It is a truth universally acknowledged

[giandujakiss]

That any Charles/Erik WIP featuring a soul-bonding style alpha-ish-/beta-ish/omega-ish or D/s universe will immediately cease updating upon achievement of a critical mass of readers.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Yes. And yet I'm still a sucker each time...

[giandujakiss]

I think there's a basic thing going on - everyone likes the idea of this premise, but no one actually wants to write it.

[ratcreature]

Though there are finished long ones too, some that have even been posted originally as WIP, for example Pookaseraph's Nation Building. Admittedly that has only D/s AU, not soulbonding or Mpreg.

[giandujakiss]

No soulbonding, exactly. Nationsbuilding is the only one that started as a WIP and actually completed, and that one doesn't have a soulbonding premise. I count anything involving a "one true partner who he knows immediately when first seen" as a soulbonding-esque premise.

(I am .. wildly squicked by mpreg, personally, but if desperate enough I'll read a story featuring men capable of mpreg so long as the actual preg is just a theoretical possibility. Which is to say, I can't really comment on the status of mpreg stories generally, but if it's got soul-bonding and D/s style in it, it won't be completed. Ever.)

Off the top of my head, I can't even really remember a complete long story along these lines, even one that wasn't started as a WIP.

Everyone likes the premise; no one likes to write it.

[ratcreature]

Yes, your general observation is sound. Though I still have hope for some WIPs (but then I don't give up on WIPs for years, and a couple of times they even actually get finished after being abandoned for over half a decade, though the frequency of that occurring is very low among the masses of abandoned WIPs, kind of like lottery wins). I actually consulted my bookmarks, and I can find some finished soulbond stories and D/s AUs, but the combination seems lethal for completeness.

[giandujakiss]

I can only really comment on Charles/Erik but I suspect it's true in other fandoms as well.

What really illustrates it is this one massive Ritchie-verse Holmes fusion with Sentinel. The premise was a soul-bonding thing (Sentinel!Holmes and Guide!Watson), with a simultaneous thing where Sentinels were doms and guides were subs. It was complete, and massive - maybe 75k? But here's the catch - they didn't meet for 90% of the story. Once they finally met, the story essentially ended.

I think the issue is that no one knows what to do with the characters once they meet - so that's basically where the stories break off.

[ratcreature]

Though 90% of Sentinel fanfic has the premise that Sentinels have a match with their guides (though not necessarily a D/s one), and while there are a ton of Sentinel AUs that end with their meeting, there are also many that just continue with them having adventures. So it doesn't have to be an obstacle. But at that point you do need an actual plot idea beyond the worldbuilding, and considering how unable I am myself to come up with any such ideas, I can totally see why it's a stumbling block.

[giandujakiss]

See, but yeah, there's all this Sentinel fanfic - but not necessarily D/s style. And that matters, I think - because making it D/s style means you have to navigate how the relationship plays out. And that's where people stall. Not commenting on Sentinel specifically but it does seem to be a pattern.

[beck_liz]

*sigh* Yes. One gets one's hopes up, because the updating was going at a great rate - "Hey, they might actually finish this thing!" - and then it stops. *pout*

[giandujakiss]

My favorites are the ones where they stall out, someone else steps in and says "Hey, can I try my hand at this prompt?" and then a couple of chapters later ... they stall out too. Which has also happened repeatedly.

[concernedlily]

This is rather reassuring to me, actually, as I had begun to suppose that the trigger to stop updating was me personally taking a look, deciding the update schedule looked reliable, and reading the whole thing to date, upon which all activity immediately appeared to halt. Sigh.

[giandujakiss]

Well, it's one or the other, anyway :-).

[nekosmuse]

I think the problem is that once you get into the story, the consent issues make it such that it is impossible for a realistic universe to have a happy ending. I don't read omega/alpha or D/s because they're on my personal squick list (but I will fight for your right to read/write it) but I can't honestly see how you could take a universe where one person has no choice (or both people have no choice) in their chosen mate and make it anything but problematic. I think writers get to the point in their story where they realize that, and since they wanted a happy ending, they bail.

[giandujakiss]

I think it's similar to that. I don't think it's the lack of choice per se - because for the majority of the ones I read, it's established that the partners really want to be there, that they're happy with each other, it doesn't read like noncon - but I do think the authors can't figure out how the relationship is supposed to work. Like, they've met, they're bonded to each other, there's supposed to be a D/s dynamic, but the authors can't see how that plays out in a non-squicky way. So it's not the fact that they are with another person they didn't "choose" that's the problem, I think - it's that the authors can't figure out how they navigate their lives from there.