"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.)

[senmut]

Agreeing with Sholio. I look at id-fic as something that I really want to see, something that might fly in the face of canon, but takes the aspects I really enjoy and make them something else.

Many versions of the final episode of Forever Knight's fanfic AUs fall close to id-fic, in my opinion.

Crack fic, on the other hand, always has an element that will fully divorce you from the source, because it's just WAY out there.

[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!

[brightknightie]

Interesting. Thank you!

So id-fic flies in the face of canon, but not as much as crack-fic does.

And the reason that all the examples of id-fic I encountered looked like crack-fic to me is because of my perceptions of the borders of canon.

[argentum_ls]

so id-fic flies in the face of canon...

Not necessarily. It could be perfectly canon compliant, inasmuch as any fanfic is perfectly canon compliant. What differentiates id-fic is the motive of the writer in producing it. If it's a story written just because it feeds the writer's baser desires (in whatever form they take), it's likely id-fic. Some id-fic may not be distinguishable as such from an outside perspective, and some may be so obvious that the only explanation for its existence is the id.

"I want these two characters who never met in canon to go on a road trip and have adventures" could be id-fic if the reason for it is little more than "because that's what I like and it makes me happy. "

[greerwatson]

I wouldn't say that idfic has to fly in the face of canon. It depends on the canon—and it depends on your id. Let's not forget that certain canons appeal more than others; and that often has to do with they way they hit your id. Idfic just takes that to the nth degree.

[malinaldarose]

These kids and their sub-genres.... (Or, that's a new one on me.)

[brightknightie]

So the term "id-fic" describes the motivation, not the result. Results need have nothing in common in terms of subject, approach, quality, or canonicity.

Does that make this the kind of term that would likely be taken as insulting if applied to a work whose author hasn't publicly applied that term herself?

[brightknightie]

So there's some measurement of personal appeal that is a boundary marker between a "normal" story and an id-fic story, and the degree of the personal appeal is the definition of the classification. Hmmmm.

[brightknightie]

I hadn't encountered it until I bumped into the Iddy-iddy-bang-bang fest a few years ago, and I didn't give it much thought until this week. To the extent that I thought about it, I probably assumed I knew what it meant; but then I looked it up, and didn't know. :-)

[argentum_ls]

So the term "id-fic" describes the motivation, not the result. Results need have nothing in common in terms of subject, approach, quality, or canonicity.

That is my understanding.

Does that make this the kind of term that would likely be taken as insulting...

I'd be cautious about applying the term externally. While there are likely many fic writers who could look at their own stories and agree retroactively that something they wrote is id-fic (and might even be thrilled to recognize that), I suspect many writers would take some offense at the idea that what they like in a story (and chose to write) doesn't have universal appeal.

Looking at my own body of works, I can identify two stories that are id-fic. Neither are labeled as such, but I wouldn't have a problem if someone else suggested they were.

[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. :-)

[raine]

It's the self-indulgent part of the process that differenitates id-fic, as defined in Fanlore, the "I'm writing this because I want to and it might be a shame to admit I like this".

Crack fic (also defined here) tends to start from a ridiculous premise, like Duncan MacLeod turns into a penguin, or the characters are stuck in a Harlequin Romance novel, etc. It's not that the fic intends to be funny but it is often is, just by the sheer amount of ridiculous things that get written into the story.

As Sholio mentioned, these are not genres - they are types of labels applied to a fic, sometimes by the author themselves, to categorize what type of story they are and why they got written. Hope this helps!