Whatever happened to...

[kangeiko]

I've had little to do but think for the past few days (well, other than sleep, or contemplating the bathroom tiles, of course), and it suddenly occured to me that entire genres of fic had come and gone and - well - they aren't around anymore!

So. I bet that there are more 'fan history'-savvy people out there who can help me out. Anyone know what happened to the following types of fic?

1. Author!fic: Not a Mary Sue, but a direct authorial insertion, where the author directly meddles in the 'verse. Could be that the author retains authorial powers, or that she is a victim of outside meddling (e.g. Babylon 5's Infinite Regress universe).

2. 'Get 'em!' fic: not merely dark!fic, or death!fic, but a type of fic that positively revelled in throwing everything including the kitchen sink at our belovee characters and watching them drop like flies. More like death and destruction as an entertainment form, rather than aspiring for any particular artistic achievements.

Help the curious?

(And, of course, if any other genres have disappeared off the face of the earth, tell me, for I am nosy. Yes.)

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I wanna know where all the elves went :)

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

I used 'em all up (http://www.trickster.org/speranza/cesper/Elves.html).

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

i'm sitting here literally giggling...

but seriously...they were elves...and then there were wings...and now genderfuck seems to have taken over the fanverse...fashion? trends?

love the icon! new?

[kangeiko]

YOU HAD ELVES?????

*mutter mutter*

Why didn't we ever had elves? All we had was stinking wing!fic. Bah.

[khriskin]

Hey, I still write MuseFic (aka Author!fic)! Somebody has to after all. ^_~ *laughs* (Although the fictives tend to end up crashing on my couch and cleaning out my fridge rather than me getting to harrass them. *sighs*)

I do remember the good old days when the Subreality Cafe was in full swing. Ah alt.comics.fan-fiction, how I miss thee. *mourns*

[kangeiko]

Yeah, exactly. *nods* I remember a time, a time of mailing lists and private servers - the mountains were lower then, and dinosaurs still walked the internetz - when author!fic was a legitimate exercise to get the muses talking to you. And you were more than welcome to post away in most lists - Babylon 5, Buffy/Angel, SG-1, X-Men... and then it all went away! Did we just become less meta about our fic?

[khriskin]

I think that perhaps we've gotten less whimsical? Back when I joined the fandom in, err, long long ago ^_~ *laughs*, there was always the sense that the fictives existed outside of the stories as well as in them. They'd nag Author's to work on WIPs, hang out in the Subreality Cafe and complain about their storylines, even band together for massive round-robin silliness.

Nowadays meta tends more towards the intellectual and less towards the silly. Alas. *goes off to have a drink with her fictives and reminisce*

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I think that a "Get 'Em" fic is the overall generic title for what is known in Blakes7 as "BUARA": "Beat Up and Rape Avon." I don't watch or read Supernatural but I kind of get the feeling that Get 'Em fics are not unknown there.

[kangeiko]

Not just one character, though (although that's what it seems to have morphed into recently). I guess that it could be best described as apocalypse!fic, except that everyone dies, and they die missing bits of themselves, and there are also man-eating tigers, and one of them is a traitor, and most of them get raped, and then the universe starts to explode.

*thinks* I had one in the draft stages that I never finished, which was basically a serial killer loose in Sunnydale, slowly picking off the Scoobies one by one. It was a gore-fest, basically, and then it turned out to be one of the Scoobies (either Oz, or an insane!Janna Calderash-possessed Giles). In retrospect, I'm quite pleased that I didn't finish it.

The X-men fandom used to have quite a few fics like this - one in particular I lost a while back and have been searching for, chronicled the fall of the X-Men (and their deaths, one by one), followed by Magneto & his group, and it basically had Gambit as the only survivor, but bound in a way that was worse than death. He was talking to a young mutant - Shackle? Shard? Something like that - and the world was continuing to fall apart.

metafandom invited me

[rhap-chan.livejournal.com]

I'm not particularly sad that author!fic disappeared. It was generally an excuse to get two characters together (that's what I used it for, the one time I thought I would be "clever"). And I don't know where you think "Get 'em!" fic went-- at least in my fandom, it's very much alive and well. Since the canon material features a bunch of underage girls, this is disturbing, to say the least.

Re: metafandom invited me

[kangeiko]

Oh, I don't know. Most of the author!fic I was familiar with was played for laughs, as a way to get the muse going. But that could just be a fandom difference, I suppose...