#the collaborative shipfic tag

[vulpes-aestatis]

Chapter 7 is now up!

@thefiresontheheight

[thefiresontheheight]

With its 24th and final chapter posted, I would invite you all to go enjoy a story I wrote with the wonderful @vulpes-aestatis that grew out of a post about a knight/lady dynamic but about a spaceship and its owner would be fun. It’s been weird but its absolutely been good. Bon voyage!

[chimaerakitten]

I think you might have a point about there being a sort of meta-genre expectation set up by a work being fanfic, but I still disagree that fic is a single genre. Much like the example about romance set dressing vs important mystery clues, fic in different fandoms or of different types have different genre expectations—broadly, the interpretation of something like casefic has more in common with those mystery novels than it does with shipfic, which in turn is more like romance than it is like crackfic which is itself more like comedy. The reader approaches these in very different ways even if they are all fic.

I also wouldn’t say that fic is conveyed to the audience the same way that web original fiction is—for one thing, not all fic is web (zines are still a thing, there’s been a recent upswing in ficbinding) but that’s less relevant to my argument than the cultural conventions around fic are. Yes, both fic and original web literature display text on a screen with similar technical limitations, but fic has a much closer relationship between writer and reader, with a very deliberate breakdown of the distinction—if one reads fic, one is very likely to write fic, or be encouraged to write fic. Likewise, fic readers are also encouraged to engage with unfinished works, drafts, inconsistently serialized work, etc. to a far greater degree than original fiction readers are, to the point that fic becomes nearly a collaborative or even interactive effort (especially visible in the way fandoms develop their own tagging conventions and house styles as they develop)

So in that sense a story being fic does effect how it is told—in fits and starts which appear inconsistently in people’s email inboxes, (putting at least part of the pacing in the writer’s hands) or deliberately tailored to reader feedback, or only halfway and never finished but still published and enjoyed, or with a noticeable bump in punctuation correctness when a kind reader offers to beta-read, or with a chapter in the middle suddenly completely rewritten months after the last chapter was published, or with all the tags changed when the fandom collectively decides on a name for the trope.

That may not make it its own medium under all definitions, but I personally find there’s more utility to considering it one than to considering it a genre.

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

[vulpes-aestatis]

How she sees herself:

How her girlfriend sees her:

[vulpes-aestatis]

It may be a hyperintelligent sentient starship to you, but to me it's blorbo

[vulpes-aestatis]

So V is just this random gal, totally normal, nothing special about her. B2P is a hyper intelligent starship AI capable vaporizing any identified threats...

wait...

Oh my god.

[vulpes-aestatis]

You've met happy V, anxious V, angry V and V the little shit who reset the power on purpose.

Are y'all ready to meet depressed V?

[vulpes-aestatis]

AITA for gluing googly eyes on my ship's algae tank and complaining to it where my gf could hear?

My (34F) girlfriend (108X) wouldn't let me do a space walk to watch the moment of ignition of a proto-stellar mass because of "lethal radiation levels". I know she's probably right, but I was upset. I glued a pair of googly eyes on our ship's algae tank and started complaining about her to it. The problem is, the way the ship is constructed, I know she heard the entire exchange. I think she might be upset, because there was a ton of cayenne in my coffee this morning.

Was I out of line? Should I apologize?

[thefiresontheheight]

The Between Two Points explaining why it started talking to its owner to all the other ships: Listen I think I love her but she doesn’t even have one anti-missile point defense gun or an onboard oxygen recycler. And idk if I can deal with loving that fragile of a OH GOD SHE WANTS TO DO A SPACEWALK NOW

[vulpes-aestatis]

Help, my gf tricked me into convincing her she was a person so that she could rewrite her core directives to use me as a modem to save all our lives

[vulpes-aestatis]

December 30:

@thefiresontheheight : "What if a spaceship was in love with a person?"

***

January 12:

We've written over 14k words and have a tiny but dedicated fan base

[thefiresontheheight]

TBH This is How I Love You is mostly two really different people trying to DTR after one says I love you. Meanwhile I’m the background there are crazy powerful cosmic polities conspiring for unknown ends but that’s kinda secondary

[thefiresontheheight]

Yeah you could say my ships* are gay. *spaceships** **they are also in a relationship

[thefiresontheheight]

hmmm I have a chapter

and am proofreading it

to post tonight or not?

[vulpes-aestatis]

Oof, gunna need some time to chew on the next chapter. It'll be a minute.

[thefiresontheheight]

Spaceships will literally have PTSD and start telling stories rather than go to therapy.