entirely ruined her disposition with books

Okay, I have recently been thinking about fictional characters I relate to, specifically how differently I relate to them than Elyssa does. Because I was thinking that she has a type and I have a type. She's all about Angel and Harry and Lee Adama. And I'm over here loving the stuffing out of Spike and Ron and Helo/Gaius/Billy/Felix/basically-all-the-other-male-characters. And the obvious difference is that she loves the Heroes and I love the sidekick/shadow character/whatever.

So of course I want to know why. And I have been digging deeply into this today.

And I have come to the conclusion that it is because I am a giant mess, okay?

( cut for self-indulgent rambling )

Gakked from gabrielleabelle and angearia.

This is gonna be hard.

( I can ramble more than you can! )

I've never done a meta about any of my own fics before, but in light of an extremely interesting discussion on snickfic's journal, I was inspired to really explore what I wanted to accomplish with Kaleidoscope. It's the fic that is the most read (or at least most-reviewed) and most-awarded of my Buffy fics, and it was also my first fic in the fandom, so it seems a decent place to start.

snickfic was commenting on how off-putting it can be in fic "when the purpose of one or more secondary characters is to have Insights about the main character, independent of their own character development." I think this is a very true statement (we in particular talked about how this sort of device mistreats Tara so horribly), and--of course--it made me think of my fanfic that is the story of Buffy and Spike through the lenses of all the other characters. I think the story works, but why? I'm going to ramble about that for a while, if anyone's interested.

There are two things to keep in mind here: I actually love seeing a character/couple/friendship/place that I love through the eyes of another character when that character doesn't suffer because of it. The character can't be the mouthpiece of the fangirly writer (as I note below, I sometimes fail in this regard), nor can the character act out of character--for example, thinking more about another character/pairing than he or she actually would. In this meta, I'll explore whether I think if I succeeded in sticking to those two rules.

Second, most of my writing is extremely intuitive. I don't often think, "I'm going to add this as a metaphor or a motif or for this reason or that." I write something, feel that it's right and move on, or I feel that it's wrong, and I fix it--without taking much time to figure out why it was wrong and the edit is right. Because of this, I hadn't thought of a lot of things on a conscious level until this moment. It'll be interesting to see what I find.

( An Introduction )

( Fred )

( Dawn )

( Gunn )

( Willow )

( Angel )

More to come: the last five characters and and some wrapping-it-up thoughts.