mark_asphodel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mark_asphodel) wrote2010-08-16 05:51 pm
mark_asphodel) wrote2010-08-16 05:51 pm
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Too Much of A Good Thing (Or, when authors get complacent)
A while back I made a comment elsewhere about the downside of fanfiction authors being too attached to their characters, which got misinterpreted to some degree and.. eh. Water under the bridge. I never meant to indicate that authors shouldn’t care about their characters, or that characters are mere tools to advance the goals of Plot and Story, or of Writing itself. A writer with enough skill can conceal dislike or indifference to his or her characters, and sometimes a character “comes alive” to the reader in spite of the author’s inability to like or understand the creation (see: Severus Snape up until HP7), but generally such things do show and it’s not pretty. And when an author loves a character enough to depict that character as a living, breathing creature with flaws and frailties, that shows too-- and it can be amazing.
I’m talking about something else, and though it’s certainly present in original ‘fic, I’ll confine the talk to fanfic here. And, just so nobody in FE fandom thinks I’m pointing fingers at them, I’ll draw my evidence from a dead fandom. How’s that?
The problem, to me, isn’t necessarily that an author can get too attached to his own characters, though that is certainly a problem on its own, as when you find an author shrilly justifying the goodness and rightness of a character whose actions are, objectively speaking, unsettling or even appalling. Or when you find an author doing backflips to protect her pet character from the logical consequences of her own plot and story. This is something more subtle that isn’t obvious on reading an author’s first story, or the second, or sometimes even the tenth. This particular malady surfaces when an author becomes so comfortable with a particular perception of a character or relationship-- a specific “take”-- that the author gets locked into a comfort zone which slowly saps the life out of his body of work.
Let’s get into the Wayback Machine. Around 2004, I decided to get back into the fiction pool after a two-year hiatus from any sort of media fandom. I gravitated toward ancient stuff-- old Disney fandoms and The Real Ghostbusters (don’t laugh... I’ve seen what you guys read and write for outside of Fire Emblem). And, believe it or not, 1980s cartoons have spawned an alarming amount of high-quality “mature” work, like John Nowak’s geeky epics for Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers. The Real Ghostbusters (henceforth TRG) had a great little fandom, one that felt like a throwback to the intimacy of the late 1990s-- ‘fics lovingly housed on personal archives with essays and recommendation pages. One writer in particular had both an astonishing personal output and a vast set of links ‘n‘ recs-- a real fandom trooper. I read her stuff on my lunch break and was captivated. These were like TRG episodes spun into life, with some of the bite and grit of the Ghostbusters film. Solid and humorous writing, well-researched and inspired monsters, diverse settings, plausible sci-fi, exquisite character interactions... it was the kind of thing that fanfic “ought” to be-- something with genuine respect for the source material that expands upon it, deepens it, and enriches it. I ate it up like candy.
It was pretty clear which characters the author favored, though she showed care and respect for all five of the mains. Her ‘fics mostly focused on the relationship between Peter Venkman and Egon Spengler (stop laughing, dammit), and while it wasn’t slash and both guys were portrayed as straight, her take on them veered to what used to be called “smarm”-- these guys were clearly Heterosexual Life Partners and their bond was the core of her stories. There would be a mystery to solve, then some peril and trauma, and some form of “I love you, man,” and then everything would be all right at the end-- just like at the end of every episode of the show. Good old-fashioned hurt/comfort in spades. And she obviously loved writing it, and that was fine.
I was seriously about thirty stories in to this woman’s archive before I realized something was wrong. It was probably another five or so stories (she was publishing steadily all the time I was reading her) before I figured out what that wrongness stemmed from. I was reading the same story, over and over. It didn’t matter what arcane monster she dredged up to be the Threat of the Week (selkies, Babylonian gods, love potions gone wrong), what exotic setting she used, what specific manner of peril and trauma she inflicted on the guys-- it was the same damned story, again and again. The little dance-steps she used to work her characters to their emotional epiphanies were always the same, regardless of the window-dressing-- and the epiphanies themselves were the same. Eventually, I’d begin one of her yarns (and some of these were “epically” long), see every twist coming well in advance, and grit my teeth. I felt cheated. Before long, I stopped reading her altogether, as this particular author had nothing more to offer me as a reader. I like candy, but ABC gum is another thing altogether.
I think with this specific author, her adherence to canon proved her undoing-- she was unwilling to ever “break” the world, and so every peril was surmountable and every story had that happy cartoon ending. No one ever died for real, the bonds of friendship frayed but never ruptured, and teamwork always prevailed. But her set-in-stone conceptions of Spengler and Venkman killed those stories just as dead, for me-- and remember, in other respects I found this writer very, very good. Grammar and punctuation and the like were non-issues. Plot wasn’t really an issue. But the static characterization was a huge issue for me... and clearly, the author liked her pets that way.
Now, maybe I’m picky, and most readers will happily sit down and gorge on ABC gum because it still tastes sweet and makes bubbles. But I’d like to think I have SOME standards about what I do with my free time, and this sort of authorial complacency-- or authorial blindness-- really irks me. And I really hate to see it in my own writing, which is why I keep trying to break free of my favorite FE topic (“Cute Boys from Altea and the Pegasus Knights Who Love Them”) to try something new and weird. And maybe new and weird fails, but at least it’s not (hopefully) just a rewrite of something I’ve already published. The words come easy when I’m in my comfort zone, but how many times can I use easy words to express the same concept again? And how many times can I expect readers to swallow that ABC gum?
The TRG fandom is basically dead, as the loss of AOL Hometown and Geocities purged the ‘Net of all those loving little shrines. I saved some of my favorites via archive.org, as they really did impress me once upon a time. But I can’t read them without feeling a measure of that disgust I once felt on opening the latest “new” fic and thinking, “Oh, this. Again. Why does this woman expend so much effort on banging out the same damned thing ad infinitum?”
Then again, why do any of us do what we do in the virtual world?
I’m talking about something else, and though it’s certainly present in original ‘fic, I’ll confine the talk to fanfic here. And, just so nobody in FE fandom thinks I’m pointing fingers at them, I’ll draw my evidence from a dead fandom. How’s that?
The problem, to me, isn’t necessarily that an author can get too attached to his own characters, though that is certainly a problem on its own, as when you find an author shrilly justifying the goodness and rightness of a character whose actions are, objectively speaking, unsettling or even appalling. Or when you find an author doing backflips to protect her pet character from the logical consequences of her own plot and story. This is something more subtle that isn’t obvious on reading an author’s first story, or the second, or sometimes even the tenth. This particular malady surfaces when an author becomes so comfortable with a particular perception of a character or relationship-- a specific “take”-- that the author gets locked into a comfort zone which slowly saps the life out of his body of work.
Let’s get into the Wayback Machine. Around 2004, I decided to get back into the fiction pool after a two-year hiatus from any sort of media fandom. I gravitated toward ancient stuff-- old Disney fandoms and The Real Ghostbusters (don’t laugh... I’ve seen what you guys read and write for outside of Fire Emblem). And, believe it or not, 1980s cartoons have spawned an alarming amount of high-quality “mature” work, like John Nowak’s geeky epics for Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers. The Real Ghostbusters (henceforth TRG) had a great little fandom, one that felt like a throwback to the intimacy of the late 1990s-- ‘fics lovingly housed on personal archives with essays and recommendation pages. One writer in particular had both an astonishing personal output and a vast set of links ‘n‘ recs-- a real fandom trooper. I read her stuff on my lunch break and was captivated. These were like TRG episodes spun into life, with some of the bite and grit of the Ghostbusters film. Solid and humorous writing, well-researched and inspired monsters, diverse settings, plausible sci-fi, exquisite character interactions... it was the kind of thing that fanfic “ought” to be-- something with genuine respect for the source material that expands upon it, deepens it, and enriches it. I ate it up like candy.
It was pretty clear which characters the author favored, though she showed care and respect for all five of the mains. Her ‘fics mostly focused on the relationship between Peter Venkman and Egon Spengler (stop laughing, dammit), and while it wasn’t slash and both guys were portrayed as straight, her take on them veered to what used to be called “smarm”-- these guys were clearly Heterosexual Life Partners and their bond was the core of her stories. There would be a mystery to solve, then some peril and trauma, and some form of “I love you, man,” and then everything would be all right at the end-- just like at the end of every episode of the show. Good old-fashioned hurt/comfort in spades. And she obviously loved writing it, and that was fine.
I was seriously about thirty stories in to this woman’s archive before I realized something was wrong. It was probably another five or so stories (she was publishing steadily all the time I was reading her) before I figured out what that wrongness stemmed from. I was reading the same story, over and over. It didn’t matter what arcane monster she dredged up to be the Threat of the Week (selkies, Babylonian gods, love potions gone wrong), what exotic setting she used, what specific manner of peril and trauma she inflicted on the guys-- it was the same damned story, again and again. The little dance-steps she used to work her characters to their emotional epiphanies were always the same, regardless of the window-dressing-- and the epiphanies themselves were the same. Eventually, I’d begin one of her yarns (and some of these were “epically” long), see every twist coming well in advance, and grit my teeth. I felt cheated. Before long, I stopped reading her altogether, as this particular author had nothing more to offer me as a reader. I like candy, but ABC gum is another thing altogether.
I think with this specific author, her adherence to canon proved her undoing-- she was unwilling to ever “break” the world, and so every peril was surmountable and every story had that happy cartoon ending. No one ever died for real, the bonds of friendship frayed but never ruptured, and teamwork always prevailed. But her set-in-stone conceptions of Spengler and Venkman killed those stories just as dead, for me-- and remember, in other respects I found this writer very, very good. Grammar and punctuation and the like were non-issues. Plot wasn’t really an issue. But the static characterization was a huge issue for me... and clearly, the author liked her pets that way.
Now, maybe I’m picky, and most readers will happily sit down and gorge on ABC gum because it still tastes sweet and makes bubbles. But I’d like to think I have SOME standards about what I do with my free time, and this sort of authorial complacency-- or authorial blindness-- really irks me. And I really hate to see it in my own writing, which is why I keep trying to break free of my favorite FE topic (“Cute Boys from Altea and the Pegasus Knights Who Love Them”) to try something new and weird. And maybe new and weird fails, but at least it’s not (hopefully) just a rewrite of something I’ve already published. The words come easy when I’m in my comfort zone, but how many times can I use easy words to express the same concept again? And how many times can I expect readers to swallow that ABC gum?
The TRG fandom is basically dead, as the loss of AOL Hometown and Geocities purged the ‘Net of all those loving little shrines. I saved some of my favorites via archive.org, as they really did impress me once upon a time. But I can’t read them without feeling a measure of that disgust I once felt on opening the latest “new” fic and thinking, “Oh, this. Again. Why does this woman expend so much effort on banging out the same damned thing ad infinitum?”
Then again, why do any of us do what we do in the virtual world?
no subject
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.