About Amnesia-fic

[bobthemole]

I tend to dislike amnesia-fic, especially if they are about reuniting a memory-less person with the other member of their OTP.

Characters are the products of their histories and if you take away the memories of those histories, how are they the same people? Unless the fic is an exploration of how much personality remains intact if you take away memory, but fics (outside the Dollhouse-verse) seldom explore that.

There's also the dynamic when one person in a pairing is an amnesiac and the other knows everything about them. If they two are teaming up to reconstruct the amnesiac's life, I think that's an interesting story because the memory loss is the primary "antagonist" and everyone's agreed on that.

But what I don't get is stories where A thinks B is dead and months later discovers a memory-less (and newly human) B working in a bar somewhere. The story then becomes about A convincing B that they belong together, although B would rather keep hir current simple bartending life and not be pursued by this creepy stranger, thank you. Inevitably, A devolves into a stalker who can't stay away from this stranger who bears a resemblance to hir lost (unrequited) love. And B is unusually content with hir memory-less life and has no curiosity about hir past. A eventually wears down B and they establish a new relationship. Sometimes B regains hir memories, precipitating another crisis, but conflicts are resolved and they embark on a happy paired life of whatever shenanigans (vampire slaying? demon hunting?) they were up to before they were separated.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on at a meta level, but it seems that the reestablishment of the pairing is prioritized over the will and happiness of the individual characters. And it's like amnesia is a shortcut for getting characters together without dealing with their mutual baggage - which I think is completely pointless and undermines everything that makes the pair interesting in the first place. What surprises me is the popularity of this trope - I'm sure I've read half a dozen spuffy fics with this plot, and now I'm finding them in Supernatural too.

There's probably a good reason Amnesia fic is so popular, and if I knew what it was I'd be able to appreciate it better. Does anyone have thoughts? Have you written or do you love reading this genre? What am I missing in my analysis?

Comments

[slaymesoftly.livejournal.com]

*waves hand* I'm one of those who enjoys a good amnesia fic. Off the top of my head, I think it's almost always Spike who has no memories (which makes better sense, given the things that have or could have happened to him since Buffy last saw him).
And I've written several - most set in the future somewhere and with varying degrees of memory recovery.
Currently working on a Randy/Joan fic and having a hard time making it believable that they would not have figured out more about who they are by now. I remember reading one years ago where there's been an apocalypse of some sort and Buffy has remained "Joan" to avoid remembering all that's gone wrong and Spike takes care of her. (In fact, there may be two fics with similar themes, now that I think of it, and I may be combining them in my little pea brain.)
Anyway - reasons for liking? A chance to explore the basic personality without the baggage of memory? How much of this person is innate, and how much of it due to life experiences? An opportunity to see/show how deep the attraction between the two characters goes, or how inevitable it is. (Trying to avoid the whole "soulmates" thing, but you know...) In the case of Randy/Joan - how might the relationship have played out without the bad memories that made Buffy so determined not to fall for another vampire? Stuff like that. Have to go to work - if I think of other, more coherent, reasons, I'll add them later. :)

[bobthemole.livejournal.com]

Yay awesome information!

Buffy has remained "Joan" to avoid remembering all that's gone wrong... the case of Randy/Joan - how might the relationship have played out without the bad memories that made Buffy so determined not to fall for another vampire?

Those that good reasons I hadn't thought about. I imagine the latter plot is tricky, because it's trying to show that a relationship is working in the absence of something that the protagonists don't know is missing.

[slaymesoftly.livejournal.com]

*nods* Randy/Joan is problematic if you try to extend it past a couple days. Unless you have an apocalypse or something that sends them running away.

I ended up making a while post about this a little while ago. And enigmaticblues had a good comment and summation of what can be appealing about the trope.