#like knowing it's definitely 4pm even though the weather & the time of year determine if that's a sunny afternoon or practically dark out

[galacticlamps]

writing asks!! 22, 26, 30? o:

22 - What is it about watching the same two idiots falling in love over and over again?

I couldn’t figure out a short way of answering this. It’s under the cut.

26 - What would you describe as OOC?

Something that doesn’t earn its keep. I think I can be convinced a lot of things make sense in context if a text is persuasive enough, but when it introduces/implies character traits that either conflict with things that were established before it, or are new but big enough to then become conspicuous by their absence in earlier appearances of that character, without sufficiently addressing the discrepancy with a good, believable reason for the change/omission, then I put it down to being OOC. And of course, the burden of proof is proportional to the size of the thing in question.

((Because of that, the feeling also applies to canon stuff in lengthy series like Doctor Who or Star Trek, especially when it feels like a failure of a particular writer to capture existing characters well, rather than an intentional decision or a plot twist to take them in a different direction. So the question of “does it feel earned?” and even “does it feel like you at least tried to earn it, and knew you had to earn something, whether or not I think you succeeded?” are probably what determine my feelings there.))

In fanfic & other written mediums though, even more often than interpretations of a character I struggle to make sense of, the thing I most often find myself considering OOC is dialogue. Maybe that’s just because dialogue is even less often explained than actions - only rarely will narration elaborate upon why a character chose to describe something in a certain way, so there’s less of an opportunity for those justifications I seem to judge by - but for some reason, OOC actions make me think “What are you, Writer, making [character] do???” and OOC dialogue makes me go “Well that’s not even [character] then, is it?”

I think I’d feel this way anyway, spending as much of my time as I do around plays where what’s said & how it’s said is such a large part of a script, but let’s face it - one of the characters I most frequently write & read fic for speaks what ranges from a dialect to an accent depending on who’s writing him, and phrasing/word choice with him never doesn’t feel significant. I know it’s certainly something I spend a lot of time thinking about when I write Jamie - whether he’d use a Scots word/expression or not depending on the context of the scene, who he’s talking to, how he’s feeling at the moment, hell, even the words directly surrounding it & what sounds like it’d flow more naturally, given all those other factors, in that exact sentence - and I’m sure many of those choices I make are too small to read as being meaningful most of the time, without even getting into whether or not someone else would agree with my judgement. But I still wind up doing that every time I write him (admittedly, more in the edit than the first draft) not because I think I’ve got such a mastery of language or even because I believe everyone that reads it is running through it with such a fine-toothed comb, but because hard-to-swallow dialogue is just one of those things that pricks up my ears and takes me out of a story quicker than any other way in which characters could be OOC.

30 - Describe a fic that almost happened, but then it didn't.

To be honest, I don’t actually have any fics that I consider abandoned - partially bc I’m quite content working on a wip for a long time before committing to finishing it one day, and partially because even when I am sure that’s my goal, I’m aware of how slow I can be - so even if I haven’t made any progress on a particular story in months, that isn’t enough for me to think of it as officially “not happening” anymore. The closest I can do is describe a fic that I thought was much closer to completion than it turned out to be, over a year ago:

At its inception, it was a one-shot told from the Doctor’s perspective, in which Circumstances have forced Jamie to admit his feelings for the first time in a very unideal situation, and he’s especially upset about this because he swears he was planning on telling him soon, he just really wanted to go about it correctly. Pretty standard fanfic fair, shouldn’t be too hard.

The thing was, I wanted there to be some irony in that this confession happens only a number of days after the Doctor came to terms with his own feelings, decided they were unrequited, and promised himself never to tell Jamie about them - and I wanted the audience to be aware of that the whole time, to’ve seen him make that decision before Jamie’s confession even began. So I knew that meant I needed a prelude set in the recent past, plus the plot details that would give sufficient context to the Original Scene - all the dialogue of which, start to finish, and even a little of the narration, didn’t even come to 2k. I already knew what all the explanations were, I wasn’t blocked or anything, but when it came to turning them from Facts I Knew About The Fic into actual storytelling, they were way longer than I was happy with. Which I know isn’t evil in itself - if I wasn’t okay with writing things that turned out to be longer than I originally thought, there’d be even less on my Ao3 page - but in my head this was very much meant to be a fic about those 2k words, and now it felt like the stuff that was supposed to just be there to support it was instead completely overpowering it, maybe even drowning it out, and that I didn’t like, so I stepped away from it.

I still work on it every so often, but I haven’t figured out what my goal should be - to keep it under 5k at any cost, or to turn it into a multi-chapter adventure-style story even if that means the focus isn’t what I want it to be on anymore. I do quite like both that original 2k and the context in my head that makes it make sense, so I’m still convinced I’ll get it on its feet somehow, eventually - but the two options are so different from each other that I have to make a firm decision before anything I do can be considered “progress” so it’s the most-stalled WIP I have at the moment.

Writing Asks!

Back to ‘why these two idiots over & over again?’

I’m not sure if this question is supposed to be about the appeal of fanfic in general or not, but being me, I’m just gonna make it about Two/Jamie. Which I think is fitting not only because it’s 90% of what I talk about here but also because even though I’ve been in fandom since high school, and shipped lots of things and had plenty of opinions, and even written fic before, I never had anything I’d call an OTP before them. So without getting into what I love about them either as individuals or a ship, I think they have a very specific appeal to me as a fanfic pairing - partially because their relationship sits right at a sweetspot between fleshed out and undefined in their source material, and partially because of what that source material does & doesn’t leave me wanting, and a certain level of inexhaustibly they also share with other characters from that era of the show.

We’ve talked before about how infrequently they make announcements about what they mean to one another, how most of the time it’s demonstrated in their behavior rather than declarations about being best friends, and I know I’ve also mentioned that I don’t think said behavior would change all that drastically before & after starting a romantic relationship. Their actions are consistent and make up a significant part of their relationship, and yet there are some pretty basic questions they still leave unanswered from a shipping perspective. They have good, instant chemistry, which could easily rush things along - but they also have believable reasons for stalling both recognizing and acting upon their feelings - they both come from cultures that would frown upon a relationship between them for various reasons, on top of the typical Friends-to-Lovers conundrums of ‘Are my feelings a betrayal of our friendship?’ and ‘Even if they aren’t, is confessing them worth risking our current relationship?’ And since it’s so hard to pinpoint how or when they’d get together, the relationship could be in basically any stage of development at just about any point in their continuity. Personally, I could see them acting upon their feelings for the first time in Season 4 or 6 (or even 6b) with pretty much equal likelihood, and I don’t believe there’s any kind of fandom consensus on the timing either, even though so many people are happy to refer to them as married.

And that’s great for the whole ‘same two idiots falling in love over and over again’ thing for a couple reasons - on the one hand, it obviously offers a ton of variety since you can read or write about it happening in so many different ways, and with different supporting characters, situations, and levels of personal history involved leading up to it, and still accept that’s how it goes as long as the story’s executed well - but it also means there’s no part of canon that’s like, The Gay Part - the whole thing is. Sure, there are episodes with more Good Bits than others, and the first few stories when they’re both newer to each other & also sharing the screen with two other main characters are the ones that feature them interacting the least - but generally speaking, any time you’re watching them, you’re watching the relationship you like, there’s no waiting for it to get good or develop into the version of it that’s shippable, because it’s so beautifully consistent across their era.

And that’s the other thing I find uniquely appealing about them & why derivative, transformative, interpretive works suit them so well - I think a real strength of their relationship (not even as a couple but as an element in a narrative) is its very stability, which is tightly connected to the kind of story it originated in: a long-form serialized episodic scifi tv show where the plots are driven by mystery & adventure, to which the consistency of the main characters’ relationship provides a comparatively solid foundation & contrast. In short, they’re characters that thrive best on being plunked down into various scenarios the audience can watch them weather, and they’re people we can get very attached to without ever having focused on too too hard on, in the source material. And that already makes them a goldmine for fanfic potential, but there’s another element in there that I think is harder for me to explain.

Initially I wrote an even longer-winded explanation for this bit & got really pretentious citing different dramaturgical approaches & everything, but basically, it boils down to this: I have never wanted their source material to be more about their relationship - not simply because canonicizing it might limit the otherwise limitless possibilities for imagining how that relationship came to be - but because I think something fundamental would have to change (be lost!) in these characters that I know and love if they existed on a show where inter-personal drama and romance were major elements of the plot & narrative.

And because of that, when I look at works of fanfiction (or even EU materials, which in this respect really are the same thing) that aim to ask ‘what if,’ explain things canon doesn’t, or further explore things canon incorporates but hasn’t exhausted, I never feel like it’s a consolation prize or some kind of second-best to what could’ve/should’ve been onscreen, because I think those are the spaces where an exploration of their relationship really belongs - not as a sideline, but as a more natural habitat where they can freely thrive. For different characters originating in a different work, fanfic might mainly serve to speculate about what could happen next or even to correct something disappointing that canon failed to do - and while Two/Jamie can do stories like that too, they aren’t bound by it. If you’re going to fic for those reasons primarily or even exclusively, I think there’s a chance of finding the “fic to end all fics,” and feeling like the box has been ticked and the need met and then some of the motivation & appeal would go with it.

But with the Second Doctor & co, even setting homophobia and eras and the realm of possibility totally aside for a moment, I don’t have some fantasy about a Drama- Romance- Genre show about the evolution of their relationship or anything else I turn to fanfic for - I love that their relationship primarily exists as the status quo in a show of a different genre, and that the times when it’s put under the magnifying glass are only rare moments on tv (like being one of several plotpoints in Evil), or EU stories that exist specifically to let audiences spend more time in the company of characters no longer current, or Fanfic that purposely defies genre to make a scifi serial briefly into a character piece or a romance instead, either because it’s telling the story of an event that’s truly different from Life As Usual, or just because it’s looking at that routine from a different angle. I like that you have to look at the story from an angle distinct to the one from which the tv show is told to see the other facets of what is conceivably there. No, their source material was never about the Doctor & Jamie being in love - but since they are, you can choose to make it a story about that if you watch it with 3d glasses on - if you engage with it in a space that zeros in on the personal, the mundane, the things happening when the main adventure is not.

For me, the medium & genre combo that produced these guys means that I never actually wish something would or did happen onscreen - all I ever want is the ability to believe it could be part of their story anyway, and as a derivative work, fanfic very much offers that, so “watching the same two idiots fall in love over and over again” doesn’t get old, because that’s an end unto itself, and specifically the only end I want when it comes to these particular characters.

#oof im sorry this wasnt shorter #they just seemed like explain type questions & im bad at doing that briefly #thank you for the ask though I definitely found these interesting to think about! #i hope i didnt make two/jamie sound static though #it's not like i think they don't change - more that they're something you could set your watch by #like knowing it's definitely 4pm even though the weather & the time of year determine if that's a sunny afternoon or practically dark out