You just described the problem that bothered me so much about my own work back in January, and what eventually exploded in February, leading to a 99% drop in my fic output. Like Wolfraven above, in some of our FE fandoms I care about only a select few characters, and have fallen into the complacency trap several times. Besides pairing or character related reasons for doing this, I find in my case that I like certain kinds of stories; for example, the devotional (master-servant usually) pairing, or the thing (event, relationship) that can never be.
These lend themselves to certain types of fic. It's not that you can't step outside the box, but that the first place an author thinks to go is the obvious, and then they get attached to whatever emotional gratification that might give them, and it just feeds itself forever. Being an author who likes that gratification, it's very easy to give in and write the same thing over and over again with different settings or AU circumstances.
I guess what I'm getting at, now that I look back at what I just wrote, is that it might go deeper than character love, too. It's a symptom of something deeper, at least in my case. How you break out of this, though, I don't know.
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These lend themselves to certain types of fic. It's not that you can't step outside the box, but that the first place an author thinks to go is the obvious, and then they get attached to whatever emotional gratification that might give them, and it just feeds itself forever. Being an author who likes that gratification, it's very easy to give in and write the same thing over and over again with different settings or AU circumstances.
I guess what I'm getting at, now that I look back at what I just wrote, is that it might go deeper than character love, too. It's a symptom of something deeper, at least in my case. How you break out of this, though, I don't know.