Curse of knowledge

[yvannairie]

Currently struggling with what to make of the fact that a lot of people's "characterisation" really boils down to giving characters traits they find cool, righteous or "relatable" with little regard to how those traits would actually interact with their established characterisation.

Like, there's nobody out there making their fave "gay and homophobic", as interesting and potentially well-tracking trait that would be.

Comments

[palominocorn]

I've seen a number of writers who were capable of writing exactly one character: the person they want to be. It's weird to see two characters who are *said* to have completely opposite personalities *behave* in exactly the same manner.

Like, at some point they become OCs, and people should maybe admit that they want to play with their own dolls rather than try and force invented personalities onto existing characters. And especially when it's an AU, it becomes a case of "this is literally an original work with something else's serial numbers".

[yvannairie]

becomes a case of "this is literally an original work with something else's serial numbers".

THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS, ISN'T IT!!! IT'S IN WORDS!!

Like it's already plenty frustrating when a fic is clearly being written from a "this is how I would react in this situation, and I relate to this character, and therefore they'd also react like this" and then when you try to probe the implications of that, people take it so goddamn seriously because they have brought themselves and their personal work into a fandom space where we all usually agree that we are playing with shared toys!!

It really feels like all fic is self-insert, now. And I say this as someone whose best friend writes reader-insert and does, like... a phenomenal job with it, basically because they're just writing a first-person POV fic with an OC based on themselves. When you just accept that you're writing an oc, the writing becomes much stronger.

I know it's pointless to theorise on the motiations of changers, but I wonder if there's an element of "self-insert and OC fic are still niche" to it, so people try to fish for an audience in the broader fandom without wanting to change how they write. I remember at least one instance where a humanformers fic I was reading started feeling so much like the author just going through their own breakup through the characters that I completely lost sense of what their dynamic was supposed to be. What is a power fantasy to the author seems like utterly deranged, distressed behaviour from the character that it's being projected onto and then when it's not actually recognised as such, it throws the whole story into chaos.

[palominocorn]

I don't think people actually *realize* they're writing glorified OCs. It's been a while, but I remember that the people who couldn't write unique characters to save their life in my old RP group actually believed that they were writing good, distinct characters.

My theory is that there are a couple of things going on here.

One, fanfic is more accessible and more well-known than ever, meaning that more people are writing it and more people are sharing. A quarter century ago when I was a budding writer coming up with Tortall fanfiction, the only people who ever knew about it were my two school friends. I didn't know there were places on the internet I could post it, and no archive had the same reach as AO3 or FF.net do now (to my knowledge, at least). I certainly didn't have access to zines or LISTSERVs or anything like that.

The other big factor IMO is that literacy rates in the US have utterly TANKED in the last couple decades, meaning that writers from the US (and a large chunk of the anglosphere IS Yankees) just. Don't read and write as well as they used to. I remember looking at fandom discussions fifteen years ago, and people were a LOT more clever around figuring stuff out, a lot more willing to pick stuff apart in detail, a lot more loyal to specific works, and waaaaaay less likely to give a shit about word of god. (I can expound on this observation more once I'm at a computer, if you'd like.)

There definitely ARE people who project their OC onto an existing character deliberately, but I think they're a minority. Most people are just. Bad.

[yvannairie]

I wonder if this is why people get so much more personal about takes they don't like, because they're implicitly having the conversation while treating characters as nothing but vessels for self-expression (a thing that occurs with people who make every character the same in my experience) and therefore all criticism of a thing becomes criticism of you.

I can sort of even relate to that myself, that was definitely the source of why I didn't like certain people, because everything they said felt like an attack on me and my preferences and the kind of person that I am. I still get that sometimes, bc I so associate a certain tone of discussing things in fandom (the "you have to be fucking stupid or uneducated to like this") and unfortunately... that's just the way some people express disliking a thing.

[palominocorn]

Oh yeah, tons of people are projecting heavily onto characters and taking it personally, especially if they have not much else going for them. If liking a certain work is the one bright spot in your life, and the protagonist is just like you, then any criticism of the protagonist is a criticism of you. And if you've had a dysfunctional upbringing where criticism feels like an attack, well. "This character is not very smart" feels like someone calling YOU a dumbass.

I can relate to it too; when I was a teenager I remember getting really upset when my friends didn't like my OCs, because my characters have pieces of ME in them, and what does it mean if my friend don't like pieces of me?

I mean, that is how some people express dislike, and I'm not going to pretend I haven't done that, but also that's... a crappy way to do it? Not that educating strangers on the internet about "subjective vs objective statements" and "people have different life experiences" is a fruitful endeavor.

because we can forgive if our fave assaults people and flirts w/teenagers but not if he's LDP

[stardust_rifle]

...

did you want to give me an invitation to complain about that time i suggested offhandedly that X Character that i like was probably politically right-wing and everyone jumped on my ass, or?

HELLO??? That sounds wild, tell me more.

[yvannairie]

.... I did now! :D

Re: HELLO??? That sounds wild, tell me more.

[stardust_rifle]

it's not as dramatic as you're probably thinking, the aforementioned character is a politician from a very wealthy family that canonically uses corporal punishment on children and is quite classist, and I'd also seen some JP speaker on Twitter talking about how his campaign posters bear similarity to JP right-wing sloganeering, so I'd kind of had this idea boiling around in the back of my head, and then offhandedly mentioned it in some Discord conversation.

A bunch of people were like "M I thought you liked X Character", "M I thought you were all on board 'what if X Character was an egg'", some people (maybe jokingly?) called me an anti?, at least one person was like "I like X Character, are you insulting me? Insinuating that I'M a right-winger?

It was weird and I just sort of dipped on that server after that. The thing was, it was supposed to be anti-free, kink tomato, your fictional tastes don't determine what you like in fiction, so that was incredibly shocking to me.

Re: HELLO??? That sounds wild, tell me more.

[yvannairie]

..... yeah. What the hell, that is definitely beyond the pale as far as how to handle headcanons you don't like. The "are you calling me a right-winger" thing is particularly apalling.