Fanfic recs for people who don't know the fandom

[melannen]

I 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?

Comments

[sylvaine]

Sort of a counterexample - I remember reading a published book some years back and thinking it was so screamingly obvious that the author came from a fanfic background, because throughout the book I was just like "look, you're writing origific, you can't rely on your readers to already know your characters were MFEO, you have to actually show us how they fit together rather than going from zero to sixty within two pages". So I think that's a factor, too, although it's much harder to pin down than the ones you mention - how much of the character interactions and relationships rely on pre-existing canon or fanon?

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."!

[melannen]

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 .)