"id-fic" versus "crack-fic"?

[brightknightie]

How do you define "id-fic" for yourself, and how do you see it differing from "crack-fic"?

I hadn't encountered the term "id-fic" at all before seeing posts for the Iddy-iddy-bang-bang fest. And I didn't think much about it, until recently I was going back in my mind through some fanfic sketches I've started this year but not taken further, even though I liked them, because they can't possibly have an audience beyond myself. (For example, I wrote an AU Nick completing an RCIA program at Father Rouchefort's parish and attending Easter Vigil mass.) This epitomizes "straight from the author's id," but the practice seems to correlate almost exclusively with established absurd and/or disturbing tropes far over the edges of their canons, not with excesses of real-world normality, however self-indulgent.

If "id-fic" and "crack-fic" share an expectation of absurdity, is the difference that "id-fic" is usually more disturbing and "crack-fic" more amusing? Or is one expected to be less well written than the other? Or is there a third sub-genre that completes the picture?

Just curious!

Comments

[sholio]

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.)

[brightknightie]

>"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."

Ah! Thank you very much. That sentence seems to make the connection I could not, when I looked at the definition and references on Fanlore and just a little general Googling. Almost all the examples of "idfic" that I encountered sounded like "crackfic" to me.

>"for some people it might be 50K of domestic curtainficcy fluff"

Is long length one of the expected characteristics of the idfic genre?

>"gloriously self-indulgent" | "without worrying too much about how or why"

Back to that possibility of a third sub-genre that I'm missing: Is there a classification for a stupendously self-indulgent piece that nevertheless worries about the how and why? Or does the fact of addressing the how and why render it, if not a "normal story," at least "just" an AU?

Thank you!

[sholio]

Is long length one of the expected characteristics of the idfic genre?

I think the place where you're running into confusion here is thinking of it as a genre. It's not. It's one of (many, many) optional labels that can be applied to describe fanfic, like "funny" or "fluff" or "curtainfic" or "angst" or "hurt/comfort" or "character study" or "casefic" or "Mary Sue." There are extremely broad common features that make something more or less likely to be described (or self-described) as idfic, but no two people are going to apply it exactly the same. It could be long, it could be short, it could be spectacularly divorced from reality or it could be grounded in canon detail with a few elements that the writer themself finds gratifyingly over-the-top but other people wouldn't agree. Just like one person's idea of hurt/comfort might look like another person's idea of casefic.

By the way, are you familiar with the id-superego-ego theory of the mind? That's where this comes from - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego. It is obviously not exactly this, and not everyone who talks about it believes in Freudian psychology or anything like that (in fact probably most people who talk about don't). But the relevant aspect is that the id is the instinctive, primal, emotional part of the brain, and when people talk about idfic it's being used as a stand-in for that - basically a shorter way for saying "the emotional, primal part of me." It originated back on Livejournal with some discussions about the Id Vortex, i.e. the part of you that just wants:

"Ellen's argument is that unlike in profic, this fannish approach has developed as a way to not ignore, but to "consciously and constructively" plunge right into the Id Vortex: "We have a toolbox for writing this sort of thing really, really well, for making these 3 A.M. fantasies work as story and work as literature without having to draw back from the Id Vortex to do it."

... and idfic, as a term, developed as a shorthand for fanfic that is working toward doing that (expressing the writer's id, or the fandom's collective id) as much as telling a story. But whether or not you choose to call something idfic or think about it at all is totally up to you.

[brightknightie]

>"I think the place where you're running into confusion here is thinking of it as a genre."

Yes, thank you, per some of the other replies in this thread, I've been advised to consider that "id-fic" identifies the author's motivation for a work more than the product of her work.

I'm concluding that it is a term I should largely stay away from. :-)

>"By the way, are you familiar with the id-superego-ego theory of the mind?"

Yep. Thank you. I am indeed a little familiar with that construction. :-)