mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2024-09-25 10:22 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2024-09-25 10:22 pm
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Fanfiction narrow-down: the "nos"
This is pretty much just... for posterity, I guess.
It's been slower going than hoped, but I've been trying to narrow down all the different ideas I've had for fics and for original works and figure out what things I want to maybe at least think of working on. My hope is to get a decent "bank" of ideas outlined, so that it's easier for future-me to find things to work on. Part of my struggle for the last... well, year or so, has been that I just didn't know what TO work on. Every time I'd try to settle on something, it just felt like so much work to start a new thing, and I'd just sort of spin my wheels.
My hope is that if I can get a few things outlined, then it'll be easier for me to pick them up when I'm ready to get to writing. If I can get a few with some actual writing progress, maybe I will have enough things at different stages of completion that I can jump in on them with whatever I have the energy for.
I don't know for sure that'll work as hoped: I traditionally really do not like switching back and forth between projects. However... I don't know if focusing solely on one thing is always the best either, especially when it comes to long projects. Too often I wind up getting burned out on that One Thing, and then I'm stuck because I don't want to work on anything else. It also means that I will forever be stuck having to choose between different types of work: if I'm only doing one thing at a time, then if I want to write original things, I have to forgo writing fic. If I want to work on the long passion-project fic, I'm resigning myself to nothing else for a year or two. So... giving this a try.
My first round of cuts was looking at my list of fic ideas and narrowing it down to things I was still interested in. The list is currently at 234 fic ideas... granted, an awful lot of those date back to high school (even earlier?), and are for fandoms I haven't been into in a decade or more, ha. Just as many of the ideas are... bad. Lol.
So I narrowed it down to 20 ideas that I had the most interest in. The oldest that made it to the list was #172. The newest was #231.
After narrowing it down, these seven were my first round of cuts:
I have fondness for this idea, which was the first SH idea I remember ever having. That said, it reads a little bit like it. It’s a bit too obvious/in-fandom cliche: a girl comes to the town under mysterious circumstances, looking for a friend that she lost contact with until finding out she was in the town. I might someday try to rework some of the ideas, because I genuinely like some of them, but as it is now, it doesn’t work as well as I would want it to.
This is a reworked version of a fic my ex girlfriend and I were going to co-write. We never got more than a few chapters in, and I granted it to her in the breakup. It was called “I’ll Meet You With a Smile,” I think, when we were writing it. There were parts of it I never loved, and characterization and ship preferences within the fandom that we didn't agree on, but that I mostly let her decide on for the fic. It was a kind of over-dramatic contemporary AU - mostly high school and college AU, and all the various groups coming back together over summer vacation. (She was on her first semester of college; I was on my second year, so it felt topical at the time, I think.)
My new version of it is for my preferred ships instead of the ones we were cowriting, and is more of a cafe/small-town AU. It centered around some of the characters setting up a queer-friendly/queer-oriented cafe, and then having the various characters meet and hook up and get together. I think parts of that idea would be cute, but overall I’m not that interested in spending a lot of time on a glorified coffee shop AU, even if it’s broader than that.
This was purely spitefic. The prevalence of antis within the fandom, and particularly when they at one point had targeted a specific acquaintance of mine within the fandom, this was a fic collection that she’d proposed. In canon there’s an area that’s held a bit out of time, which the characters canonically use for training (I think; idk, I never made it to that part of canon) and the proposal was to use that as a setting for any and everyone’s ships of choice having messy kinky sex out of spite for the purity police. I really wanted to participate, but at this point that was YEARS ago, and I feel like the fires of spite have died. At the time I was still working up to trying to put a sex scene to page, but now it feels like it’s been too long for this one. (I don’t even know if the collection ever went up or if anyone ever wrote anything for it, heh.)
These two stories have a really great aesthetic similarity that I want SO BADLY to exploit. (Apparently I’m not entirely alone - the same artist apparently did the official tie-in comics for both series?) But the whole “multiple Londons” of SoM, plus the clear alternate/fantasy!London of Dishonored… And in Dishonored, the Outsider as the chaos/trickster god, with the black eyes… while in SoM they have the Antari, the uniquely gifted magic-workers who have… single black eyes.
The tiniest little seed of an idea is that the city of Dishonored is one that’s somehow been sundered from the Black/White/Red/Grey Londons, and that the creation of the Outsider (implied in canon to have been a deliberate act, where some group tortured a young man in a ritual attempt) being a failed attempt to create an Antari.
Now, I really like and vibe with this idea. HOWEVER. This is another of those things that would require quite the canon refresh: I’d need to reread the original trilogy for SoM at least (plus there’s now the second trilogy coming out) and I’d need to replay the various games, only one of which I own. (Or find some really thorough let’s plays.)
This was a pretty minor idea from back when I’d just finished the fic (my superhero AU). The idea of a follow-up where Aqua, Terra, and Ventus show up, because there are still dimensional instabilities. I think the main idea was that Xehanort, having been the big bad of Potentials, is a bigger threat than known; something of a dimensional parasite, creating destruction in every dimension he manages to reach, and he’s unlikely to have been destroyed after the events of Potentials. Mostly I feel like I have moved on from this idea. I still like it, but that fic was years ago now, and I have lots of other things I’d rather write. I particularly feel like this isn’t where I’d want to dump the energy of having to figure out all the KH canon that I never got to, haha.
This was a very silly idea, I think, but it really did grab hold for a short time. The idea was that it was set in the Firefly universe, and Simon had hired Hardison (and maybe the rest of the team) to help save River (since he’d said he’d had help finding her, when she was brought on board Serenity.) Alternatively, he hires them eventually to try and rescue the others who were being held in the same facility/for the same purposes. I don’t think I ever got much farther than that, except that I think there’d be some fun character interactions, but there’s not really anything else underpinning the whole idea.
I feel like timeloop fix-its for ST were pretty much a dime a dozen, or at least that was my impression a few steps removed from the fandom itself. This one was not a timeloop, per se; but Steve winding up going through every possible different dimension until he could find one where everything worked out correctly and Eddie survived. Maybe a timeloop would really make more sense, since I wasn’t truly utilizing any weird AU ideas for the different dimensions he was going through. Buuuut I am who I am as a person, so I also had him figuring out that he could save MORE people - Chrissie, being the main one. Not his original goal, but in going through incarnations over and over with her, he couldn’t leave her behind and wound up falling in love with her a bit, too. I think I made it just a giant polycule by the end, because it was sort of one of those “now that I’ve spent so much time with all of these people I can’t give up any of them.” I like the idea, but I’m not into Stranger Things enough to put in the effort that pulling this sort of thing off well would require.
That left me with lucky thirteen ideas remaining. I cut five more.
This is technically three ideas rather than one, but I'd lumped them together. The three were somewhat interconnected SH stories that expanded on a few repeat characters I planned to focus on for a sort of ongoing set of fics around Silent Hill. "Doctor" was about a woman investigating mysterious deaths at a Silent Hill hospital; "Internship" was about a girl who got a job interning at the historical society and was drawn into the cult; and "Revival" was about the cult having an underground revival post-SH3 (since it’s stated that Douglas largely exposed the cult and what they tried to do to Heather, and the cult disbanded after that.)
I like all of that, but lack any particularly strong plot elements for any of them but the first one. I could, I suppose make these into shorter fics. These were all originally intended to expand on characters that would be mentioned in a different ongoing fic, the one codenamed “Documentary.” Because of that, I think these ones are safe to put on hold until and unless I actually write that fic, at which point these could be short sequel or tie-in type stories for it.
Well, there’s real unfortunately all the allegations against Neil Gaiman, which makes me pretty uninterested in ideas focused on works of his. The original idea was about the “what if Kairi was a literal falling star” thought that also led to the Howl’s Moving Castle crossover.
There are things that lent really well to this as a crossover - the numbered siblings meshing well with the numbered organization members, for instance. There are aspects of this that I think would be fun, especially because I enjoyed the Howl's Moving Castle one so much, and liked the fantasy fairy tale vibes. I was reluctant initially because of it being another thing that needs a canon refresh. Now it’s not a canon I want to refresh particularly, so that kind of makes that decision for me.
The Zero Escape series is one I really love, but am way too intimidated to write fic for. It’s such a weird series, I don’t know that I can match the vibe.
In the second game, there's one aspect that's a very deliberate tragedy: that in the timeline that leads to Virtue's Last Reward, Junpei never sees Akane again after the events of 999, despite spending years and years looking for her. This is meant to be a tragic thing for those characters! However, I was more upset in VLR about the fact that Aoi isn't there! After everything HE did to make the events of 999 happen, to save her, he doesn't even get mentioned!? THAT was more upsetting to me, and I had a much harder time believing she could cut Aoi out of her life as opposed to Junepei. (I will say that according to some meta I read somewhere, Aoi was supposedly helping with the events of VLR, but I do not remember seeing that confirmed in canon. I do need to replay the game.)
So for this stupid fic idea: with both Junpei and Aoi being left behind by Akane, I really just wanted them to have the worst toxic hookup ever. I don’t hate the idea, but I also feel a little bad having that be the only thing I’d write for the fandom, ha.
I’ve looked at Twilight as a whole thing... I was a Twilight-hater for a while, and then did try to give it a fairer shot, but it was still deeply not my thing. I can recognize how it IS candy for someone’s id, just not mine! But looking at it that way made me feel like... well, what WOULD make it appeal to my id?
I mean, personally, my id latches onto queer poly stories, and I feel like that could actually work pretty well within the Twilight structure, with how close-knit and insular the main family is and all. It’d be a fun source of drama, even, that it’s not just one character falling for this outsider character, but that it’s also fitting this in with preexisting relationships. And that’s always how I want to resolve love triangle, so bring the werewolf along!
At the same time, if I want to focus on rewriting a story from the ground up to appeal specifically to me as a self-indulgent exercise... well, why wouldn’t I put that energy toward my OWN story, instead of on dismantling/rebuilding one that I didn’t even like?
This is one that has existed in some form or another for a really long time, though got a kind of idea revamp within the last few years. I remember the first seed of the idea when I was in high school, so it goes back a ways! The original idea was sort of like... a mafia war of sorts, I think between rival families. The first incarnation may have been Riku/Sora, but I feel like it became an OT3 fic pretty early on? Anyway, I wrote up the sort of conclusion to this idea (though a bit different than the original way I’d envisioned it) for one of the AUgust fics. I’d hoped that would get it out of my system for good, but it didn’t quite. Instead of the rival family thing, I’d made it into a crime family son being pushed to marry a political family daughter, and then their mutual love interest, with an OT3 ending. The newer version of it that I've been thinking of basically has Riku and Kairi deciding to try and outdo each other at being Sora’s sugar daddies. I feel like this could be fun to write, pretty light-hearted despite the whole “mafia/political corruption forced marriage” angle. But I really DID get the conclusion out of my system already, so it doesn’t feel all that pressing. I might still come back to it.
Ultimately, I wound up with eight fic ideas that I want to move forward with for now.
That doesn't mean that none of the above will ever get used... I could come back to almost any of these eventually. (The fact that I can't really think up a good plot for the Shades of Magic/Dishonored crossover pains me. Those Silent Hill fics might see the light of day eventually. Any of the others could possibly strike me with the bat of inspiration and move up the priority list.)
It's been slower going than hoped, but I've been trying to narrow down all the different ideas I've had for fics and for original works and figure out what things I want to maybe at least think of working on. My hope is to get a decent "bank" of ideas outlined, so that it's easier for future-me to find things to work on. Part of my struggle for the last... well, year or so, has been that I just didn't know what TO work on. Every time I'd try to settle on something, it just felt like so much work to start a new thing, and I'd just sort of spin my wheels.
My hope is that if I can get a few things outlined, then it'll be easier for me to pick them up when I'm ready to get to writing. If I can get a few with some actual writing progress, maybe I will have enough things at different stages of completion that I can jump in on them with whatever I have the energy for.
I don't know for sure that'll work as hoped: I traditionally really do not like switching back and forth between projects. However... I don't know if focusing solely on one thing is always the best either, especially when it comes to long projects. Too often I wind up getting burned out on that One Thing, and then I'm stuck because I don't want to work on anything else. It also means that I will forever be stuck having to choose between different types of work: if I'm only doing one thing at a time, then if I want to write original things, I have to forgo writing fic. If I want to work on the long passion-project fic, I'm resigning myself to nothing else for a year or two. So... giving this a try.
My first round of cuts was looking at my list of fic ideas and narrowing it down to things I was still interested in. The list is currently at 234 fic ideas... granted, an awful lot of those date back to high school (even earlier?), and are for fandoms I haven't been into in a decade or more, ha. Just as many of the ideas are... bad. Lol.
So I narrowed it down to 20 ideas that I had the most interest in. The oldest that made it to the list was #172. The newest was #231.
After narrowing it down, these seven were my first round of cuts:
Silent Hill: "Carnival"
I have fondness for this idea, which was the first SH idea I remember ever having. That said, it reads a little bit like it. It’s a bit too obvious/in-fandom cliche: a girl comes to the town under mysterious circumstances, looking for a friend that she lost contact with until finding out she was in the town. I might someday try to rework some of the ideas, because I genuinely like some of them, but as it is now, it doesn’t work as well as I would want it to.
Kingdom Hearts: "Birds of a Feather"
This is a reworked version of a fic my ex girlfriend and I were going to co-write. We never got more than a few chapters in, and I granted it to her in the breakup. It was called “I’ll Meet You With a Smile,” I think, when we were writing it. There were parts of it I never loved, and characterization and ship preferences within the fandom that we didn't agree on, but that I mostly let her decide on for the fic. It was a kind of over-dramatic contemporary AU - mostly high school and college AU, and all the various groups coming back together over summer vacation. (She was on her first semester of college; I was on my second year, so it felt topical at the time, I think.)
My new version of it is for my preferred ships instead of the ones we were cowriting, and is more of a cafe/small-town AU. It centered around some of the characters setting up a queer-friendly/queer-oriented cafe, and then having the various characters meet and hook up and get together. I think parts of that idea would be cute, but overall I’m not that interested in spending a lot of time on a glorified coffee shop AU, even if it’s broader than that.
Kingdom Hearts: "All the Fucks We Give"
This was purely spitefic. The prevalence of antis within the fandom, and particularly when they at one point had targeted a specific acquaintance of mine within the fandom, this was a fic collection that she’d proposed. In canon there’s an area that’s held a bit out of time, which the characters canonically use for training (I think; idk, I never made it to that part of canon) and the proposal was to use that as a setting for any and everyone’s ships of choice having messy kinky sex out of spite for the purity police. I really wanted to participate, but at this point that was YEARS ago, and I feel like the fires of spite have died. At the time I was still working up to trying to put a sex scene to page, but now it feels like it’s been too long for this one. (I don’t even know if the collection ever went up or if anyone ever wrote anything for it, heh.)
Shades of Magic x Dishonored crossover
These two stories have a really great aesthetic similarity that I want SO BADLY to exploit. (Apparently I’m not entirely alone - the same artist apparently did the official tie-in comics for both series?) But the whole “multiple Londons” of SoM, plus the clear alternate/fantasy!London of Dishonored… And in Dishonored, the Outsider as the chaos/trickster god, with the black eyes… while in SoM they have the Antari, the uniquely gifted magic-workers who have… single black eyes.
The tiniest little seed of an idea is that the city of Dishonored is one that’s somehow been sundered from the Black/White/Red/Grey Londons, and that the creation of the Outsider (implied in canon to have been a deliberate act, where some group tortured a young man in a ritual attempt) being a failed attempt to create an Antari.
Now, I really like and vibe with this idea. HOWEVER. This is another of those things that would require quite the canon refresh: I’d need to reread the original trilogy for SoM at least (plus there’s now the second trilogy coming out) and I’d need to replay the various games, only one of which I own. (Or find some really thorough let’s plays.)
Kingdom Hearts: Potentials sequel
This was a pretty minor idea from back when I’d just finished the fic (my superhero AU). The idea of a follow-up where Aqua, Terra, and Ventus show up, because there are still dimensional instabilities. I think the main idea was that Xehanort, having been the big bad of Potentials, is a bigger threat than known; something of a dimensional parasite, creating destruction in every dimension he manages to reach, and he’s unlikely to have been destroyed after the events of Potentials. Mostly I feel like I have moved on from this idea. I still like it, but that fic was years ago now, and I have lots of other things I’d rather write. I particularly feel like this isn’t where I’d want to dump the energy of having to figure out all the KH canon that I never got to, haha.
Firefly x Leverage crossover
This was a very silly idea, I think, but it really did grab hold for a short time. The idea was that it was set in the Firefly universe, and Simon had hired Hardison (and maybe the rest of the team) to help save River (since he’d said he’d had help finding her, when she was brought on board Serenity.) Alternatively, he hires them eventually to try and rescue the others who were being held in the same facility/for the same purposes. I don’t think I ever got much farther than that, except that I think there’d be some fun character interactions, but there’s not really anything else underpinning the whole idea.
Stranger Things: parallel timelines
I feel like timeloop fix-its for ST were pretty much a dime a dozen, or at least that was my impression a few steps removed from the fandom itself. This one was not a timeloop, per se; but Steve winding up going through every possible different dimension until he could find one where everything worked out correctly and Eddie survived. Maybe a timeloop would really make more sense, since I wasn’t truly utilizing any weird AU ideas for the different dimensions he was going through. Buuuut I am who I am as a person, so I also had him figuring out that he could save MORE people - Chrissie, being the main one. Not his original goal, but in going through incarnations over and over with her, he couldn’t leave her behind and wound up falling in love with her a bit, too. I think I made it just a giant polycule by the end, because it was sort of one of those “now that I’ve spent so much time with all of these people I can’t give up any of them.” I like the idea, but I’m not into Stranger Things enough to put in the effort that pulling this sort of thing off well would require.
That left me with lucky thirteen ideas remaining. I cut five more.
Silent Hill: Doctor/Internship/Revival
This is technically three ideas rather than one, but I'd lumped them together. The three were somewhat interconnected SH stories that expanded on a few repeat characters I planned to focus on for a sort of ongoing set of fics around Silent Hill. "Doctor" was about a woman investigating mysterious deaths at a Silent Hill hospital; "Internship" was about a girl who got a job interning at the historical society and was drawn into the cult; and "Revival" was about the cult having an underground revival post-SH3 (since it’s stated that Douglas largely exposed the cult and what they tried to do to Heather, and the cult disbanded after that.)
I like all of that, but lack any particularly strong plot elements for any of them but the first one. I could, I suppose make these into shorter fics. These were all originally intended to expand on characters that would be mentioned in a different ongoing fic, the one codenamed “Documentary.” Because of that, I think these ones are safe to put on hold until and unless I actually write that fic, at which point these could be short sequel or tie-in type stories for it.
Kingdom Hearts: Stardust AU
Well, there’s real unfortunately all the allegations against Neil Gaiman, which makes me pretty uninterested in ideas focused on works of his. The original idea was about the “what if Kairi was a literal falling star” thought that also led to the Howl’s Moving Castle crossover.
There are things that lent really well to this as a crossover - the numbered siblings meshing well with the numbered organization members, for instance. There are aspects of this that I think would be fun, especially because I enjoyed the Howl's Moving Castle one so much, and liked the fantasy fairy tale vibes. I was reluctant initially because of it being another thing that needs a canon refresh. Now it’s not a canon I want to refresh particularly, so that kind of makes that decision for me.
Zero Escape: ill-advised hookup (includes some vague spoilers for 999 and VLR)
The Zero Escape series is one I really love, but am way too intimidated to write fic for. It’s such a weird series, I don’t know that I can match the vibe.
In the second game, there's one aspect that's a very deliberate tragedy: that in the timeline that leads to Virtue's Last Reward, Junpei never sees Akane again after the events of 999, despite spending years and years looking for her. This is meant to be a tragic thing for those characters! However, I was more upset in VLR about the fact that Aoi isn't there! After everything HE did to make the events of 999 happen, to save her, he doesn't even get mentioned!? THAT was more upsetting to me, and I had a much harder time believing she could cut Aoi out of her life as opposed to Junepei. (I will say that according to some meta I read somewhere, Aoi was supposedly helping with the events of VLR, but I do not remember seeing that confirmed in canon. I do need to replay the game.)
So for this stupid fic idea: with both Junpei and Aoi being left behind by Akane, I really just wanted them to have the worst toxic hookup ever. I don’t hate the idea, but I also feel a little bad having that be the only thing I’d write for the fandom, ha.
Twilight for my id
I’ve looked at Twilight as a whole thing... I was a Twilight-hater for a while, and then did try to give it a fairer shot, but it was still deeply not my thing. I can recognize how it IS candy for someone’s id, just not mine! But looking at it that way made me feel like... well, what WOULD make it appeal to my id?
I mean, personally, my id latches onto queer poly stories, and I feel like that could actually work pretty well within the Twilight structure, with how close-knit and insular the main family is and all. It’d be a fun source of drama, even, that it’s not just one character falling for this outsider character, but that it’s also fitting this in with preexisting relationships. And that’s always how I want to resolve love triangle, so bring the werewolf along!
At the same time, if I want to focus on rewriting a story from the ground up to appeal specifically to me as a self-indulgent exercise... well, why wouldn’t I put that energy toward my OWN story, instead of on dismantling/rebuilding one that I didn’t even like?
Kingdom Hearts: "Dressed to Kill"
This is one that has existed in some form or another for a really long time, though got a kind of idea revamp within the last few years. I remember the first seed of the idea when I was in high school, so it goes back a ways! The original idea was sort of like... a mafia war of sorts, I think between rival families. The first incarnation may have been Riku/Sora, but I feel like it became an OT3 fic pretty early on? Anyway, I wrote up the sort of conclusion to this idea (though a bit different than the original way I’d envisioned it) for one of the AUgust fics. I’d hoped that would get it out of my system for good, but it didn’t quite. Instead of the rival family thing, I’d made it into a crime family son being pushed to marry a political family daughter, and then their mutual love interest, with an OT3 ending. The newer version of it that I've been thinking of basically has Riku and Kairi deciding to try and outdo each other at being Sora’s sugar daddies. I feel like this could be fun to write, pretty light-hearted despite the whole “mafia/political corruption forced marriage” angle. But I really DID get the conclusion out of my system already, so it doesn’t feel all that pressing. I might still come back to it.
Ultimately, I wound up with eight fic ideas that I want to move forward with for now.
That doesn't mean that none of the above will ever get used... I could come back to almost any of these eventually. (The fact that I can't really think up a good plot for the Shades of Magic/Dishonored crossover pains me. Those Silent Hill fics might see the light of day eventually. Any of the others could possibly strike me with the bat of inspiration and move up the priority list.)
no subject
Steddie fandom has a ton of time loops, but also it's a popular idea that people seem to like. I've liked a few (though from a purely personal POV a lot decide to ground themselves in the canon by retelling a chunk of it with no changes and that got tedious)
While I haven't actually read it or watched it, I've very much had the same questions about Twilight.
Good luck! Hopefully something makes you want to latch onto a specific idea.
no subject
There are definitely some recurring themes, and in others I can just see the way that other media was impacting me at the time, ha. Like, in some of those old high-school era fic ideas, I can see the ways the anime that I was watching with friends impacted the kinds of stories I was thinking about, even when those series weren't the fandoms I was actually active in.
Some of the recurring plot threads are pretty broad relationship arc type things: going through a lot to be with the person(s) you want to be with, regardless of whether they're who you *should* want to be with.
(And I know that "the battle against internal and external homophobia" is considered a very passe plotline these days, where mentioning the existence of homophobia is somehow a homophobic act, but it's still a thing that I have some baggage around from growing up in the 90s and 00s. A lot of the fic ideas aren't literally about that, but they're *kind of about that*, if you know what I mean.)
Others are relationship arcs that are embarrassingly revealing, lol. "No, the fact that trauma recovery or overcoming bad shit happening, with a partner who works to understand you/you working to understand them and help them through their own baggage doesn't say anything about me, nope."
Sometimes it's just more of "I want to read genre stories about the types of characters and relationships I enjoy, and I will shamelessly write AUs to get those stories."
That's a very good point about timeloops... I really like them when they're done well, but there've been some that bored me or left me pretty cold. I think that's a lot of it: ones that feel like I'm just watching the canon episode over and over definitely isn't as satisfying as one that does more to play with what's going on.
I only ever read the first Twilight book, and saw maybe the first two movies? I think? They were Not For Me, but I do at least understand that they are for someone. But I'd love something that catered to me the same way it caters to the tastes of the people who were super into it!
no subject
Also, I love genre but so much of it is not the relationships and stuff I want to read. I'd also love writing some of that.
Trying to figure out what themes I really want to explore is part of how I've been approaching things.
no subject
I like some hopepunk type stuff, but the *punk* part of that should be a significant part! Hope *in the face of terrible things* can feel inspiring or comforting to me... but I am sooooo burned out on conflict-free sugary fluff.
But yeah. I love genre stories - fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc - and there's certainly more diversity within those genres now than there ever has been before. But still... I feel like there could be more that caters more to my tastes, haha. Or sometimes I want the thing that's the "just fun" version of the genre, instead of being an award-winner about the human condition. (I love the award-winners, too! But sometimes I want things that are more fun.)
Figuring out reoccurring themes is definitely a good one to figure out... when the same things crop up over and over, it seems like something worth exploring!
no subject
I just keep looking for more stuff I like in genre stuff. It feels like such a slog these days.
no subject
But it DOES suck when it swings all the way the other way into that "good vibes only, zero conflict" type of storytelling being considered the only "morally acceptable" sort of story to tell. As well as yeah, having that conflation where depiction of a thing equals endorsement of the thing, the idea that anything showing up in a story must be 100% the real-life view of the author... that is such a toxic mindset to have!
I remember that free ebook event thing, and just scrolling through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of titles... I just KNOW that there are some in there that I'd probably love, but it's a lot to wade through.
And a lot of the things that get hyped up and that I end up hearing about also end up being the kind of thing that I do not actually enjoy, even if I theoretically like all the ingredients.
no subject
There is stuff out there, but finding it is such a slog. And, as I've said, some of the stuff widely considered as the 'good' series do not vibe with me at all. I cannot with some of the biggest names.
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It does feel like a slog. I've been trying to pick through some of those ebooks I downloaded during that free event thing, and hoo boy, some of them have been A Struggle.
It also sucks when there's just a vibe mismatch between the popular thing and your own taste. I feel like I have fairly flexible taste in some things, but others are total nopes that seem way too common to me!