axael | Fandom Snowflake Challenge #3

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 5th

A Fannish Opinion that has Changed Over Time

My opinions about fan things are usually pretty chill, and now that I'm older, I let them evolve on their own, so the ones I can really think about Changing (capital-letter changing) were both back when I first encountered online fandom in any sort of fannish community sense. I have a small one and a big one, both related to me first starting to write fic, and both kind of took me by surprise. :)

Johnlock with a rule!63 Sherlock:

I wrote a fic for BBC Sherlock based on a kinkmeme prompt that was basically a romance novel prompt. Since, at the time, I had been reading an exorbitant amount of Victorian-era romance novels, I decided to tackle it.

The first half of the opinion change is starts with the fact that, at the time, I thought it would be easiest to gender-swap Sherlock. I think the swap went rather well, all things considered. The writing of the fic was a fun and interesting challenge to make sure that Sherlock was IC while having such a fundamental shift in background. Plus, I got to build her genderbent friends, who were minor characters in canon. Thing is: would I do the same genderbending thing now? Absolutely not. I would zero percent try to make Sherlock a girl in any future fics, if I was ever drawn to writing for the fandom for whatever bizarre reason. The prompt allowed for het, and I made it het to cleave closer to the formula I was using, but honestly, doing the same now strikes me as...hrm. I don't like to read made-het fics in any of the fandoms I've since encountered and enjoyed. I find them unnecessary and often a bit too self-inserty for my reading pleasure. So I'm in the strange position of looking at something I wrote and do enjoy rereading and knowing that I would never voluntarily read it if I found it in the wild. If I wrote it again, I'd honestly probably make gender a nonissue within the narrative, or just have an outright ABO world. A half-step more worldbuilding for a little less unnecessary het. (Even if it did turn out well, and it's a fun read, imho.)

The second half of the opinion change, however, is what really sideswiped me. I absolutely no longer ship Johnlock. I just...don't. I had to force the characters together enough that I was like, 'Wow, I *barely* believe this, and I'm the one who made it plausible.' And if I was writing a romance novel where I'm making sure they fit together so they do feel like a reasonable couple, then canon is not giving me nearly enough to believe it anymore. Not when the characters are such assholes, by design. A good asshole character can make a wonderful ship partner, but now--especially in retrospect; poor BBC Sherlock fandom--these were not good asshole characters. They were just assholes and I don't want them near each other anymore. Give me a good old-fashioned Watson from an earlier canon.
Fic, and me writing it:

Okay, this one's hilarious, but when I first got obsessed with Doctor Who and went hunting More, I encountered fic, and had a whole crisis about 'writing in someone else's world.' I was drawn to do so, but also: why would I do that?! I wrote only rp and original fiction up until that point, and Pern (and McCafferey's attitudes towards fic) had sort of shaped my concepts of 'but you can't write the characters like the author writes them...' So I was sitting there, staring at the idea of trying to write someone else's characters. Wasn't that like...inherently wrong or something? (Lol)

I ended up reading a lot of Marvel, actually, until my brain settled out into a: oh, these canons are basically fanfic anyways. Especially Marvel and Doctor Who. And then I felt 100% less concerned about writing someone else's characters, because I wasn't, was I? I was ingesting the characters and making them my own, to tell the kind of story I wanted to tell, that was in conversation with canon in a unique and interesting way. Fic was fun *because* of canon, because there was a whole substrate that I could reference and draw on and interpret and reflect. Delicious. I'm honestly drawn to these type of long-standing fic-like canons, because they're big enough to have been contributed to by many different authors. I honestly find it a little difficult to fic smaller canons, because I haven't seen the core of the character interpreted through different lenses--something I both love and find useful in my own writing endeavors.

So eventually fic became its own Thing in my head. Which is also very funny, because in one of my writer's groups, a friend wrote fic of one of *my* stories. Which was. A Very Wild Experience. I had to become cool with a lot of things very fast. It also helped me realize some of the fundamental reasons that people tackle transformative works, especially fic, and settle into the idea that I really just wanted to write so much of it.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge #3

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 5th

A Fannish Opinion that has Changed Over Time

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