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fictional_fansI have been going back through my AO3 history, trying to pull out the all-time favorite fics I want to be able to go back to easily, and it’s occurring to me that a disproportionate number are in fandoms where I don’t know the canon (some of them are one of the only stories I’ve read in that fandom.)
Which got me curious: What makes a fanfic a good story for someone who doesn’t know the fandom it’s in?
Of course there are different reasons why you might be recommending a story to someone who doesn’t know the canon - maybe they just want good fanfic and they’ve said they’re fine with reading outside their fandoms; maybe you are trying to lure them into the fandom; maybe they are just starting on the canon and want stories that won’t spoil them but will draw them in. And each of those (and every individual) would have different needs.
But I feel like maybe we can tease out certain things that are often good.
For example, I often see people recommending complete/setting-swap AUs (where almost nothing is the same except the characters) in this situation - I guess on the idea that since they don’t have much to do with canon, they don’t need as much canon knowledge. But as a reader, lately I’ve often found them particularly bad starting points when I don’t know canon, because a good setting-swap AU often does rely heavily on the reader knowing at least the characters: part of the pleasure is seeing that minor character slotted into a role you never would have guessed, but is perfect; or seeing what they’re going to do with that one plot point in the new setting; or trusting that something that seems bad is going to come out a certain way because that’s how it is in canon. And so a lot of the story relies on the reader already knowing canon, and a lot of the pleasure isn’t there if they don’t. These can be really good for people who are already basically familiar with the characters but want to avoid major spoilers, though.
On the other hand, a lot of the stories I’ve loved without knowing the fandom (or that served to pull me into a new fandom) are canon-divergence AUs, especially ones where the divergence is before canon started (characters are starting from different places, or that One Thing That Happened happened differently, or somebody was secretly an elf all along, or things like that.) You’d think these are also very reliant on the reader knowing the original canon, but often the author is at pains to work out in detail why certain things happen in certain ways as a result of their divergence, so they do a good job at introducing things and characters one at a time and explaining why things are happening.
On the gripping hand, fix-it canon divergence AUs tend to start with the premise that the reader already knows what needs fixing and agrees that it should be fixed, so they tend not to work as well either.
Some other things that I think tend to be more likely to work for readers outside the fandom include:
- Extremely formulaic tropes - being a fan of the formula can carry you past not knowing things
- Complete AUs that have become standard within the fandom - for example, if so much of the fandom is modern/mundane AUs that nobody tags it anymore - because that’s often fandom writing to itself rather than to canon, and it’s not generally about being clever within the AU the way stand-alone setting swaps are.
- Longfic in juggernaut pairings - anything that hits a certain level of popularity probably has a lot of generically appealing characteristics, and also after a certain point, fandom is often writing to itself rather than writing to canon here too. (A2G fic is the sweet spot of these three.)
- Crossovers of the kind where two groups of characters from different canons meet up - they tend to be designed so that people who only know one fandom can follow them, and they tend to involve a lot of characters explaining their canons to each other.
- Good casefic in the canon style tends to not be super-dependent on a lot of canon knowledge any more than stand-along canon cases are, and a well-done self-contained plot can carry a lack of character knowledge.
Can anyone think of good examples or counterexamples? Or other ideas of things that might make something better or worse as a don't-need-canon fic?
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Date: 2019-03-21 09:23 pm (UTC)I agree though about crossovers because I have read those only knowing one fandom. They are a great gateway drug into other fandoms.
Soo I think a good example of a canon divergent AU would be
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Date: 2019-03-22 02:33 pm (UTC)Huh. I haven't read that one, so I can't say how it is to read, but I have learned from it that there are definitely stories where the summaries aren't appealing to people outside the fandom! :D
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Date: 2019-03-22 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-22 02:45 pm (UTC)See, I need my short smut to have enough characterization for me to understand why the characters are into it, so that's the one thing where I actually do tend to stick to fandoms I know! Also if it's a new fandom I'll get distracted from the smut trying to learn the fandom. (It does limit what I can read, sadly, because yeah, it needs to be the right kink and the right fandom and the right characterization and that's a tough call sometimes.)
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Date: 2019-03-22 02:38 pm (UTC)Interesting. I too would have said longer fic was better, because a lot of times shorter fic rely heavily on you already knowing the characters and don't have enough time to establish them in their own right. But I guess if you're really definitely in it just for the trope, that doesn't matter. (Honestly if I'm looking for tropefic, I usually look for novelette length, because yeah I don't want to commit to a ton of backstory, but I want enough story for it to be worth it, too. But in fanfic, novelette counts as "long" :P)
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Date: 2019-03-21 10:26 pm (UTC)For example, there's a really awesome Lord of the Rings fanfiction novel that retells much of LoTR from the POV of the ghosts of the dwarves who died in the Battle of Five Armies (and Gimli and also the living dwarves who aren't Gimli). Because that author liked the dwarves, dammit, and Tolkien sort of pushed them offstage after the Hobbit and relegated all their deeds to a few lines in the Appendices. You get much of the War of the Ring, just from a dwarven POV instead of hobbitses.
And yeah, lemons generally didn't require you knowing much beyond the most basic facts about the involved characters.
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Date: 2019-03-22 02:40 pm (UTC)I though about putting in alternate/outsider POV fic, but idk, I've had mixed experience with those - sometimes you just get to experience canon but better. But sometimes they, like alternate setting AUs, rely heavily on the the reader already having enough affection for canon to understand (and care) why you're changing it. I think with those it depends a LOT on the skill and intent of the writer (and a writer with enough skill and the right intent can make anything work for anyone.)
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Date: 2019-03-22 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-24 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-03-24 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-24 02:17 am (UTC)The one nice thing about the Hobbit movies is the characterization of the dwarves. For the movies, they were made visually distinct with individual personalities; the Hobbit book, sad to say, was a little bit weak in that department--most of the dwarves were not memorable. Sansûkh incorporates movie characters and events way better than the Hobbit movies themselves did. It also ignores some of the really stupid lore-mangling that happened in the Hobbit movies (no Nazgûl tombs, no Gandalf/Galadriel implied relationship, etc).
ETA: the first Hobbit movie did a good job at the beginning with "An Unexpected Party". It went downhill somewhat after that.
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Date: 2019-03-24 02:54 am (UTC)*winces at some of the lore-mangling examples* I hadn't even *heard* of those. I had enough with the addition of Tauriel (I love female characters but I'm too much of a purist in LOTR to change the storyline like that) and the sled-pulling rabbits just made me roll my eyes and confirmed my decision not to watch (I also had a friend who knew how I approached LOTR and knew that I wouldn't want to see it from her experience of it). Plus I had a lot of respect for what I'd heard of Viggo Mortenson and could read between the lines with his response to being asked to be in them (never mind the timeline issues). Sadly, it does mean that I've felt that I can't really read Hobbit fic anymore, because I really want ones that don't have a bit of movie tint to them, and most fic is tagged as both. So I pretty much stick to LOTR, when I read that fandom (I get into it in bursts - these days I've been heavily into Rookie Blue but I keep up with a few WIPs that are periodically updated and I'm sure to get back to reading a bunch of it again at some point - still a ton of HASA fics I intended to download and re-read now that they're easy to download).
Yeah, there's definitely a difference between the Hobbit writing and LOTR - you can tell he wrote the Hobbit as a "children's story", focusing on the plot and only the most important chars, and didn't flesh them all out the same way as he did when he got serious about LOTR. (Though LOTR suffers from too many characters to flesh everyone out fully, which is where you get tons and tons of different characterizations for a character which gets maybe two lines about them in the text if you're lucky - which I actually kind of like - it makes it almost like reading infinitely many fandoms that all are spokes of the same wheel, if that makes sense.)
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Date: 2019-03-21 10:37 pm (UTC)Also, so often people recommend short fic as "don't have to know canon", and while this is technically often true, in practice I find these to be the least compelling recs because often short fic in fandoms I don't know don't give me any reason as to why I should care about the characters and the situations depicted in the fic. So generally speaking longer fic I think is better.
And also, based on my own experiences? If you're in the fandom yourself, figuring out what's don't-need-to-know-canon and what's not is SO damn hard. The best don't-need-to-know-canon recs start with "I don't know the first thing about this fandom but I loved this fic."!
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Date: 2019-03-22 02:59 pm (UTC)I think longer fic is nearly always better in this situation, yeah. One of the reason fandom is so good at shorts is that we've got all of canon to give them depth, so when you take that away, it's tough. I have been known to read one 300,000 word fic in a fandom and then never touch it otherwise. :P Also being long, they often start establishing their own canon before you're too far in. I think there is a difference between fanfic that can be read without knowing the fandom and original fic that reads like fanfic, though! For one thing, when I go into fanfic, I know that the author does expect me to know the backstory, and it's on me that I didn't bother. With original fic I feel like the author has a lot more of an obligation. Although to be fair, "I didn't bother to establish why my characters were MFEO" is a problem in a lot of original romance regardless of whether it's from a fandom background or no. And yeah! Part of the reason I don't do more recs is that I feel like I have to caveat them all as either "I don't know canon, so this characterization may not be good if you do, but it worked for me"; "I don't know canon, but I've read so much other fic in this fandom that I feel like I do, so I honestly don't know if it's good for anyone else"; and "This is great if you know canon! No idea if it is if you don't." And my tastes do change a lot after I learn a canon (but then again, my tastes tend to get very gen and rarepair after I learn a canon, which clearly isn't what most people's do, or there would be a lot more gen and rarepair out there .)
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Date: 2019-03-21 10:55 pm (UTC)I'd actually argue with you, Melannen, and say that complete-au's are the easiest to start with to get your footing in a new fandom, at least if the intention is that you're going to keep reading more fics in that fandom. Sometimes it's too much information to keep track of at once when you're trying to figure out what the worldbuilding of the canon is alongside figuring out the characters and the relationships. But with an au, you know that the fic author is making up all the worldbuilding and has to give the reader some kind of accessible introduction to it (or just assume you already know what a coffee shop fic is, because you probably do). So you can expend all your detective energy on figuring out what kind of people the various characters are and how they relate to each other. Once I've got a handle on that, I find it's easier to move into fic that's closer tied to canon, because I understand the characters at least a bit, so I have more mental space to figure out the worldbuilding and the relevant canon plot points that are being talked around.
Of course, all of this depends on how complicated the canon is. If it's something really straightforward, or something that is itself based on known tropes (eg with a buddy cop tv show, you already know some of what canon is probably about without knowning a thing about this particular canon), then it's easier to just dive straight in to canon-based fic.
Another recommendation I have is that, whatever you do, don't start with a bodyswap fic as your first ever fic in a new fandom. You will get so confused about which character traits belong with which character vs which character's body. Ask me how I know! (It's obvious how I know. I've done it. Successfully even, but that was really playing on hardmode.)
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Date: 2019-03-22 03:26 pm (UTC)Oh no, the bodyswap fic sounds like a bad idea. I've actually found that with complete AUs, I have the opposite experience in terms of figuring out the worldbuilding - I have no way to tell which parts of the worldbuilding come from canon and which are original to the writer, and it actually confuses me more trying to separate them out. (In some cases I've read complete-AU fics as my first story and not even realized they were complete AUs, and that is also a terrible way to start, for the record.) And if I'm looking to read more fic in the fandom, it's usually because I am interested in aspects that are unique to the canon (not necessarily plot per se, but relationship dynamic stuff like loyalty kink or ideological conflicts or whatever), so I often find myself actively disinterested in fics that don't use it. And sometimes complete AUs will even completely change basic character dynamics - switching out which character is in a position of relative power, for example. In a canon-divergence AU, that's usually signposted as a major difference from canon, but no so much in complete AUs.
But if people were looking for only the characters, period, I can see how that would be less important.
I do think something like a coffeeshop AU or a Hogwarts AU is different from a more freewheeling thing like a fantasy AU, where authors often go wild - in the common formulaic AU settings, I can recognize the AU elements from the formula, so it's a lot easier to know what's canon and what isn't. At some point that fades into the suggestions up there about formulaic tropes and standard AUs. And of course that depends - I definitely wouldn't recommend the Imperial Radch coffeeshop AU for someone unfamiliar with the fandom!
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Date: 2019-03-22 04:35 pm (UTC)So it's possible I'm actually the worst possible person to give advice to others on how to approach a new fandom fic-first, because I am That Person who honestly doesn't really mind how I approach it.....
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Date: 2019-03-22 05:07 pm (UTC)Oh good point!
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Date: 2019-03-21 11:10 pm (UTC)For 'don't need canon' fic: I remember enjoying a selection of the Supernatural Harlequin Romance challenge stories, basically because I had *no* interest in the show, knew what the characters looked like, and was quite happy to read slushy m/m romances for a while. But I would never have chosen to read a canon-adjacent Supernatural story.
Not sure if there's a point in there or not!
But: I read a short story recently—I think it was a Check, please! rec—where for a while I could not figure out what was going on, because the canon characters were referred to by different parts of their names in different parts of the fic—nickname vs surname, that kind of thing. Eventually I think I got them sorted out, but it was too much like hard work to continue reading the story. For a canon fan, it's hardly unreasonable to expect them to know who's who, but it didn't work for me! I've read in that fandom before, because there seems to be a lot of pining in it and I approve of pining, but I don't know or care what anyone looks like and cannot keep straight in my head what they do or where or who relates how to whom. So I need the simple stuff. And I do quite often find that there are a lot of characters within a quite short fic, and that there isn't much characterisation that helps me figure out... anything very much. Again, a fan would presumably know them in the first place, and have read more of the palimpsest of fanon so as to be able to fit them onto the already-fleshed-out characterisation.
I like your point about the way AUs very often *do* rely on the fans knowing what the correspondences are, where the surprises are, and so forth. I usually like to put some canon references/parallels in my AUs, it's more fun that way and, well, this is my fandom, not that thing over there. Also, after a certain point, an AU with no actual reference to canon except for the characters' names is essentially (un)original fiction, just the kind that we'll read because we know what the characters look like already. See above.
Crossovers—specifically, several very well done popslash/SGA crossovers—lured me into reading SGA stories for a while, and I had seen enough SGA icons on my friends list to have an idea what the characters looked like. Eventually I even acquired the canon! It was, of course, disappointing.
On the subject of story length: I'm very rarely willing to invest much time on a story in a fandom I don't know, so for me, long fics are very unlikely to lure me in. I suppose I did make exceptions for the Supernatural Harlequins, but I knew I wasn't interested in the fandom when I read those.
Ultimately, though, what makes a fanfic a good story for someone who doesn't know the fandom is some combination of good writing, characterisation, and the right kind of fan catnip, whatever that may be.
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Date: 2019-03-21 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-22 01:05 am (UTC)But other than that, I wouldn't know where to begin in rec'ing fics to people who don't know the fandom - I'm all "consume canon first, then devour fic". Never reverse order. So it'd be hard for me to evaluate a fic as to whether it would make a good intro to the fandom or not. Most all of my favorites are compelling stories because they delve more deeply into the characters and would probably not be very interesting to someone who didn't care as much about the characters in the first place.
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Date: 2019-03-22 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-03-26 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-22 04:07 am (UTC)https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6255031/1/Ready_Sette_Go is a Nanoha fic that multiple people have enjoyed without knowing anything about Nanoha. Not sure why, I'd guess just the right amount of in-cluing, plus being really funny from the start.
I read one volume of Naruto and vaguely know the premise. I've also been following this Naruto fanfic https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12431866/1/Sanitize But I think that works because it barely depends on Naruto at all, it's some modern person reincarnated in Naruto-Japan and trying to improve medicine. That there are ninjas and they have powers becomes obvious in the fic.
I think I've read more Sailor Moon fanfic than consumed canon Sailor Moon, and I haven't consumed that much SM fanfic. But I have done some, so know the basic characters and premise, and a lot of the 'fic' was stuff like Shadowjack's WIW thread, so I have much of the plot secondhand.
Hmm, that reminds me, I think I got into Nanoha fics and WIW threads before full consuming all the canon.
Oh! So, I basically view tie-in novels as authorized fanfic, especially in the older Star Trek days when they definitely weren't canon or particularly supervised (I don't think any are canon now, for that matter.) All of my childhood Star Trek exposure was novels, plus a coloring book.
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Date: 2019-03-22 04:40 am (UTC)I haven’t really branched out to read fanfic from canon that I’m not familiar with.
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Date: 2019-03-22 07:29 am (UTC)When bored one day, I went searching for fic. I picked a long fic that was complete. It turned out to be a Sheldon/Penny story which today remains one of my favourite stories.
If the story is good, you don't need in depth familiarity with all of the canon.
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Date: 2019-03-22 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-22 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-22 03:09 pm (UTC)I feel like missionfic/casefic/monster of the week can be a good entry point where the author can (re)define who exactly these characters are in this particular fic - having One Big Problem lets me learn about new-to-me characters and how they work together ie why I should care. Even if it departs from that into a more character/ship-focused story, it puts me into the location and the vibe. The premise is also now in the fic, instead of in the canon somewhere else - they're reacting to things onscreen. A commitment to one particular kink can even fit this - where a bunch in one fic can feel like a sampler platter that depends on you liking the character/dynamics already and extrapolating, just one can give a little more focus. Making one or two canon changes also means that the writer has to build out the characters a little more - even if a reader knows these characters very well, there's still something that needs to be elaborated! Who is this person as a girl? How does OC from the Past showing up affect current dynamics? that helps.
I agree that the juggernaut ships can end up accessible based on their ubiquity. The fan osmosis is real, but also Migratory Slash Fandom loves particular characterizations so if you like that, the specifics of canon tend to come out in the wash. What doesn't grab me in unfamiliar fandoms is fluff, otp shmoop, modern AUs, pwp, and shorter tropefic. I like reading these for canons I know a little more about, and I'll read if it's well-kudosed and exactly what I'm looking for, but I feel like they depend more on specific references or details and building that out.
PS - what's A2G?
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Date: 2019-03-22 03:29 pm (UTC)For A Price, Dresden Files, Dresden/Marcone
Indelible, SGA, Sheppard/McKay
Stuck on the Puzzle, Dragon Age Inquisition, Bull/Cullen
Good Morning Penthesilea, SG1, Jack/Daniel
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Date: 2019-03-22 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-22 08:03 pm (UTC)The other 25% of the time it's because it's a fusion crossover with something I am familiar with and like so rather than being, I dunno, Hannibal/Fruits Basket fusion, I'm reading some kind of neat Hannibal AU where Will Graham turns into a dog when people touch him. Or something. But since I click on these for the "high concept" I'm less likely to finish them if they don't work for me, too.
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Date: 2019-03-23 08:13 am (UTC)What usually happens then is that I go through the author's back catalog, and if it turns out that they write a lot in the fandom, I might well be hooked. But I might only read one author in a fandom (e.g.: Chash in 'The 100' writes Clarke/Bellamy that works for me, and I've bounced off every other story in the fandom, including watching the first episode and deciding that I could watch more, or read these stories, but not both).
Which means that of course, new-to-me authors and their back catalogs are a way that I end up reading in a new fandom. I tend to pick a pairing or a character of interest, and follow them. Or a mood (post MCU Civil War I'm fascinated with the anti-Cap sentiment).
The last kind of gateway fic is when I go trawling the AO3 on a trope, and find something different. Currently, that is soul bonds, but I've had a number of fascinations over the years.
And really, I only got in to fic in the first place because friends would post their stories. Once I'd read a few of those, I read their recommendations. And acquired a few fandoms I was interested in along the way. And then some years later the AO3 came along, and suddenly it was much easier to find what I was looking for.
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Date: 2019-03-23 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-24 03:04 am (UTC)a) It was a crossover, and I knew one of the fandoms but not the other. (This was like two? Maybe three?)
b) It was a friend's - and they asked me to read it. (That was like once or twice?)
c) I was betaing the fic. (Handful of fics here.)
d) I was checking the fic as part of Yuletide volunteer duties - to make sure it was complete, didn't have filler text, missing bits like {CHARACTER NAME}, etc.. (OK, I've had to read hundreds and hundreds for that over the years - but most of the time I'm skimming, only slowing to real reading if the fic somehow catches my eye - for good or for bad, lol. Scrutinizing a fic to tell if the author actually finished it or if they were trying to get away with something that was over minimum wordcount and add the rest of the words later… it's not at all the same thing as reading for fun, but requires similar levels of brainpower and absorption of the fic in one's mind.)
On my own, I never go to a fandom and go "oh, let's read this fic even though I know nothing about it". I marvel at the people who do - my brain clearly works very differently to theirs!
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Date: 2019-03-28 07:19 am (UTC)Also a small bit of canon and a lot of fandom osmosis were enought to get me through many SGA, Teen Wolf or Supernatural fics... ^^
I agree that often longfics and canon AU are better for that kind of things, because they are fleshed out.