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Chapter and 'verse
Nov. 19th, 2011 02:59 pmIf season 4 of Buffy has taught us one thing, it's to run the other way when someone starts a monologue with "I've been thinking."
I've been thinking about how some fanfic writers somehow manage to create entire 'verses of their own. They start off from some point in canon, and then build one huge story from there that may or may not be told linearly, but where everything has continuity and is (more or less) internally consistent. I have a ton of respect for people who manage that; I never could. My stories are usually short, a jumble of brief standalone wouldn'titbecoolifs that aren't supposed to go together at all.
And yet when I look at them with a bit of distance, it's odd how many of them seem to form little 'verses after all - where, even if they're supposed to work as standalones, you can still read them in sequence and have them provide context for each other. And so, I give you, My Hypothetical and Mostly Accidental 'Verses, with links to relevant fics and drabbles arranged in more or less the order in which they happen.
( Long list of fics and self-congratulatory meta )
There are a few others I could piece together, of course; there's the little Faith/Willow story I've touched upon once or twice, there's the everything-went-to-hell-after-NFA-verse, there's the metaverse where every fourth wall is broken regularly, and there's still a ton of truly standalone stories... But the point, if there is one: I think context matters, especially in fanfic, and especially when it comes to drabbles and ficlets. A lot of what I write runs on my interpretation of what happened in canon and what it meant, or my interpretation of what happened after the cameras stopped rolling. Take Stylish, Yet Affordable, for instance; on its own, it's just a nice little drabble about Buffy getting some recognition; setting it in the middle of s6, with Buffy struggling with both bills and depression, it hopefully takes on a slightly different taste. After Work becomes a different drabble if I claim it's explicitly part of a larger story in which they end up getting married. Special Delivery is silly slapstick until you remember what he did right after. Mission Accomplished, with its talk about how this is the way things have always been and always will be, can be a very different fic depending on your opinion of seasons 6 and 7; whether it's about Giles trying to live with never changing the status quo, or if it's the question to which "Chosen" is the answer. Etc. Stories take place within vectors, depending on which aspects of them you emphasize, and in any source story with enough depth, there's no limit to the amount of stories you can tell even without changing what actually happened on screen. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
There's more thoughts to be had here, I think, but that's for another day.
I've been thinking about how some fanfic writers somehow manage to create entire 'verses of their own. They start off from some point in canon, and then build one huge story from there that may or may not be told linearly, but where everything has continuity and is (more or less) internally consistent. I have a ton of respect for people who manage that; I never could. My stories are usually short, a jumble of brief standalone wouldn'titbecoolifs that aren't supposed to go together at all.
And yet when I look at them with a bit of distance, it's odd how many of them seem to form little 'verses after all - where, even if they're supposed to work as standalones, you can still read them in sequence and have them provide context for each other. And so, I give you, My Hypothetical and Mostly Accidental 'Verses, with links to relevant fics and drabbles arranged in more or less the order in which they happen.
( Long list of fics and self-congratulatory meta )
There are a few others I could piece together, of course; there's the little Faith/Willow story I've touched upon once or twice, there's the everything-went-to-hell-after-NFA-verse, there's the metaverse where every fourth wall is broken regularly, and there's still a ton of truly standalone stories... But the point, if there is one: I think context matters, especially in fanfic, and especially when it comes to drabbles and ficlets. A lot of what I write runs on my interpretation of what happened in canon and what it meant, or my interpretation of what happened after the cameras stopped rolling. Take Stylish, Yet Affordable, for instance; on its own, it's just a nice little drabble about Buffy getting some recognition; setting it in the middle of s6, with Buffy struggling with both bills and depression, it hopefully takes on a slightly different taste. After Work becomes a different drabble if I claim it's explicitly part of a larger story in which they end up getting married. Special Delivery is silly slapstick until you remember what he did right after. Mission Accomplished, with its talk about how this is the way things have always been and always will be, can be a very different fic depending on your opinion of seasons 6 and 7; whether it's about Giles trying to live with never changing the status quo, or if it's the question to which "Chosen" is the answer. Etc. Stories take place within vectors, depending on which aspects of them you emphasize, and in any source story with enough depth, there's no limit to the amount of stories you can tell even without changing what actually happened on screen. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
There's more thoughts to be had here, I think, but that's for another day.
