#richie our king of repression and avoidance

[incorrect-losers]

Eddie: Truth or dare

Richie: Truth

Eddie: Do you want to kiss me?

Richie: Dare

Eddie: I dare you to kiss me

Richie: Never have I ever-

Eddie: THAT’S NOT THE GAME!

[indigoire]

This isn’t going to make any sense but I have to get it out so

Hi. I’m Sam. I’m addicted to fix-it fics.

I realize I can’t really get involved in something unless there’s this huge fan effort to fix something with the canon. Now that doesn’t mean the canon is necessarily trash. Usually it’s pretty damn good content that deserves a lot of perusal and discussion. Might have a good ship or five. I tend to really like stuff where I can get involved in the interpersonal relationships.

Like. Example one. I used to be very very involved in The Hobbit fandom. I really enjoyed the movies in addition to the book, I really liked a bunch of the actors, and the ending needed a MAJOR overhaul. I was already drawn in by the fantasy premise and the story and I became majorly involved once it became crystal clear that the ending needed a boatload of fix-it.

I got so used to seeing the “Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives” tag on AO3 that I basically skimmed over it every time. It was almost bizarre to see anything canon compliant after the last movie came out. There was enough canon to work with and enough interesting AUs that for a good long while the fandom was not stale in the slightest, and there were some really good works that came from it.

Eventually...everything got a bit repetitive. The fandom denial went from charming to grating. The fans began to get other interests, the fandom died down. I pulled away slowly.

Now. Example two.

Stephen King’s IT.

I’ll flat out say it: I don’t care for Stephen King’s work.

I don’t like his writing style. I think he’s a bit of a hack, and his premises are a bit fucking out there. The plot of IT is goddamn insane under the surface, and the movies blessedly cut so much of the wacky shit and focused on what people actually liked: the Losers, their camaraderie, and the crazy fucking clown they have to kill to save their world and themselves.

Of course, the movies still had to stick to the plot of the source material, and as Stephen King himself says, in a cameo in the second movie, “I didn’t like the ending.” Sidenote, god, all the times they rag on Bill for his book endings, I definitely feel like that was shade towards King, because Bill is basically King’s stand-in. Either that or a bit of self-awareness, poking fun at how they knew the end of the second movie would be perceived. Maybe that’s going a bit too far. I digress.

I’m not the only one who didn’t like the ending. There are characters who die who the audience got attached to, especially their kid versions. They die without purpose and one character in particular dies while living a terrible version of his life because he didn’t remember It.

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing, It causes mass amnesia once the Losers leave Derry. The Losers forget each other and what they go through, and it makes them fall into terrible situations, because they seek out things that remind them of their childhood rather than remember what they did as children to change their futures. Beverly marries a man just like her father, abusive and cruel, Eddie marries an overly controlling woman who is just like his overly controlling mother, Richie represses who he is out of cowardice--those are the most clear cut examples.

So that’s a trope just begging to be put to use, mix that with a character that dies without realizing their potential and you have an excellent start for mass amounts of fix-it fic. There’s so many ways to do it. Change how they attack the monster. Have the antagonist of It help the kids out somewhere along the way. Maybe the deadlights give another character insight into what’s to come. Maybe the Losers meet during the twenty-seven years apart and their meeting fixes everything.

Whatever the case may be, I’ve happily been consuming fix-it fic (and art) for the last two weeks now, and I gotta tell ya, there’s a lot to be had.

It helps that there was a two year gap between the two movies, not to mention thirty odd years of book canon or mini-series canon for people to fix. There’s plenty of content and lots of interest.

We all want to see our favorite characters happy. We all want to see a good ending. We choose to discard the boring or annoying parts of a movie, or gloss over them, in order to find the interactions that we enjoy. We choose to forget about the sadness and pain and death and instead go “okay, but what if they took a different path? What if someone was more honest, or vulnerable, or took time to do something different that could save them?”

It’s this kind of stuff that makes me happy to be a fan, gives me something to tinker with and enjoy rather than consume and simply process.

Maybe next rant I’ll go into why I highly identify with Richie Tozier, closet-case, uses humor to avoid being vulnerable and struggles with romance. Another time perhaps.