this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Standard: third person, either limited or omniscient. Nothing wrong with it, and it’s the easiest to read. It really shines when the author can use it to provide insight when necessary and pull back when they want to conceal information from the reader.
Requires skill: first person. It’s not an automatic no on my part, but if I’m going to be locked into a character’s head then there needs to be enough characterization for it to be worth it. Only if I feel confident about my character do I write this.
This is torture: second person and ANYTHING involving the reader. I will never, ever understand reader fics, and the concept makes me uncomfortable: is this why a lot of “the discourse” indicates younger readers often can only interact with fics from a self-insert perspective?
Oh, and regarding tenses: mostly past, but what can be fun is deliberately violating tense. This only works if the author has established that they’re meticulous, so that, say, a sudden switch to present tense during an energetic or tense paragraph can make the text feel punchier.
Reader-inserts are definitely not for me either. I'm not interested in kissing these canon characters which is... mainly what OC stories are about, unfortunately. I want to see what canon characters do in their world and how they react to each other. Sometimes I'm okay seeing how they react with OCs, but for the most part? It's not why I read fic.
I did write a second person fic recently, where the perspective was from a canon character. I enjoyed writing it, but I was under no impression it would be for many people (even if it wasn't in a relatively inactive fandom). Using "you" for a canon character has echoes of writing in first person, but is very, very different. An interesting challenge.
I've heard similar said about younger readers and self-inserts, but I can't wrap my head around it. Even when I was young, I never read those stories. I did read a lot more OC centric stories back then, but I don't know if it was because I really liked those or I was a bit stupid and didn't understand how to search for anything else, so I just clicked on what came up.