First person is harder to write well in any circumstances, and you may well be right that it feels too masturbatory.
There was a fanfic archive that's now defunct, Freedom of Speech FF, that tended to have smutfics written in second person. Gosh, I hated those, even though they were supposed to be porn. Write to entertain me, but get your hands off my body! And I don't particularly want to imagine yours, Ms. Narrator!
I think the idea that romance gets boring pretty quickly without any other plot is valid. Some fans can't even stand the amount of romance in FFX, and want to fast forward through the "screw the laws of physics, let's have underwater nookie!" sequence. I felt the romance in that story was very well-done, but that's because it came about through the characters' shared experiences. Stuff HAPPENED to them, and they came to care for each other. There were other characters around too. There was non-relationship stuff happening.
Unless I'm looking for PWP bedtime reading, I want the second P more than the first.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-03-15 08:13 pm (UTC)There was a fanfic archive that's now defunct, Freedom of Speech FF, that tended to have smutfics written in second person. Gosh, I hated those, even though they were supposed to be porn. Write to entertain me, but get your hands off my body! And I don't particularly want to imagine yours, Ms. Narrator!
I think the idea that romance gets boring pretty quickly without any other plot is valid. Some fans can't even stand the amount of romance in FFX, and want to fast forward through the "screw the laws of physics, let's have underwater nookie!" sequence. I felt the romance in that story was very well-done, but that's because it came about through the characters' shared experiences. Stuff HAPPENED to them, and they came to care for each other. There were other characters around too. There was non-relationship stuff happening.
Unless I'm looking for PWP bedtime reading, I want the second P more than the first.