Storm Blowing In. Love It When It Looks Like This.
Storm blowing in. Love it when it looks like this.
More Posts from Anera527 and Others
Fanfic Ask Meme
Alec Hardy remembers and dreams about drowning as much if not more than actually carrying Pipa’s body and that affects me A LOT.
Unpopular opinion:
The biggest problem I have with DT as Crowley is that we are going to inevitably have Crowley/Rose Tyler fics, and when that happens I’m going to flip a table. Leave my ineffable husbands alone please!
I’m fascinated by Tess, and I’ll be perfectly honest in saying I do still ship Alec/Tess. This fic itself isn’t shipping in terms of the show but gives a (hopefully) realistic reasoning as to how Alec and Tess may have first met, how their marriage dynamics would have been, and how their marriage ultimately dissolved.
As a shorter summary, Tess can be a possessive bitch and Alec is too “good” sometimes for his own well-being.
Headcanon: Alec Hardy has a secret love of folk music and he’ll never turn off anything by Peter Paul and Mary, Mady Prior, or Jim Croce. One of his favorite songs was ‘Time In a Bottle’ until he and Tess divorced. Ellie Miller owns several cds by the band Journey and she listens to Queen when she can, although Joe never cared for them so she had to limit when she listened to their music.
They realize each other’s likes in music when they never move to turn those bands off when they play on the radio.
Perhaps I’m mistaken here, but every time I watch BBC Sherlock all the way through, I feel like the dynamic of Sherlock and John changes between TRF and TEH. Sherlock is still the brilliant detective and John is still the faithful blogger and friend; but it’s their individual reactions to St Barts and the subsequent two years that have changed how they react to one another.
Sherlock’s still an insufferable prat most of the time, and he still misses social cues 99.9% of the time, but he’s softer around the edges. The way he interacts with Archie, his reactions to James Sholto locked in his hotel room, his MANY little moments with Mary, all reflect on a man who went through hell during his two years away and rather than becoming even more closed off and alienated than normal actually found it hard to be as much of an island as before. His circle of friends is small but he finds it impossible not to be somewhat gentler to them than before Moriarty’s scheme on the rooftop. Or rather, he had come to care for John and Greg and Mrs Hudson a great deal before the rooftop, but Moriarty forced him to actively prove it and once the lid was popped open it was impossible for it to be sealed completely again.
It’s rather like the Twelfth Doctor, who starts out as oblivious to social cues and more of an anti-hero than any Doctor before, a man who is harsh and unforgiving to those who anger him and has absolutely no recognition of friendship or even the desire to hug; who by the end of his tenure and with the help of his companions, whether it be Clara or Bill or Nardole or even Missy, has softened to the point where he even initiates a hug with Bill and Nardole and clearly has no desire to break it. Of course, Sherlock and the Twelfth Doctor are both written by Moffatt, so it’s not so much of a surprise that their dynamics are so similar.
John, on the other hand, grew sharper due to St Barts and the subsequent two years. His anger with Sherlock’s necessary deception is unrelenting and viscous, and it’s clear that even if he forgave Sherlock of it in TEH we can still see its latent existence all too clearly in TLD. He’s a man who fell to pieces once again in the wake of a life-changing tragedy and when he managed to glue himself back together some of the pieces were either missing or more brittle. He has less patience for Sherlock’s actions, he actively confronts Sherlock about the latter’s drug use during TAB, and I will not even get started in on the morgue scene during TLD. (That will be addressed later in another post eventually.) Where Sherlock’s learned response to the two years-hiatus is newfound understanding, John’s is anger, which all culminates in TLD and finds a somewhat solved dynamic in TFP.
It’s been almost twenty years, but I still tear up every time I hear the Hobbits’ theme played any time during the LotR and Hobbit soundtracks.
Absolute. Perfection.
But why fanfiction?
I got asked again recently why I write fanfiction and not ‘proper books’ (I’m pretty open about my fic writing, I’m not ashamed). I told them what I’ve told everyone else - I’ve done both and this is so much better.
I self-published a YA novel a few years back, the plot of which I was super proud of, and I even have ideas for two sequels, but they’ll never see the light of day. I just have no motivation to write them, and world building is hard and that amount of effort just doesn’t seem worth it.
See, everyone I knew wanted to read my novel, but no one wanted to buy it. Probably about 40 people read it but I only sold 16 copies, and for the effort to format text into a publishable format, the cost of ordering proof copies only to find it was wrong and to do it all again, and the stress of the whole process was just so not worth those few dollars that I made. But I knew going into it that I wasn’t going to be one of those fairy tale stories of an unknown author suddenly becoming a sensation overnight. The story was too obscure, set in Western Australia and wasn’t an ‘outback romance’ which is the only ones that seem to be popular in this setting. I’m more than okay with that because I have fanfiction now.
The difference? I have thousands of people reading my stories, and not just reading them, but I get feedback from some of them (never enough, we authors are fickle creatures who always want more comments, more interacton, more discussion). The thing is though, fanfiction gives me an audience that I will never have from my YA novel. That audience already exists, it’s out there, and they’re hungry for the story to continue. Not all fanfiction is successful - the people who read it aren’t a mindless mass; they have expectations, standards, itches that need scratching. Quality matters, but not just the quality of the writing but of the idea. It’s not just formulaic bullshit that a ghost writer can churn out, change the names but the plot is the same and then throw a big name author on the cover and it’s instantly a bestseller. We’re forgiving of small mistakes if the plot makes us want to keep reading until dawn lights the horizon, we’ll salute the authors who write in English when it’s not their native language and will gladly offer help with those phrases that they’re not sure of, and best of all, we stick together to protect and support each other from annon hate so those ideas have a safe place to grow. We’re a community, a family.
Fanfiction has also given me a platform to improve my writing. Looking back at the standard of my work at the very beginning (and even in my novel) I cringe now at how terrible it was. I’ve written over 1,200,000 words of fanfiction and I’m forever improving. I know how to properly punctuate dialogue tags now, my vocabulary has expanded, I’m not afraid to use adverbs just because some twat said ‘show, not tell’ is better. If an adverb makes the story flow better than three extra waffly sentences then I’ll damned well use it and be proud of it. I’m more confident in my writing and that shows in the quality. I would never have gained that confidence by selling fifty thousand books to ‘silent readers’. It’s the interaction, the feedback, the community that fanfic has that has made me a better writer.
So that’s why I prefer to write fanfic over ‘proper books’ and I will fight anyone who says that we’re not real writers. At the end of the day, people read fiction to be entertained and if I can honestly say that thousands of people from all over the world have been entertained by my fanfiction, that makes me a real bloody writer.
