Fanfic preferences

[graculus]

Gakked from luthien as I attempt to make yet more posts without mentioning ferret bowel movements...

Is there a character type that you fall for every time, e.g. the hero, the bad boy, the geek, the anti-hero?

I tend to like geeks, but the one thing my favourite characters (Daniel Jackson, Ezra Standish, Artemus Gordon, Illya Kuryakin, Severus Snape...) tend to have in common is that they're intelligent, somewhat sarcastic individuals who don't wear their hearts on their sleeves. I don't mind some ambiguity as long as there's also some morality there, even if it's a twisted or unexplored one.

What about sex in fic--must have; can take it or leave it; how many times can you insert Tab A into Slot B?

Yes and no. I've been known to skip over sex scenes to get to the plot, but that tends to happen more when it's feeling like 'oh, I've written 10 pages, time for another sex scene' and it doesn't seem to advance the plot or my understanding of the author's take on the characters. I'm just as happy with any kind of sex scene and don't feel Tab A and Slot B deserves more attention than anything else, but then in terms of my own writing, I find I don't write a great deal of penetrative sex, so make of that what you will...

Slash, het, gen, or give me it all, babe?

In order of preference: slash, gen - I started life as a gen fan and as a result have a healthy respect for well-written gen (that's gen as in 'no romantic interludes', not non-slash). I've yet to be in a fandom where I actively seek out het fic.

Are there any types of stories you crave, i.e. hurt/comfort, humour, AUs, adventure, kink etc?

I love hurt/comfort, as long as it's balanced - I dislike whumping for the sake of whumping where there's not equivalent amounts of comfort being dished out as well. I also have a great love for AUs, unless it's in Magnificent 7, where I think they ought to be banned because they make people forget it's a show about cowboys.

Kink for the sake of kink doesn't do much for me, but I don't object to it (except for a few more extreme things which I really don't want to read about, like scat...) as long as it's germane to the rest of the story and I can see the characters actually getting into that. Sometimes it just doesn't fit so well, so why shoehorn it in? I have to say I've learned a hell of a lot about what turns some people on since I started reading slash and am now surprised by the range of stuff I will read compared to what I would have thought I'd be reading 5 years ago...

OTP--Do you have one, or do you like to read a range of pairings?

I tend towards One True Character more than One True Pairing, except in Wild Wild West, Man from UNCLE and Due South (RayK all the way, baby!) - in the other fandoms I read and write in, I tend to have a favourite character and can mostly read them with pretty much anyone except for a few exceptions. No Malfoy sex for me, for instance...

Bullet proof kink--Do you have any and are you willing to share?

I'm not sure it's a kink as much as a serious story preference... there are two things I really love and one is how-they-first-met stories where there's no established canon for that (so we're talking Wild Wild West and Man from UNCLE here predominantly) and the other is where one character thinks the other has betrayed him but they haven't really and he finds that out in the end... Mmmmm. :)

Comments

[innocent-lex.livejournal.com]

With the expansion of reading material, I have to agree. The first time I came across fic at all it was Voyager Janeway/Paris, and I fell about laughing at the very idea. Now I read an awful lot of fic that I would probably have flicked straight past back then (not the Janeway/Paris fic - that's too much even for me).

[graculus.livejournal.com]

It's been my experience that a good writer can convince me of pretty much anything, but there are still things I just would struggle to summon up any interest to read and het fic tends to loom large in that list.