potboy

I think it has to be a combination of both. I've read some books where I felt that the plot had been polished like clockwork to the point where it was *perfect* in terms of high stakes and people making difficult choices and so on. But it ran like a machine and I didn't care because I felt that it wasn't actually happening to people. The characters felt like plot devices. But then I've also really enjoyed some high-concept SF where the central idea was interesting enough not to care that I didn't care about their characters. (I'm thinking specifically of a Neil Stephenson book in which they rediscover the original pre-Babel language, which turns out to be like a programming language for the brain.)

But for me the high concept concept has to be something I've genuinely never thought of before if I'm going to forgive a book for having flat characters in it. Otherwise I'm reading for at least one character that I love, or who intrigues me enough to need to see what they'll do next and why. And yeah, I can get that in a coffee-shop AU *if* the author has put real thought into how that character would behave in a coffee-shop.

If it's just 'insert today's fair-haired twink of choice/insert today's dark haired hunk of choice' then I'm not interested. Probably because that's a specific plot structure being re-enacted rather than an examination of my fave's deep character traits.

Ugh. I wonder if this is the reason that so much of fanfic is based on SF/F franchises? Most 'literary' canon already has that intense focus on character, but it has it without enough focus on plot. Most SF/F tends to have an intense focus on plot but sacrifices character to get it. Fanfiction is there to re-introduce a character-focus into the material that already has the good plot?

I think 'slice of life' probably is the term. Or 'literary fiction.' But it's a genre I don't know anything about, so don't take my word for it :)