When Bad Fanfic Happens to Good Characters, Part I
Part One: A Closed Circle
I started reading FE7 'fic long before playing the game out of a combination of boredom and desperation. Writers I enjoyed, like shimizu_hitomi , had FE7 (and FE6) works that looked promising, and the simple fact was that Elibe fanworks outnumbered Archanea fanworks by about three orders of magnitude. So I got a taste of the prevailing fan-take on the FE7 gang long before I actually sat down with the source material.
And when I did sit down with my copy of FE7 (a very thoughtful birthday present from my most excellent spouse), I was extremely... surprised. For one, I liked Sain. My impression from fanfic was that Sain was a deeply irritating character, someone who managed to grate on my nerves whether he was used in a dramatic setting or a comic one. And I liked Serra, who also raised my hackles in fanfic. And while I didn't adore Lyn, it struck me that she wasn't quite the "Lyn" I'd been seeing in fanfic, either.
By the time I'd finished Lyn's Tale, I was wondering what fandom was collectively smoking.
Now, I understand the deal with Sain and Serra, at least in part. Quirky characters are hard to write-- the affectations of speech that are distinctively Sain or distinctively Serra don't roll from the pen, er, keyboard, naturally. But it also seemed that fans, possibly distracted by the surface gloss of the dialogue, were misreading the actual characterizations that make Sain and Serra both sympathetic and compelling characters instead of just comic foils to say, Kent, or Oswin. The issue with Lyn was harder to get a handle on, and I wasn't much invested in it emotionally, so I didn't pursue it any deeper.
But I think I figured it out in time, and I get the impression that a number of y'all out there in f-list land got to the same conclusion. Basically, a large and visible chunk of FE7 fandom wasn't working off the game itself. They weren't writing the way I was writing Archanea fiction, with one eye on the screen and one on the supplemental materials (not that ANYONE is expected to do that-- I am the first to admit I go overboard in research). They were writing off the perceptions of other fans, as filtered through other fanfics.
Small wonder "Lyn" often sounded more like an American teenager than a pseudo-medieval plainswoman, even in things that weren't intended as AUs. Small wonder that "Sain" and "Serra" were reduced to a collection of speech quirks and froth.
But hey, that happens in fandom. A couple of high-profile 'fics can color the perceptions of about 90% of the writers in a given community. I'd seen it before, and I think the only reason it surprised me in Fire Emblem was that there is SO much superficial emphasis on the game text, so much emphasis on support conversations and death quotes and boss battle quotes. It's truly weird to have that much emphasis on the words that make up the game script and such a disconnect between in-game characterization and fanfic characterization.
Another thing I didn't understand at first was that a good many FE7 writers hadn't completed, or even begun, other games in the franchise. That struck me as weird, too-- IMO, Fire Emblem as a series is self-referential enough, both in themes and details, that to just focus on one game in isolation misses out on the Big Picture. This is especially true of FE7, which is, after all, a deliberate prequel to another game in the series. It doesn't exist in a vacuum.
So, I decided in time that FE7 fandom was something of a closed circle-- deeply conservative and very bound up in cherished personal interpretations of the characters. Honestly, from an outsider's perspective, it looked like something of a death spiral, particularly once I got the sense that many Elibe writers had no interest in migrating into any of the other games. But I didn't feel like I had anything to offer them, either, so I sat down in my "no1curr" sandbox of Archanea, Valencia, and Magvel.
Of course, FE7 was only one pole in the fandom. The other behemoth, Tellius, had its own set of issues.
Stay tuned for Part Two: When Pairings Eat a Fandom