Ghosts Metafic Chatter

Decided to roll a joint tonight (this is a lie, I'm using a vape pen like a dystopian cyberpunk poseur) and write about my current BBC Ghosts WIP, whose working title is "Thomas Discovers Ao3."

This is because I am procrastinating finishing this fic, which is actually titled "This Work May Contain Adult Content" as a nod to Ao3's old logged-out content warning, which is also a very funny and fitting title because at the moment it is pretty goddamn literal--- I haven't finished writing the climactic getting-together scenes, so it really may contain adult content. ...I just haven't written the adult content yet. (If I write it at all--- This thing could end up being anywhere from T to E at this point. (In reality, though, it'll probably be either T or M... I'll have to save my E rating for the plotbunny I've been adamantly not chasing yet where Humphrey the gentle seme top's head falls off and his body is... Let's say "more demanding."))

It's basically about Thomas wanting to Google himself, which of course Julian has to help with because Alison can't be bothered (I don't blame her), and then of course they end up discovering historical RPF written about Thomas and Lord Byron instead of any actual historical repositories. Lol. Lmao, even. I love a good comedy&romance concept.

The thing about this fic is that very early on in the writing process I decided I wanted to try to emulate the feeling of watching the show. I wanted comedy. I wanted little quips. I wanted jokes, damn it!! I didn't want constant melodrama! I mean, it still has to have some melodrama, it is slashfic after all, but I wanted it to have the tone of a slashfic-flavored episode of Ghosts, not the tone of your average serious romance/drama genre tag slashfic. (If that makes sense.)

Honestly, I find a lot of the fic in this fandom to be a little too morose and at times almost grim. This show is nowhere near as serious as some of the fic I've read* makes it out to be--- it's a fucking serialized comedy on the BBC.

Let's lighten up for a second, huh, kids?

Can we lighten up?

...No?

...And you said Thomas is going to try to drown himself in the lake completely seriously in this fic?

Like not played as a joke?

Well, alrighty then... You have fun out there...

But my problem isn't that dead-serious Ghosts fic exists period; more that there is a huge lack of fic that does take the same comedic, light-hearted tone as canon. I understand, not everyone can write comedy... But maybe you should just get funnier, then, I guess...

Though I can also see this as being a "wrong ship" problem... I don't read Pat/Cap or Cap/Havers (To me they're like unflavored yogurt or cottage cheese. Nothing wrong with them. A lot of people like eating bowls of them. I personally can only enjoy them as, say, ingredients in recipes where at the end you have a completely new dish. I'm not sitting down to eat a bowl of the ingredient.), but those ships seem like they'd have a better chance of a comedic tone that's closer to canon. Unfortunately, I'll never know.

So maybe all the good fic with canon-tone and good characterization and funny jokes are all for ships I don't read and will never read. Which is unfortunate, but par for the course. (sidebar, I'm still shocked by how unpopular Thomas/Humphrey is. WTF. He carries him around in almost every episode! The bit where Humphrey tries to help break Thomas of his "addiction" to Alison? He looked so disappointed at the end when he's right back to obsessing over her! What the hell! ...But I digress. This is a discussion for another page on this site--- I'd like to write some ship manifestos eventually.)

So anyway, a big part of my writing for this fandom comes from my desire to have my ships in the rule of funny tone of canon. I like rule of funny canons. I don't like when people try to go loremaster and figure out everything implied and contradicted and and and and in s2e4 they say this but in s5e3 they say that and so that implies that-- THEY SAID IT BECAUSE IT'S A COMEDY SHOW AND THE JOKE RELIED ON IT. IT'S BECAUSE IT MADE A JOKE FUNNIER. STOP TRYING TO FIGURE OUT THE MECHANICS OF GHOST POWERS AND ASCENDING AND--- Um. Ahem. Sorry.

Got carried away.

Uh.

...Another thing that came up when I first started writing this fic--- I worried a lot at first that I was cutting between scenes too much, making too many POV changes and ruining the flow of the story as it cut back and forth between characters. But then, when I started leveraging it as a tool to advance the plot instead of trying to work around it, I found a lot of fun in a "cut the camera here" format. It is a TV show canon, after all, and there are a lot of great jokes in canon that are accomplished via cutting away from a scene at the perfect moment. Plus, with 22 scenes in the end, I didn't want to have a 22 chapter fic that's barely more than ~25k words. That's a little tacky to me...

I could seriously go on a whole side-rant about chapter length and number of chapters vs. total word count. Personally, I think anything under 3k and especially under 1.5k should usually (usually is the key word here) be posted as a single chapter with line breaks between scenes. (Not including drabble collections or bingo challenges or prompt collections and other stuff like that.)
Anything under about 10k words shouldn't have more than maybe 2-6 chapters, and 6 is honestly pushing it. Most chapters of a fic being under 1k is also a huge red flag depending on the length of the fic. As it gets longer this becomes more and more of a warning sign. Fics over 25k should have chapters of at least 3-5k words each or I start to get suspicious of quality. This varies a lot by fandom, too, though.
I think in general your fic's total word count should not be less than 1,000 times your number of chapters.
For fun, here is my opinion represented as a mathematical equation:
(Total Word Count) / (Number of Chapters) > 1,000
I have more thoughts. But, again: Maybe another time.

Anyway, eventually I decided I'd just finish writing the whole thing, edit and polish it, and then simply post it in one long chapter, maybe with fun linebreaks between scene-cuts. (There's a The Sting fic that I liked that did some cute linebreaks using card suit unicode symbols, and it made me want to do something fun like that, too.) I momentarily considered posting each "cut" between POV changes as their own chapters, but then I imagined reading that myself and clicking through the chapters and how ugly it would look even with Show Entire Work enabled... It just sounded too annoying, especially for the shorter scenes. I might backbutton out of that fic. (Depending on how desperate I was. Honestly if it was thomphrey fic I'd probably keep trying to read it anyway. But I would still find it annoying.)

So, as I was celebrating finishing up writing the ending of this fic (I write the ending before finishing the middle or it will never get done) with a drink (blood orange liqueur & milk--- Fruity, pretentious, and a good source of calcium. Just like yours truly.), I got the suggestion from a friend to "stretch it out" and "piecemeal [the release of each chapter] to farm engagement."

Point blank, just "TO FARM ENGAGEMENT!"

DAMN!

See, the thing is, I never in a million years would have thought to do that on my own--- I like being a nobody. I like not getting many hits and I like not being well known.

I've been well known and that shit is complete ass.*

...So of course after my sworn oath to never become a fan of any notability ever again, I go right on ahead and write a novella-length fic for a rarepair that hasn't seen a non-AU fic over 15k in like 3 years, and I've made the decision to post it in chapters to farm hits garner more engagement.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

...Not that I actually expect to get any notoriety in reality, though--- I'm being very hyperbolic in the above. I don't think I'll become a Tomphrey BNF or anything, lol.
But this is a rarepair ship with seemingly zero fanart (unless I'm just not looking hard enough), and I've already written like, what, about 45k words of fic about them combined (including WIPs and drawerfic), AND icons (that no one but me will ever use ), so who really knows.

Like, I hardly think Thomas/Humphrey is even a controversial ship myself. But then again, I also assumed Cap/Julian would be a no-brainer juggernaut ship... Like a classic LJ slash style rivals to lovers trope... And in reality it's only the sixth most popular slash ship on the ao3 feed.
Woe.

Apparently not engaging with the fandom for this show while it was airing means I missed a FUCKLOAD of arguments that upon closer inspection were actually just covert ship wars!

I mean, c'moooon! Whatever happened to "The only good conservative politician is a dead conservative politician"?
He's literally dead, you guys! It's fiiiiine!

But yeah, seeing the burnt out forest of the remnants of concurrent-with-original-airings Ghosts fandom made me feel very thankful that I stopped using social media for fandom purposes a while back.

I joke a lot about the (in my opinion meaningless) age gaps between characters (Is the gap between Thomas and Humphrey 17 years or 260? Go argue with Julian about it.) for a reason--- it's absolutely something I can see the most annoying people in fandom starting wank* about. (Do you stop counting their age once a person dies? Does ghost-life count for the same amount of years as living-life? Is it like reverse dog years? Is, say, Kitty, younger or older than, perhaps, Alison, for example? No reason I chose that example btw. Oh, and is Pat/Cap actually a problematic age gap because in '83, when Pat was 38, Cap would technically be 84 or so? Are we just ignoring that because it's the fandom darling ship, but it's fair game to argue about the technicalities between age gaps of other pairings? I don't want to talk about the answers to any of these questions!)

But the weird moral policing of ships and scenarios that are entirely contained to underground fictional works on a fanfiction archive is really the exact kind of shit that motivated me to make this neocities site in the first place. I can't imagine speaking as freely as I do here on any other social media platform. The repost feature used to be my favorite feature of tumblr as someone whose formative lurking years was spent on livejournal, but now I think it's one of the biggest site design features that led to the incentivization of negativity and finger-pointing as a social currency. BUT THAT'S JUST ME!

Uh, definitely digressed a bit here......

I'll probably update this later with more of my thoughts once some of the fic's actually posted...

For now, I'll sign off with a fun excerpt from the early segments of the fic:

 "...What's this you've written?" Thomas said as he looked over the text on the computer's screen.

 "Well don't start trying to make corrections now," Julian complained, taking a small step away from him as Thomas leaned down closer over the device.

 "It's just that I'm fairly certain I told you to ask it: 'What is the remaining legacy of the talented and prolific Romantic poet, Thomas Angus Thorne of Scotland, whose tragic and untimely death served only in piquing the curiosity of the public as to uncovering the true tale of his intense and fully-justified enmity with Lord George Byron?'" Thomas recited in a questioning tone.

 "Ah, yeah," Julian huffed a few loud breaths in amusement, "That's a bloody lot to type though, isn't it?"

 "He might have a point, there, actually," added Humphrey mildly. "I think I remember Alison saying something about keeping it brief?"

 "Oh, but he's barely even written a complete thought!" Thomas gestured angrily at the words in the search bar. "'Thomas Thorne Lord Byron rivalry story'? Who on earth ---man or machine--- could possibly parse a request for information so... so lacking in particles?"

 Julian, true to form, ignored him; and with a few more grunting noises he selected the button on screen that said Search.

Wow...

Formatting all of that text was a huge pain... It really gave me a greater appreciation for all the code that went into people posting their whole fics on a personal site. Hm. Very thankful for ao3 right now.