Fragmented musings on the differences from fandom to fandom

I know that some of you have been surfing fandoms for years, if not decades. I, however, am a novice to this practice. Or I feel like a novice although actually, I have been 'out' of lotrips and reading in other fandoms for around 1 1/2 years now.

But I'm not getting into these other fandoms. I'm not getting into the communal swooning and drooling. Still, that's not really what this post is about. This post is trying to come to grips with some of the differences among fandoms at the level of fanfic prose style.

In order to figure this out, I went and revisited some old lotrips favourites and it is true: I came across formulations and ways with words I have not encountered like this in any of the other fandoms I've visited since -- and that would be HP, mainly, plus a sprinkling of Stargate and Blake's 7. The comparison is made more interesting by my almost complete and blissful ignorance of Stargate and Blake's 7 canon; I am relying solely upon the fanfic here so am getting maybe a 'purer' dose of fanfic style than if I were familiar with canon (and, for that matter, fanon -- but I take these fics to be representative of some underlying fanon as, after all, each individual fic goes to make up the fanon).

Here are some of the types of sentences I used to find not infrequently in lotrips:

Example 1
He can't stand it, the sight, the sensation; can't stand it, body tensing, weakening; falls back, can't stand, lets the door catch him [...]
[...] begging for Sean's orgasm, for Sean's cum; and when it starts, the part of Sean that can still think, thinks that when Orli is asking so nicely, Sean shouldn't give so violently; but Sean's body isn't thinking, isnt' considerate or considering [...] ¹

Example 2
Dom pressed up against him felt like thunder trapped in skin, thunder, which made him think of lightning, because thunder was just the sound lightning made when it arced through the sky, displacing air and moisture, discharging energy. And it all seemed so appropriate, Dom-thunder and Billy-lightning, because he knew he could be lightning for Dominic. He knew he could. ²

There was often something rather lyrical about lotrips fic, an experimentation with words and syntax, an interesting playing around with repetition, alliteration and metaphor: The 'stand'/'standing' wordplay in example 1, and the thunder-and-lightning in example 2. There was also a crawling into the minutiae of sex, the use of sex to work out nuances of character and relationship (eyebrowofdoom did this a lot, and ukcalico, just to cite two that come to mind, but a lot of writers were doing this in lotrips).

Maybe it's only now that I've been out of lotrips that I'm coming to notice this as a peculiarity of not fanfic in general but of lotrips in particular. Maybe it was the rps nature of the fandom, (but the Nsync fics I've read don't do this to that extent), maybe it was the romance of New Zealand and the chamaeleon-like quality of the protagonists, but I tend to think it was probably the way fanon developed very early on in the game in interaction with the first slew of huggy-kissy pics and those photos of sunlight flying off the hair and skin of boys in bathing suits, holding surfboards and each others' shoulders. It also seems to have been an interesting interaction of authors with fandom; thejennabides, for example, had written in Buffy fandom before but it wasn't until lotrips that she delved into that intense experimentation with words which ended up being almost abstract.

The one thing that lotrips was never very interested in was complex plotting. I remember how surprised I was, several months into lotrips, to read pecos's unusually complexly (for lotrips) plotted fics. They reminded me of early Star Trek fics (I hadn't read much other fps at that stage!).

I think that fps is in general more weighted towards the plot bit than rps. Nsync, lotrips and, um, Wainthropp fic (where plot was more or less, um, evacuated for zaniness and, of course, deep and sophisticated characterisation, not to mention refined description of knitwear -- but I digress) are limited in their plottiness -- whoops, in my enthusiasm I just mistook Wainthropp for rps, silly me. The canon does feel so real, *weak laugh*

No, but back to my line of thought: RPS, I suppose, lends itself less to plots because the ready-made plot universe and action characteristic of the kinds of canon appropriated for fandom is absent. In lotrips, we had a bunch of actors. They didn't really do much for us to know about beyond standing around for the cameras. But in FPS, we have a diversity of professions, we have other worlds, we have shootings and deadlines and threats to world survival and emergencies and general runnings arounds. We have plot! Conceivably, there might be a less-plotful type of FPS, if, say, we appropriated Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf rather than J.K.Rowling but the types of canon that get chosen to be fandommed tend to be of the rather plotty kind, and more often than not, revolve around a) space travel, b) fantasy, or c) cops.

Anyway, I have noticed that in HP or Stargate you tend to get this type of sentence:

Example 3
After the fourth piece of furniture was pulverized by a misdirected spell, though, McGonagall suggested that they carry out the testing outdoors as long as the good weather held out. And as there were still parts of the grounds that even the birds wouldn't fly over, this meant that Harry and Malfoy had to spend several days together squinting to disarm mines that barely showed up in the sunlight [...] ³

Example 4
They took a break for a late lunch, having made some very interesting progress. The funny thing was, now that Rodney had a metaphysical rationale for absurdity, a whole lot of Ancient technology started making sense. The tooth fairy was causing problems, but once they posited an infinite number of massively multidimensional realities, and that minds were subject to the laws of the reality they believed in, unless the realities interacted under force of sentient will, the rest was fairly straightforward.

The hard part was the math, which Rodney was having to do by hand. [...] ⁴

The comparison is perhaps slightly skewed because both of these fps fics also have plenty of sex (although, interestingly, I would estimate that the overall percentage of sex-per-fic is much higher in lotrips than in fps fics I've read), so it may be a little unfair to compare lotrips sex sentences with fps non-sex sentences. The point is that such non-sex plot-type sentences are very common in the fps I've read but they are almost non-existent in lotrips. And perhaps even the sex, at the level of syntax, rhythm and word choice, is different in fps from the way it is in lotrips. That would be another post, then. Huh. But as a quick note my impression is that fps (the ones I've read) deals more in complete sentences, even in sex, than lotrips which liked to veer towards the allusive and elusive, the run-on sentence, the sentence fragment.

It's not that one is better or hotter than the other. It is true that my emotions were more engaged and cathected in lotrips but my fic-appreciation goes across the fandoms, and some of the best fics I've read come from outside of lotrips. But it is the case that they are different. And having learned to write in the one fandom, lotrips, I am having difficulties adjusting to writing (not reading) in another (HP).

The reason I found zarah5's HP fic so interesting was that here was an author I was familiar with from lotrips, doing an HP fic in what I perceived to be a 'lotrips mode'. I, myself, haven't quite managed to figure out what my new 'voice' is to be in HP. I'm not good at plotting, or at least, I feel not good or not practiced at plotting, but the lyricism feels wrong when applied to HP -- or maybe that's just the pressure of fanon exerting itself, and I am too weak to withstand it and erect my own?

Anyway, these are just some musings from somebody who thought she knew all about slashy goodness and now finds herself floundering and wandering in a much larger world than initially envisaged.



Notes
1) Example 1 is from chapter 1 of thejennabides's Happiness (More or Less).

2) Example 2 is from shaenie's Cusp.

3) Example 3 is from resonant8's Transfigurations.

4) Example 4 is from julad's Absurdity Theory.