I was just about to write,

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in a comment on a fic, that what I enjoy in angst (and some h/c) is not the breaking of a character but the character's fighting back against his or her breaking.

And realised, that makes me Methos in this fic.

*is creeped out by self*

ETA: Specifically, this describes how I choose my objects of obsession:

(s)he never chooses those who are broken easily

Comments

Just...

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Word. Word. Word.

I'm all about the fallout, the picking-up-the-pieces-and-gluing-them-back-together, the living of damaged lives etc. Well, most of my fic is, anyway - and my fic reading preferences are, too.

Mind you, the 'during' can be very interesting, too, if done right. E.g. I'm enjoying some - not all - of the damaged Sam dak is currently writing, although that's technically 'during'. The bits that show him trying to hold up under pressure - his desperate sarcasm in the latest installment, for instance. Or, in The Lord of the Rings, basically everything that happens to Frodo ;-)(LotR was a revelation to me at age 16, because it was the first piece of literature I'd ever encountered that catered *perfectly* to my very odd kink, of which I was only dimly aware myself at the time. It's still the book that provides the most undiluted angst of the particular type I enjoy.) And, of course, Farscape is pretty good about depicting the 'during', too. And so is Life on Mars (the show itself), really. LotR, FS, LoM - they're all about trauma in process. And that's interesting to me - if the trauma is inflicted on characters who are not just laying down and taking it. Frodo, John Crichton, Sam Tyler... they all fight back. Hard.

(And of course, the fact that LotR, FS and LoM are all about trauma in process, makes them very good source material for fanfic dealing with aftermaths...)

I don't want to pity my favourite characters; I want to be awed by them. Or, if there is to be pity (and *some* pity can be good - generally speaking, *mixed* emotions are good, and the most believable, too), it must not be all there is.

An addition about LotR

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because it just occurred to me:

LotR actually has *both* the 'during' *and* the 'after', as it ends in several chapters of essentially fanfic-like descriptions of the aftermath of everything that happened before. I remember how stunned I was to actually find that stuff included - most books I knew ended at the climax, or very soon after the climax of the main plot. It was exhilarating to find a book that actually did, *in* the main text, what I had been doing for years in my mind after finishing a book, namely, ask: 'And how did they deal with all that, afterwards?'

(Sorry to keep blathering about LotR and FS so much, but they, together with LoM, form the holy trinity of 'My Kind of Angst'. Very, very few texts, in any medium, actually deliver this kind of canonical angst in such high doses.)