Hmm, lots of things I want to pick up on here, though I am bound to forget them.
AU... As someone who spent a year writing an AU fic I am very aware of the concerns that Cap had about his Trek fic but the conclusion I came to in planning my own was that if the reader buys into who the character is at the the start (ie Tara is Tara for more reasons that having the name, blue eyes and blonde hair) then you can develop that character within the story in ways that would not have been consistent with canon. In that case you are putting
Tara (or whoever) through a different set of circumstances and I think readers can enjoy that. It comes down to the question of characterisation. A writer, to pull off an AU, has to prove upfront that they have a grasp on the characters that the readers can relate to.
Here on Kitten writers are pretty good at that.
Getting back to the sex scenes thing that was being mentioned prior to B/D being raised. I am a person who can quite cheerfully write a love scene between two women but I rarely read them. Apart from redrafting the fic I hardly even read my own. People seem to like them when they get posted but I choose not to read them myself - even my own. Someone clever want to tell me what that says about me?? *S*
B/D... first I want to say no way, no how. It doesn't matter how well written that fic is to me technically it is based in a morally dangerous premise and on characterisation that is flawed. I am afraid that if you accept that the characters in that fic are going to "go for" that then, to me, you are simply looking at some people who happen to share the name and physical attributes of the characters not
who they are. It is sort of like a porn film compared to say Great Expectations. It might look pretty to some people... but it never gets to who the characters are. Any exploration of the feelings of those characters must, for me, come back to the fact that under the surface they are not, infact, Buffy and Dawn at all.
This comes back to the point above about AU... If you do not convince the reader of who the characters are, and then develop them in a way that was consistent with who they were, then it is not a story it is porn in words (which is distinct from smut.) Buffy saying "Oh I have to go Slay vampires" is not really what makes her Buffy. One of the things that makes her Buffy is that she is not going to go and abuse her sister in that way.
There is no way that I would ever accept B/D... but to tell
any story that could accomplish something like that degree of change in the characters from the start point we know would be something that took chapter after chapter after chapter before you even got near the sex. As Xita said... it would have to
show why the characters came to be who they were. And that is not something that can be explained in half a paragraph. Development would not be desirable, it would be required and even then it would be horror story.
I suspect that instead this B/D story less about development and more about sex.
Wow... And I came here to comment on the love scenes and AU thing.
Oops.
Katharyn
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If I want a little pussy, I got my own to play with.
Chance in Chance.
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Edited by: Katharyn at: 12/11/02 9:58:21 pm