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

[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