I completely agree with the above commenters who remarked upon the Woobie's helplessness in the face of circumstances -- those circumstances can neither be their fault nor escapable by them. I saw a ton of this back in my Torchwood days, very early on in the last years of LJ, but I think the purest versions of the form are less frequent now, or at least, I see them less frequently. If I had to wager a guess, the sorts of people who in the past would pick an ickle babey to woobify via all sorts of torments are nowadays in the purity camp, and would be horrified to write the sorts of stories that I most associate with the Woobie: torture, rape and recovery, kidnap, sometimes pregnancy fics, etc. However, the passivity and assumed moral purity have certainly not gone away. Perhaps the Woobie's torments have merely been watered down, and the core of the character really is the utter lack of agency!
In the meantime, I must get around to this book! I make a point to try to read all the pro-published novels about fandom -- so far I have found one (1) good one, and this sounds intriguingly like a potential number 2.
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I completely agree with the above commenters who remarked upon the Woobie's helplessness in the face of circumstances -- those circumstances can neither be their fault nor escapable by them. I saw a ton of this back in my Torchwood days, very early on in the last years of LJ, but I think the purest versions of the form are less frequent now, or at least, I see them less frequently. If I had to wager a guess, the sorts of people who in the past would pick an ickle babey to woobify via all sorts of torments are nowadays in the purity camp, and would be horrified to write the sorts of stories that I most associate with the Woobie: torture, rape and recovery, kidnap, sometimes pregnancy fics, etc. However, the passivity and assumed moral purity have certainly not gone away. Perhaps the Woobie's torments have merely been watered down, and the core of the character really is the utter lack of agency!
In the meantime, I must get around to this book! I make a point to try to read all the pro-published novels about fandom -- so far I have found one (1) good one, and this sounds intriguingly like a potential number 2.