Recently, you linked to the lj of a cartoonist named Kyle in one of your posts. I looked at his lj, and found a brief essay or speech by author Kurt Vonnegut, on advice for fiction writers. One of his rules was: Be a sadist. Torture your characters to show what they are made of.
I have had the same thought about h/c in fanfic. My first fandom was XFiles, and there was a significant sub-fandom of writers who wrote stories about Mulder suffering severe medical trauma. There was a site called Muldertorture, which was an archive for fic that went way beyond angst.
Probably the ur-Muldertorture fic is "Oklahoma" (gen) (http://x-files.bytewright.com/arcO/Oklahoma.html, http://x-files.bytewright.com/arcO/Oklahoma2.html), which is an interesting read if you've got a chunk of time. It's set before the show starts. It's almost a whole MB of plain text. I read it in one 12+ hour sitting in 1997, when I first discovered online fandom.
This story, and others by Amperage and Livengoo, who were among the more powerful writers, esp. towards the beginning of XF's online fandom, made a big impression on other writers. I believe the horror story was part of the genre template they drew from, and they visited horrors upon Mulder. I think they, more than any others, drove the idea that Mulder had been severely abused as a child into "fanon". By the time I was reading XF fic online, it was so commonly assumed, that I thought it must have been taken from the show.
I recall being on a newsgroup once, and someone posted a similar question, but with a more pointed sense, ie, what's wrong with these people who like to imagine all these awful things happening to our hero, Mulder? And someone answered back, oh, you mean like Chris Carter? Other people concurred that the many traumatic events that happened to Mulder on the show inspired similar events in fic. I've not seen LOTR or sequels. Does a lot happen to the characters in them, that would cause authors to cast them in more trauma?
In mysteries and sci fi, there has to be some kind of problem that must be fixed, eg, the murderer discovered and caught, the alien invasion beaten back. Along the way, the hero usually must overcome obstacles, such as injuries, betrayals, getting captured by the bad guy, etc, and the author illustrates the hero's superior will, creativity, selflessness, etc by having him/her solving these problems and overcoming these obstacles.
I haven't read a romance novel in quite a while, but there seems to be a variation on the theme. By stoically enduring suffering, the heroine earns the right to be loved. I suspect the heroines are "pluckier" than they used to be, but I think the heroine finally being rescued and nurtured by Mr. Right is hardwired into the genre. The movie "Secretary" is a twist on that, ie, Lee "earns" Edward's love by suffering, but it's the suffering itself that appeals to her in the first place.
In detective novels, the hero doesn't cry, even when the bad guy has cracked his skull, locked him in a basement, and abducted his girlfriend. I watched a crime drama last night starring James Spader, where his character runs around fighting off bad guys a day after he got shot in the shoulder. In romance novels, on the other hand, the heroine cries, but she never gets snot and runny makeup all over her face doing it. She manages even to look adorable crying.
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I have had the same thought about h/c in fanfic. My first fandom was XFiles, and there was a significant sub-fandom of writers who wrote stories about Mulder suffering severe medical trauma. There was a site called Muldertorture, which was an archive for fic that went way beyond angst.
Probably the ur-Muldertorture fic is "Oklahoma" (gen) (http://x-files.bytewright.com/arcO/Oklahoma.html, http://x-files.bytewright.com/arcO/Oklahoma2.html), which is an interesting read if you've got a chunk of time. It's set before the show starts. It's almost a whole MB of plain text. I read it in one 12+ hour sitting in 1997, when I first discovered online fandom.
This story, and others by Amperage and Livengoo, who were among the more powerful writers, esp. towards the beginning of XF's online fandom, made a big impression on other writers. I believe the horror story was part of the genre template they drew from, and they visited horrors upon Mulder. I think they, more than any others, drove the idea that Mulder had been severely abused as a child into "fanon". By the time I was reading XF fic online, it was so commonly assumed, that I thought it must have been taken from the show.
I recall being on a newsgroup once, and someone posted a similar question, but with a more pointed sense, ie, what's wrong with these people who like to imagine all these awful things happening to our hero, Mulder? And someone answered back, oh, you mean like Chris Carter? Other people concurred that the many traumatic events that happened to Mulder on the show inspired similar events in fic. I've not seen LOTR or sequels. Does a lot happen to the characters in them, that would cause authors to cast them in more trauma?
In mysteries and sci fi, there has to be some kind of problem that must be fixed, eg, the murderer discovered and caught, the alien invasion beaten back. Along the way, the hero usually must overcome obstacles, such as injuries, betrayals, getting captured by the bad guy, etc, and the author illustrates the hero's superior will, creativity, selflessness, etc by having him/her solving these problems and overcoming these obstacles.
I haven't read a romance novel in quite a while, but there seems to be a variation on the theme. By stoically enduring suffering, the heroine earns the right to be loved. I suspect the heroines are "pluckier" than they used to be, but I think the heroine finally being rescued and nurtured by Mr. Right is hardwired into the genre. The movie "Secretary" is a twist on that, ie, Lee "earns" Edward's love by suffering, but it's the suffering itself that appeals to her in the first place.
In detective novels, the hero doesn't cry, even when the bad guy has cracked his skull, locked him in a basement, and abducted his girlfriend. I watched a crime drama last night starring James Spader, where his character runs around fighting off bad guys a day after he got shot in the shoulder. In romance novels, on the other hand, the heroine cries, but she never gets snot and runny makeup all over her face doing it. She manages even to look adorable crying.