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browngirlSo I was thinking, which is always a recipe for disaster. *grin* And yet I'm writing those thoughts down.
In "real life", as it were, most people past a certain maturity level understand that different people tend to see different sides ofany given person depending on our relationship with them. For examples: you all know me differently than my friends on the mailing lists I used to be on did, let alone how my parents know me (or don't). In a similar vein, when I get really mad at, say, my coworkers, sometimes I imagine how they must be with their children and their parents, and it helps me see them as people again, not obstacles.
Still, real people have core selves, shaped by the classic duo of "nature and nurture", and all the sources for both. Over that we have different facets we more or less consciously show to different people, and pick up on different aspects of other people's facets because of who we are. Remembering this is important when creating fictional character's interactions.
Fictional characters don't so much exist as they are continually created and recreated; by their authors, especially when they're TV Show or serial publication characters with multiple authors, and by us when we read or watch the stories and shows they're in.
Because of this, their cores are more tenuous, more fragile, in some ways. Even characters when characters are created by just one author, during the course of the creation of the work that author will have changing ideas on who they are, changing states of mindfulness about the core qualities of their characters and their varied facets. When characters have more than one creator, those creators will privilige and downplay different features, just by virtue of being different people with different viewpoints. After that, different fans will build different concepts of those characters, both in facets and in core, while they experience them by reading or viewing the works they inhabit.
In a nutshell, it seems to me that the range of ideas of a character's core, who they *are*, is potentially even more variable than that of who a real person is.
OK, so that's all setup, really. Now, my point.
The reason why I'm writing this is because of a recurring thought during my reading of many slash vs non-slash discussions, many shipper wars, many characterization and canon discussions. That thought is, "why are we fighting over this?" Because a great deal of it comes down to which facets we each notice more and look through while building our ideas of the characters' cores, and that seems... too personal to argue over, to have one right answer.
Which isn't a statement meant to preclude either the idea of verifiable characterization or the idea of discussing our ideas. Characters do, I believe, have core selves, analogously to real people. An individual character's facets, the different faces they present to different people both inside their stories and to different readers, do resemble because they derive from the same core. So in a well-characterized fanfic we can recognize a character we met in a movie or book, or in a discussion we can recognize in each other's descriptions the characters we love or loathe, despite the fact that we all notice slightly different things about them.
It's just that... people often debate which pairing is canon or the proper balance of a character's revealed features as if there were one right answer. What I'm trying to say here while speaking vaguely (not least because I don't want to point to some of the discussions that led me to these thoughts) is that there's more of a range of answers than *one* single right answer, and that discussing what we think is more likely to be fruitful than trying to choose the single correct viewpoint that everyone in a fandom should share.
(ETA: This is why... when people complain about a genre warping the characters, (for example, that's a charge often leveled at slash), I boggle a little. To keep using that example (since it's convenient---but this does happen with other genres and issues too) f one person's version of character A is written into slash, that doesn't at all preclude another person's version of that character not being involved in slash. So why argue about if they'd *really* do that?)
That's what I think, anyway.
In "real life", as it were, most people past a certain maturity level understand that different people tend to see different sides ofany given person depending on our relationship with them. For examples: you all know me differently than my friends on the mailing lists I used to be on did, let alone how my parents know me (or don't). In a similar vein, when I get really mad at, say, my coworkers, sometimes I imagine how they must be with their children and their parents, and it helps me see them as people again, not obstacles.
Still, real people have core selves, shaped by the classic duo of "nature and nurture", and all the sources for both. Over that we have different facets we more or less consciously show to different people, and pick up on different aspects of other people's facets because of who we are. Remembering this is important when creating fictional character's interactions.
Fictional characters don't so much exist as they are continually created and recreated; by their authors, especially when they're TV Show or serial publication characters with multiple authors, and by us when we read or watch the stories and shows they're in.
Because of this, their cores are more tenuous, more fragile, in some ways. Even characters when characters are created by just one author, during the course of the creation of the work that author will have changing ideas on who they are, changing states of mindfulness about the core qualities of their characters and their varied facets. When characters have more than one creator, those creators will privilige and downplay different features, just by virtue of being different people with different viewpoints. After that, different fans will build different concepts of those characters, both in facets and in core, while they experience them by reading or viewing the works they inhabit.
In a nutshell, it seems to me that the range of ideas of a character's core, who they *are*, is potentially even more variable than that of who a real person is.
OK, so that's all setup, really. Now, my point.
The reason why I'm writing this is because of a recurring thought during my reading of many slash vs non-slash discussions, many shipper wars, many characterization and canon discussions. That thought is, "why are we fighting over this?" Because a great deal of it comes down to which facets we each notice more and look through while building our ideas of the characters' cores, and that seems... too personal to argue over, to have one right answer.
Which isn't a statement meant to preclude either the idea of verifiable characterization or the idea of discussing our ideas. Characters do, I believe, have core selves, analogously to real people. An individual character's facets, the different faces they present to different people both inside their stories and to different readers, do resemble because they derive from the same core. So in a well-characterized fanfic we can recognize a character we met in a movie or book, or in a discussion we can recognize in each other's descriptions the characters we love or loathe, despite the fact that we all notice slightly different things about them.
It's just that... people often debate which pairing is canon or the proper balance of a character's revealed features as if there were one right answer. What I'm trying to say here while speaking vaguely (not least because I don't want to point to some of the discussions that led me to these thoughts) is that there's more of a range of answers than *one* single right answer, and that discussing what we think is more likely to be fruitful than trying to choose the single correct viewpoint that everyone in a fandom should share.
(ETA: This is why... when people complain about a genre warping the characters, (for example, that's a charge often leveled at slash), I boggle a little. To keep using that example (since it's convenient---but this does happen with other genres and issues too) f one person's version of character A is written into slash, that doesn't at all preclude another person's version of that character not being involved in slash. So why argue about if they'd *really* do that?)
That's what I think, anyway.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-13 01:34 pm (UTC)many thoughts
Date: 2005-11-13 02:26 pm (UTC)I wanted to add an "on the other hand" that people can't unsee something they've seen or read, and fans who just can't deal with the idea of, say, Frodo having sex, who are upset when they find fandom rather graphically adding sex to Frodo's fictional life, can't go back to not having read it.
Okay, that happens. Except... lots of stuff comes into view that we don't want to remember (the nightly news, for instance), and most of us do a reasonable job of filtering it into boxes out of the immediate mind's eye, to stay sane. If I can forget the entire travesty that was Star Trek V, fans who don't like hobbits having actual sex lives can deal with learning not to think about the way some fans write it.
Re: many thoughts
Date: 2005-11-13 02:47 pm (UTC)Perhaps the problem for people who think that hobbits shouldn't have sex or pee is that deep down inside they know that hobbits must have sex and pee. They just didn't want to consider it until someone waved it in front of them. You're right, they can't go back to not having read it, and given that they're going to stumble across warnings on all kinds of fic reminding them of hobbitsex and other necessities, they'll either have to bail out of the fandom or learn to ignore it. There is option C, of course, which is to write your own version of what might happen.
Or versions.
I'm with ruby on this one -- the joy of fanfic isn't just figuring out what fits into canon, it's also thinking, reading, and writing about other versions of what might fit. My response to shipper wars is generally, "why not both?" Even in a fandom as well-established as Sherlock Holmes, people still play the game of trying to "prove" this or that, but they know it's a game, not a war, and some of them change sides of the argument on a regular basis.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-13 04:30 pm (UTC)It's something I especially noticed about myself in writing "In all your glories," where Tim really was a different (sort of) person for Dick, Bruce, Cass, and, of course, Steph.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-13 04:33 pm (UTC)Also, I still think you should post that other thing. But that must be because I'm pretty wicked when I want to be. *grins*
*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2005-11-13 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-13 07:43 pm (UTC)