seperis | lethargy is defined by this

Lethargy shouldn't be combined with suddenly wanting to turn one's reading log into a statistical sampling, but I was fixing my tags by month (the thing is, I used to have this sucker sorted by *day*, that is how anal I was) and wondered if creating a tag for pov would be *that* bad of an idea. Just so I know. And then create a flowchart on how I got where to what fic when and how, which is kind of crazy, and then realized I was picking out colors for the Venn diagram and closed everything before something weird happened.

I don't even know what to do with that but satisfy my vague curiosity if there *are* actually an overwhelming number of first person pov stories or if I feel that because in SGA, that's the unicorn of fictional points of view. It's just so uncommon; off the top of my head, I cannot think of a first person pov story I've read in the last year before Due South. In fact, to tell the truth, I can't remember the last time I read an experimental second person. And I can't remember a fic I read that had more than one narrator other than gen fic by

miss_porcupine and

ltlj. I know there were some--probably several. But I can't think of any that weren't exclusively third person limited, one narrator.

Also, I've never seen anyone anywhere pull off omniscient narrator without making me want to beat my head in before now. That was neat.

Hmm. I think part of my curiosity for dS is to see if it's actually *that* common because I used three specific rec pages to jump from one at a time, so for all intents and purposes, I'm going to hit a lot of *similar* fics, in that they all conform to the reccers taste and it's recent enough that I can still remember (and have in cache), how I went here or there. It's like a fannish migration pattern in miniature. It's especially true when hitting certain authors, weirdly enough--I'll read X author, remember she's really close to Y author, go to Y author to see if she wrote anything, check Z who was friends with Y, and keep going out until I run out of associations and return to the rec page (I run out of associations fast, btw).

Okay, so I am enthralled with really useless information, but it's kind of fascinating. I started logging July first, five days after starting to *read the fic* and had to retroactively add in the June ones. Going backward through them is kind of dizzying.

Overthinking useless things == totally my thing.

There are a ton--A TON--of first person POV stories in Bandslash. I have a hard time with first person; maybe because it feels too self-insertive to me, sometimes, or maybe because many times the 'voice' the author uses doesn't match the character in my head. Either way, I stopped reading bandslash a while ago (except for a few favorite authors) and that's one of the reasons why.

I honestly must be reading in a different part of Due South than you are, because I've been on a reading binge for days in DS now, and haven't hit a single first-person story!

See! That's why I think it was associative now--I'm just hitting a lot of authors that *do* do that, rather than a fandom trend. Because third person is invisible to me, so I *won't* notice the number of those; I'll notice what 's not.

Exactly! I never really notice POV unless it's different from the 'norm' (and in norm, I actually do include second person, sometimes, and omniscient, as well as targeted third person POVs). So when I kept running into stories that started with "I walked out of the room..." (or whatever) it really stood out to me.

I mostly relied (and still rely) on rec lists and communities. There are even THEMED lists out there, which is one of my favorite things ever...sometimes you just want a good hurt/comfort story, or an AU, or a first-time, or whatever, and those themed lists are perfect for that kind of reading.

It's very odd to me, but due South is the *only* fandom in which I do not immediately back-button when I find a first-person narrator. I don't know if it's just that RayK and Fraser have such unique and obvious "voices" that I can immediately tell who it is.

Yes, it is. It is *not* hard to tell who is speaking at all.

If you've read any of my novellas, then you've read more than one 3rd person POV from me. But not more than one 1st person narrator.

Hmm. This is really tempting me to tag now.

Gah, what have you done, now I have this urge to tag for POV. *curses*

...I might have just started that and my Venn Diagram of Migration.

*head on desk* Maybe I'll get bored with it soon?

You know, it's not so bad that I'm considering this for future tagging, what worries me is the vaguely OCD-like urge to start going through 3000+ existing story bookmarks to check and tag...

It's a weird cross of glee and slow, inevitable doom, yes?

Yeah, doom just about covers it... *glares*

Also, the only 1st person POV story in SGA I remember on top of my head is Before & After from Radek's POV: http://helena-eternal.livejournal.com/90013.html

I've read a couple, but most were pretty decently awful PWPs with no redeeming values. Basically just the author pretending to be one of the characters screwing another character. They were... not-so-right...

Acutally I just remembered another one I read only yesterday, one of the Mcshep Match stories:
http://community.livejournal.com/mcshep_match/42410.html
That was an outsider POV though. It seems 1st person narratives may be more popular for outsiders. Beause it is easier not to blunder with voice for original characters, maybe?

Possibly. You know how you want your original character to be, and the character is an unknown factor to the readers, so they can't exactly judge the voice as "off" for someone they have no experience with. I think too many times we each get our own idea for a specific character, original or not, how they should be, how they should act, what they most likely think about or what their thought patterns are like, and any variation on that just knocks us off-kilter, and possibly out of enjoying the fic.

I have an outsidePOV tag (http://del.icio.us/MErecs/outsidePOV), but most of those are 3rd person, not 1st. And I have a 2nd person (http://del.icio.us/MErecs/2ndPerson) tag, because for those when well-done are the rarest of the rare, the high-wire act of POV.

Yeah, I have an outsider pov tag too, and from now on I'm also going to tag for the rest of POV options, since I realized I might want to track and search for this, but unfortunately that doesn't help with the backlog. But then it is like that with a lot of tags I only realize after a while I need.

I wrote one!

The New Frontier (http://www.aliencorn.net/stories/new.html)

It also was an outsider POV (and, come to think of it, based on a source which was first-person).

edited at: Date: 2008-07-09 11:21 pm (UTC)

Yeah, when I first started reading dS, it was a shock the number of first person POVs I came across. I shied away from for a while, but then I guess I just got used to them. To the point where I think I wrote one of them, myself!

Now, I'm on this SGA reading binge, and first person POVs are scary and odd all over again. Weird.

Huh. I used to write first person all the time, especially when I wrote X-Files or Voyager. Both Chakotay and Skinner would demand it - I would start with limited third (my preferred form from the beginning) from their POVs and be writing first before I finished the first page.

The only time I experimented with second person was a due South story - the story itself asked for it.

I haven't written first person in a long, long time...

I can remember writing first person POV in X-Files and I don't think it was ever remarked upon - either by me or readers. Perhaps it's something about the source material that makes it more acceptable.

Heh. This is fascinating. I've been thinking about POV a lot recently, because the fic I've just finished (in German) is in third person, but nowhere near the very tight third person that's become the standard for fic around here. And it somehow took me a while to get out of that frame of mind when I wanted to write something else - as if a part of me couldn't quite believe any more that any other way of writing was valid. Weird, but true.

The majority of what I write is 3rd person; usually limited or objective, but I've tried omniscent before - it's a bit harder to do and still make things sound right. This also appears to be the style of fic I prefer reading overall. I've read some of the others, but they just don't feel right. With a few exceptions in SGA, I've mainly seen 3rd person, but I wasn't sure if it was just that's what I remember, just what I found, or that I hit the back button on the others before finishing it. A lot of the 1st person fics almost seem like the author's fantasy of what it would be like to be Character X and if their voice/concept/feeling for the character doesn't match my own, I'm thrown out of the fic too much to enjoy it.

I am really torn between awe and fear right now.

You should see the diagram. I'm trying to work out if I went to crys from green-grrl's rec page or from bifictional bedlam by what stories came before or after. Also, apparently, I read on a wave pattern--I do like, *four waves* through a rec page and pick three or so fic per wave before browsing away for no particular reason.

This is like mapping clouds.

are you actually making a venn diagram?

i envy your dedication but am far too lazy to attempt it on my own. share your results with the class!

*sad* Yes. Yes I am. And it was just a joke and then I was kind of curious and started it and then--well. *sighs*

I'm also tagging for point of view and number of narrators. Shoot me now.

do iiiiiiiit. and show it to me. i require it.

This needs to be publically posted. For science!

Just today I was trying to track down a story (turns out it was Old Soldiers Die Hard (http://friendshipper.laylalawlor.com/soldiers.shtml) by

friendshipper) in which Rodney is a very grumpy old man living in a nursing home, post-Wraith attack, visited every day by a slightly less-aged John. The story is told from the first person POV of a volunteer in the home. It's one of the very few SGA stories that's attempted 1st person POV and hasn't made me want to hit the back button - possibly because it's told from the POV of a minor OC. And she's addressing the story to her (dead) mother.

The only others I can think of are also from the POV of minor OCs: Blink (http://community.livejournal.com/mcshep_match/42410.html) by Team Away and another story which was a series of letters between a (OC) scientist on Atlantis and a housewife on earth. I don't know if letters count as such - from what I remember, the latter story wasn't all that great anyway, and the narrative could have been either; another possible contender on the letter front (and a good one) is Less to Say (http://community.livejournal.com/mcshep_match/37835.html) by Team Away.

(Somebody above has mentioned Before and After by

helena_eternal - did you know that there's a podfic (http://community.livejournal.com/sgapodfic/72346.html) of it by

doccy?

dodificus says "He sounds kind of like a serious Cookie Monster." Yes, 'he'. It's awesome.)

Koschka :)

I'm always a bit bemused by the widespread dislike of first person POV in fandom, having entered fandom via literary mysteries, where the canons are often written in first person.

Perhaps I feel this way only because Holmes fandom (for example) has some very fine writers, but I've never noticed them having any more or less difficulty holding to their narrative voice in first person than those authors in other fandoms who work in third. In fact, first person voices often strikes me as truer to canon characterization than tight third person voices because the authors don't dare to get as lazy about the proper POV filtering during the description and exposition passages. Not that I'm too suprised to find myself in the minority on this question: mild to strong dislike of first person voice seems to be a literary fashion of our age

However, I do wonder if this indifference to voice is part of what's saved me from feeling the bump in the road moving from older to newer fandoms and back again? Usually, it's only what I think of as the changing philosophy of relationships and gender between older and newer fandoms that trip me up.

I'm not sure it's dislike so much as unfamiliarity. There was *huge* hostility in some quarters to present tense fic. Once you're used to it it's invisible and has a *lot* of flexibility. But if you're past-tense only, it can feel very jarring. When it became more widespread, it became invisible. I think it's almost a cause and effect situation--the less it's written, the less it's read, the more the readers lose familiarity with how to read it.

That is very true. I never disliked it, but at first it was quite rare when I started reading fanfic in TS and it stood out, now it is so common you don't notice. Though really I've always thought that unusual narrative tenses can be very effective, I mean, I don't memorize lines well, or at all really, but I still remember the opening line of Christa Wolf's Störfall because the narration was in 1st person Future Perfect fo a bit, passive too, and actually the tenses switch throughout as the narrator talks to us, from present tense to Perfect (which is the past tense used in spoken German, not for written narrative which correctly is supposed to be in the Preterite, though obviously if you want to invoke a truly spoken feeling you can't use the latter as it is uncommon and kind of snobbish). And yet the overall effect really works for me for this story.

I just saw a comment the other day saying 1st person was always bad and evil...in everything! I was like ooookay. You're missing out on a lot of good books, then...

I know! Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye? Given how many of the classics that folks still read and rave about are written in first person, I'm a bit taken aback to see writers or readers produce these all-or-nothing pronouncements. And yet, I've seen several of them.

Perhaps Seperis is right, and it's someone's unfamiliarity and discomfort being exalted to the level of a principle: 'ship wars for stylists.

In fact, to tell the truth, I can't remember the last time I read an experimental second person.

I'm finding out just now that it is ridiculously hard to find *any* 2nd person POV SGA fic, now that you made me curious. I didn't think it *that* rare, but I suspect that is because I've also read quite a bit SPN recently. With some browinsing I've only found *one* (by Frostfire) and that's from 2005 when the fandom was apparently still young enough to be experimental, maybe?

Why did you have to make me curious??

I cannot think of a first person pov story I've read in the last year before Due South. In fact, to tell the truth, I can't remember the last time I read an experimental second person. And I can't remember a fic I read that had more than one narrator other than gen fic

I'm cringing over here, because you just described, basically, my entire due South collection! *facepalm* Not just 1st person POV, but double-narrator 1st-person POV! It's a double whammy!

(Edited to close the goddamn tag.)

edited at: Date: 2008-07-07 08:44 pm (UTC)

*giggles* So far, according to my tags, there's one first person pov for every three third-person point of view for all fics I've read. Interesting.

First person is incredibly common in Due South, much more so than in any other fandom I've ever read in. And it's strange because I can't read most first person fic in other fandoms, but in Due South I've read and enjoyed a ton of it.

AuKestrel did a whole ... *waves* thing (http://aukestrel.livejournal.com/325921.html) on POV after some odd con conversations. But yeah, way more 1st in DS, I'd say--but they work.

Hmm. When I think of 1st person POV in SGA, that first writers I think of are

koschka and

liketheriver, who seem to primarily write in 1st person. I can usually recognize something that they've written right off the bat, simply for that reason. And honestly, other than their stuff, most fanfic written in that POV usually makes my cringe. I'm not sure why. I think I've just read one too many badfics with that POV, and now I'm scarred for life.

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