Open Thread: Oracle Hotline

[mithen]

--What's the angstiest idea you've ever come up with?

Oh, it's hard for me to top Bruce with Alzheimer's locking himself in the Fortress and programming it to pretend to be the Manor so as his memory goes it can work around his memory loss and the rest of the extended family can call him and get his insight without upsetting him. Except--being the world's greatest detective--he keeps figuring out over and over again what's really going on and being horribly distressed until his mind slips away again...

Yeah, nothing I'm even considering right now is going to compare with that! In fact, I just finished posting my long Clark/Bruce movieverse series, and just finished writing a long super-romantic lush wrestling fic, and am working on Yuletide stories and just signed up for the Superbat Big Bang, so I am extremely busy in mostly good ways! How about you?

Comments

[me_ya_ri]

I think my angstiest story to date is The Collar which, apparently, has Tim Drake as Jason Todd's unwilling sex slave while Jason takes over Gotham and scatters the rest of the Batfam to the winds after Bruce's death. But not all is at it seems in that one and the story has a bunch of layers that go along with Tim being insane and other stuff revealed in the story.

*grin* I started out so angsty on that one that I had to keep writing until i found a happy ending for it.

I tend not to write angst all that much. I much prefer happy stories and ones where the characters overcome all odds to get what they want.

I'm trying to write short stories right now and struggling with it after writing so many novels nonstop. But it's a fun way to stretch myself and good for the publishing schedule so I'm happy. Plus I got another book published last night so I'm happy.

Good luck on your Yuletide and Big Bang stories!

[mithen]

I can pretty much name my purely angst stories on one hand! Like you, I prefer to get people to a happy ending in some way...

Short stories can be really tough! You might automatically think easier until you tried to whip one into shape. :P I can write short pieces fairly easily, but a short story with structure can be a very different kind of thing...

[prince0froses]

I'm fairly certain nothing tops Sander's pre-happy ending situation. But I too feel compelled to give everything happy endings. It viscerally upsets me to my core when things do not get happy endings. So I tend to struggle with angst in my writing. I have no trouble coming up with angsty situations, it's that I am eager to quickly sweep them away and ring in the happiness so I fear presenting the angst as consequence-free or unrealistic because of my eagerness to get back to the good part.

[mithen]

I love the angst IF the end of it is pretty near--and honestly, if it's in a canon where it's clearly coded as melodramatic and unrealistic to begin with, if that makes sense, so it's fairly easy to get past it. Clark is mind controlled and tries to kill Batman! But the whole situation is so contrived that it's not hard to imagine that Bruce would shrug that off once everything got cleared up. (Another reason I tend to stick to fanfic rather than original stories that will have fewer melodramatic tropes!)