(no subject)

[the_rck]

I'm once again rec'ing fics for try_this_fic. This time, I'm rec'ing Gundam Wing. I did a rec a week during November, because the community moderator had asked me to do both November and December, and I wasn't sure at the outset that I had enough fics to do more than one a week. Gundam Wing is one of those fandoms that I dabble in as a reader. Most of the archives are too scary for me to do more than peek in and then flee again. I think I'll be doing two or three recs a week this month, though. I've got them all written up and ready to go, so that shouldn't cut into my writing time any further.

I feel a little odd rec'ing in Gundam Wing because my grasp of the canon is fairly poor. I've seen the series once (and don't intend to again, thank you), but that was during the last weeks of my pregnancy and first weeks as a new mother. I kept falling asleep in spite of having good intentions. I got the impression that the story either needed a tighter focus or a longer run. There were too many events for the characters to be much more than cardboard cutouts, and the factionalization and loyalty changes seemed to occur at random, almost as if someone had a deck of cards with the character names on them and shuffled and dealt them out anew with each change. I was also astonished at how much of what I'd seen in fics was fanon.

I also feel odd because Gundam Wing fandom is one that I started reading as a source of smut. That means that my recs skew toward the explicit as opposed to toward lower rated, plot intensive stories. Thinking about that has led me to consider what I like in different fandoms. A good plot can catch me in just about any fandom, but I'm less interested in sexually explicit stuff in any fandom based on a live action series or film. Books and animated material are fair game, but I don't seem to want anything that has characters my brain associates with real people. I think there's a line in my head between character and actor that gets crossed once a writer puts in intimate physical details-- The character is common property, but the physical body belongs to the actor.

Comments

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. I was really into Sentinel fanfiction heavily skewed toward smut...until I watched the show.

Then it got all . . . awkward. Yeah.

[the_rck]

That's something I hadn't thought about, but you're quite right! I can read explicit stuff in fandoms where I haven't seen the TV series without being particularly bothered, and it probably is because the characters don't seem to be connected to the actors then. There's somehow a line between "fully fictional" and "fictional as portrayed by," and the distinction is more in the associations in my head than anywhere else.