Nym Has Fannish Nostalgia And Thinky Thoughts - Tumblr Posts

Fanfic evolution, history, context, noodling, AUs and the Omegaverse

I've had a lousy few health days and ended up listening to a long, slow-burn, characterisation-rich Omegaverse fanfic in between sleeps. I've wanted to get my head properly around the A/B/O AU concept for ages (I'm feeling my fannish-elder age and thinking a lot about our evolution as a creative community after we got online, about the gamechangers like Buffy, Harry Potter, X-Files, and Supernatural) but never found one that was this much in-character to keep me engaged for the duration of a long read. I've only finished reading smutty shorts before.

I mean, I'm so broad-minded about fictional content that I have trouble fitting my mind inside my actual skull (my joke excuse for chronic migraine!), but I'm basically here to read about the characters I already love being recognisably themselves in some way, even in the most extreme AU setting. I wander off quickly with a 'meh' if that's missing, as I tend to do with original works/characters unless the writing is next-level extraordinary (Wolf Hall, Dresden Files, Titus Groan/Gormenghast, most of Terry Pratchett) and don't have two fucks to rub together about the kink side of fanfiction. I'll read it if it's there in an otherwise engaging piece, but it's never a draw for me.

I'm trying not to get all analytical until I finish hearing/reading this fanfic, but my brain-spider's groping as far back as Kirk/Spock and Amok Time for context and history, here. And I wouldn't say the same about mpreg, which I've tended to view as an evolution of smarm (The Sentinel fandom's 1990s flavour of it in particular) and soft whump, more than of graphic, romantic slash like K/S - yet I thought all this time that mpreg and the Omegaverse shared a common ancestry. Innteresssting.

I had the vague thought as I listened that some of the best AU fanfic I ever consumed came from the Star Wars: TPM/Jedi Apprentice fandom - the Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan pairing stuff on the Master Apprentice mailing list and archive. Soaring AUs and worldbuilding, yet deeply grounded in what little we then knew of those two characters. And there was so little to go on - I mean, Lucas' prequels were, to put it politely, heavily stylised rather than emotionally deep. That fandom had epic AU/AR fics that took my breath away with their character-richness, with their emotional beats, and had me going, "How?!?!" with writerly awe at a time when I was no slouch myself in the writing department. I need to find the energy to get myself up to date with the Disney!Star Wars content explosion and pay another visit.