"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]

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. :-)