I have a real fondness for bleak dark stories, put two characters together, give them a taste of hope or happiness and then grind it away under your heel.

Except for Due South. I don't want bleak dark despair in Due South. I want Fraser and RayK to live happily ever with lots and lots of hot sex.

I don't want bleak dark despair in Due South. I want Fraser and RayK to live happily ever with lots and lots of hot sex.

I don't mind some sadness in Due South (c.f. "Executor") or some angs along the way, but I totally agree with you on the happily ever after for those two.

The occasional sadness is fine. Obviously I love Executor, I do tend to skip right to the poem, even though I know I'll get teary because I want the pain of it.

And angst during the story is fine, but it should end well.

However, with Smallville (although I don't read much Smallville) I prefer a story where it starts happily and hopefully with hot sex and ends in bleak despair with Lex and Clark being ripped apart because of their differences.

Except for Due South. I don't want bleak dark despair in Due South. I want Fraser and RayK to live happily ever with lots and lots of hot sex.

Yes, I was thinking exactly that myself. Bleakness doesn't seem appropriate to dueSouth, because the source material is generally fairly frothy and packed with character-bonding goodness. And there isn't a big narrative arc thing going on, as far as I've gathered - it's a nice, traditional story-after-story-after-story set up. On the whole I just want to read about Ray and Fraser having quirky adventures and then living happily ever after. Or just admitting the Big Gay Love and shagging their socks off. But not having the Big Misery.

I mean, granted Buffy is often frothy and v. comical, but the whole 'verse has plenty of scope for darkness and angst too, and canonically there's been plenty of misery. And, hello - vampires are evil murderous fiends. So there's all manner of scope within the BtVS-verse, and lots of different styles of stories (be they gen, het or slash) have appealed to me.

With Smallville I'm torn. On the one hand it's the tragic Big Doomed Gay Love that I like about it all (and I'm just as fond of it if a writer chooses to go with Big Doomed Platonic Love, for that matter) because the Clark-Lex dynamic is so resonant and interesting, and so stories in which we see the Clark/Lex thing going to hell in a handbasket have a lot of appeal. But on the other hand I really want it all to work out - like watching Troilus and Cressida or R & J and just wishing that THIS time it would all be okay. Mind you, I'm also v. fond of non-Clexian stories in SV if they're well written - the whole Superman mythos does give you a great big playground, and that can be very much of the good. (And Chloe/Lana has lots of potential too, of course, in SV canon.) I have a real weakness for Lex-Martha bonding, for example. Bless. And Hope's recent piece about Wee!Clark was just lovely. (Mind you, I've yet to read anything of Hope's that wasn't beautifully executed and/or thought provoking.)

With Harry Potter fiction I don't have a particular emotional investment in the source material (reading the books was fun, but not emotionally engaging in the way that Pulman's His Dark Materials was). Generally speaking I'm more interested in the minor characters - Harry's such a blank slate canonically that it's difficult to really latch onto him all that much as a character, but there's lots of interesting potential in most of the other characters, and so far Rowling (hilariously I just typed Hall automatically) has sketched lots of people and not coloured them in, so there's lots of scope for writing. So far nothing in the fandom has made me cry, although a couple of stories have rather choked me.

I like a Smallville story that follows these lines: Clark, with his feelings for Lex, but unsure of what to do...trying for that right moment. And then that moment comes and he and Lex despite the age difference and all the secrets that they hide from one another, they admit their attraction. They kiss, they work their way to sex. There is still tension because of the secrets. A delicate romantic relationship is formed, such a fragile thing. And the truth comes out...and things are shattered. Because Lex can't handle being lied to. Or Clark can't handle Lex's reality.

Or you know, they've been together and they've tried to make it work but they can't compromise their ideals for the other.

And there is misery all around.

Buffy and Angel can go either way. You can make a story funny and it works or you can make it dark and deadly with no hope or light. Or full of bittersweet longing and regret. Or delicate hope.

The only fic that's made me cry is Annie SJ's "Last Summer."

I also like "Executor" because it uses Harding Welsh as a narrator, which you hardly ever see, and gets him right, too.

I haven't finished Last Summer, there's something about it that doesn't click for me.

I always sob about 3/4 of the way through the last part of the Talking Stick/Circle series (The Rose and the Yew Tree). And I've been known to get pleasantly sniffly over Herself's Bittersweets.