coaltide | Demure

I think it's a fundamentally bad idea to write fic for a blank exchange signup in a Yuletide-sized fandom based on the sourceless assumption that they are contact with any existing fandom, aware of and agree with prevailing opinion about what they should dislike about the canon, and that following the consensus fanon held by a bunch of other people would be a better gift for them than something that's actually similar to canon. Absent other cues, the canon is your prompt.

Absent other cues, the canon is your prompt.

No. Depending on the canon, there might well be as many people who dislike the canon and want it fixed than there are people who love the canon and want more of the same. You can't make assumptions which group your recipient falls under and what they may or may not like unless they tell you.

For a blank sign-up, I stay away from the big common triggers (underage/incest/gore/real life politics and diseases/body fluid kinks/noncon) written in explicit and detailed ways, and otherwise write the fic I want to write.

You also can't make an assumption that they don't love that stuff.
You have only one thing to go off, stop trying to make this more complicated than it is. The request is for canon (and characters), take the requestor at their word that that's what they want, instead of turning yourself into a "but what if they want a coffee shop AU" pretzel

CYRT

I'm not making any assumptions at all. I accept that it's going to be up to chance. Either they'll like it or they won't - if you have no information, guessing at their preferences is pointless.

Steering clear of common triggers is an attempt to maximize the chance of the recip enjoying it. Beyond that, in the absence of any stated likes or preferences from the recip, there's nothing the author can do so they might as well write something they (the author) enjoys so there's at least one person who's guaranteed to be happy with it.

You have to make an assumption one way or the other to write your fic. Your one clue is that they requested this canon. Absent any further information I'm always going to lean towards assuming that the person who requested a thing probably likes at least something about that thing, and that replicating canon has a better chance of hitting whatever aspects they like than writing against canon and potentially removing those aspects.

+1

For Yuletide in particular the default assumption should be that they had no idea there was any fandom for this canon until they saw it in the noms list and would have no idea where to find it if it existed. Even if there's a few other fics on AO3 one can usually assume they were mostly written for other exchange prompts, or by a small friend group your recip isn't part of, or by an older fandom community that doesn't really exist anymore, not as part of an ongoing fandom with relevant norms.

If the recip writes a letter talking about the fanon they can counteract this a bit, but we're talking a blank signup situation. The canon is the prompt.

The situation might be a bit different if you prompted a large fandom. But this is yuletide. Even if you prompt a small fandom connected to a large one you're all supposed to assume nobody knows anything about the large one.

Absent other cues, the canon is your prompt.

This is true but what precisely about the canon you choose to write matters, and I think "well Hannibal has lots of gore so it's totally fine to write a fill that's full of gore. if they don't like it, they've learned about DNWs" is such faulty reasoning that I really can't see it being in good faith. Most people are not watching Hannibal exclusively or even mostly for the gore, and the show itself isn't even exclusively or mostly gore. "I'm going to write a fic that fits the tone of the show even if that's not the tone of the flower crown fanon", fine! Follow your bliss. But there's a limit to what most people expect to see in fanfic and yeah, with a blank signup I would expect a good faith writer to not commit hardcore to a common trigger, that is also a less popular theme/trope in fic, that the show itself features but does not devote a majority of its runtime to. Like, come on. This is "don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining" territory.

This conversation is about canon-typical gore, and the fact that if they don't give you any other information, it is okay to assume they will be all right with receiving canon-typical levels of canon-typical content. I don't know why you seem to be continually jumping to the idea that this means deliberately writing a fic that is exclusively or mostly hardcore gore in an attempt to punish them for not DNWing something that appeared in canon as opposed to, you know, writing a completely canon-typical casefic that has a similar level of gore to canon cases?

I think that's a really bad line to draw, and maybe Hannibal was a bad example because it is a fandom with an unusually divergent canon and fanfic universe, and it's widely known that this is true. (Even with Hannibal fandom though I really wish people wouldn't assume; I can't do Hannibal fanfic because I'm fine with fic where the food is people and fic where the food isn't people but I absolutely cannot handle fic where I can't tell if the food is people and they don't even fucking tag whether it's a no-cannibals AU or not, but if you encounter Hannibal fic where the food is explicitly tagged as people and get upset that's 100% on you...)

But if someone requested "Legend of the Overfiend" or "Human Centipede" with a blank signup it would be really fucking weird to assume they didn't want freaky noncon porn, coalie.

But if someone requested "Legend of the Overfiend" or "Human Centipede" with a blank signup it would be really fucking weird to assume they didn't want freaky noncon porn, coalie.

I mean, yeah. I agree the example was bad because the specifically provided dichotomy and insistence that it's fine to pretend fannish context doesn't exist is what I'm objecting to.

So you agree that absent other cues it's fine to write canon-typical content, even if that canon-typical content is something that would often be a DNW.

It sounds like the disagreement here is what counts as canon-typical content, and what counts as "other cues".

I would say that in Yuletide there is absolutely 0 expectation that your author (or recip!) knows anything about "the fandom" outside of canon, and you can't expect them to take cues from something they may not know about; that's kind of the point of Yuletide. I would agree that in other contexts it's a lot more reasonable to expect people to know what is typical of the fandom even if that diverges from canon. But this is coal and we're talking about Yuletide.

If someone requests Hannibal bookverse fic, in Yuletide we should not expect them or their writer to know what Hannibal TV fandom is like, or assume their recip wants something similar to Hannibal TV fanon (in fact, in yuletide it's probably safer to assume the opposite, that they waited to request bookverse in Yuletide because they actively did not want TV fic.) If someone does request a small fandom in Yuletide assuming that their writer will know they actually want a large fandom's fanon, then they're doing Yuletide wrong. And if someone requests a just-barely-small-enough fandom in Yuletide, they should not be surprised if their recip isn't part of that fandom year-round and isn't familiar with it.

The original comment specifies and extant fanon. Of course absent such a fanon you should not be referring to what you'd guess the fanon would be. But there are plenty of mid-size Yuletide fandoms with established pools of fic that don't always hew closely to the canon; Push fic, for example, is rarely going hard on the pedo vibes. So in those cases, yes, I would go with "what is most commonly enjoyed" rather than strictly "what is closest to canon". That's the entirety of my argument.

I shouldn't have to DNW weird fanon to get a canon based fic, some of my yuletide requests have been for fandoms with terribly OOC fanon precisely because the existing fics weren't something I was interested in. Unless a letter or request specifically refers to fanon or has prompts that match the extant fanon you should stick to canon.

Right but part of my point is that there is actually a huge gulf between "pure fanon" and "fic for this fandom doesn't tend to focus on this aspect of the canon".

But that gulf doesn't matter, you're not writing for the fandom but for a single recipient who may be either unaware of what the rest of fandom likes to focus on or may dislike that focus, unless they say either way then canon should be the default.

No, sorry, this is stupid. You are not required to replicate the tone of the canon for a blank signup. It is totally reasonable to assume someone requesting a fandom in a niche fandom event is in fact familiar with the existing output. I'm not saying you have an obligation to replicate fanon, I'm saying that if that existing output exists, it is a smart idea for your fic to be more similar to that than a different aspect of the canon if that different aspect is something likely to be upsetting like gore, sexual assault, etc.

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