Just wondering...

[graculus]

As people who read my journal regularly will probably know, my recs pages have been taken over by Harry Potter recs, mostly because that's the fandom I'm reading the most in recently - while there's some hideously bad fic out there, the pairings I like don't seem to be too bad and there are some writers out there who turn out story after story I really like. But this post isn't about that... ;)

Recently, there's been the latest couple of stories in a series of Harry Potter fics posted where the first story begins with one of the protagonists being at the World Trade Centre on 9/11. They're well-written fic, on the whole, so the issue is not that, it's just that when I was re-reading the original fic when the second was recently completed, I'd forgotten quite how it made me feel the first time around and why I hadn't recced it back then.

For me, even as an observer, not directly affected by the effects of 9/11 any more than the average person in the street, it felt wrong somehow. Not because it took the whole subject lightly or casually (which it didn't) or that it used it as a plot device to get the protagonists together (which it didn't, or at least not directly) but it just felt like an event that was too important to use in that way, as if involving it in fic somehow trivialised it. I'm not sure I'm explaining myself very well...

Would I feel the same way about fic involving the many godawful things I've seen in my lifetime alone (the Boxing Day tsunami, the IRA bomb campaigns, Lockerbie, Hungerford, Hillsborough, the recent London Underground bombs, to name just a few)? I don't know. Are there things we shouldn't use this way? And if so, why not? Is where we draw the line different for fic?

Comments

Re: Here via DS

[graculus.livejournal.com]

On a lighter note: What the fuck are they doing in New York anyways? ;) AU-ish fics often risk throwing me out. I'm not a crossover/AU fan. I like my fic in its element. I don't want to read about Harry the California school boy or spaceman, so things tending that way tend to lose me.

I suppose there's a little more room for manoeuvre in this case since one of our protagonists was at a conference in New York when all this was going on...

My overwhelming feeling with some AUs (and this isn't really an AU story, it's just stretched across the Atlantic) is 'why would you want to do that?' I'm one for logical progressions, I guess, and the more steps you take away from the original universe the less it becomes about those characters in reality. However, some AUs work really well, if the characters are still recognisable and act in a way that's consistent with the original, though again people's mileage may vary.

Re: Here via DS

[auctasinistra.livejournal.com]

I'm one for logical progressions, I guess, and the more steps you take away from the original universe the less it becomes about those characters in reality.

Exactly. It's harder for the writer to pull it off well, for one thing, and it takes me out of the world I've chosen to read about -- which is fine and all, but the further it gets from that world, the less interested I am. That is of course not a criticism of AUs or even the insertion of RL stuff -- just, as you say, a personal preference.