Let's talk meme

[petronia]

From fahye:

Pick a character I write, and I will give you the top five ideas/concepts/other I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting them accurately. This includes both original characters and characters about whom I write fanfic.

Actually, you can extend that to any character I've read a lot of fic about... not that you'd know necessarily, of course. XD My voracious and not-particular-picky fic consumption is (among other things) a way of honing my own ideas of characterization against Fandom, like window shopping or a card-sorting exercise. Right, right, wrong, right, hmm, wrong, poor taste, right. Reading is what creates the model. Writing only introduces quirks.

Or, pick up the meme so I can ask you.

Or-or, I was taking Ask Me Anything questions on my Tumblr the other day - click link, ask me a question?

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

This made me realize I almost never wrote Kagetora. XD It was always Naoe or Chiaki or someone else.

1) Doesn't ratiocinate. Is why I didn't write him, probably - I don't usually write out feelings so much as external actions indicative of emotional activity.

2) Abuse victim with no baseline for normal relationships. I wouldn't say he has borderline personality disorder, precisely, but he had the sort of background that creates BPD. Takaya gains friendships with a few genuinely nice people - Yuzuru, Ushio, et al - that are not warped irreparably by power dynamics, but he's not allowed to be saved by them.

3) That idea Mary Renault had about Alexander the Great, that a charismatic war commander has the same personality as a great courtesan. In Kagetora it's a dark trait, something like the seductive behaviour exhibited by sexually abused children. He's conflicted about it, naturally, so doesn't/can't always control it, and that makes it ten times as dangerous.

4) Extending that to the whole idea of the joousama uke... the thing that people do, right, is to take these nexuses of behavioural responses to female roles/stereotypes and isolate them so that there's no privilege differential, or the differential doesn't come from gender, and see what happens to them. Intentionally defuse them, I think, in a lot of cases. Like, a princess isn't a person, she's an object - of idealization, desire, resentment, markers of purity and defilement. But a prince is a person, so a prince can take up those weapons and put them down, for a happy ending. It's so you can play, not fight. Or just put yourself in the other person's shoes. The creepy thing about Mirage after a while is that it doesn't defuse. Kagetora's always in danger of being raped. And it reads prurient, like a fantasy. I'm not going to say this can't happen in reality, that a man can't be faced with pervasive sexual violence because he's somehow threatening, because one encounters analogous RL examples - sometimes it doesn't even have anything to do with queerness. It can happen to het dudes, that they get stuck in the queer/girl category. And it's not that Kagetora's desire is threatening, that's not the remotest issue - just, dudes have some kind of problem with him being in charge, like they would if he were a woman and they were horribly sexist. Because they can't separate Kagetora the person from the effect he has on their sexuality, so it's no longer about following orders or not, it's about bending over and taking it. I mean, that's the central tension of the books, really, because that's Naoe's problem, but it's nuts because WHY? There's no good answer. Everyone in the books makes a case for essentialism, that this is just how Kagetora is, it's his fault dudes cannot treat him like a dude. And the reader can write it off as self-justification, sure, but you're not presented with an alternative construct for making sense of the WTF. Instead, I got the impression you were supposed to enjoy it.

5) Do I need a 5? XD; He's a very narrow person, in some ways. Doesn't bother to learn stuff, doesn't bend. Nnnnngh you know I reread one of my old entries a while back, something re: how Kagetora's and Naoe's personalities affect ppl differently depending on gender, and why. I was really disturbed by how well it applied to the BBC version of Sherlock Holmes. XD;;; I had to go away and not think about it, basically.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Sure, go right ahead - I may not answer comments though, this week is really crazy for me. XD;

[narie.livejournal.com]

I totally read fic for the same reasons - I read voraciously so I can decide on what bits I like and dislike and watch everyone else prototype characters so I can refine my own. It's awesome.

But I'm an absolute fandom monogamist, that said.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm not XD - well, there's almost always something that interests me above and beyond the others, theories still being formed. Possibly I lose interest somewhat once there are no more theories, actually.

[narie.livejournal.com]

I think that happens to me with some fandoms, but not with all - I read some Inception fic last year and it was ok but ultimately I got tired fairly quickly, because the only character I was interested in was Robert Fisher, and he was not enough of a protagonist to merit lots of fic on any of the memes/comms. The fandom felt rather centred around the kink meme, also, which I think is a function of its age - it tends to be the first thing that pops up, and then, if you reach critical mass, you get all the splinter comms and the shipping comms and the gen comms and the fic challenges, but I came into it at the wrong time, at least for my interests, so the love affair was brief and ultimately unsatisfying.

Now every second of my time has been taken over by Glee, which is a much bigger fandom, both in terms of canon and fan works, and much better established. So there's plenty to read, and I do derive some intellectual satisfaction from watching ideas spread through time and (virtual) space and their ebbing and going, even if I am very surprised by how... tropey fandom has become. It makes me feel old and crochety, but as far as I can recall from my HP heyday, there was just a lot of fic and while there were obviously tropes, people were less blatant about them, tho I remember the emergence of comms like pervy_werewolf, which at the time I found rather strange. But nowadays it's all 'wing!fic' or 'apocalypse!fic' or 'facebook!fic' (not that I am hating, I can link you to rather superb examples of all three) and I find it a bit bemusing.

All that said, I tend to lose interest in reading the bulk of what is out there fairly quickly, as soon as I have crystallized an impression of the characters I like in my head - this happens mostly because of prose quality issues. But because it takes me a while to seek out the fandom attached to a particular canon, I tend to be rather invested in it by the time I'm actually lurking in comms and reading fic, which in turn means I tend to stick to it for a long haul, as it does become rather all-consuming. I either follow some authors for ages if they write good fics along the lines I like, or lurk in comms and grumble about how the kids these days are doing it wrong, and this will more often than not lead to my own writing of fic, as it has in Glee. My writing is mostly reactionary, born when I get annoyed by a certain canon/fanon point being repeatedly handled in a way I would not deal with it.

Especially in a fandom as active as Glee, and where new canon is rapidly forthcoming, I think I'll find things to gripe about for a while, so I suspect I'm in it for the long haul. Unless Ryan Murphy et al lose the plot too badly and the show goes downhill faster than expected, anyhow.

[naiyad.livejournal.com]

Schuldig. I was rereading your The Berchtesgaden Debriefing recently and it remains one of my favourite characterization of him. Ever. =)

correcting typos, I was nearly asleep writing this

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Schuldig~~~~~~~~ Maybe this is not TBD!Schuldig, though, this is grown-up Schwarz!Schuldig. The one who prowls around my head like an outdoors cat.

1) Novelty-seeking. Like to the point of genuinely enjoying unpleasantness, as long as it's new and unexpected unpleasantness and you can't quite predict what it's all leading up to. I was writing about Kagetora up there, how he's all emotion inside, and Schuldig is all sensation.

2) Maybe as a corollary to 1, has an immense aptitude for just rolling with it. Not much truly gets under his skin - Crawford and the spectre of institutionalization basically cover it, and both are devils he knows very well. Shit happens, mostly it is lulz. He never stops to think about how his life is effed up because that would imply it could theoretically be normal like everyone else's, and he's not a human being, really.

3) My favorite Schuldig was ladyjaida's, because she made his telepathy a physiological trade-off. My Schuldig, if anything, is just hyper-environment-aware. He sees a lot too, he takes stock of rooms and people and does these spot checks. He's good at dealing with the noise, actually - he got overwhelmed, he self-medicated, but in the TBD setup, everyone else with that talent is catatonic or dead.

4) Has a fraught relationship with authority. At base it might be learned helplessness - there's this bit in one of the stories quoting Kipling about being born in captivity. He was raised in a facility, then essentially locked in the attic for a while, then out on the street, then back to the facility. Altogether maybe 3 years of non-institutionalization, out of 21, and he wasn't what you'd call un-beholden then. He won't die for his freedom, I think, principally because way deep down he has no inner conviction that freedom exists for him. Someone will always be skulking around with a bear trap. And if he didn't buy into the discipline and maintain it internally he would actually be dead, so.

This feeds into Crawford's thing, because Crawford's issue w/r/t freedom is existentialist. Given his talent and all. XD; Crawford was born free and stays free in his own head. He looks for power and answers and it's obviously easier to get them from the side of the ppl doing the oppressing/institutionalizing/whatever. So he throws Schuldig under a bus when he feels he has to, but it actually bothers him more that Schuldig isn't free than it bothers Schuldig. He systematically does more about it. Schuldig genuinely has no idea that that's one of the drivers of the Plan, Schuldig's eventual right to self-determination.

5) Is a drama llama on an epic scale but you would try to force a reaction too if you could read everyone else's minds but one. Actually his feelings for Crawford are uber-simplistic and even rather generous; Crawford could probably reduce the drama incidence by 90% with a daily cuddle. Obviously this is the part Crawford genuinely has no idea about, it would never occur to him in a million years.

I like this a lot esp #1-3 :D

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

And had never directly considered #4 but it is /right/ in terms of making sense of a load of other traits that go with the character - impulsiveness, lack of long-term planning &c. #1-4 combined make up a major point in favour of me taking to any fictional character: poise. The quality of being precisely and unselfconsciously oneself. And never mind whether that poise corresponds to any kind of external ideal whatsoever. #5 is just cute. XD

Please to do Johnny Joestar? Or JoJo character of yr choosing. *sparkles* Or Crawford, actually, although it rather feels like the most important point has been discussed above viz. Crawford and Schuldig's differing thoughts on freedom.

Re: I like this a lot esp #1-3 :D

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Poise, yes, precisely. He can afford to be impulsive, too, in a way normal ppl can't: TBD-verse, this is someone who's constantly criss-crossing the globe with no need to worry about 1) money and 2) not speaking the local language.

I can do Johnny... there actually is stuff to say about Crawford, mind you, so little of it came through in the actual fic. XD;

Re: I like this a lot esp #1-3 :D

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

Crawford would be interesting because you actually seem to have a complete idea of Crawford where many people don't. I've been guilty of writing Crawford as a cipher because I'm not sure what his purpose and thinking style is - is he pragmatist or idealist; opportunist or meticulous planner? I tend to associate 'let's change things!' with 'heroic and dumb', and Crawford obvs isn't that, so ... ?

Johhny is less of a mystery, but I wouldn't have the first idea where to start writing him because I don't know how to reconcile 'derp derp derp this is a song about cheese' with 'OH MY FUCKING GOD WE'RE GOING TO DIE, genuinely traumatised here' XD Although at the same time that is what's awesome about SBR; the increasing interest in character psychology hasn't been accompanied by a reduction in capslocky WTF. Seriously though how /does/ Johnny go to the toilet? D:

n.b. I haven't read the scans for a while but apparently the dimensional portal has hit the fan, as it were. XD

Re: correcting typos, I was nearly asleep writing this

[naiyad.livejournal.com]

Loved this. I'd never really considered your point in #4 before, and that's real food for thought. It's interesting to think about the balance of 'anti-authority' vs 'learned helplessness' in his personality. Probably because it clicks so well with how he seems to be able to survive anything and yet be so self-destructive at the same time.

Lady Jaida's Schuldig was the first Schuldig that really clicked for me, followed closely by Mami-san's. Speaking of Lady Jaida, would you happen to know where I could find her 'Unmitigated' fic? It's listed in her WK fic timeline list thing over at her ff.net account, but it's not actually there.

Also, Crawford needs to get a clue on the cuddling business. ♥

Re: correcting typos, I was nearly asleep writing this

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Rolling, I'm not sure I considered #4 per se before I wrote it down here. Not in as many words - I'm pretty sure that when I was writing TBD I didn't know the term "learned helplessness", and also not mature enough to have an adult perspective on how your childhood/adolescence can subtly warp your mentality. But I knew Schuldig was a product of his environment, yanno? And that a lot of the conflict between him and Crawford stems from authority and power issues.

Alas, I wouldn't know what had happened to Jaida's fic. >_> It's been a really long time since I'd reread!

[credoimprobus]

Taking you up on that read-rather-than-written characters angle -- don't know how your reading preferences run with s5!nuWho, obviously, but if it applies, I'd be really curious about Your Views On Amy Pond. :D


(Ha, I'd be half tempted to do this meme too, but a) who wants to hear about my OCs anyway XD and b) not convinced I'd have enough patience for the brainwork necessary to tease the answers out, ahaha. *loses*)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I actually have read almost no S5 fic. XD; It felt sort of unnecessary - there're no emotional threads hanging, and it seems the show itself's got hold of the plot bits. I think most of what I've ended up reading are various crossovers, like... [other series] trundles along, then a blue box shows up.

My idea of Amy Pond in short (this is not stuff I need or expect to see in a fic, per se, but her portrayal should be congruent):

1) She kind of fronts. Like, she actually is a tough cookie, events prove it, but she wants to be seen as a tough cookie too, she doesn't like being vulnerable. As time goes by she overcompensates less, though.

2) She's a tomboy. Despite the short skirts and all that she's not very girly, she just has nothing to hide - no body image issues, no sex hangups. She doesn't seem to prize girliness, actually; my guess is that she has no close female friends of her age bracket, in fact might have been disliked by other girls. Boys would have liked her, both romantically and as friends. I don't think her emotional guardedness is just because everyone thought she lied about the Doctor, but the idea of him was something she fell back on over and over, so there must've been other stuff going on, other sources of loneliness.

3) Differentiating between Nu!Who's young ladies: Amy is most likely to instigate (and win) a drinking contest in a space bar for cred. Rose wouldn't, Martha definitely wouldn't, Donna would be more FUCK YEAH SWEET ALCOHOL straight up, River... no one in their right mind would challenge River.

4) She shades more toward the adrenalin junkie side of "wonders of the universe etc." It's not so much getting to know people or cultures on their own terms as the process of navigating outrageousness on the fly that appeals.

5) She was genuinely geeky as a child; she was into stuff. This is probably what I like best about her.

[credoimprobus]

I kind of suspected you might not have, ha -- I have got the idea you prefer RTD era for the fic. (And I get what you mean about the feels unnecessary -- I only started reading it for the OT3 originally, after all, and then only gradually branched out from there.)

Anyway: I really like these! They fit well with my own mostly unexamined ideas about Amy; #2 in particular feels like a forehead-slappingly obvious thing that I somehow, nonetheless, hadn't had concretely occur to me. (And lulz at #3, hahaha. Is it possibly telling that my three favourites of those five characters are very much NOT the ones with the reasonable responses? XD)

TL;DR footnote: I have a bit of a weird relationship to Amy; I feel I should love her a lot more than I do (I love her, but I don't love her, if you see what I mean), because on paper everything about her should put me neck-deep in intense adoration. But I feel like... I haven't been able to connect with her fully? Which I guess makes sense since she doesn't want people to get that close ahahaha. So she's a bit like an endless intellectual puzzle that I keep prodding at, because I really want to get to that place of adoration that I know I'm capable of with her. ...the short form of all that being: and these were really helpful pieces to that puzzle-solving effort, actually, so <3 <3.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of done with reading RTD era too, though that's more because I read a lot of it and kind of feel like what needs to be said has been said at this point. XD You should rec more Donna fic, though, since I haven't read a lot of that due to being intensely picky about it. I'm not a Ten/Donna shipper in the romantic sense, but they were so good for each other... and yet I don't like the idea that being back on earth is a tragedy for Donna, like that life absolutely has no value. That feels like it says something about the ficcer, yanno? To me, that's a setback. Not even internal personal growth is linear, in life. And to the degree that the idea of travelling with the Doctor is appealing, I'm intensely wary of his consuming/warping effect on people's lives. RTD's companions all went back to Earth well no, Rose didn't, arguably. I don't know what will happen to Amy and Rory.

This is swinging pretty OT from the original post by now, haha

[credoimprobus]

(Late comment is late due to bout of internet apathy. Or, well, really, because I couldn't be arsed to unpack and plug in the usb keyboard, hahaha.)

Haven't actually read that much Donna fic yet, myself -- see that whole Cannot Touch Fic With Ten In It thing, and all, heh; the ones I posted are pretty much what I had bookmarked. But I'll have to make sure to post links anytime I come across something good, then. :D

(Very with you wrt the 'not a shipper, BUT'. I am fervently noromo about Donna and Ten, in fact -- it was just so bloody wonderful to have a male/female friendship that had absolutely no romantic/sexual undertones in a canon for once, especially on this show, hahaha.)

Yeah, the tragedy with Donna wasn't so much the return to earth, as being made to forget all the amazing things she'd seen, and more pertinently the amazing things she's capable of, that she had in fact done. So the fic I crave, consequently, are ones that let her rediscover that huge potential within herself of her own power, in whatever way and whatever form that rediscovery may come. <3

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Asami? lol after all this time I've been reading Viewfinder, why. Or Ten if you'd rather.

I like this meme but am not sure I could swing it; so much of my understanding of characterization is, like, intuited, so trying to verbalize it in nice neat insightful top 5 lists would be exhausting. And/or I would just make a series of super-vapid obvious statements.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Asami. Srsly? XD ---And man, I have been doing this meme thus far completely wrong, since there is almost no Mirage fic written by ppl who read the books, and it's been eons since I've read WK fic, so I just barfed out the stuff informing my characterizations. In most cases I don't think generic-you have to write it exactly like me in order to be "getting it right" - some stuff pings me as wrong-wrong, but there's room to move around. Sometimes I even think other ppl have the better ideas.

I started to say, I would rather do Ten, but the thing about Ten is that ppl like him or don't like him as the case may be, but no one really gets his characterization wrong. XD;

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

IC and OOC are ranges, for sure, and it's not necessary for someone else's characterization to precisely overlap mine in order to fall within the IC range. Though for me the IC <--> OOC ranges are often pretty inextricable from OTPing. XD; Like, the other day I read this gen Spirited Away futurefic in which Haku had no place of significance in Chihiro's life or memory or subconscious or worldview or...or anything. In a sense it was the ultimate anti-ship fic. Didn't hold water for me obv because the author didn't account for Haku's non-importance, she just sort of took it as a given, whereas I assume a Chihiro for whom Haku is significant in some way, romance negotiable. ...Sry for tangent but I've been needing to get that off my chest ahaha.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Asami. OK! This is more one where I don't agree with every characterization out there.

1) He doesn't do moments of self-doubt. Not repressing or anything, nature just made him a magnificent bastard. It's that or bust. He doesn't have a lot of sympathy for other people's self-doubt, either. Either you want something or you don't want it; if you want it, do your best to get it.

2) He thrives on challenge. It's kind of that Ayn Rand thing. XD; He likes strength, competence, resilience. Anything he can run roughshod right over doesn't hold his interest. I think his fondness for Takaba (which implies respect, although he takes Takaba about as seriously as a toddler) is predicated at the most basic level on Takaba's indestructability... by Asami, at any rate. As ukes go, Takaba is a 4WD off-road vehicle with body armour that can stop tank rounds.

3) He's very protective. Incredibly territorial. But he's not paranoid-jealous, which is nice. I mean, he's usually given a good reason to scowl and shoot ppl in the face. XD; There's no sense that he's overextending himself, that the implied responsibility weighs on him or causes him angst. He's a yakuza boss, if you work for him or sleep in his bed he'll make sure you're taken care of, that's what a yakuza boss does.

4) He's genuinely fond of Feilong too, but Feilong has the same job as he does and that seems to be Asami's version of Friend Zone. Also if he perceives Takaba as a little kid I think he perceives Feilong as an emo teen with daddy issues. This is because Feilong is an emo teen with daddy issues.

5) He expects loyalty but the leash is long, nearly invisible unless you try to throw it off... It's a subtlety but important to VF's overall non-skeeviness, that he doesn't manipulate or force Takaba into going back to him. When he wants to see Takaba he... goes to see him, almost like a normal boyfriend.

6) ......I kind of fell asleep in the middle of this for the whole night...... Nnn apparently I need a 6 but it's an important 6, to wit, it doesn't destroy Asami's self-image to genuinely care about ppl like this. I don't know what that says about his background, but Takaba, Feilong, are well within his capacity to handle and not have a meltdown over omg what have I done with my life up to this point.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

2) So much is explained, lol, thank you for this--I've been sort of stumped as to what Asami sees in him, other than a satisfactory fuck obv (if it weren't satisfactory he wouldn't continue to bother). An indestructible toddler or small dog, yes, the kind you can drop from 3 floors up--repeatedly--and he just bounces off the concrete and maybe howls for a minute but then promptly goes back to playing with his toy. From the perspective of an onlooker it's sort of amazing, not to say uncanny--why doesn't he sustain lasting damage? Too dumb for trauma?? XD So I can see why this trait at least would be of interest.

[acchikocchi.livejournal.com]

To backtrack several years, Ginji. (...and Ban, if you feel so inclined.)

[maeran.livejournal.com]

In case you ever had doubts I was deeply, seriously obsessed, let me put them to rest. ^^;;

Fuji Yuuta. Because Flor de Yemanja is still THE CANON reconciliation fic for me.

I'd also wanted to ask about Hikaru and/or Akira but I remembered do have a conscience. Sometimes. I mean, I didn't ask about Fuji or Tezuka. but figured I should go with number one priority question.