You pay your money...

[thrihyrne]

…and you take your chance, when you're dealing with love and romance… -Bruce Cockburn

In my not-quite-one-year of reading fanfiction (primarily Tolkien until the past couple of months) I've noticed that a lot of them are romances, and even some that are dark and angsty are rather on the romantic side. I'm certainly not going to intimate that the reason for that is because it's almost exclusively being written by women, and I'm sure there are whole sub-genres that I haven't read which are contrary to that broad, sweeping statement (I still need to read "The Witch-King of Angmar", for example. For all I know, that's a weird kind of romance as well, but I think it's a darkfic), but I haven't run across them yet. I mention this because last night I treated myself to lupercali's extensive going-through of her own story, And Still. It was great to reread the story anyway, but I hadn't run across anything like that, in which the author makes comments through their own work, explaining to the reader what was going on in her head as she was writing it, what parts she really thinks are great, what things perhaps had been changed along the way. What struck me in addition was that though it's very angst-ridden, it is also hopelessly romantic.

Perhaps to counteract that, as though anybody wants to read fanfiction which isn't romantic (except in short bits since I think I want to believe in romanticism and I'm the author), I spent about three months writing a story which I feel is the most sophisticated I've written so far, and the one which rings the most wholly true, or even (gasp!) realistic.
A House Divided

Why is that? Because the two main characters, Morwen and Thengel, are flawed. Their marriage is flawed. They have serious ups and downs. Morwen can be selfish and sulky. Thengel (17 years her senior) can be stand-offish and self-righteous. After they've been married awhile, they don't keep making it like rabbits. Their desire wanes, occasionally flickering back to life. Morwen's relationship to alcohol is probably more intimate than she'd care to admit. When Thengel gets older, he gets even more introspective and distant (though now that I think about it, I don't think I expressed that very effectively in the story. Oh well. I don't want to keep messing with it or I'll completely ruin it.). It will be very interesting to see what reaction it gets out in the public domain when I'm brave enough to put it out there. My dear palarran, whose cherished skills as a beta reader I've already gushed about before, really enjoyed it, and said that the chapter titled "Death" (and that should tell you something right there!) is the favorite thing of mine that she's ever read. But romantic it is not, at least I don't see it that way.

Maybe I'm defining romantic incorrectly. Anyone have any thoughts on why so much fanfiction is romantic? Perhaps readers and authors alike want to escape from the Real World, and hence why so much fanfiction is in that vein. Duh, that's probably the most obvious reason in the world. And also another reason why I wrote AHD. My life resembles nothing like the fanfiction stories that I read, and early on when I was positively inhaling the stuff, I would compare my marriage and life to them and (um, not surprisingly) came up rather lacking. I've learned to diverge the two, but I suppose I also wanted to have something out there which perhaps more closely did resemble my own life, which is far from perfect and rather flawed.

Or maybe I just want to be living with a tall, strapping man of Rohan with long dark blonde hair and a reddish beard, who just happens to be called back to reclaim his throne. ;)

Comments

[palarran.livejournal.com]

In the Queer as Folk fandom there are a lot more guy fanfic writers, and all of those stories focus on the romance too. So it's not necessarily a gender thing.