The term IC/OOC in H/D post-Hogwarts long stories

[painless_j]

wayfairer's post of recs pushed me to thinking in an unexpected direction.

She recommended fearlessdiva 's Tissue of Silver ("ToS is one of the best full-length fics in the fandom despite its rough state, and the new rewrites have turned it from a purely skilled, romantic fic to an absolutely incredible work. Go. Read. And then go fangirl her on the Armchair. :D")

Comments

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[verstehen]

Well, the thing is that the characters should serve the plot not the other way around. So il/logical plot developments also affect the characters and the way they grow. Sending Hermione to a Muggle university would affect her differently than if she gained an apprenticeship or joined the Aurors.

I agree with you completely about the 'sufficient backstory' but there's always going to be things that, even with backstory, are going to see completely ridiculous. Back when it was the fic of the month on Midnight Oil, I slogged through about half of the Of Silver universe until I reached Of Linen. Ooodles and ooodles of backstory. Still read as completely ridiculous and wildly out-of-character to me -- and it wasn't only because of the way the characters acted, it was the plot too. So I think it has to be a fusion of believable plot and believable reactions/actions within the constraints of the plot.

Well, the sad thing about the tangent is that I find it slightly less ridiculous than many of the fan theories passed around, even recently. People seem to forget that Lily herself could change. Not to mention that she comes off having the same sort of entitlement that James does -- she turns around and laughs at Snape too.

Re:

[marinarusalka]

Well, the thing is that the characters should serve the plot not the other way around.

I think it is the other way around, actually. Most of the bad characterization I've seen comes from twisting the characters around to serve the plot: turning Ron or Sirius into homicidal psychos to provide an obstacle for Harry's perfect romance with Draco or Snape, making Hermione into a helpless ditz so that Snape can be the dashing hero who rescues her, etc. I think it works better when the plot servers the characters. If an author wants to explore how Hermione would pursue her love of learning after Hogwarts, it's not that difficult to come up a canonically plausible scenario to shoe how she does it.

It's been a while since I've read of Silver. It didn't work very well for me either, but the problem, I think, was not so much that the characters' personalities didn't work in terms of the backstory, but that the backstory itself didn't work for me. I couldn't believe in all those arcane vampire rituals in Sirius' childhood history, and I couldn't believe in self-destructive junkie Remus, so I couldn't believe in changes that resulted from these backstories, either. In "The Lodger," by contrast, I could actually believe that Draco's life might've happened the way Marta showed it happening. So the backstory must be not only sufficient, but sufficiently convincing, too.

People seem to forget that Lily herself could change. Not to mention that she comes off having the same sort of entitlement that James does -- she turns around and laughs at Snape too.

Well, canon itself shows us that Lily changed -- she went from despising James to being in love with him. But she, presumably, did not change randomly or for no reason, either. And I'm not sure what a sense of entitlement has to do with laughing at Snape -- there are any number of reasons why anyone might laugh at Snape. (In any case, I'm generally resistant to the common fannish notion that a character's entire moral fiber for the duration of their existence is determined solely by how they behave toward Snape.) Anyway, my point is that people often seem to take an overly simplistic, black-and-white view of teenage characters, not allowing for the changes that take place between adolescence and adulthood, or even for the complexity that exists in adolescents. We've heard a lot of stories about how great and heroic James was, then saw him acting like a total asshole at 15. A lot of people reacted by saying, oh, all those stories about good!James must be false then. But I think that results in a very one-dimensional view of the character. It's much more interesting to create a characterization that encompasses both the petty bullying and the heroic decency and examines how such qualities might coexist in one person, and what circumstances would be necessary to make one aspect triumph over the other. Same thing with future Draco characterizations: we've only seen him acting like an asshole, but in theory he should be as capable of moral complexity as any other character. Now, I actually suspect that JKR has no intention of ever giving us a morally complex Draco, but since morally complex characters do exist in the books, it's not really uncanonical to make Draco into one for purposes of fanfic. It's just that "sufficient and sufficiently convincing" backstory that becomes the sticking point.

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[painless_j]

I think, actually, that here we are just speaking of two different types of novels. One is so-called 'classical' novel, which means big serious novels of the 19 century and those that follow the tradition. They are the study of Character, even when they aren't psychological novels literally. In them, sure, it works "the other way around". The second type (hugely simplifying the matter for the sake of the dispute) uses characters for plot, like detective and action/adventure novels. Seems so, no?

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[marinarusalka]

It's true that the balance between character and plot tends to vary a lot from genre to genre (or from category from category). One of the sources of tension, I think, is that fanfic is a very character-oriented category, but the source material on which it's based tends to be plot-driven. Now, ideally, plot and characterization should balance and serve each other. In PoA, for example, the plot requires that no one knows that Sirius is an Animagus, and Remus is given believable character traits that explain why he keeps that information to himself. In OOP, on the other hand, the plot requires that Harry doesn't use his two-way mirror to check if Sirius has really been captured, and many readers felt that this was not sufficiently explained in terms of Harry's character. In fanfic, we get a lot of stories that try to provide psychological explanations for events about which we only have plot information: why did Sirius send Snape to the Whomping Willow, for example, or why Snape joined/quit the Death Eaters.

The difficulty with future fics is that the fanfic author has to come up with both the plot events and the character changes, and balance them against each other.

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[painless_j]

So very true and therefore rare : /