(no subject)

[sideways]

Iiiiit's 3 Sentence Ficathon season! Looking forward to the usual collection of prompts that make me pause and reflect that even within niche hobbies there are many people who walk through the world at a different angle to me.

I'm actually battling with a certain degree of curmudgeonly feeling towards fandom habits in general... something about not wanting to fall into the trap of arguing that shipping and self-inserts are lower forms of engaging with a story, but nonetheless feeling weary of how immediately the text can get pushed aside in the collective eagerness to focus on one's own vision for it. I've always felt a big part of the enjoyment lies in marinating in the actual canon for a while before getting all transformative about it! O for a grace period of analysis and speculation before the tag is swamped with reader insert ship headcanons.

Relatedly, Ersatz is a fun little indie project about an amnesiac waking in the trenches of an undying war. Strong aesthetics, evocative animation style, lots of juicy worldbuilding implications. Reminds me a bit of Wildbow's Twig serial, in a good way.

Comments

[i_wish_to_remain_nameless]

I'm fine with shipping though I think that I must like it for different reasons than most people do and don't tend to like it when the main pairing is too decontextualized from canon and put in a generic romance story instead.
As for self-insertion I think that writer inserts can occasionally be interesting if the author is self aware enough to characterize them decently but I just don't get the appeal of reader inserts. Like I understand intellectually that people want to imagine dating characters that they find attractive. That's easy enough to understand. But most reader inserts are basically just OC fics written in second person so I don't really get why the reader would be find it easier to project onto "y/n" than onto an actual original character or even a canon character. I also don't get why people don't just come up with their own fantasy scenarios about dating whatever character they find most desirable instead of reading reader insert fics. It would make sense if they were like wanted to see what other people did on their imaginary dates with The Character as a social activity and to maybe get some new ideas for their own but from what I've heard y/n fic readers tend to dislike it when the reader insert demonstrates traits that the are different from the reader's or does things that they don't think that they'd do.
Honestly I find traitless reader inserts a very strange phenomenon in general since I relate to characters based more on noticing elements of their character that remind me of myself in rather than projecting elements of my self into the blank spaces within the character (though I do this too but usually only after I've relate to the character) so characters who are all blank space are much less relatable to me.