Maybe that’s why I enjoy Labrat’s revelations.
Thank you for the compliment, Arawn! It quite made my day finding it in here. I was reading your post, finding your question interesting, when I kind of screeched to a halt at the last line.
As for your question, I was about to reply along the same lines as alcyone. I think that, generally speaking, if the story is well written and works in character most readers will appreciate any kind of revelation.
But at the same time, I do think that you get a sense of 'been there, done that' with the violent response stories now and then - even when they're perfectly in character - just because there's so much more of them than anything else.
So you tend to get 'cycles' where authors start writing softer responses and readers appreciate them more just because they've written/read a ton of violent response stories and just want a change for a while. Violent response stories never entirely 'go out of fashion' though.
I know that as an author, I'd pretty much reached that stage in my writing and if I hadn't stopped writing I'd have produced two or three soft response stories by now (most of which remain half written on my hd). I wouldn't have abandoned violent responses entirely, I'd have gone back to them at some point, but I just felt like a change, doing something different instead for a time.
LabRat
