#i was gonna add something about genericized trademarks a la “polaroid” for “instant film photo”

[mikansei]

Ohh this articulates so well a thought I've had about regional/temporal/subcultural etc. details like this in fic!

It's hard to recall specific instances - when done well, it blends seamlessly and doesn't stick out. I'm always trying to achieve this in my fics while also tempering my need to describe everything in excruciating detail, lol. Paring away the result of an hours-long research binge like gently peeling an apple...

(Wikipedia's blue links are dangerous stuff 😭 like a gacha except the prize is learning trivial shit about everything under the sun for free)

When done well it's a great way to ground a character within their own world and humanize them, rather than just pasting a reference like a sticky note on top the narrative. One way to do it is to get less specific - per the example, not naming Naruto specifically and generalizing to just "anime," so the reader can mentally fill in whichever series they feel might fit. Still gets the gist across without potentially revealing the author's personal taste in Ao3 reading material, lol.

But making it less specific isn't necessarily the best way, you know? Especially for a character who might reasonably know the specific thing being referenced.

Something I'm currently running up against in my fic: the Visored have lived in the Material World since 1901, and are all at least a little tuned-in to human culture - Rose & Shinji's love of music (despite the slight anachronism of jazz in 1901 lol), everyone's fashion, etc. Rose is more classical-themed (his outfit & Kinshara's conductor's baton), so for actual in-text references I'm sticking to classical music: he complains about Shinji making him play the boring bass part of Pachelbel's Canon in D. (Totally not channeling my former band kid woes here...)

Would it be unfitting to mention him singing something more contemporary? Not necessarily. Does naming a modern song directly in the fic feel like transporting myself back in time to 2003 songfic on FF.net? YES 💀

I don't have like, a solution here, lol. In lieu of specific references that might ring false or forced, I've been trying to focus on the non-specific - the reactions, the feelings, the vibes other characters are getting from Rose as "that one friend of yours who bursts into showtunes at any given opportunity." He is That Guy™ who starts singing in the group call and makes everybody groan, not because he's a bad singer, but because this is the third song he's sung in the past half hour alone. They have been down this road before. A lonely road; the only one that they've ever known--

*I am pulled offstage Vaudeville-cane-style*

Another way to make the setting feel like a lived-in place that the characters actually occupy is inventing things for them to do (or avoid), events for them to take part in (or not) - but the trick is to keep it conversational. If the character's talking about a local festival in their hometown, even in narration, they're probably not describing the whole shebang down to the history of when it was first celebrated. Because they're already familiar with it, you can flex their voice by summarizing what about it would be important to them. Maybe it's "You know, that thing where a noisy crowd makes navigating main street hellish for three days," or "Right, the 'festival' - or as I like to call it, 'an excuse to be publically day-drunk all weekend'."

(Bonus: doing that means you don't have to come up with details, lmao.)

Verisimilitude (long thoughts about writing)

Sometimes I get mailed random books to consider for course adoption. The first one I looked at the other day was so incredibly bad I could not make it past page 12--"oh my god I hate books" bad; "trees were wasted on this!!" bad. And then there's this one. I've made it to page 30-something and I could have told you 20 pages ago that Oliver Twist it would remain, but I am still reading it to read it, and maybe keep it to recommend extracurricularly. (The protagonist Alva is a weeb for American culture, whatever the word is for that, which I think could make for interesting study!) But that's all context to say,

AH YES THE INTERNET RABBIT HOLE OF NARUTO FAN FICTION, HENTAILORD. WE'VE ALL BEEN THERE.

SO...

BLEACH MENTION WHEN????

Based on the style of her screen name, the Naruto porn, and her listening to My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park, this girl is definitely living her teenage life in the mid-00s, in ways that are searingly obvious. Which feels like it should be a massive success in terms of using verisimilitude to pinpoint a particular time and place and, by extension, person. But I don't think it does?

In thinking about why this doesn't work for me as a reader:

1. As a general rule, I tend not to enjoy "fandom" subculture references like this in fiction, because they have never felt true to my experience of fandom, or even my experience of others' experiences of fandom. The specificity is there but not the verisimilitude. Whether this is because of an inability to articulate the breath of life that animates fandom spaces, or a feeling of needing to at least kind of translate it for the uninitiated general audience, I don't know. Not that Alva's narrative goes far enough to merit this discussion; she's just reading Naruto porn for one sentence, but it just doesn't land right for me. (Sidebar, this is probably also why I don't enjoy acafandom or fandom essays that aspire to acafandom; there's usually this attempted, manufactured critical/"objective" distance from the text that often feels performative, or at least the wrong [or less interesting] tool for the job. And even where 'in-group' positionality is addressed, the translation required to make these things legible to the out-group is just--well, not what I want in life, I guess!)

2. I am a great believer in drawing greatly from what you know and feel and all those random thoughts and behaviors and emotions and tics that make life interesting, and giving them to fiction. In fanfic especially, I am a great believer in seeing the author's hands in a text, making the story (and the original canon) unmistakably theirs. But I kind of always want them to be hands that are in the act of giving. By which I mean, I think there's a difference between all these things existing in a story and having been given to a character or a world or a story, and integrated genuinely into them.

Like, all I can think about while reading this book is how the author definitely lived through the mid-00s in a particular and very familiar way. Rather than create a richly immersive world, the details jump out of the page and leave the story behind. They don't feel like they belong to Alva (or perhaps Alva does not feel like a character with the depth to hold them and make them hers). They belong do the author, and to me, and to history, but Alva falls out of the equation. And if this is going to work, I feel like Alva can't fall out of the equation.

3. I was talking to a friend about something similar a few months ago. She was complaining about a historical fiction book she was reading with a book club she leads at the library she works at--how it was clearly very well-researched, but dry as hell. The information was not animated by the story itself. And I compared it to a fanfic I'd (not) read, where the author was very proud of all the research they'd done and how accurate-to-life its setting was. (To be clear, I'm not subtweeting Bleach fandom. Completely different fandom! Also this fanfic was published like 16 years ago.) The fic did bring in lots of specific details about trees and highways and city names--things I knew well, too, because it was set where my sister lives--but rather than be as exciting and, again, rich, as I feel like that familiarity could have been, it all felt dead. Because all these things were described specifically, but not true to how the narrating characters would describe them, or mentally catalogue them, or experience them.

And you might think, well, how would we possibly know how a character thinks about highways? It's not like he's explained this in canon. And I'd say, well, you definitely can. There are probably a lot of different ways a character could plausibly think about highways, depending on the specific shade and flavor of your characterization of them, all equally believable; but it's got to be part of the equation. There are a lot of ways to be right, and you know it when it's wrong. The wrong-est way it can be is for the way they think about highways to not factor into the way those dang highways are being described by them, in their POV.

4. I think about this both as a reader and as a writer--certainly more often as a writer, because I find that level of imagining a character's headspace the VERY best part of the process, and also because I am often concerned I am not doing it, or at least not well, lol. I'm positive I've done all the things I've just talked about not enjoying.

These concerns exist at the level of characterization work in general, but also at that level of, is the wizard behind the green curtain? Are his hands giving? Because while I do write fanfic because "it is fun" and because "this idea interests me," I am also usually writing it to work through deeply personal emotions/experiences. Which again, perhaps selfishly, I support that. But from a craft perspective I don't want it to feel, transparently, like "oh lol this author is going through it."

Moreover, from a relational perspective, I don't want that to be the relationship between me as author and the characters. Because one thing I am ALWAYS writing fanfic to do is to indulge my feelings about how much I am in complete, rapturous love with the characters and worlds in question. I don't want to just place things upon them, like a film or shroud; I want them to be given, integrated, arriving in the text wholly in their bodies and in their minds and entirely theirs. And I mean this for both the emotional arcs and conflicts and the random tics and details. I want them to have been given, and to belong, and to feel completely and inextricably theirs.

So, those are my thoughts about mid-00s Naruto porn!!!

I'd love to hear others' perspectives, as readers or writers or both. Have you had similar reactions, or quite different? Why do you write, and what do you want? What's your template for how you think about characterization, or your writerly relationship to canon/characters?