I once tried to read that oft-recced Buffyfic in which a bunch of the Scoobs, Spike & Wes are turned into little kids, but the cutesy-ness of it all made me kind of queasy so I had to stop.

Oh, yeah, I had a several huge problems with that, too. Mostly of the have-you-ever-been-around-children variety, which is the same kind of weird feeling I get when reading a story by someone who I know (through idle lurking in their journal, or whatever) has had sex, as an adult, and participated in conversations with a significant other, and been out with said s.o. in public. And yet their story is like the fantasy of an unsocialized twelve-year-old virgin.

Also, I get incredibly irritated at people who keep on talking about how Spike has been mistreated in the show and how *their* Spike is the right Spike. Which is hypocritical of me, because I've said the exact same thing about Cordelia when I was reccing Julie Fortune's Angel fic.

Vonnie is me.

I loved "Small Fry" and "Son of Small Fry." Quick, how many folks can say "Are we surprised?"

I sort of feel that way about Spike. But I think Herself's Spike is Spike, so...

But I think Herself's Spike is Spike, so...

I think she writes the character wonderfully, but I don't think he has much to do with Spike as he has been developed on the shows after "Bargaining" or so.

(I suspect she'd agree with me on that, given what she's said about the show recently, and I like her version of him a lot anyhow.)

And yet their story is like the fantasy of an unsocialized twelve-year-old virgin.

I think that's often a writing problem -- it's like that line in "Sleepless in Seattle" about how one character wants to be in love in a movie, not in real life. People are trying to write movie love/sex, not the real thing as they experienced it.

I like h/c too, connie. Hey, we've all got our kinks.

I hate hate HATE this plot device. The hell? I once tried to read that oft-recced Buffyfic in which a bunch of the Scoobs, Spike & Wes are turned into little kids, but the cutesy-ness of it all made me kind of queasy so I had to stop.

Yeah. Well, the thing with that series I was talking about is I was sure it was undermining that, and I was all "hey! This is an interesting take!" And then it... wasn't.

I'm with erika and Lyra. And to me the Herself!Spike makes total sense, given that she started writing him that way back when it could be extrapolated from canon. Why drop a perfectly good WIP just because it gets jossed?

It's funny, the question of "Dark" fic, both how common it is in a fandom, and how it's defined. When I got into Farscape, Maayan and I spent a lot of time going, "where's the tough stuff?" Because we just weren't finding it.

Nobody was really pushing the characters all the way to the worst possible outcomes, nobody was breaking them in interesting ways. Which is odd, because the show supports that interpretation, imho. It's all about throwing people against the worst in themselves. And in fic, you can do anything you want, so I didn't understand why more people weren't experimenting with this.

In XF, there's no shortage or truly horrible stories, or at least truly dark outcomes: "Before I Forget Blue", "Drive, He Said", Nascent's Barnyard Stories, lots of post-col, lots of the profiler fics. SE Parson's work, M Sebasky's work, Sabine's "Are We Having a Good Time?" (I think that's not the right name, but it's close). Rivka & Sally's "Iolokus" and "Tikkun Olam". Rivka's "Wireless". LoneGunGuy's "The Tiger Complex". Sally's post-ep for En Ami. They push and they push and they push, all the way out.

Most of the SG fic I've been reading is the stuff off recs from Vonnie and company, so I expect it to be good and probably dark. I have no concept of what the bulk of the fandom is writing.

What I do know is that in Farscape, until recently, the really dark stuff didn't go over very well. The fans have issues with anything that doesn't show a glimmer of hope. There have been long-ranging arguments waged over this on various boards and lists, and basically the two sides have forced a detente. I'm never going to convince anyone that "Xenophilia" is believable if she's completely invested in the John/Aeryn romance, and I'm never going to buy a happy family story with aliens on Earth. (Well, never say never: but you'd have to work for it.)

But after reading "The Cost of Doing Business" I realized that I hadn't read anyone but Maayan who'd done that to the Farscape characters. And even she mostly did it by implication: I'm thinking of "Gehenna" and "Black(Ghosts)" primarily. People die, but it's mostly offstage. Not the way Tripoli does it.

Oh, and Katie? Thanks for the link to Salieri's LJ and that conversation. I'd been wondering where Maayan was hiding out *g*.

You know, the first fic I thought about after I read "The Cost of Doing Business" was RivkaT's "Wireless", which is one of my all-time fave in any fandom. XF was such a goldmine for darkfic. I'm surprised at the dearth of a similar type of fic at FS fandom, because well, look at the canon.

(Barnyard Series! God, I loved them so. So funny and so fucked-up. Too bad Nascent took her fic off the 'net.)

I don't want to fall into the trap of automatic dark = good, 'cause I think it'd probably be harder to write a genuinely happy story without letting it fall into schmoopy goop than to write darkfic, but I dunno... it's like I have been imprinted on them via XF fandom. I gravitate toward the dark.

As to how to define darkfic... Hmm, it's more about the psychological state of your protagonist at the end of the story than it is about what horrible events have befallen the character. Like Anne said about the Kat Allison fic (which I haven't read), if there is bittersweetness or glimmer of hope at the end, I wouldn't call it really dark no matter how much pain the character has been through. The flip-side would be... let me see, something like Salieri's Surface Tension, which I would probably classify as darkfic despite the nominally "happy" denouement, plot-wise, because this paragraph near the end?

"They didn't just make me know. They made me see. I saw you. . . your--" The memory is like a blocked artery, a painful pressure depriving her of oxygen, greying out the world. "I saw. But I wouldn't let them make me feel so they pushed and pushed. And I was so tired. And now there's this--" she presses her fist against her chest until the dogtags bite into her skin, her eyes squeezed shut, "--this hole in me where you used to be. All of you."

... totally signfies the kind of spiritual loss that is the hallmark of a darkfic. Not many people do stuff like this in SG--off the top of my head, we've got Tripoli, Salieri and Otter, and that's about it.

Jossverse fosters this way better, but as Anne has said, the impact is not as startling because it's kind of expected in the fandom.