"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.

[malinaldarose]

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

[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!