Okay, but, do you know what we’re not talking about enough? The body swap scene.

So, in my opinion, the mark of a good plot twist is that you shouldn’t see it coming the first time around, but the second time through, you should wonder how you possibly missed it. The body swap scene is that 100%.

David Tennant plays Aziraphale-as-Crowley almost identically to how he plays Crowley. The exceptions are marvelous to watch – seeing the Bentley is my favorite, when Aziraphale-as-Crowley smiles more broadly and easily than Crowley ever lets himself until the end dinner at the Ritz be still my heart.

But in Hell? No discernible difference. The swagger is there. The casual seeming disregard for the danger he’s in. Seriously, the energy of his entrance when he’s brought into the courtroom is identical to his “Hi, guys” in the graveyard at the beginning.

I love this. Because it’s how Aziraphale would play it. Hell doesn’t frighten Aziraphale the way Heaven does. Demons are, in his book, straightforward. He just has to out-intimidate them, and Crowley already does that. So be Crowley, and that’ll do the deed. And he knows Crowley well enough to pull it off without a single hesitation. The only time it felt even slightly not-quite-right (in terms of not questioning that it was Crowley) was the utterly amazing little nose wrinkle. And I’ll forgive Aziraphale that – he knows he’s won; he can gloat a little.

But MICHAEL SHEEN, FRIENDS.

Crowley-as-Aziraphale is a completely different story because Crowley is not as good at the facade as Aziraphale is. 

He almost is. When Crowley-as-Aziraphale is getting dragged away by the angels? That reads as Aziraphale 100%. But in the park with Aziraphale-as-Crowley? In the bookshop? And especially in Heaven opposite the angels? That is so obviously Not-Aziraphale that I DO NOT KNOW how I missed it the first time through. And that is a testament to Michael Sheen’s talent.

Aziraphale is a being who shows emotion with his entire self. He is never still, not his hands, not his body, not his face. Everything he is feeling plays out across every inch of him. He is effusive and genuine and has no idea how to push away any emotion even a little bit.

Think of all the other times we see him in Heaven! He’s nervous, he’s anxious, he’s flustered, he’s doing that thing with his voice and his face when confronted with these beings who genuinely terrify him. He can’t hide it. 

But Crowley is all too familiar with pushing down emotion. Crowley is guarded, he is caution personified, he reserve and preservation, and with his angel’s life in his hands, on Heaven’s home turf? He can’t shake that.

Crowley-as-Aziraphale is so still. His face, his body language, his posture, it’s all this perfectly calm facade hiding a smoldering fury that Aziraphale might be incapable of achieving. But when Crowley-as-Aziraphale is confronted with the angels and see how they treat his soulmate best friend, he cannot hide that fury. It’s in his eyes, his face, his voice. But Michael Sheen-as-Crowley-as-Aziraphale plays it so well because it comes across as Crowley-as-Aziraphale saying to the angels, You broke him. You pushed him too far and you broke him and this is what it looks like, and you should be terrified.

And it’s all so perfect, and they’re both so talented, and I don’t think we talk about it enough.

YES.  THIS.

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t. 

And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre. 

So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused. 

It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me. 

Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about. 

And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.” 

When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that. 

Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. 

“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”

yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why - it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”

Yes! Exactly! This!!!

This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments. 

This explains so much about myself to me! 😭 I’ve been a big reader all of my life. I knew at a young age I wanted to get an English degree and become an editor. But then I found fanfiction, a little over ten years ago, and suddenly most regular fiction was too dry for me? I ended up dropping my English schooling after a year because there weren’t the same connections happening for me as there were in fic. I’m suuuper character driven. I’ll read the same character in a hundred different ships, in all of the different fic genres and tropes, aus or what have you, because I like to see how they adapt to those changes. Those “offscreen” moments are just as important, if not MORE important, to me.

This speaks to me so much! I’m in grad school rn and have been thinking about the fact that I DEVOUR fic but cannot get into “traditional” fiction unless I’m on break and *sit down* to read a book. Yet I was able to pick up a new Sarah Waters book and read it in two days (during term time!) because I was so invested. After reading this interesting post(s) I realized I like her writing so much because she is like fic! I’ve long recognized that she is one of the few published authors that write with character driven stories aka why I like her (and Emma Donoghue’s) writing. It’s also interesting that they are both women and also include lesbian relationships within their writing. The reason it’s so good tho (and how I try to sell her books to my friends) is that the gayness isn’t a THING it’s just incidental to being human female people. And that’s how fic bills it too –just being people and that’s why we read it and fall in love. Lots of thoughts on this –thanks for the post @earlgreytea68!

You’re very welcome! Honestly, I wrote this because I was trying to think through things in my own brain, but I feel like it also helped *me* make this huge breakthrough! I’d been having this very unsettled relationship with original writing and my difficulty getting back into it and I realized it was because I was treating it like a completely different genre. It really made me aware of what switches I’m pulling in my writing brain to make me move back and forth and no wonder I’m so creatively exhausted!

Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s reactions to this post, they’ve been really interesting to hear about everyone else’s experiences and relationships to fic vs. “original” stories. I FEEL LIKE I FINALLY UNDERSTAND AFTER ALL THIS TIME WHAT @knackorcraft WAS TRYING TO TEACH ME, SORRY I’M SO SLOW!!

This is an incredible thread! We DEFINITELY need to talk more and finish that draft we started. ❤️

AU'S

So, just for fun, I hyperlinked most of this list to the Arthur/Eames fics that correspond with them, if I could find them, because I could. I’m sad that I could not find something for the one about the soup but i’m sure it’s out there. It’s that kind of fandom. <3

Some examples of why the Oxford comma is generally a good idea

Please don’t let the Oxford comma die. If you were apathetic about it before, I think this will help you understand why it is necessary.

On the other hand, these sentences are pure gold.

Maxine Peake as Hamlet

#fuck me up with this lil draco malfoy butch

Arthur works at an upscale bar in the evenings to pay off his student debts. Working for ambitious Dominic Cobb as his PA/lackey might be lucrative in the long run but it didn’t pay his rent. 

Handsome but secretive Eames came into the upscale hotel bar once every few weeks. Arthur was intrigued but knew better than to get involved with a patron especially since he needed the money and tips to afford his tiny but expensive walkup that he had fallen in love with and was slowly renovating.

Would Arthur take Eames up on his offer?

naps are the worst kind of temptation.. they promise u rest and wellness but leave you with a cloudy headache and an inescapable drowsiness the rest of the day

First look at Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, which tells the story of  a philosophy professor in existential crisis, who gives his life new purpose when he enters into a relationship with his student.

WHAT A TWIST FROM WOODY ALLEN AND MALE HOLLYWOOD! 

this reads like a parody of a woody allen movie, wtf

gosh, hollywood is giving us a tale of a brooding middle-aged guy finding meaning when a fresh young woman inexplicably find him attractive.

something new, something different.

i guess we should be grateful woody didn’t cast himself…?

Please, for the love of all that is right and good in the world, can you people just STOP financing this garbage?

Ugh.  Gross.

AU (ALTERNATE UNIVERSE)

Guys. My love for a good AU fic is so intense that I’m almost frozen in the face of this category. (Oh, and also remembering that I missed this up in my nominations last time, didn’t I?) This fandom has SO MANY IMPORTANT AMAZING AUs. I do not even know where to start. 

At first I was like, “I will only nominate whatever springs first to my mind,” and then literally without thinking I had, like, a dozen fantastic AUs in my head. TOO MANY GOOD AUs. 

Anyway, there are already some fabulous nominations in THIS THREAD that you should go and check out. And you should add your own. I know you have your favorites. I know one popped into your brain right now. Go! Nominate it!

And don’t forget we’ve got plenty of other categories, too!

(P.S. I know there’s some thing where LJ is marking some posts as spam if you’re not a member or something. We’re monitoring and will unmark those posts asap.)

This reminds me that I need to update my AU list.  But there are already so many great AUs.  Come nominate some!

ANGST

Did that get your attention? 

It’s Dreaming Readers nomination time, and today I’m highlighting the particular category of ANGST. You know, those fics you read where you kind of want to claw your weeping eyes out because of how much weeping because of the ~exquisite angst~? 

I’m actually not much of an angst reader myself, so we really extra-need your help here! What are your favorite angsty Inception fics? What angsty fic’s been on your radar to read and you haven’t yet but you’ve heard good things? 

The best I am going to do, I think, is nominating @toomuchplor‘s  Whither Thou Goest, which is part of the larger Steinwayverse and when I was at this point in the ‘verse and they were being angsty I felt like they were going to KILL ME with this. 

Oh! Or I could nominate @nolaespoir‘s I Kept It from You, which I honestly read accidentally and then it also KILLED ME. 

So, you should GO HERE and nominate your favorite angst fics. 

And if angst isn’t your thing, there are lots of other categories!

I tried! I want to! It keeps marking my post as spam…. 

Oh, argh! I think this was a thing it was doing? @ladyprydian, was there a solution to this? I can’t remember now. 

@mahons-ondine I have unspammed your nominations. 

I just made a post to dreamin-readers about this where if you are not a member of the community your posts might get marked as spam. I have altered the LJ settings so anyone can comment but it still blocks non memebers (and @involuntaryorange not sure why that is happening and others were effected las round as well). 

Still investigating, and very closely monitoring the posts to make sure all “suspicious comments” are checked and unspammed. 

Thanks for this!!

Sooooo much delicious angst!  Come nominate your favorites!!!!

I’m sure this is all over my dash already (it’s been a busy day) but can we talk about the perfection that is the Hamilton cast mashing up Sweeney Todd with “Alexander Hamilton”?

That isn’t Pippa btw.

Agreed. I finally caught a clearer view on one of my 17,493 rewatches. :-)

Drum major!Arthur?

I’m at my kid’s multi-school band event and I swear to god the posture and gestures and slicked back hair on this drum major just screams high school Arthur to me. Is this a thing? Can it be a thing?

Now they are playing Uptown Funk.

I don’t actually know much about school bands, but there is this one where Arthur is on the drumline. 

Thanks for this!  I remember it now.

I’m sure this is all over my dash already (it’s been a busy day) but can we talk about the perfection that is the Hamilton cast mashing up Sweeney Todd with “Alexander Hamilton”?

THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING I’VE EVER SEEN!!!!

IKR?!?!?!?!