English professor experiencing a midlife crisis and the only one who understands me is my hot young grad student, so I'm gonna have an affair with her, to break out of the bordeom that is the tyranny of a normal life" vs. "all I want to do is get my PhD but this asshole is hitting on me and calling me his muse" are the same events but very different books, and the second one is much more aware of what's going on. But the first one gets to be the most generic stereotypical litfic and the second does not.
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(Similarly, I'm sure I have encountered "My PhD advisor keeps saying I am the only one who understands him and I am his muse, I am so special, this is the greatest romance of all time" (written by women!) and thrown it at the wall.)
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I would definitely rather have the fic than the theses though. :D