How very out of character of you...

[otw-staff.livejournal.com]



I'm sure we've all had this experience: You're reading a work of fan fiction and enjoying the heck out of it. Then.... boom; a sudden loss of characterization.
It's not the end of the world; no alarms go off, no oxygen masks fall from the ceiling -- but just like that, the little world you were immersed in goes away. You may forge ahead, but now you're all too aware of the actual process of reading the story again.

It happens even with the best of fan fic writers: Occasionally you're going to write someone's fictional darling acting not quite like themselves. Sometimes it's on purpose, of course; a chance to play with 'what if' scenarios, or to explore a side of him or her that's been shown but not expanded upon.

What's your tolerance for OOC fanfic? Are there stories you feel captured a character particularly well? Stories that play with or alter their behavior in ways that are creative and entertaining? Or ones that put them in wildly unusual AUs but maintain their personalities? Are there characters you have a knack for writing or that you struggle with?

Would love to read your thoughts - and if you have a link to some well-crafted fic with strong or interesting characterization, please share! I could use a good read this week, myself.

Here are some links of interest. The OTW doesn't necessarily agree with every opinion, but offers them as interesting musings on the subject of characterization.

• Characterization in Fanfic: Using Canon as the DNA for Your Characters by Dreamflower


• Avoiding Mistakes in Fanfiction Writing: A Beginner's Guide


• Will the Real John Watson Please Stand-Up


• Common Fanfiction Mistakes - characterization


• The Seven Deadly Fanons of Characterization

Comments

[otw-staff.livejournal.com]

Hee. Funny - and yet, also an idea for a future post or two in that first sentence so thanks! :)

Good point re: movie versus book characterization. The medium can affect that, certainly, with the constraints and opportunities particular to it. And yes, people are flexible enough to change with their situations (hopefully) so why not characters?

I find some so much easier to capture than others - and I wonder if it's because they appeal to me more, or because they were better drawn in canon to begin with? Maybe both.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

The Eagle movie and the Eagle of the Ninth book on which it was based is an example of a situation where the physical characterisation of the two main characters is a complete opposite of the book, and the personalities are also very different, even though the setting is almost the same.

I am not sure why both book and movie work for me when they are SO different, but they do. And a number of fans (me included) have written fusions of book and movie. I found that an interesting exercise, because you want to try to leave it open for the reader to flesh out the character as he lives in their head, there are some things you can describe in detail, and some that you emphatically can't because you have to leave that area for the reader to fill in.

With TV and movie, the fan almost always sees the authorial viewpoint when it comes to characterisation. You can hear what the characters say, and you can see their expressions, but you cannot hear their thoughts.

Whereas, in books at the moment and a lot of fanfic too, the limited third person viewpoint seems to be enormously popular, so you do not see the movie, you read the character's thoughts and reactions and see throgh their eyes.

So, is a limited third person story about, say Merlin and Arthur, told from Merlin's point of view, really out of character, if it does not conflict directly with canon? I may be thrown out of a story, believing "Merlin doesn't think like that!" But if there is nothing in the canon to dispute it, because the canon is not shown from inside Merlin's head, then another reader may find the fic compelling and superbly characterised, because they are reading the actor's expressions just a little differently to me.

[otw-staff.livejournal.com]

Very good points about the perception and perspective of the reader/viewer, thanks for sharing them.

With TV and movies, I'm often amazed at how various viewer 'takes' on a character and his/her story can differ so widely. The author still has his/her voice, but fandom will get what it gets from the show and the performances. That's not unique to those media, though, of course. For instance, I can think of a couple of songs that are not love songs, but are widely perceived to be - in one case the songwriter says he's come to accept it and in the other he said it really makes him wonder if they were listening to the lyrics at all!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Another example would be cultural expectation colouring the reaction. With 'the Eagle' movie, I was amazed to discover US reviews where the American-accented Romans were taken at face value as 'the good guys' because they were clean and had familiar voices, whereas the Britons were depicted as more primitive and clearly 'baddies' (because in Hollywood, the British accents always indicate a bad guy??).

This amazed me particularly, because I thought the depiction of the Romans in that movie showed them as strikingly unsympathetic - indeed, it came across as having a specifically anti-US-imperialism message to me - and in the British cinema where I watched it, people in the audience were cheering on the native British attacks on the Roman fort!

Where your eyes come from really does seem to make a huge difference to what you see with them.