Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 14

[aadler]

 
Continuing the meme/challenge begun and tracked here.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 14
 
In your own space, share your love for something fannish: a trope, cliché, kink, motif, theme, format, or fandom.

I had trouble with this one last year, for the same reason as now: I don’t like tropes or kinks, and the other stuff … well, I just hate placing such limits on myself. As far as fandoms, I’ve made it repeatedly clear just how much and why I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so there’s nothing new to see on that one. There are a few lesser things I enjoy, though, and I suppose perhaps I can shoehorn something like that into this general category.

I do have a weakness for what-if stories. Not just AUs, but the whole idea of “what if such-and-such had gone this way instead of that way?”. My very first Buffyfic fit such a mold, and I’ve done more than a few of them since. At the same time, I’m utterly turned off by the idea of all-human AUs (is that done anywhere except in Buffy? probably there are Supernatural fics of that type); for me, that’s a bridge too far, changing too much and stripping out the parts of the original canon that make it interesting in the first place. In the ‘what-if’ venue, what entertains me most is seeing the effect of small changes: an axe hitting at a very slightly different angle, a fleck of mascara falling into an eye instead of off the eyelid, things like that. (Actually, I like seeing how significant differences can be brought about by such tiny alterations.) Probably the biggest ‘difference’ I ever did was in “As Moonlight Unto Sunlight”, and even then the reader had to get nearly to the end before it was clear just what that change was.

… And, okay, I also have a soft spot for Buffy/Xander stories, if done right. But I don’t seek them out just for being B/X, I simply enjoy them when I run across them. (More than once in the past, I’ve opined that Xander deserves Buffy, but doesn’t necessarily deserve the baggage she would bring along with her.)

And maybe — but we’re getting a lot further down the line here — the occasional Giles/Anya.

That’s all. Honest. I’m a gen guy, don’t be puttin’ none of that ’shippy stuff on me!