#tbh what i really crave is a giant collection for ''dc comics fic that is actually based on comics''

[bitimdrake]

Why is it so damn hard these days to find fics without Tim’s parents being abusive and evil or Jason having “Lazarus Pit Madness”?? Dx I’m dying

I knowwww. I get annoyed by both, yet they’re so prevalent it’s impossible to really read fic without accepting them to some extent :( I wish my standards for accurate characterization in fic could be much higher, but instead I just have to keep high standards for writing quality, and the slimmest list of deal breakers for characterization/canonocity.

I haven't actually been into comics all that long, but I've looked back a bit at older fic a few times, and it's truly wild how different the vibe is. If you jump back like 10 years ago, almost everything is written with an awareness of canon, and a huge number of fics will outright say specifically when they occur or what specific events they're ignoring. You know when you read normal fic for, say, a TV show, and every author is like "this is au after episode 6" or "this occurs vaguely some time in season 2". Like...can you imagine if we still got to have that in dc fic. The fucking dream.

But as far as I can tell it's this combination of...the reboot mixed things up so much that even people who do read a lot of comics either have to declare their fics are set preboot, or operate on this unclear foundation of the contradictory backstories from the new 52 through now. And the less and less current preboot is, the less and less there is to keep popular interest in it alive.

You’d still think that people could be basing fic off current comics, even if the backstories/histories are under debate--but also a lot of people slid over from the fandoms of various adaptations (or just found the fandom by itself somehow??) and, for reasons that have never made sense to me personally, decided to create for this world that they’ve never actually interacted with. And one little piece of completely fabricated fanon--like “Jason was affected by ‘lazarus pit madness’ when he returned to gotham”--gets picked up by other people who use it in their work and claim it’s canon, which gets picked up by even more people, into a snowball effect. Until everyone who doesn’t know the source material thinks it’s true, and even people who do know comics can very very easily get swayed or muddled with popular fanon.

So now we have a million blogs run by people dedicated to a fandom for a fiction they’ve never even touched, and 90% of any given dc search on ao3 filled with fic that is based on other fic that was based on an incorrect quotes blog that was based on other fic that was based on an animated show that was loosely based on the comics.

And it becomes nearly impossible for comics readers to find fic that genuinely deals with the things from comics that they were excited to continue reading/see through an alternate perspective/read fix-its about/etc

(ps people who tag fics with some variation of “i’ve never read comics” have my genuine gratitude. I support you guys having fun, but I am so glad to get the warning so I can more easily customize my experience.)