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sarasa_catI've been thinking about the kinds of video game fanfic I most want to write (and read) versus the kind of fanfic I find easiest to write.
Easiest to write: fanfic that diverges from canon, or is mostly divorced from canon, or doesn't really rely on canon at all. "What if" fic, AU, or fic that borrows the canonical characters and/or setting purely for my own purposes to tell whatever story I wish. (Most of the prompt fic I write falls into this category).
Most want to write: fanfic that is Quite Tightly Aligned with canon, but rather than just existing a straight-forward retelling (novelization) of the canon, the story contributes additional layers of meta-analysis and depth to the canon, serving as a dialogue with the canon itself. (For each video game that has inspired me to write fanfic, THIS category of fic is always what I draft first and think about the most, but isn't necessarily what I finish first.).
The above creates an odd contradiction. I've never been interested in slavish novelizations of anything. In fanfic, I cringe for reasons I cannot name whenever I read (or write) exact lines or scenes from a video game's canon. I already know the canonical story so I don't need it retold to me. On the other hand, I am interested in everything unspoken that goes on inside characters' heads. I'm interested in alternate points of view that add to the overall story. I want the missing scenes and, when a video game allows players to create a custom protagonist, I want their point of view, particularly if that point of view says something interesting to me about the story and the world -- something different from the way I experienced it.
The thing I struggle with is doing this kind of novelization-style metafiction well and writing it in such a way that the story actually adds something of value as it weaving through the existing threads of canon.
All of this is why I find it so much easier to do the other thing -- to write fanfic that takes some random idea and runs with it, canon be damned! For me, fanfic like this can be a lot of fun to write but I think I enjoy writing this kind of fanfic less and less each year I'm in fandom because unless the story is short or it is gift-fic for someone else, I often wonder why I'm not developing the story further and writing it as original fiction instead. And, when I read this kind of fic, I find it hit or miss whether the story keeps my interest because the further it diverges from canon and my understanding of the characters (especially!), the more I start wishing I was reading that story as original fiction.
When I'm reading fanfic that has been written more or less as a novelization *and* the story provides me with that fic author's thoughts and feelings and experiences with the canon, that interests me. That fanfic becomes dialogue about the canon. In video games, especially games with highly detailed worlds and multi-pathed parallel "canons" that are based on players' choices, this sort of story as dialogue about canon becomes a really interesting space to explore, at least to me.
There's also a middle ground in here: stories that are written as alternate canon where the canonical story suddenly takes a left turn, and the character go down a completely canon-believable alternate path that the game itself was not written to explore.
But either with novelization-style stories told through the protagonist's eyes or through an alternate POV, and with these middle-ground stories, within the Dragon Age games, the canon is chock full of things that are under-explored. So many hints waiting to be unpacked and dots waiting to be connected. And then there are all of the different ways that any particular Hawke or Warden could think and feel and believe as they experience the on-screen events of the game and, perhaps of more interest to me, all of those other hours, days, weeks, months, (and for Hawke, years) that happen off screen but that logically connect on-screen events together. And then there are all of the alternate points of view and along with the roads that are and aren't taken.
To me, what is most interesting in this kind of fanfic is the opportunity for meta -- the opportunity to say something interesting that adds to canon or illuminates canon. Usually these stories add something new to the canon that slips right in, weaving between existing canonical threads, which tends to be far more interesting than playing canon slavishly straight.
All of this gets back to why the fanfic I most want to write is always the first story I think of, the first idea that makes me want to participate in a fandom, but also the most difficult for me to write. I play a video game. I have an experience. I start thinking about what is going on behind the scenes. I have something I want to say but getting all of this into a story that is interesting and that truly weaves right into canon is far more difficult than just winging it and writing "what ifs" or AUs or random tangents, short character studies, PWP and kink prompts, or anything else that isn't really saying something directly about the canon itself.
Or, it's easier to just tell a story than to tell a story about a story. ;)
YMMV.
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Date: Sunday, 26 January 2014 04:17 am (UTC)Lots of different taxonomies for AU are here: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Alternate_Universe
Here's how I tend to break it down:
Alternate Universe = Radical divergence from canon by doing any one or more of the following:
1. Alternate setting: Placing the characters a different setting. For Dragon Age examples include coffee shop AU, roaring 1920s AU, "Dragon Effect" (dragon age characters living entirely inside mass effect's universe), ...
2. Alternate physics/rules: Radically altering how the world works. For Dragon Age examples could include everyone is a mage, magic no longer exists, A/B/O dynamics exist among the entire population, ...
3. Alternate history: Radically altering how major historical events shaped the current world. For Dragon Age, Tevinter still rules all of the known world in 9:30+, the Qun rule most of the Free Marches, etc.
4. Cross-overs & pastiches: Merging of two or more universes. For Dragon Age, merging Thedas with one of the Final Fantasy universes, characters can travel across the two maps and engage in each other's affairs. Rewriting DA2 where Hawke is a fictional creation (hawke doesn't exist) and the entire story is a tongue-in-cheek pastiche with "Fight Club" ("hawke" is the fictional persona of the story's narrator, a la tyler durden)
5. Alternate erotic characterizations/situations: Characters and situations are purposefully changed to provide a story vehicle for porn, PWP, and/or erotica. For Dragon Age, s/D societies within the Circles, contemporary BSDM kink with paper-thin fantasy veneer, etc.
6. Swap-verses: Cast is genderswapped. Society's levels are power-swapped. etc. For Dragon Age, the elves are in power and the humans live in slums. DA:O with bumbling Warden Alice, the almost ex-templar; Stena the Qunari warrior woman, Anorick the ambitious son of female war Hero Loghanna, etc.
Alternate Canon (and canon additions) = Adherence to canon while making minor changes, minor additions, or specific canonical selections or branchings.
1. Alternate character paths: additions or changes that change a character's plot arc *without* changing the larger story arc. For Dragon Age, DA:O's events play out exactly the same as in game except the warden recruits extra characters (Ser Gilmore, Shianni, Cullen) into the party. DA2 as-is but with the inclusion of Templar Knight Captain Cullen written as if he was a recruitable, romanceable "DLC" character.
2. Additions that don't break canon, aka "Gap Filler" and "Missing Scenes": When there is no evidence that some event did not happen, declaring that they event DID happen during an off screen time gap. For Dragon Age, assuming that Isabela/Aveline sex for the sake of sex occurred. Assuming that Hawke frequently has dinner with Bran to discuss politics after Hawke is declared Champion. Etc. The key is that they don't break existing canon but, instead, weave into the canon.
3a. Canonical branchings (aka, local canon): Declaring that a game-possible event is canon within a universe. For Dragon Age, the official post-game comics are Alt-canon/local canon with King Alistair and all of the other assumptions that have been made about DA:O+DA2. Anyone writing a story about how Warden Brosca defeats the archdemon while romancing Alistair is writing local canon. Etc. One alt-canon does not invalidate another alt-canon: Alistair, Bethany, and Carver each have many possible alt-canon lives, all equally valid but all cannot simultaneously coexist (Bethany cannot simultaneously be a warden and a circle mage and dead at the same exact moment in time).
3b. Unsupported canon-parallel branchings: Declaring that a theoretically possible or probable event is local canon within a specific universe, particularly when the game doesn't have branching paths or doesn't address certain branches. Example from FinalFantasy XII (which has ZERO on screen romance despite all the eye-sex and a non-branching storyline), Penelo's very close canonical friendship with the (very) young Lord Larsa (next in line to become emperor) is amended/changed in fanfic to have Larsa declare that he plans on proposing to Penelo. (This doesn't effect the main story line at all but -- oh wow -- it adds one hell of a complication!)
Could be either AU and Alt-Canon, depending on how much it changes the canonical story
1. Averting Death: Keeping canon generally the same except a character who is confirmed as dead or believed to be dead is instead kept alive. If this change happens early in the canonical story, it can radically change the canon and becomes more of a "what if" AU. From Dragon Age, both Bethany and Carver survive. Wesley survives but Aveline does not.
2. Deviated character paths and "what ifs": What if Alistair tries to be king and a grey warden at the same time? What if Cullen did his job and mage!Hawke was taken to the circle during Act 1? What if Hawke is forced into an arranged marriage but everything else plays out the same?
...
Getting back to what I wrote in my original post, while all of those different categories of AU and Alt-Canon provide space for interesting stories, in my experience, the kinds of stories that actually SAY something about the original story require some sort of metafictive device, else it is impossible to provide that layer that SAYS something.
Genderswap and powerswap AU are great for metafictive explorations where as alternate settings tend to be hit and miss, mostly miss. Alternate erotic characterizations/situations rarely have metafictive components although there are a few writers who specialize in this but the ones I thinking of aren't DA writers.
In my experience with AUs, I'm most likely to see interesting metafictive explorations that say something about the original media when the writer has something to say and uses alt physics/rules or swap-verses as the device for setting up what it is that they want to explore. Most of the AUs I've read feel far more like borrowed character fiction, which is fine in its own right. I've written a lot of it. But it usually isn't saying very much about the canon.
On the other hand, alt-canon and straight-up canon additions adhere much closer to canon so there is a lot more opportunity to say something interesting about the canon itself (metafiction) while also telling a story (fiction).
My original point up above is that assuming someone is comfortable with writing, it is far easier to just tell a story that you feel like telling rather than tell a story that simultaneously says something about the original canon. One of my disappointments with dragon age fanfic (much of my own posted fic falls into this category) is that so much of it is stories that people feel like telling, which is great and many stories are well written, but so little of it seems to actually SAY something about the canon itself.
For the characters and situations I'm most interested in, it is actually quite difficult for me to find fanfic that adheres to canon and to characterizations that simultaneously feel "in-character" (to me) while also saying something *more* than what canon already says.
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Date: Sunday, 26 January 2014 08:09 am (UTC)I agree that it's very difficult to write something that is meta-fanfiction. Have you found any DA metafiction? Because I'm really curious to read it :)
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Date: Sunday, 26 January 2014 08:35 am (UTC)I'm certain such stories exist there and I just haven't found it. I've heard of a few DA stories that fall into this specific kind of metafiction but I haven't read them and have mostly just heard tidbits in passing so I don't have links. It's just another case of DA fandom feeling (at least to me) a good bit different from prior fandoms I've been in.
I'd love to find fan fiction that blatantly explores Kirkwall and DA2's in an intertextually/interdiscursively aware manner, where the story is, at one level, just a story, but at another level the story is commentary about Thedas, be it any of the following:
1. Parodical exposés of where bioware's writers went down a problematic path.
2. Deep meta that makes a serious attempt at unpacking how societies in Thedas might really work based on the canon given to us.
3. Further deconstruction of how DA2+Hawke's story is a deconstruction of heroic fantasy.
[** discounting some projects I and a co-conspirator are quietly working on, both together and separately]
Most of the Kirkwall-based DA2 fic I find is fluff for the sake of fluff, romance for the sake of romance, or erotica/smut/porn/kink. The longer stories that follow a plot tend to be pretty good but ... they feel more like borrowed character fanfic than canon-exploration fanfic.
I sometimes wonder if the controversy and difficulty in DA2's canon scare people off from exploring it.
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Date: Sunday, 26 January 2014 08:54 am (UTC)Tbh, I think the DA2 storyline was fairly mature and the significance of it escaped a lot of general gamers... who were just left confused about why Hawke didn't quite seem like a 'hero' by the end.
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Date: Sunday, 26 January 2014 09:20 am (UTC)As for Hawke not being a hero, I've bookmarked some of foxghost's stories. She's written a variety of jerkass Hawkes.
Whether or not many people are confused by how DA2 deconstructs the heroic fantasy, I suspect the confrontational tenor of the fandom pushes a lot of people out. Not sure if my ever decreasing participation makes me see less and less of the confrontational nature or if the fandom is calming down in anticipation of DA:I, but during the first year or so after DA2 was out, there was far too much moralizing and insisting that there is one correct way to play the game, one correct way to write fanfic, and anything else means that you are a nazi sympathizer.