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I've just spent the last, oh, half an hour or so, sobbing. First in my desk chair and then in the bathroom until it tapered off. Why? Because I finally settled in to read ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cesperanza's amazing Written by the Victors*, and about two hours after finishing, in the middle of listening to fleurrochard chant one of aesc's apocryphal texts, I just broke down. The hell of it was, I'd waited until now to read the damn thing (and listen, I'm talking like Sheppard now) because I knew it would be a sock in the gut, between what I'd heard about the content and the expectation that it would throw me into despair about my own potential as a writer, and I needed to be in an emotionally stable place before diving in. Well, hell.
( In which I try to figure out what exactly affected me the most, while trying not to set myself off again. Includes potentially spoilery discussion of 'Victors' and 'Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose.' )
Which isn't quite the basis for a good cry that I'd expected.
* * *
I don't know. Enough about me (unless it's not just me?). What are some of the things that tend to make you ache, other than character death, in fanfic?
*Which, yes, is an SGA story and best appreciated as such, but it's also about history and academia and politics, love and loyalty, standing up for what one believes in against daunting odds, ordinary people and extraordinary heroism, culture and language, myth and legend, fans' relations to canon and canon's relations to fanfic and fans' relations to fanfic and fanfic's relations to other fanfic, and a dozen other things, all in 55,000 words. People: There's a constructed bibliography.
cesperanza's amazing Written by the Victors*, and about two hours after finishing, in the middle of listening to fleurrochard chant one of aesc's apocryphal texts, I just broke down. The hell of it was, I'd waited until now to read the damn thing (and listen, I'm talking like Sheppard now) because I knew it would be a sock in the gut, between what I'd heard about the content and the expectation that it would throw me into despair about my own potential as a writer, and I needed to be in an emotionally stable place before diving in. Well, hell.( In which I try to figure out what exactly affected me the most, while trying not to set myself off again. Includes potentially spoilery discussion of 'Victors' and 'Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose.' )
Which isn't quite the basis for a good cry that I'd expected.
* * *
I don't know. Enough about me (unless it's not just me?). What are some of the things that tend to make you ache, other than character death, in fanfic?
*Which, yes, is an SGA story and best appreciated as such, but it's also about history and academia and politics, love and loyalty, standing up for what one believes in against daunting odds, ordinary people and extraordinary heroism, culture and language, myth and legend, fans' relations to canon and canon's relations to fanfic and fans' relations to fanfic and fanfic's relations to other fanfic, and a dozen other things, all in 55,000 words. People: There's a constructed bibliography.
