Characters behaving badly
I was having this discussion on reenka's lj and this came up...
reenka said, regarding Ginny's change of personality in OotP:
"Of course it's still Ginny-- it has to be. Even bad writing is 'the truth' as far as 'fictional reality' goes, because we have nothing else, right-- except for our own imaginations patching up the holes bad writing leaves behind."
I guess my question here is...does it have to still be Ginny? Where do you draw the line? I think most people read with an understanding that any character has the potential to be written OOC even by his author, if that author changes her mind or gets a new agenda or loses interest or whatever. If the characters are going to seem "real" to us at all we have to believe that there are certain things they would never do. But if they break that rule for us, are they not themselves? How far can someone push a character while claiming this is just a "different side?"
I mean, this is something we don't think twice about in fanfic: X character is OOC. Everyone complains about fics where a character is suddenly different--and for me, this was very true of OotP Ginny. It wasn't a different side, it was a different character.
Like the difference between if I were to surprise someone by revealing I spoke Chinese, and if I suddenly began speaking in a Scottish accent and everyone insisted I had always spoken that way and you just had thought I had an American accent because I got nervous around you. I get that JKR is claiming Ginny is a case of the former, but to me it was definitely the latter. Maybe there too there were fanfic writers who would say, "Hey, I wasn't surprised. We never knew where Sister Magpie was from and I wrote her as being born in Glasgow. Many of us had considered her being Scottish because of her coloring!" But they'd still have to admit that no, they'd never actually heard me talk that way before.
I don't mean for this to be a discussion of Ginny, though. I'm just using that as an example of a character where the question comes up. If you think her characterization wasn't a change etc., feel free to substitute another character or just think of a hypothetical situation where you couldn't make the leap.
Is there a place where everyone just says, "Nyuh uh. Not the character?" Sometimes it's just a question of the character doing something wrong--like, oh, all of the last season of The X-Files where everybody was just acting out Chris Carter's agenda. But I still felt like it "was" the characters, perhaps only because I had the advantage of looking at them and they looked and sounded the same, had the same body language. Had I just read "Awful Things" (sorry--that's "All Things") I think it might have seemed even more wildly ridiculous than it was watching it acted out.
So my question is, what do other people think about OOC canon characters? Do you see a grey area between the author giving you surprising new information and doing something that just doesn't work? Of course ritics can and do criticize characterization. So where do you draw the line?
(Btw, I also believe that you can have Mary Sues in canon and don't really understand why one couldn't, but that's a separate question.) This question, I guess, can we not look at a canon now and consider certain things unacceptable for a character based on what we've seen so far, or is open to happen as long as the author is still writing? I mean, this is the sort of thing we have no trouble discarding in fanfic. How much difference does it make if it's canon...and why is it different, exactly?
reenka said, regarding Ginny's change of personality in OotP:
"Of course it's still Ginny-- it has to be. Even bad writing is 'the truth' as far as 'fictional reality' goes, because we have nothing else, right-- except for our own imaginations patching up the holes bad writing leaves behind."
I guess my question here is...does it have to still be Ginny? Where do you draw the line? I think most people read with an understanding that any character has the potential to be written OOC even by his author, if that author changes her mind or gets a new agenda or loses interest or whatever. If the characters are going to seem "real" to us at all we have to believe that there are certain things they would never do. But if they break that rule for us, are they not themselves? How far can someone push a character while claiming this is just a "different side?"
I mean, this is something we don't think twice about in fanfic: X character is OOC. Everyone complains about fics where a character is suddenly different--and for me, this was very true of OotP Ginny. It wasn't a different side, it was a different character.
Like the difference between if I were to surprise someone by revealing I spoke Chinese, and if I suddenly began speaking in a Scottish accent and everyone insisted I had always spoken that way and you just had thought I had an American accent because I got nervous around you. I get that JKR is claiming Ginny is a case of the former, but to me it was definitely the latter. Maybe there too there were fanfic writers who would say, "Hey, I wasn't surprised. We never knew where Sister Magpie was from and I wrote her as being born in Glasgow. Many of us had considered her being Scottish because of her coloring!" But they'd still have to admit that no, they'd never actually heard me talk that way before.
I don't mean for this to be a discussion of Ginny, though. I'm just using that as an example of a character where the question comes up. If you think her characterization wasn't a change etc., feel free to substitute another character or just think of a hypothetical situation where you couldn't make the leap.
Is there a place where everyone just says, "Nyuh uh. Not the character?" Sometimes it's just a question of the character doing something wrong--like, oh, all of the last season of The X-Files where everybody was just acting out Chris Carter's agenda. But I still felt like it "was" the characters, perhaps only because I had the advantage of looking at them and they looked and sounded the same, had the same body language. Had I just read "Awful Things" (sorry--that's "All Things") I think it might have seemed even more wildly ridiculous than it was watching it acted out.
So my question is, what do other people think about OOC canon characters? Do you see a grey area between the author giving you surprising new information and doing something that just doesn't work? Of course ritics can and do criticize characterization. So where do you draw the line?
(Btw, I also believe that you can have Mary Sues in canon and don't really understand why one couldn't, but that's a separate question.) This question, I guess, can we not look at a canon now and consider certain things unacceptable for a character based on what we've seen so far, or is open to happen as long as the author is still writing? I mean, this is the sort of thing we have no trouble discarding in fanfic. How much difference does it make if it's canon...and why is it different, exactly?