Ten Little Chances to be Free

More and more often, I find myself leaving feedback only on badfic. Mary Sues to be specific. I know when I find a fic I like I should thank the author by leaving them some praise, but I feel like I can't review unless I have something to say. If I find something striking and unusual I'll usually bwee at the author, but in the case of most goodfic I feel like I don't have anything to say. "I liked it?" "Reading this wasn't a waste of my time?" "Yay, there was nothing glaringly wrong with it?" Meh.

And really, is it condescending to try to turn Suethors into goodfic writers by con crit? I want more goodfic. The Les Mis fandom needs more goodfic. If that requires offering to beta for someone with decent writing but an abysmal Sue, I'm game. Ditto that if it requires leaving reviews explaining who Mary-Sue is, why we don't want to read about her, and why writing Sues isn't a crime but should be kept as a private pleasure. I used to be caustic about sporking Sues, but I think now I've realized that it's a phase most people pass through when they start writing fanfiction, and if I can gently poke some people out of that phase faster, it means more goodfic for me. Gently poke. Not attack with sarcasm. How weird is it that I tend to be nicer giving reviews to Suethors than to mature authors? But they're new, straight-up con crit makes them feel attacked, and I usually try to dig up something good about their fic that I wouldn't ordinarily comment on in addition to my usual "this is a Mary Sue" spiel. That if anything is what makes me feel like I'm being condescending, but what am I going to do, skewer them on their first jump into the fandom?

I'm more hesitant to criticize fanon and characterization issues, though. If a fic is decently written and contains specimens of my least favorite Enjolras and Grantaire characterizations ever, I usually don't say anything, because it could legitimately be argued as being a matter of interpretation, and therefore on the same spectrum of asshattery as "Good fic but I hate that pairing and you shouldn't have written it." (Okay, that's significantly more blockheaded, but the point is that criticizing a fic for interpreting canon differently than you do is a slippery slope.) And yet, said least favorite characterizations are solidly fanon. Should I leave a review suggesting that the author take a good hard look at the characters herself and come up with her own interpretations, rather than letting the fandom spoon-feed it to her? Or a review saying this fic has been written a zillion times before, and something marginally original would be nice? Or should I even bother, considering how deeply entrenched that interpretation is?

I think the root of my dislike for fanon, and of my severe case of multiple figment syndrome, is that part of the reason I like fanfiction is because it lets me Fuck Around With Shit. I like the new and interesting. I don't like "these are my interpretations of the characters and they're the only ones I'll accept," or even "...and these are the only ones I'll write about." I like playing around with cracked-out characterizations and pairings; I like sociopath!Montparnasse and Eponine/Javert and genderfucked!Enjolras and Marius/Eponine and guilt-complex!Valjean and Enjolras/Fantine, all without ever considering them Absolute and Canon. Canon-compliant, if I can help it, but not The One And Only Interpretation, or even anything that would have worked or been possible outside of my crazy little head. On the flip side, I have a problem with interpretations that I don't see as canon-compliant--magnified a thousandfold when they become conventional. In fact, all fanon bugs me, especially when people don't see it for what it is. If clumsy!Bossuet and pacifist!Combeferre were a couple of my spin-off figments, I'd think they were cute, but now they're so prevalent and so accepted that they irritate me. Greatly. I'm also of the rather crotchety opinion that if Hugo hints strongly at something--that Jehan was the 19th-century equivalent of a goth and dressed weirdly on purpose, that Eponine's wretched situation included prostitution, that Grantaire's love for Enjolras wasn't exactly pure and brotherly--it's fine for it to be fanon, but it's not fine for the reverse to be fanon. colorblind!Jehan, pure!Eponine, and straight!Grantaire should be the exceptions, not the defaults. Obviously it varies--colorblind!Jehan is near ubiquitous, opinions on Eponine run fifty-fifty, and Grantaire gen is uncommon enough to get specifically labeled "not slash, I promise!" I'd write all three, but only as a lark.

And yes, I do have default interpretations of all the characters. I'm conceited enough to think they're based directly off Hugo's versions, but at least I back up that conceit by rereading their sections of the Brick whenever I'm in doubt. Usually the defaults pop up as cameos and supporting characters when the story's not about them, because when I write about someone, it's usually some odd bee that's gotten into my bonnet and therefore not about the default. I don't mind fanon as much in supporting characters, but I get pissed off when people write stories centered on fanonized versions of the characters. Where's your creativity?! Shouldn't the point of your fic be something more original than the same old bastardized version of Enjolras having the same old conversation with the same old bastardized version of Grantaire? For god's sake!

....okay, I got seriously off-topic there, considering this post was originally supposed to be about feedback.

OH. You know what else annoys me? Errors. Not just netspeak out the wazoo, but littler things like mispunctuated dialogue, homophone confusion (even and especially rarer words that are almost always confused, like discreet/discrete or flout/flaunt), comma splices, anachronistic speech patterns, uncorrected typos, uneven capitalization, and the like. My eyes tend to slide over them by now, and I've stopped twitching at every little error, but even if there are only a few, my gut impression of the fic will be "sloppy" no matter how good the writing is. (And conversely, if I stumble upon a fic that is mechanically flawless, I will be impressed by that alone.)

Hello, citizens. This is Enjolras.

I've been asked by my typist and by Jean Prouvaire to give a eulogy for the 174th anniversary of our deaths, but a eulogy isn't what we need. You know who we were. You know us as people; you know who we were when we lived; but you pay frighteningly little attention to who we were when we died: we were soldiers. We were men, not little lost boys playing at being crusaders and crying foul when we realized the blood on our hands was real. We knew from the start that we might be forced to do terrible things, and that terrible things might happen to us; all the same, we endured those dual horrors in order to do what was right. What was right, what was brave, and what was honourable. You ask, Is there honour in dying for an ideal, to no immediate gain? I answer, Not all gains are immediate, and there is no greater honour than to die for the most sublime ideal the world has ever known. Do not think I have no guilt in my soul for what transpired in the rue de la Chanvrerie. I will be haunted for the rest of my existence by the shadows of the men I killed and of the three dozen men I led to their deaths. But there are more important things than life and death; not only does the dawn of liberty outshine the darkness of those hours and of all those lives snuffed out, its light is all the sweeter for having been born from so black a night.

But let us return to the idea of dying for one's beliefs. Is that such a bad way to leave this earth? Is this community really so cynical as to believe that dying at twenty-six for the Republic is more pointless than dying at eighty-six after having done nothing with one's life? The young do not like to hear that one day they will lie in the ground as well, but they will, and sixty years of life cut short pale beside the weight of centuries. To be a part of history, to work important events, and to die young for them, is more valuable than to shun danger in order to preserve one's own limited lifespan.

And what events! The fandom I address this to seems under the impression that dying alone, abandoned, in a cul-de-sac or the attic of a wineshop, means the death takes place in a vacuum and has no effect--simply because the event appeared ignominious and unwitnessed when it transpired. But even if the only physical eyes open by three in the afternoon on 6 June belonged to the troops who shot us, in the aftermath the eyes of all the city were upon us. Discount all you like the silent power of martyrs, but it exists, and Louis-Philippe pardoned Charles Jeanne to avoid creating one. You ask what our sacrifice was for, you ask what our legacy was; I'll tell you what our legacy was: 1834, 1839, 1848; the societies of the Rights of Man, the Familles, the Saisons; insurrection, montagnardism, the overthrow of Louis-Philippe; the Third Republic, the Résistance, the fact that France is a republic today. 1832, still set in the formative years of the Orléans regime, set the tone for the era to come, and caused our republican brothers to cast aside their hesitation and the moderation that supported the monarchy of July. I am proud to have died for that. What value in our petty handful of lives compares to the setting in motion of the revolutionary underground? We had our roles and we played them.

And were those roles inevitable? Only God can tell. Was our deathly assumption, that a people so eager to depose a monarch in 1830 would be equally ready to complete an aborted revolution and depose the monarch who had taken his place, founded on pure naïveté? That is not for us to know. We saw the right and we led the people to it, and if the people did not wish to follow yet, their will reigned supreme. That is as it should be. We misjudged, and that was our undoing, but we were hardly doomed from the start; to accept the possibility of one's death in combat is not to accept its certainty. The massacre of '32 was unexpected--we had prepared ourselves for losses, for the possibility of defeat, for the shadow of Madame la Guillotine to loom over us for our so-called treason. What actually happened was a shock. That my friends and my comrades dealt with this shock with courage, honour, backs straight and heads held high, is a testiment to their strength and their patriotism. Every one of them died a hero, and despite the tragedy of so many lives cut short--so many people close to me mown down--when I consider what we have gained, it was worth every drop of blood spilled in the rue de la Chanvrerie.



[typist: *fails at being hugothique*]

So I was in the car, listening to a bootleg of Anthony Warlow in PotO sent to me by the lovely puddleduck3, and I got to thinking about Phantom again. It's slightly odd, revisiting it after a good long period in various other fandoms, but not having it constantly on the brain does make it seem fresher when you come back to it, and I like to think I have more of a sense of perspective on it by now. And so, having not produced a long and caffeinated ramble in quite some time, I think it's time for a bit of meta.

( Assorted musings on the Erik/Christine/Raoul triangle. Probably not much new but ah well. )

I'll thank ladyknight30 not to gloat too hard when I say I've slowly developed a mildly obsessive love/hate relationship with Les Miserables, in both book and musical form. The kind where you hate half the songs and love the other half, and no matter what your feelings on them they're all stuck in your head the whole day; the kind where you put up with Victor Hugo's rambling-on-and-on-and-on because you've discovered to your horror that you actually like the plot and the characters.

It probably wouldn't be hitting me so hard if I weren't, at the moment, deprived of all my music except maybe 5 CDs that aren't scratched and 8 cassettes that I like, and if I had in my possession a recording of a musical other than Les Mis. But alas; my Phantom OLC is scratched to unplayability and all the rest of them resided on my extremely-broken computer. In any case, the only non-rock music I have is an ancient and slightly wonky tape of the Les Mis OLC, which I've listened to far more times than can possibly be healthy.

( Oh no, it's a Fandom Ramble (tm)! )

So in conclusion? Please, God, find me another fandom as fast as you can.

ETA: I almost forgot what it was like to have a fanfic make you go *thunk*