Writing inadvertent Sues
Oct. 18th, 2009 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseThe other day I came upon one of those inadvertent things that highlights just where writing fanfiction can go wrong. It was a comparison issue where one writer was being praised for making a previously imagined untenable relationship between two characters palatable to a reader, where the first obvious choice for writing comparison tended to balls it up.
The usual response to this sort of scenario is to just call the other participant a bad writer and be done with it. But when both writers are writing the same characters who have established canon personalities and motivations it seems a little hard to get it quite that badly wrong. If both writers are technically proficient in English, are native speaker enough not to trip up on the sorts of issues that a non native speaker simply won’t realise are there and have the time to devote to their writing then they actually begin on quite a level field. Neither has the advantage, technically at any rate. And even if one has more experience in writing and generally experience anyway to draw on that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be all that far ahead. So the real difference must lie somewhere else.
The obvious difference then will be in the way in which either author is writing the characters and what they’re doing with them plot-wise. The plot might have a considerable impact on the comparison especially depending upon how ‘true to canon’ the plotline is dubbed. But for the sake of comparison if both authors are writing plots of a similar tone then the real comparison takes place between the types of characterisation.
Characterisation is a tricky issue anyway because what one person might ignore as a trivial detail in canon might spark a tangent for someone else to expand on. By way of Trinity Blood examples, one author might interpret William attempting to smoke in Caterina’s office as teasing on his part because he knows Kate will immediately respond by telling him that he’s in a no smoking area; another might interpret it as the least of his vices and a reminder of days gone by when he might have been smoking things other than tobacco regularly instead. Both interpretations would be consistent with his characterisation and could be expanded upon and reinforced by other aspects of his behaviour or canonical past. I’m of the opinion that William was something of a Dorian Gray character in his youth but until canon tells me that ‘his friendship was fatal to young men’ I can’t state that as a certainty. Characterisation is open to interpretation.
Yet with characterisation being so open-ended there are still ways of getting it spectacularly wrong. The main way in which this occurs seems to be consistent across fandoms, though I’ll admit that I don’t do much fanfiction reading at all these days and haven’t for quite some time: the author picks a character that they’re fond of and instead of writing an entire character virtues and flaws intact in an attempt to show off the wonder of the character they end up writing them as the biggest Stu imaginable. The character’s established flaws are removed or played down to the point where they’re not flaws at all and if they’re only an incidental character then a lack of glaring flaws is taken to indicate that they have no flaws at all. Worse still any obvious virtues are played up well beyond their realistic limits and situations are created with the sole aim of demonstrating those specific virtues as being superior to those of all the surrounding cast e.g. the acknowledged master swordsman is put in a position where the sole aim is to demonstrate what’s already established canonical fact. By way of original fiction examples the monster in the tower of one of my original series may be the legendary General of the Empire, of the same calibre as the Dark Knight Sparda for a Devil May Cry comparison, but what does he do in my writing? He feeds the fruit bats in his tower, reminisces about the past and occasionally goes out on little trips with his Second. Because it’s already established that he’s a formidable warrior, that he’s a living legend that strikes terror into the hearts of his Empire’s foes so that point doesn’t need to be laboured and in fact what he’s doing when he isn’t at the head of his armies becomes the more interesting thread to follow.
Sometimes, granted, a character’s main trait can be expanded upon but you have to take that somewhere interesting. Everybody knows that DS9’s Elim Garak has a very dubious background and is presumed to be/has been a high ranked Obsidian Order agent but if you go into that in fanfic you need to take it somewhere, even if that somewhere is Garak using the idea of his mysterious past as a hook to draw in Julian Bashir and eventually bed him, otherwise you’re just labouring an already obvious point. This works with original characters inserted into an already established universe or canonical ones. If there’s a character trait that needs establishing that’s fine but there’s a distinct line between establishing a trait and beating everybody over the head with it. And the minute that you start to become repetitive is the minute that said trait starts to lose its appeal. When the audience grow bored with whatever trait it may be then you undercut all your hard work in establishing said trait as laudable. Even if a character trait is reoccurring and tends to crop up often there has to be a sensible reason for this to occur e.g. Fruits Basket’s Tohru is almost painfully optimistic and this is demonstrated all over the place, but the ways in which those demonstrations occur tend to make sense where the focus is on the trigger event and not just Tohru’s optimism in the face of it.
Thus a character trait is simply that, part of the basic make up of a character and it needs to be demonstrated as such rather than as an independent reason to write the character at all. Coming back to the comparison example I began with, since I do have a specific example in mind, if the contrast between two different versions of the same character falls into a case of one version of the character being written as a whole character and the other being written as a Stu surrounded by a cast whose only purpose is to show off said Stu’s virtues then the ‘better’ version is obvious. And it does happen. Established canon characters turned into Stus isn’t at all unusual. It’s mostly, as I understand it, the product of fans of specific characters trying to write about how wonderful their favourite character is by highlighting those good points for everybody to see. Unfortunately, they tend to take it that step further into bending canon so that their chosen Stu can do no wrong and everybody else around him serves the reinforce this point. And this clearly lobotomises the entire characterisation, reducing said character to a bizarre caricature unrecognisable to other fans.
And of course because fandom is nothing if not thorough this butchering of characterisation can also be taken one step further. This type of butchery may be specific to certain types of characters and perhaps even certain fandoms but I can’t be certain. It’s that bizarre psychological mess where an author will write their favourite character as a cross between a strange type of perfect version of that character and a perfect version of themselves or an idealised love interest. Due to its very nature this may well be restricted to certain types of characters and it’s a pretty odd scenario all things considered. It seems to be the product of an author not being able to decide if they’re attracted to a characterisation or if they’d want to be that collection of traits themselves. So instead of shelving one idea or the other so that they write an idealised version of the character or an idealised Stu with the character’s name slapped on it, they instead end up writing a strange hybrid that veers so far away from the original characterisation that it’s not just obvious but embarrassingly so. I recall reading one particular example of this sort of characterisation where while I first presumed the author had a different take on the character to mine, it became increasingly obvious that they were writing an idealised version of the character with all the character’s flaws neatly filled off. And it ought to have stopped there but it didn’t, the more I read the more I came to the conclusion that, along with other clues, the author was obviously writing a hybrid of idealised character and idealised self and that’s the point at which I backed away realising that I’d become an unwitting participant in somebody else’s kink.
I don’t really understand the idea of splicing those two specific fantasies together and I highly suspect that it’s the result of writing by individuals who haven’t realised what they’re doing. After all, if you were writing a fantasy that personal the odds are it would be too personal to share. It’s probably a subconscious incorporation of the two ideas because I refuse to believe that someone would simply put their highly personal fantasy out there for the masses. Because when you write a character that you like or admire there’s always a conscious separation between the characterisation of said character and your admiration of their traits. There’s a point at which you acknowledge, even subconsciously, that while you admire any number of traits you wouldn’t necessarily want to be the entire person possessing them. I’d like the kind of absolutely secure job that Dollhouse’s Topher has but on my own terms, without my having to actually be Topher in that exact environment. Of course that’s not something that would come up in my writing since I haven’t written any Dollhouse fanfic but for an example I have written about, while it might be handy to be a Flame Alchemist I’m not at all sure that I’d actually want to be Roy Mustang, homoerotic undertones with his best friend aside. In fact I can’t think of any one character whose traits are so overwhelmingly desirous that I’d be willing to trade everything they have for everything of mine. Though I will admit that wanting to be somebody else entirely does seem to be a specific fantasy of a certain demographic. Still, it’s an entirely separate fantasy that doesn’t exactly need to be written out or spliced together with any other one.
The idealised character and idealised self fantasies are separately detrimental enough to characterisation as it is. Neither pay any attention to the canonical character being written about, they have nothing to do with the whole of that characterisation and how that fits into the character’s environment thus producing a rather jarring result. Add in a hybrid of both fantasies and the reader ends up with an interpretation of the character if said character were the author in some idealised format which takes the entire concept so far away from canon as to be almost unrecognisable and squarely into uncomfortable territory. I don’t want to read somebody else’s masturbatory fantasy in general, let alone in a format that lets it masquerade as fanfiction about an already established character and its pretty annoying when I find myself reading something that’s legible in a way most Sues aren’t only to find that the sole difference is that it’s a better written, far more uncomfortable Stu piece. I don’t want to see that and I genuinely can’t imagine why anybody would want to expose it to the world. After all I have some rather lurid fantasies myself on occasion, occasionally involving yeniçeri, but I’ve no intention of putting them out there for all to see unless I’m going to get paid for directing a pr0n classic based on them.
The usual response to this sort of scenario is to just call the other participant a bad writer and be done with it. But when both writers are writing the same characters who have established canon personalities and motivations it seems a little hard to get it quite that badly wrong. If both writers are technically proficient in English, are native speaker enough not to trip up on the sorts of issues that a non native speaker simply won’t realise are there and have the time to devote to their writing then they actually begin on quite a level field. Neither has the advantage, technically at any rate. And even if one has more experience in writing and generally experience anyway to draw on that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be all that far ahead. So the real difference must lie somewhere else.
The obvious difference then will be in the way in which either author is writing the characters and what they’re doing with them plot-wise. The plot might have a considerable impact on the comparison especially depending upon how ‘true to canon’ the plotline is dubbed. But for the sake of comparison if both authors are writing plots of a similar tone then the real comparison takes place between the types of characterisation.
Characterisation is a tricky issue anyway because what one person might ignore as a trivial detail in canon might spark a tangent for someone else to expand on. By way of Trinity Blood examples, one author might interpret William attempting to smoke in Caterina’s office as teasing on his part because he knows Kate will immediately respond by telling him that he’s in a no smoking area; another might interpret it as the least of his vices and a reminder of days gone by when he might have been smoking things other than tobacco regularly instead. Both interpretations would be consistent with his characterisation and could be expanded upon and reinforced by other aspects of his behaviour or canonical past. I’m of the opinion that William was something of a Dorian Gray character in his youth but until canon tells me that ‘his friendship was fatal to young men’ I can’t state that as a certainty. Characterisation is open to interpretation.
Yet with characterisation being so open-ended there are still ways of getting it spectacularly wrong. The main way in which this occurs seems to be consistent across fandoms, though I’ll admit that I don’t do much fanfiction reading at all these days and haven’t for quite some time: the author picks a character that they’re fond of and instead of writing an entire character virtues and flaws intact in an attempt to show off the wonder of the character they end up writing them as the biggest Stu imaginable. The character’s established flaws are removed or played down to the point where they’re not flaws at all and if they’re only an incidental character then a lack of glaring flaws is taken to indicate that they have no flaws at all. Worse still any obvious virtues are played up well beyond their realistic limits and situations are created with the sole aim of demonstrating those specific virtues as being superior to those of all the surrounding cast e.g. the acknowledged master swordsman is put in a position where the sole aim is to demonstrate what’s already established canonical fact. By way of original fiction examples the monster in the tower of one of my original series may be the legendary General of the Empire, of the same calibre as the Dark Knight Sparda for a Devil May Cry comparison, but what does he do in my writing? He feeds the fruit bats in his tower, reminisces about the past and occasionally goes out on little trips with his Second. Because it’s already established that he’s a formidable warrior, that he’s a living legend that strikes terror into the hearts of his Empire’s foes so that point doesn’t need to be laboured and in fact what he’s doing when he isn’t at the head of his armies becomes the more interesting thread to follow.
Sometimes, granted, a character’s main trait can be expanded upon but you have to take that somewhere interesting. Everybody knows that DS9’s Elim Garak has a very dubious background and is presumed to be/has been a high ranked Obsidian Order agent but if you go into that in fanfic you need to take it somewhere, even if that somewhere is Garak using the idea of his mysterious past as a hook to draw in Julian Bashir and eventually bed him, otherwise you’re just labouring an already obvious point. This works with original characters inserted into an already established universe or canonical ones. If there’s a character trait that needs establishing that’s fine but there’s a distinct line between establishing a trait and beating everybody over the head with it. And the minute that you start to become repetitive is the minute that said trait starts to lose its appeal. When the audience grow bored with whatever trait it may be then you undercut all your hard work in establishing said trait as laudable. Even if a character trait is reoccurring and tends to crop up often there has to be a sensible reason for this to occur e.g. Fruits Basket’s Tohru is almost painfully optimistic and this is demonstrated all over the place, but the ways in which those demonstrations occur tend to make sense where the focus is on the trigger event and not just Tohru’s optimism in the face of it.
Thus a character trait is simply that, part of the basic make up of a character and it needs to be demonstrated as such rather than as an independent reason to write the character at all. Coming back to the comparison example I began with, since I do have a specific example in mind, if the contrast between two different versions of the same character falls into a case of one version of the character being written as a whole character and the other being written as a Stu surrounded by a cast whose only purpose is to show off said Stu’s virtues then the ‘better’ version is obvious. And it does happen. Established canon characters turned into Stus isn’t at all unusual. It’s mostly, as I understand it, the product of fans of specific characters trying to write about how wonderful their favourite character is by highlighting those good points for everybody to see. Unfortunately, they tend to take it that step further into bending canon so that their chosen Stu can do no wrong and everybody else around him serves the reinforce this point. And this clearly lobotomises the entire characterisation, reducing said character to a bizarre caricature unrecognisable to other fans.
And of course because fandom is nothing if not thorough this butchering of characterisation can also be taken one step further. This type of butchery may be specific to certain types of characters and perhaps even certain fandoms but I can’t be certain. It’s that bizarre psychological mess where an author will write their favourite character as a cross between a strange type of perfect version of that character and a perfect version of themselves or an idealised love interest. Due to its very nature this may well be restricted to certain types of characters and it’s a pretty odd scenario all things considered. It seems to be the product of an author not being able to decide if they’re attracted to a characterisation or if they’d want to be that collection of traits themselves. So instead of shelving one idea or the other so that they write an idealised version of the character or an idealised Stu with the character’s name slapped on it, they instead end up writing a strange hybrid that veers so far away from the original characterisation that it’s not just obvious but embarrassingly so. I recall reading one particular example of this sort of characterisation where while I first presumed the author had a different take on the character to mine, it became increasingly obvious that they were writing an idealised version of the character with all the character’s flaws neatly filled off. And it ought to have stopped there but it didn’t, the more I read the more I came to the conclusion that, along with other clues, the author was obviously writing a hybrid of idealised character and idealised self and that’s the point at which I backed away realising that I’d become an unwitting participant in somebody else’s kink.
I don’t really understand the idea of splicing those two specific fantasies together and I highly suspect that it’s the result of writing by individuals who haven’t realised what they’re doing. After all, if you were writing a fantasy that personal the odds are it would be too personal to share. It’s probably a subconscious incorporation of the two ideas because I refuse to believe that someone would simply put their highly personal fantasy out there for the masses. Because when you write a character that you like or admire there’s always a conscious separation between the characterisation of said character and your admiration of their traits. There’s a point at which you acknowledge, even subconsciously, that while you admire any number of traits you wouldn’t necessarily want to be the entire person possessing them. I’d like the kind of absolutely secure job that Dollhouse’s Topher has but on my own terms, without my having to actually be Topher in that exact environment. Of course that’s not something that would come up in my writing since I haven’t written any Dollhouse fanfic but for an example I have written about, while it might be handy to be a Flame Alchemist I’m not at all sure that I’d actually want to be Roy Mustang, homoerotic undertones with his best friend aside. In fact I can’t think of any one character whose traits are so overwhelmingly desirous that I’d be willing to trade everything they have for everything of mine. Though I will admit that wanting to be somebody else entirely does seem to be a specific fantasy of a certain demographic. Still, it’s an entirely separate fantasy that doesn’t exactly need to be written out or spliced together with any other one.
The idealised character and idealised self fantasies are separately detrimental enough to characterisation as it is. Neither pay any attention to the canonical character being written about, they have nothing to do with the whole of that characterisation and how that fits into the character’s environment thus producing a rather jarring result. Add in a hybrid of both fantasies and the reader ends up with an interpretation of the character if said character were the author in some idealised format which takes the entire concept so far away from canon as to be almost unrecognisable and squarely into uncomfortable territory. I don’t want to read somebody else’s masturbatory fantasy in general, let alone in a format that lets it masquerade as fanfiction about an already established character and its pretty annoying when I find myself reading something that’s legible in a way most Sues aren’t only to find that the sole difference is that it’s a better written, far more uncomfortable Stu piece. I don’t want to see that and I genuinely can’t imagine why anybody would want to expose it to the world. After all I have some rather lurid fantasies myself on occasion, occasionally involving yeniçeri, but I’ve no intention of putting them out there for all to see unless I’m going to get paid for directing a pr0n classic based on them.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-19 10:41 am (UTC)On the 'kinks' side, you made me laugh a quite embarassed laugh because I realized reading that I actually do it a lot: myself is quite mixed up with the characters I write, not in terms of personality, but emotionally, it is. I oftenly feel a lot for them and that's what triggers me to write.
Maybe this is not even exactly what you were criticizing, or what you'd list as 'kink', but it has always happened to me, even if I must admit that, as time goes by, I write a lot less, and more for the sake of an intriguing concept than for the feelings I actually have about something.
Limiting the argument to the sexual sphere, I have another point of perplexity. If you have to write a character having a sexual life/fantasy/interaction, whatever... how would you keep you own life experience completely separate from his/her 'fictional' experience you are writing? Immagination is powerfull, but I don't think I can imagine the texture of human skin, the temperature of breath, without having at least a little of my own life experience poured into it. It's not so different, in the end, from when you write a character having coffe and it smells like the coffe you've just drank.
But maybe you are refering to a much more explicit and shamless example of self-insertion I was never that lucky (?) to came across...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-19 11:01 am (UTC)If one has to magnify something, than dwelling in a flaw of you character of choice is much more acceptable solution than flashing out his virtues while annihilating his faults. Taking a stretch onto something negative can be a funny interesting exercise, while flattening anyone on a perfection standard hardly gets anyway interesting. I also hate those 'one-character-centered long stories where the 'supporting cast'- equally important in the original story - is reduced to old dumb wallpaper, e.g. you are writing a story about a conspiration at the AX headquartiers and the whole fic is centered on Hugue that brilliantly saves the day slashing everyone here and there and be hot and blondie-damned, while other members of the Agency are not doing anything notable, or just get into trouble to be rescued by our hero.
Spotlight-on is good for an introspective piece, but you can't build good spotlight-on action without sending the character on his lonely road, and making anyone around him just act dumb for too long.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-21 08:56 am (UTC)But maybe you are refering to a much more explicit and shamless example of self-insertion I was never that lucky (?) to came across...
In a word: yes. Though now that I think about it there are probably at least two examples I can think of. It’s one of those cases where you can tell that the writing is a personal fantasy on some subconscious level so that it becomes highly uncomfortable to read. It’s not even that it’s impossible to make personal fantasy suitable for public consumption, if Anne Rice is anything to go by she did that quite lucratively with her Vampire Chronicles. It’s just that in this case the fantasy falls on the wrong side of uncomfortable because it’s so blatant, there’s a gut response of ‘dear god, your kink is not my kink: get it the hell away from me, I did not consent to this’.
I also hate those 'one-character-centered long stories where the 'supporting cast'- equally important in the original story - is reduced to old dumb wallpaper
With those things I have to wonder why the writer didn’t just drop the rest of the supporting cast from the story. If I can write William being William in Rome without going into detail about the other AX agents around him because I don’t want to then I’m sure other people can. It might be a sense of obligation that does it though, where the writer feels obliged to mention all the characters that are usually about but isn’t really interested in them so they just get token appearances. Even if a writer wants to focus on one character going on their hero’s journey they can do that without involving other characters all that much, they just need to make sure that when they do have other characters come in those characters have a sensible reason to. Granted, you probably couldn’t write a piece about Tres without mentioning Caterina or Cain without mentioning his siblings and/or Isaak but if you like the character that much shouldn’t their impressions of and attachments to other people be of interest?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-21 12:41 pm (UTC)I feel kinkmemes are quite a fair game in the field of making public your masturbatory material, since you are warned by the premises that you are reading/writing someone's fantasies and you can chose to be part of it or not - on a side note, I'm pretty persuaded that "teh lulz" is much more a driving force for this communities than any real dirty fantasy of the users, whatever....
Granted, you probably couldn’t write a piece about Tres without mentioning Caterina or Cain without mentioning his siblings and/or Isaak but if you like the character that much shouldn’t their impressions of and attachments to other people be of interest?
I took Hugue as an example precisely for this reason: he's one of those characters from AX you can write without involving the others at any level - it's like this also in the novels. The other members might be more or less emancipated from the rest of the cast, but one can actually write them on their own and manage to give the people that happen to be important for focus character the deserved attention.
Probably, the most correct reading key for this flavour of fiction-fail is the issue we were addressing above: self-insertion. The writer is focused on writing his own hero and might so forget the supposed priorities of the characters he named his self-insertion after, with painfull misunderstandings between him and the audience that was actually expecting to read a fic about Tres Iqs....
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-21 01:16 pm (UTC)The writer is focused on writing his own hero and might so forget the supposed priorities of the characters he named his self-insertion after, with painfull misunderstandings between him and the audience that was actually expecting to read a fic about Tres Iqs....
I saw this far too much in the Matrix fandom where the case was usually argued that Neo could do anything within the Matrix itself so the writer was justified in doing anything they wanted to. There’s also a vein of the Harry Potter fandom that does this with bizarre results, mostly because they usually feel the need to ‘boost’ Harry’s powers and change his personality to fit with whatever they find ‘cool’ at the time. Both Neo and Harry are the main characters of their stories already and yet this somehow doesn’t save them and instead makes them bigger targets for this sort of thing. Not that minor characters are immune exactly. Within recent memory I’ve seen one very minor character in their canon and one one-shot antagonist suffer this too: the minor character was completely warped into a slut-Sue and the one-shot antagonist became a tragic badass.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 04:33 pm (UTC)definitely not my thing but to each his own.Funny examples you have there. I've watched the movies but I've never been pondering onto Matrix that much, but what amuses me the most about this kind of distortion of Harry's character is that one of the real few merits of JKR in her management of the series is that the protagonist, although growing a lot, remains, till the last page
minus the epilogue, evidently flawed, one way or another. I guess half-assed self-insertion is really the most probable explanation for all of this.