I usually don’t, and I think the reason is because I ship mostly rarepairs; the fics featuring my OTPs either don’t even exist or are, in a lot of cases, pretty OOC (but I read them all anyway because there’s literally *nothing else* out there).

And once I start writing my own fic in a fandom I pretty much stop reading other people’s work (because when it comes to reading and writing it’s apparently either/or for me). All of this makes it difficult to find something that meshes with my preferred characterizations.

I’m more likely to read gen fic and lift individual character headcanons from there and then mash them together into OTP headcanon.