FIC: was Re: [LMB] Re: Slash (was OT) now Bujold Romance/Slash Meta

[Azalais Aranxta]

On Wed, 3 Jan 2007, quietann wrote:

> I've taken this into the FIC: heading because I give some specific examples
> of Vorkosiverse fic below.
>
> From what I've seen poking around LJ, this is a very common reaction WRT
> fanfic based on Bujold's books.  Or people will be very critical of anyone
> who does not capture "Bujold style" in their works.

That seems unfair to me, because really, you cannot expect a fic
writer--even a good one--to write with the same style as a
published author.  The fic writer's style may be just as good but
it won't really be the same.

This is one of the reasons I find the philosophy behind certain
Potterfic archives bizarre-to-insane; Rowling, like Bujold, has a
very distinctive style which I do not think a fanficcer can or
should try to emulate.  (Lois is ten thousand times better at
worldbuilding and a much nicer person, but they do have that in
common.)

> OTOH, a great deal of Bujold fanfic looks back in time and
> fills in missing pieces of canon.

That's a common motivation for writing fanfic.  It's almost never
*my* motivation, although it was part of the motivation behind
the "House of Ill Faith" Potterfic series I worked on in
2002-2004.

(My motivation for writing fanfic may ostensibly be filling in
missing pieces of canon or addressing some imbalance I see in
canon, but the actual motivation is always this:  a character
who, technically, doesn't belong to me has got into my head and
will not shut up and is telling me stories and demanding I write
them.  My versions of these characters look a lot like the
canonical versions to a lot of people, but there is nearly always
someone who takes violent exception to my portrayal.  I have long
ago stopped caring about this.  As long as there is a
sufficiently large number of people who DO recognise the
character, I'm okay with that.)

> There is actually not a huge amount of Vorkosiverse slash, with
> a few rather notable exceptions (e.g. Gregor/Miles, which just
> seemed wrong to a lot of people, but was done *so* well that it
> became quite believable; By/Ivan, which can be too hilarious
> for words; Simon/Aral which has several interesting
> permutations)  The relationships in the books are as they are,
> and it's not terribly easy to put them aside.

Not only does the Vorkosiverse not generate a lot of slash, it
also does not generate a lot of villainfic.  That is to say, I
have not noticed a lot of fanfiction of any of Lois' works that
purports to be from the POV of the Designated Bad Guys.

There are three types of villainfic.  There are the people who
like Bad Guys *because* they are bad.  I call them the "It's Cool
To Be Evil" contingent.  These people will write fanfiction about
Designated Bad Guys such as Death Eaters, Sith Lords, Klingons,
Cardassians, Wraith and whateverelse have you because they think
that the bad guys get the best lines, wear the best costumes, get
the hottest hotties whether the hotties want them or not, and
they write a lot of slavefic and non-con-pr0n.

There are the people who like to play Devil's Advocate,
literally.  (I have fallen into this contingent in many fandoms.)
They think that the Bad Guys Have Some Points, and that the good
guys aren't as Good as they like to think they are.  Some of them
will write fanfiction that inverts authorial intent, and some of
them will write fanfiction from a perspective where everyone's
kind of morally ambiguous.

Lastly, there are the people who like to Redeem Bad Guys.  Do not
confuse them with Devil's Advocate people--they both hate that.
I used to get so p*ssed off by people who lumped me in with the
Redeem Draco writers, because the last thing in the world I
thought Draco needed to do was start kissing Dumbledore's arse,
which nearly all Redeemed!Dracos do.

In my experience Lois doesn't attract any It's Cool To Be Evil
types because the evil in Lois' work is actually pretty
realistic, which means it's not attractive, even if the character
is physically good looking, because its evil and unpleasant
nature comes through.  She also doesn't attract a lot of Devil's
Advocate types because the evil in her stuff is not only
realistically evil, it's also actually evil, and her good guys
are flawed and imperfect and human but not hypocritical rotters.

There may be some Redemption fic out there; I know some people
who have the occasional temptation to humanise say, Ges, or
Cavilo.  But I've not seen it.

I think my point, and I do have one, is that fill-in-the-blanks
fic is the dominant type of Bujold fic out there for a reason.
Lois writes convincingly enough and makes her ethical case
strongly enough that people don't particularly want to pair the
characters up with different people--they like the relationships
we see--or to say, hey, Maybe The Bharaputras Have A Point.

Lois is a good enough worldbuilder that most people don't want to
take her characters out of her world and write
historical/regency/fantasy AU about them although there is the
occasional entertaining crossover in which we learn that Neville
Longbottom and Cordelia Naismith are related.

> In fact there are quite a few people who try writing
> Vorkosiverse fic *once* and decide it's too hard.

That wouldn't surprise me, but I also think a lot of people don't
*need* to write Vorkosiverse fic because they are perfectly
*satisfied* with the universe as it is.

For instance, I write a lot of fic, but while I often really want
to know what happened when X met Y or whether or not Ethan and
Terence ever got it on, I really want Lois to be the one to tell
me, because I am perfectly happy with her versions of things and
they all seem just right.

I do not have the niggling feeling when I read Bujold that there
is a big white elephant in the room that nobody's willing to talk
about, like I do with Supernatural.  I love SPN canon and don't
much want to change it, but the relationship between Sam and Dean
has all these nuances that the show doesn't deal with because You
Can't Do That On Television (and some of it seems to be the
actors, not the writers).  So I have to write about that.  I do
not have the feeling when I read Bujold that I do when I read
Rowling, that maybe this Malfoy kid is kind of a jerk, but he's
awfully funny, and damn if I don't think he's right about some of
this stuff, and I'm not too thrilled with some of the people that
don't like him.

Reading Lois may leave me with a lot of ideas racing through my
mind and the urge to go Write Something, but it doesn't leave me
feeling that there's something more that needs to be said that
the author will never say because s/he is unwilling or unable to
acknowledge it.  None of her characters ever take up residence in
my brain and refuse to shut up till I tell their side, or the
whole truth, because Lois is already doing that.

And as a result, I'm not horribly interested in what anyone who
is not Lois wants to write about her characters; I'll read it if
a friend wrote it, but meh, it's got to be a slow day--whereas a
story about how Sam and Dean finally make out will get bookmarked
to read later no matter how crazy my day is, unless the warning
labels have one of my squicks in them.

~malfoy :)
****************************************************************
Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy)
ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness

"I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it
think we all bow down." --Christopher Morley