angst in PotC
Feb. 5th, 2004 02:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
czeriHeh, I guess I lied. I’ve found another use for a livejournal – discussion. So here’s my random rantish observation about the PotC fandom.
I’m pretty new to the fandom – I’ve seen the film for the first time a month ago, and the thing that struck me most about it is that it is so completely angst-free. Horrible, traumatic things happen to all the characters, and yet no one lets anything dampen their spirits. It makes sense, I suppose, since the film is, essentially, a fairy tale, and not the tearjerking kind, either.
Once I started to read PotC fanfiction, however, what struck me was that so many stories are heavily laden with angst. Deathfic seems to strive, there are numerous single and double suicides, and if they’re not killing themselves or dying, the characters spend their lives reflecting sadly on their past, present or future.
Of course there is also a fair amount of light and angst-free stories, but compared to the dark fic the number of carefree stories is surprisingly low. I mean, honestly, X Files is a more cheery fandom than PotC.
The phenomenon puzzled me greatly, so I started to wonder about the possible reasons for it.
The first thing I came up with was that angst is one of the most, if not THE most popular genre in fanfic. We all love to cry over the fate of out beloved characters, don’t we? I sure do ;-) So maybe the presence of angst in PotC fic is just a natural result of authors writing their preferred genre?
Then it occurred to me that perhaps the fact the film itself is so carefree leads so many authors to compensating for that fact by making their characters particularly prone to depressions. After all, according to one of the most popular theories of fanfiction, it originates from the fans’ need to satisfactorily fill in whatever they find missing in the original work.
And here I got distracted from my musings by the question whether the addition of angst doesn’t automatically bend the film’s universe beyond recognition? After all, in the film, even though he’s lost his ship and has almost been killed numerous times, Jack Sparrow reacts the most strongly to finding the rum gone. And even that disaster only makes him homicidal for a moment. Which is actually true of all the characters – they react to things, sure, and heatedly, but their rage, sadness, resignation etc. only lasts a few minutes. They don’t wallow in self-pity even though they are perfectly entitled to it and, had the film’s universe resembled reality in that respect, they logically SHOULD have. If a fanfic story, then, takes one of these characters and makes them lastingly depressed because they lost the love of their life/their relationship turned sour/they are unhappy with the life they’re stuck with/choose your favorite reason, even though we’ve seen those same characters carelessly disregard their brushes with death and being rejected by lovers, it just, well, it doesn’t ring true. To me at least. In fact, I believe it looks an awful lot like OOC, even with the slack the artistic license affords. Am I too severe in that assessment?
I’m pretty new to the fandom – I’ve seen the film for the first time a month ago, and the thing that struck me most about it is that it is so completely angst-free. Horrible, traumatic things happen to all the characters, and yet no one lets anything dampen their spirits. It makes sense, I suppose, since the film is, essentially, a fairy tale, and not the tearjerking kind, either.
Once I started to read PotC fanfiction, however, what struck me was that so many stories are heavily laden with angst. Deathfic seems to strive, there are numerous single and double suicides, and if they’re not killing themselves or dying, the characters spend their lives reflecting sadly on their past, present or future.
Of course there is also a fair amount of light and angst-free stories, but compared to the dark fic the number of carefree stories is surprisingly low. I mean, honestly, X Files is a more cheery fandom than PotC.
The phenomenon puzzled me greatly, so I started to wonder about the possible reasons for it.
The first thing I came up with was that angst is one of the most, if not THE most popular genre in fanfic. We all love to cry over the fate of out beloved characters, don’t we? I sure do ;-) So maybe the presence of angst in PotC fic is just a natural result of authors writing their preferred genre?
Then it occurred to me that perhaps the fact the film itself is so carefree leads so many authors to compensating for that fact by making their characters particularly prone to depressions. After all, according to one of the most popular theories of fanfiction, it originates from the fans’ need to satisfactorily fill in whatever they find missing in the original work.
And here I got distracted from my musings by the question whether the addition of angst doesn’t automatically bend the film’s universe beyond recognition? After all, in the film, even though he’s lost his ship and has almost been killed numerous times, Jack Sparrow reacts the most strongly to finding the rum gone. And even that disaster only makes him homicidal for a moment. Which is actually true of all the characters – they react to things, sure, and heatedly, but their rage, sadness, resignation etc. only lasts a few minutes. They don’t wallow in self-pity even though they are perfectly entitled to it and, had the film’s universe resembled reality in that respect, they logically SHOULD have. If a fanfic story, then, takes one of these characters and makes them lastingly depressed because they lost the love of their life/their relationship turned sour/they are unhappy with the life they’re stuck with/choose your favorite reason, even though we’ve seen those same characters carelessly disregard their brushes with death and being rejected by lovers, it just, well, it doesn’t ring true. To me at least. In fact, I believe it looks an awful lot like OOC, even with the slack the artistic license affords. Am I too severe in that assessment?
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-09 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-10 07:56 am (UTC)I do agree, though, that angst is getting much love in fanfic ;-)