Wishful thinking

I few days ago I was poking around the Web, looking for some story titles, and I came across this BtVS story page that was sort of unusual and amused me in a nasty kind of way. They were using feedback quotes like a book blurb, something I've seen a few people do and which always comes across as pretentious, self-adoring, and embarassing. Because you know that if anyone sent bad fb (although I realize pretty much no one does send critical or negative fb these days in Net fandom), it would not have made it on the site, and I always feel cringey about people who feel the need to do that kind of thing. They take themselves way too seriously. But instead of just zipping past, I actually read a few of the "blurbs" this time, and I noticed a peculiar pattern. A number of people were commenting on how they rarely read fanfic, because all fanfic seems to be designed to do is create things that aren't happening on the screen, or make stories that aren't part of the canon, and fulfill the wishes of the fans because they're not seeing that happen on screen.

I was like, HELLO!? Did you come late to the meeting and missed the handout? Did no one ever tell you that's what fanfic is?? How did you ever get into fandom and try reading fanfic if you thought it was supposed to only be about the canon and what the canon gives you? I couldn't even understand one person's complaint, that fanfic departs from canon, because I thought "how could you possibly write only the canon?" I mean, all you'd be doing is writing what you saw on screen, and what's the point of that? Buried in these bizarre complaints were of course praise for the authors, who managed to write a story that was "just like the show." I assume that meant they didn't depart from the storyline much, and just filled in the missing hours and days, rather than conveying the quality of the show. Yeesh capeesh.

So why am I rambling about this pointlessly? I'm not entirely sure, other than that I have two new stories up at my page, one of which is more a vignette about what I didn't see happening after Get It Done, and what I wished would happen. I suppose that's the great failing of my fanfic, I'm writing that awful non-canonical, wish-fulfillment fic. Darn me, anyway. ;-) So I proudly take up the Wish Fulfillment banner and ride forward.

One of the stories is very weird, a paper by a Watcher about The Valorous Vampire, (yes, it's supposed to be humorous, but I honestly don't know if it works or not; apologies if it doesn't) and the other is just pointless and short, a vignette called Soft What Light.

Many, many thanks to sweet_ali for the beta reading on the vignette, and to merryish for the academic expertise to make the "paper" story so much more delightfully pedantic and journally. You guys rock.