What kind of fan fiction do you like?

[musicantoinette]

Hello, I haven’t posted anything on Live Journal yet. I’m fairly new and joined just so I could be a part of this community. Anyway, I was wondering what sort of Leviathan fan fiction everybody liked.  What is your favorite genre, subjects, POVs, etc.? What is important to you when you read fan fiction? Do you care how long it is? I figured this

Comments

[mightyinkas]

Well, howdy! Welcome to the party! And my, what nice questions you've brought us! LOL

I'm not picky about the genre/subject/POV... I just want the story to be good. By that I mean everyone's in character, there's decent grammar & spelling, a natural flow/"voice", and it has a satisfying conclusion.

I'm tempted to say that I like longer fics better, but if something is short and wonderful, I'm also happy with it. What I most hate are stories that are started and then abandoned. Not cool, people!

[musicantoinette]

Thanks! :)

Unfinished stories are quite annoying. There is nothing worse than getting into a good story, and patiently waiting for the next update and then slowly realizing it will not come. :( Short and sweet is better than not finishing a longer story at all.

[friggeng]

I've shifted away from FF.net since Goliath, as it's all mostly Deryn/Alek post Goliath or Alternate Goliath stuff, now... and pretty much everything's been done by Julia already, and better, too. Haha.

I adore the alternative pov stuff; like Barlow, but mostly characters the series didn't focus on at all. Unfortunately this is really, really, really hard to find, especially recently.

I generally prefer longfic.

[musicantoinette]

There is so much fan fic on ff.net. It is hard to keep up with it all, but that pretty much sums it up it seems. Lots of Dalek of course, lol. And most of it has been done before. Are there other fan fiction communities out there?

[readingredhead]

Archive of Our Own (AO3 for short) only has a small archive of Leviathan fic at the moment, but you might want to check it out? (Most of it is from the rare fandom holiday fic exchange, Yuletide Challenge.) I personally think it's a much smoother interface than FF.net, makes searching for fic a lot easier.

[readingredhead]

Hm, my favorite fic is generally long-ish but not epic -- something I can sink my teeth into, but not something that will keep straggling along and overspreading the bounds of its initial conception, either to never be finished or to be wound up poorly. I'd say maybe 10k is the ideal fic length for me? Just enough to tell a meaty and sustained story rather than merely a single scene. Though of course I love well-written stand-alone scenes/shorter one-shots (and I tend to write fics that are much shorter than the ones I most like to read). In terms of POV, as long as the voice is consistent both with itself and with the voice that the narrating character has had throughout the books, I will read fic in anyone's perspective. I tend to shy from first-person fic because canon is in third-person but this may be a personal thing.

Honestly when I read fic I care more about the quality of the writing and the thoughtful exploration of the "gaps" in canon than I do about the precise subject matter. I am pretty sure that the only inviolable canon

[mightyinkas]

Your talk about the alt-future brings to mind something I turned up in my research (for a Leviathan fic, of course): Jacksonville, FL, was the "first Hollywood", but WWI helped to torpedo the film industry there. Without 4 years of war...

I mean, that's just a silly thing - the movies - but imagine how different America would be if LA was a sleepy California town and all the showbiz happened in Jax. Fun to speculate.

[readingredhead]

Oh wow, this is definitely intriguing! I grew up in suburban southern California, went to college in norcal, and am trying to figure out how CA would be changed by the lack of an LA showbiz industry... Wikipedia tells me that population-wise, San Francisco was actually a slightly larger city than Los Angeles in 1910 (despite the impact of the 1906 SF earthquake!), although LA's percentage increase in population becomes much more dramatic than SF's in the 20s and 30s. But I imagine part of this, at least, has to do with the movie industry -- and if LA didn't have it, it might have slowed down the population growth of socal as a whole. (I mean, the suburbs I grew up in were basically a desert before aqueducts were built to grow stuff there, and a large reason for those aqueducts was, if I remember correctly, to serve the increasing population of LA!)

I am now going to be sad that I don't have the time (or probably the patience) to write fic about Leviathan-verse San Francisco's reconstruction post-quake.