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

[pensnest]

Hmmm.

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.