Posted by Maureen on 7/9/2007, 7:49 pm, in reply to "I know I'm not Maureen but....." For a while we had a rash of "Holmes Kills Himself", "Lestrade Kills Herself", "Holmes Gets Killed", and "Lestrade Gets Killed" stories. Some of these were on fanfiction.net and some here. Some of them were good, some not so much. (Which is about what I'd expect from character death stories in any fandom.) The trouble is... a tragedy isn't all about feeling depressed. You get your Greek ones where it all comes from someone's tragic flaw. You get your operatic ones where everybody screws up. But either way, a tragedy doesn't work well unless it's a really thoroughly satisfying, logical and emotional, truly human, and totally cathartic tragedy. And that's not easy, to be frank. It's a lot easier to write gently sad endings, or slightly dark endings, or whatever. And it's not the sort of thing that people are used to getting these days, unless they _are_ fans of opera or Shakespeare or whatever. They don't sit down like Victorians to read a book where everybody succumbs to tuberculosis or ends up martyrs. There is zero possibility that a generic romance book from the grocery store will end in two people dying for love or for their own weaknesses. So you have to work harder to get the audience to get satisfaction out of a tragedy, and not to feel like slitting their own wrists (one loses more readers that way!). OTOH, there have been whole fandoms full of a love of tragedy. Geez, I don't know how many tragic X-Files stories there were, but definitely a ton. So there probably is an untapped audience. Again, the problem is: how to tap it? Believe me, I understand your frustration and sympathize. You've taken on a challenge.
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Ah, the angst and tragedy....
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