Dear Fandom,

[giandujakiss]

I understand, and completely sympathize, with your love of insecure woobies with low self-esteem who fail to recognize their true worth. And I understand, and sympathize, with your love of AUs.

But if you create an AU where you keep all the insecure neediness of the character but eliminate everything in his backstory that justified it, you're left with an emotionally manipulative diva instead of an attractively damaged hero.

Love,
Me.

Comments

[surexit]

Oh, Christ, I have just finished an Avengers fic which fit this bill.

[giandujakiss]

It's so odd, because usually, fandom goes overboard with generating horrible past histories - I've read so many where the level of torture inflicted on the hero couldn't possibly be survived by any real-life human being. So it always leaves me baffled when I see the opposite - all the insecurity, none of the torture.

[ratcreature]

I think fandom just likes the extremes and push them. It's like the odd h/c where you get a ton of comfort for the sniffles or something like that. I find that completely ridiculous (I mean, why not just go for plain fluff, why the h/c route?). But then I appreciate the hurt side of h/c quite a bit and like the emphasis there, up to and including torture without any comfort when I'm in the right mood. (Though sometimes I like the comfort part too.)

So I assume similarly in the tortured backstory-woobie insecurity balance fans push in both directions to ridiculous extremes, like playing with a model organism or something.

[mswyrr]

But isn't the fun all about giving them a whole different set of reasons to be total jerks?

((she said, as notes for her forever unfinished Let's Give Jane a Backstory as a Teenage Hustler! Mentalist AU fanfic languished on her harddrive))

[giandujakiss]

Usually it is - that's why these particular AUs are so surprising to me. Usually you write an AU where they have a whole different tortured past - hence, my love of the hooker!fic. But sometimes, they get a different past that leaves out the torture part.