You got me thinking about those older W/G fics, and this afternoon I did a little rereading, to refresh my memory about the problems I had with them. The following is more to clarify my own thoughts than anything else. Tastes are of course highly subjective, and this is my own highly subjective take on those older fics!
It just seemed from your essay that you were being rather harsh and over-generalising based on possibly a relatively restricted sample, is all.
I spent a lot of time looking through the older W/G archives before I started writing my own fics, and it's no exaggeration to say that if I had found more than a handful of W/G stories I'd enjoyed reading, I wouldn't have felt the need to start writing them myself.
When I said I didn't care for the characterization in such stories, I didn't mean I found them OOC so much - just that the characterizations are rather bland and at times Mary Sueish. (Although I must say Monique's Buffy and Xander being instantly in favor of Willow and Giles hooking up strikes me as very OOC.)
As I said in my essay, I was used to reading highly accomplished fics in other pairings - stories that used language in fresh and interesting ways. By contrast, the writing style in a lot of these older W/G stories is unoriginal, relying a lot on fanon conventions like Willow being called "Wills" and her eyes being "emerald eyes." The sex scenes in particular are highly formulaic and tend to include cliches like "waves of passion." Even though, as a W/G enthusiast, I want to get caught up in these stories, they just aren't stories I can fully enjoy.
Which is probably way more than you wanted to know! But hopefully I've at least clarified my reasons for criticizing these stories.
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those older fics...
Date: 2004-09-17 09:38 pm (UTC)It just seemed from your essay that you were being rather harsh and over-generalising based on possibly a relatively restricted sample, is all.
I spent a lot of time looking through the older W/G archives before I started writing my own fics, and it's no exaggeration to say that if I had found more than a handful of W/G stories I'd enjoyed reading, I wouldn't have felt the need to start writing them myself.
When I said I didn't care for the characterization in such stories, I didn't mean I found them OOC so much - just that the characterizations are rather bland and at times Mary Sueish. (Although I must say Monique's Buffy and Xander being instantly in favor of Willow and Giles hooking up strikes me as very OOC.)
As I said in my essay, I was used to reading highly accomplished fics in other pairings - stories that used language in fresh and interesting ways. By contrast, the writing style in a lot of these older W/G stories is unoriginal, relying a lot on fanon conventions like Willow being called "Wills" and her eyes being "emerald eyes." The sex scenes in particular are highly formulaic and tend to include cliches like "waves of passion." Even though, as a W/G enthusiast, I want to get caught up in these stories, they just aren't stories I can fully enjoy.
Which is probably way more than you wanted to know! But hopefully I've at least clarified my reasons for criticizing these stories.