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May. 13th, 2007 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI'm looking for a fandom-- a new fandom-- in which I can devour fics for a while. I've been wanting to read fics recently but haven't really known where to start looking. I suspect that part of the problem is that I'm see-sawing between wanting to read uncritically and responding hyper-critical to everything I see. This is not a good mood to be in when dipping toes in a new fandom or exploring the depths of one I've previously visited as a tourist.
I'm not even sure that a new fandom will help. I haven't been keeping up with my 'old' fandoms because it feels like work rather than fun. Part of this but by no means all of it is that I find the Balkanization of larger fandoms on LJ hugely frustrating. I don't read by pairings or genre. If a fandom has more than one fic community, I start getting cranky and just not bothering to look at any of them. Fics on LJ also have an additional barrier to entry for me-- I'm usually doing something else, something other than looking for fics to read, when I see fic postings on LJ. That means that most of them get ignored unless they have something extra special going for them.
Those of you who use LJ as your primary access point for fics, how do you make it work? What strategies do you use?
Another factor in my lack of fic reading is that I'm feeling largely uninterested in smut. I want plot. That plot can include romance/sex, but if there's not a non-romantic, non-sexual plot too-- a major one, nothing simply tacked on or used as an excuse to get characters together-- I don't want to be bothered. That means that I'm often avoiding everything but G, PG and PG-13 gen. Not that I dislike slash, het, threesomes or whatever... I just haven't been in the right mood for them in months.
Even if I were in the mood for smut, I like starting new fandoms with stories that don't center on sex, romance or even strong friendship. I don't mind having those things as elements, but I don't like them as the reason for the story. I want to see something happen.
Also, I generally avoid sexually explicit stories in live action fandoms. There are exceptions-- Those are stories that work just right for me, stories where I could skip over the sex and pretend it wasn't there or stories in fandoms where I've never seen the source material or have somehow divorced the characters in my mind from the actors who portrayed them. I have trouble watching actors without being aware of them as actors. I suspect that part of that is all of the theater work I've done. I never quite lose awareness that I'm watching a construct, a performance, something created by the cooperation of the actors, writers, directors, set designers, etc. That means that real people end up intrinsically tied to the fiction in my head. It's a lot easier to ignore the creators in reading or in viewing something animated. In the former case, I think it's because the creator's active part in the creation isn't visible when I pick up a book or open a document. They did the work, but I can forget about it when I enter the text because I don't see them or hear them (books on tape would likely feel different to me, but I'm not sure by how much). In the latter case, I'm not sure entirely why it's different. It has to do with not having to use real people's bodies as the maps for the characters, but I'm not certain that's all of it. I'll think about it further but may never reach a conclusion.
In the past, I've dived into some fandoms and read others only by recommendation (or by sheer serendipity). I don't tend to fall in love with particular characters or pairings. I think that it's story potential that hooks me.
Dived in: The Pretender, Weiss Kreuz, Yami no Matsuei, Detective Conan (and Magic Kaitou), Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, Sky High, Princess Tutu, Ayatsuri Sakon.
By recommendation: Harry Potter, Stargate: SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, X-Men, DC comics and derivatives, Doctor Who, Firefly, Buffy, Angel, Farscape and a bunch of others I'm not thinking of just now.
When looking at fandoms, I steer away from anything that focuses on just one or two characters. I like large casts. Buddy stories feel too claustrophobic. I dislike horror and stories centered on cops, doctors or lawyers. Mystery series only rarely appeal to me (and usually do so because of things that don't have anything to do with the mysteries). I have low threshold for violence. I'm squicked by bad things happening to babies and/or children and dislike origin stories 90% of the time. Anything that combines origin stories with child torture... No.
(I suspect that half of my problem with origin stories is that I find the set up less interesting than the payoff. I'm not so interested in seeing, step by step, how a character came to be as s/he is. I want to see what s/he does with the resulting situation. The writer has to know the character's origin, but plodding through it makes me crazy bored. I've read books that I disliked because, for my taste, they ought to have started somewhere around chapter ten and used judicious backfilling to cover anything from the first half of the book that was actually necessary to the plot. I've also given up on several books when they started with the character's early childhood when it was clear from the blurb that the book was about events taking place in the character's adult years. I also don't care much for prologues.)
I don't enjoy seeing villains doing evil things just to prove that they're villains. I also get cranky with villains who're villains only because they had dreadful childhoods. I can deal with them having had dreadful pasts, and I don't mind those dreadful pasts forming their agendas, warping their values and so on. I just get cranky when that's all there is to it (especially if hugs and puppies suddenly make them not be villains). I like villains with some complexity, villains with long term plans and especially villains who could be viewed as heroes with just a bit of adjustment in angle.
This leads to a list of fandoms that either seem to be bad fits for me or that I won't touch because the canon either fails to appeal to me or actively repels me-- House, Battlestar Galactica (I can't even be in the room when Scott watches this), Heroes (I can manage to watch this only about half the time), Supernatural, Due South, The Sentinel, Starsky and Hutch, Boston Legal, CSI, Law and Order, Homicide and lots of others that I'm not thinking of just now because, well, why would I?
Anyway, I'm looking for ideas of things to try reading, general fandoms, archives, and such or specific authors or stories.
I'm also interested in suggestions for things to watch. There's nothing I'm currently watching, either via Netflix or on TV, that I feel very strongly connected to or interested in. I'm watching a few things-- both Stargate shows and The Dresden Files-- relatively regularly, but I don't really notice if I miss an episode. Scott tells me about Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. I've liked Dead Like Me, The Invisible Man, The Pretender, Farscape, The West Wing. I didn't like what I tried of Alias. Jeremiah was too violent, and the Sopranos was worse. The X-Files doesn't really work for me (too small a cast and too many horror elements).
::sighs:: I think I'm hoping that reading or watching something good enough, fun enough, will help my mood, ease my anxiety, help me feel less (borderline) depressed. It probably won't help, but it's something that doesn't cost too much to try.
I'm not even sure that a new fandom will help. I haven't been keeping up with my 'old' fandoms because it feels like work rather than fun. Part of this but by no means all of it is that I find the Balkanization of larger fandoms on LJ hugely frustrating. I don't read by pairings or genre. If a fandom has more than one fic community, I start getting cranky and just not bothering to look at any of them. Fics on LJ also have an additional barrier to entry for me-- I'm usually doing something else, something other than looking for fics to read, when I see fic postings on LJ. That means that most of them get ignored unless they have something extra special going for them.
Those of you who use LJ as your primary access point for fics, how do you make it work? What strategies do you use?
Another factor in my lack of fic reading is that I'm feeling largely uninterested in smut. I want plot. That plot can include romance/sex, but if there's not a non-romantic, non-sexual plot too-- a major one, nothing simply tacked on or used as an excuse to get characters together-- I don't want to be bothered. That means that I'm often avoiding everything but G, PG and PG-13 gen. Not that I dislike slash, het, threesomes or whatever... I just haven't been in the right mood for them in months.
Even if I were in the mood for smut, I like starting new fandoms with stories that don't center on sex, romance or even strong friendship. I don't mind having those things as elements, but I don't like them as the reason for the story. I want to see something happen.
Also, I generally avoid sexually explicit stories in live action fandoms. There are exceptions-- Those are stories that work just right for me, stories where I could skip over the sex and pretend it wasn't there or stories in fandoms where I've never seen the source material or have somehow divorced the characters in my mind from the actors who portrayed them. I have trouble watching actors without being aware of them as actors. I suspect that part of that is all of the theater work I've done. I never quite lose awareness that I'm watching a construct, a performance, something created by the cooperation of the actors, writers, directors, set designers, etc. That means that real people end up intrinsically tied to the fiction in my head. It's a lot easier to ignore the creators in reading or in viewing something animated. In the former case, I think it's because the creator's active part in the creation isn't visible when I pick up a book or open a document. They did the work, but I can forget about it when I enter the text because I don't see them or hear them (books on tape would likely feel different to me, but I'm not sure by how much). In the latter case, I'm not sure entirely why it's different. It has to do with not having to use real people's bodies as the maps for the characters, but I'm not certain that's all of it. I'll think about it further but may never reach a conclusion.
In the past, I've dived into some fandoms and read others only by recommendation (or by sheer serendipity). I don't tend to fall in love with particular characters or pairings. I think that it's story potential that hooks me.
Dived in: The Pretender, Weiss Kreuz, Yami no Matsuei, Detective Conan (and Magic Kaitou), Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, Sky High, Princess Tutu, Ayatsuri Sakon.
By recommendation: Harry Potter, Stargate: SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, X-Men, DC comics and derivatives, Doctor Who, Firefly, Buffy, Angel, Farscape and a bunch of others I'm not thinking of just now.
When looking at fandoms, I steer away from anything that focuses on just one or two characters. I like large casts. Buddy stories feel too claustrophobic. I dislike horror and stories centered on cops, doctors or lawyers. Mystery series only rarely appeal to me (and usually do so because of things that don't have anything to do with the mysteries). I have low threshold for violence. I'm squicked by bad things happening to babies and/or children and dislike origin stories 90% of the time. Anything that combines origin stories with child torture... No.
(I suspect that half of my problem with origin stories is that I find the set up less interesting than the payoff. I'm not so interested in seeing, step by step, how a character came to be as s/he is. I want to see what s/he does with the resulting situation. The writer has to know the character's origin, but plodding through it makes me crazy bored. I've read books that I disliked because, for my taste, they ought to have started somewhere around chapter ten and used judicious backfilling to cover anything from the first half of the book that was actually necessary to the plot. I've also given up on several books when they started with the character's early childhood when it was clear from the blurb that the book was about events taking place in the character's adult years. I also don't care much for prologues.)
I don't enjoy seeing villains doing evil things just to prove that they're villains. I also get cranky with villains who're villains only because they had dreadful childhoods. I can deal with them having had dreadful pasts, and I don't mind those dreadful pasts forming their agendas, warping their values and so on. I just get cranky when that's all there is to it (especially if hugs and puppies suddenly make them not be villains). I like villains with some complexity, villains with long term plans and especially villains who could be viewed as heroes with just a bit of adjustment in angle.
This leads to a list of fandoms that either seem to be bad fits for me or that I won't touch because the canon either fails to appeal to me or actively repels me-- House, Battlestar Galactica (I can't even be in the room when Scott watches this), Heroes (I can manage to watch this only about half the time), Supernatural, Due South, The Sentinel, Starsky and Hutch, Boston Legal, CSI, Law and Order, Homicide and lots of others that I'm not thinking of just now because, well, why would I?
Anyway, I'm looking for ideas of things to try reading, general fandoms, archives, and such or specific authors or stories.
I'm also interested in suggestions for things to watch. There's nothing I'm currently watching, either via Netflix or on TV, that I feel very strongly connected to or interested in. I'm watching a few things-- both Stargate shows and The Dresden Files-- relatively regularly, but I don't really notice if I miss an episode. Scott tells me about Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. I've liked Dead Like Me, The Invisible Man, The Pretender, Farscape, The West Wing. I didn't like what I tried of Alias. Jeremiah was too violent, and the Sopranos was worse. The X-Files doesn't really work for me (too small a cast and too many horror elements).
::sighs:: I think I'm hoping that reading or watching something good enough, fun enough, will help my mood, ease my anxiety, help me feel less (borderline) depressed. It probably won't help, but it's something that doesn't cost too much to try.
