Wow, I don't think of those two as being even remotely similar!
Idfic as I've always thought of it is the fic your heart wants, the deeply indulgent stuff that hits straight at emotions (or points farther south) without needing to take that much of a stop at your brain along the way. Like ... there's no particular reason why these two characters just happen to be stranded along the highway and half dead of hypothermia and have to huddle in a small cabin for warmth, THEY JUST DO, because your heart eats that up with a spoon and you could read a zillion words of it. For some people it might be a character presumed dead and saved by their friends with tons of hugging and petting; for some people it might be 50K of domestic curtainficcy fluff; for some people it might be a character tied up in a BDSM scenario. It's the fic that make you go "my heart wants this" without worrying too much about whether it's that plausible in the canon setting. (Idfic for me is almost invariably hurt/comfort scenarios or characters rescuing each other and things of that nature, with a few side stops at things like sex pollen along the way. But usually with a hurt/comforty slant even when it's technically sexual.)
Whereas crack is almost by definition not that? It's supposed to be funny and ridiculous and silly, not heart-stoppingly emotional or gloriously self-indulgent. I mean, there definitely could be overlap, now that I think about it. An AU in which the whole cast are florists, say, could seem crack-like to one person, whereas the person who wrote it just NEEDS to escape from the real world into a fantasy world of flower languages for a while. But if you set out to write idfic and it somehow ended up reading like crack to you, I feel like you would have somehow missed achieving idfic and ended up with something else instead.
(I mean, it's "id" as in superego-ego-id, the purely emotional/animalistic part of you that just wants stuff and feels things, without worrying too much about how or why. It goes back to LJ and people talking about fanfic being "iddy" - emotionally indulgent - as opposed to leaning more on plot.)
no subject
Idfic as I've always thought of it is the fic your heart wants, the deeply indulgent stuff that hits straight at emotions (or points farther south) without needing to take that much of a stop at your brain along the way. Like ... there's no particular reason why these two characters just happen to be stranded along the highway and half dead of hypothermia and have to huddle in a small cabin for warmth, THEY JUST DO, because your heart eats that up with a spoon and you could read a zillion words of it. For some people it might be a character presumed dead and saved by their friends with tons of hugging and petting; for some people it might be 50K of domestic curtainficcy fluff; for some people it might be a character tied up in a BDSM scenario. It's the fic that make you go "my heart wants this" without worrying too much about whether it's that plausible in the canon setting. (Idfic for me is almost invariably hurt/comfort scenarios or characters rescuing each other and things of that nature, with a few side stops at things like sex pollen along the way. But usually with a hurt/comforty slant even when it's technically sexual.)
Whereas crack is almost by definition not that? It's supposed to be funny and ridiculous and silly, not heart-stoppingly emotional or gloriously self-indulgent. I mean, there definitely could be overlap, now that I think about it. An AU in which the whole cast are florists, say, could seem crack-like to one person, whereas the person who wrote it just NEEDS to escape from the real world into a fantasy world of flower languages for a while. But if you set out to write idfic and it somehow ended up reading like crack to you, I feel like you would have somehow missed achieving idfic and ended up with something else instead.
(I mean, it's "id" as in superego-ego-id, the purely emotional/animalistic part of you that just wants stuff and feels things, without worrying too much about how or why. It goes back to LJ and people talking about fanfic being "iddy" - emotionally indulgent - as opposed to leaning more on plot.)