Mini-rant...

[fajrdrako]

I would be really, really happy if I never read another Jack/Ianto fic in which Jack asks Ianto to stop calling him 'sir'.

Please.

Comments

[reina-isabella.livejournal.com]

I'd have to agree - and I'll even cop to having it done it myself (actually, it was "captain," not "sir"), but I'm not particularly proud of it ...

I do love hearing the particular fic tropes that make people mental. For some reason, the buttons flying off when a shirt is ripped open drives me absolutely spare. Can't stand it.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The problem with the button thing is that too many Jack/Ianto writers have used it... recently. Nothing is a cliche when it's just done once - but do it a dozen times and I groan to see it. I've read that several times in the last week alone. It might have been sexy the first time. The tenth time? Not so much.

The throw Ianto across Jack's desk for hot sex' scenario is running a little thin, too.

Each fandom seems to gather its own set of cliches.

[reina-isabella.livejournal.com]

The tenth time? Not so much.

Amen to that.

Each fandom seems to gather its own set of cliches.

Chicken-and-egg question: do they come about because writers are reading them in other people's work and they get subconsciously (well, or consciously) 'imprinted' and start popping up everywhere, I wonder?

Or is it something about the characters themselves that just makes everyone in the collective unconscious go, "Right! I really want to see them shag on Jack's desk with lots of buttons popping and Jack saying 'Don't call me sir!'?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

My guess is that the cliches come about and become ingrained because the fan writers are reading each other's work and copying what they like, rather than trusting to the episodes and their own imaginations and interpretations for material. So things tend to become a little ingrown, as fan writers get their ideas from other fan writers and start reusing images and situations. They start thinking of the fannish characterization as a sort of standard and a secondary legend grows: the notion that Ianto was abused as a child, that Jack found him at Torchwood One, and so on.

I think the 'doing it on Jack's desk' (with or without popping buttons) comes about because the show doesn't give us much in the way of venues, and because at the end of "They Keep Killing Suzie" Jack tells Ianto to meet him in his office. If you look at his office, there isn't a lot of comfortable space for sex - guess they think the desk is better than the floor. I think these writers are forgetting that Jack's bedroom is accessed through his office, with, presumably, a serviceable bed in it.

I recently read an old Horatio Hornblower slash story of mine in which I had Pellew (tell Horatio not to call him 'sir' in bed. It wasn't a cliche in that fandom and I didn't hesitate to say it. Now? I cringe to remember.