(no subject)
All fandoms have them; the widely acknowledged favourite characters/pairings, the characters who get lots of backstory focused on them where others seem to get little or nothing (Jack's tattoos, I'm looking at you!) It's come up in the news recently where Harold Perrineau talked about Lost being the Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Locke show to the detriment of other characters, and he's not wrong (seriously, never get me started on that. Libby, Charlotte, Frank, Ilana, none of them ever even got their own episode, and that can't all be pinned on the writers' strike screwing up season 4.) Once Upon a Time also reached the point where, if I found out an episode was going to focus on Snow and Regina's feud, my response would be "I think this flashback's mostly filler" *Willow voice*
If you know me at all, you will know that I love to tackle those characters who don't get a lot of attention. I find myself now considering doing something with a character who's barely been seen on screen (Dark's Mads Nielsen. I may have only just started season 2, so don't know if he'll appear more than has been seen so far, but there was a line in my recent Dark fic where Michael/Mikkel considers the possibility that 1986's Mads has taken his place in 2019, which had me starting to think more about what if that actually happened).
For me, this dates back to when I was 13, and it did start out for me due to dislike of a particular character: the lovely Zoey Passmore . Thirteen year old me used to devour this book series, although I got frustrated that there seemed to be so much focus on Zoey. About half the series was centred on her, with her name in the title, where other characters got one book named after them and one person never gets his own book at all; the series had a format where we'd see diary entries from the characters, usually taking the form of them answering a question such as how they'd define friendship, but it didn't matter who the centric character was, we always got Zoey first. And the thing was, over the course of the series, I found myself getting irritated with Zoey. Maybe it's because I've always been a "talk things out, get the other person's side of the story" person that I'd get irritated about her default response being to run (at one point she runs out of an out of state trip).
Flash forward to when Lost aired, and there seemed to be an excess of Jack episodes at the expense of others - I would have preferred to have seen backstory for Libby, Charlotte, Frank and Ilana instead of Jack's tattoos. To be clear, in this case, it's not about a dislike of Jack at all, I have no issues with him as a character, just with the balance of centric episodes. And I'd actually have been very interested in seeing more about the backstory of the Others, where there's a lot that's hinted at but not spelled out. Take Ethan. We know that he started out as DHARMA, yet he survived the Purge and joined the Others, which canon doesn't really explore - I tackled this by killing off Amy, having Ben lead Ethan towards blaming DHARMA's experiments for that.. Take Danny Pickett, who displays an extreme dislike of Sawyer which is never really explained - what could make more sense than him being ex-DHARMA and this dislike being rooted in something involving LaFleur? Or Harper, disliked and dismissed, yet consider her role as therapist - she's probably been the person who's had a lot of involvement in counselling her fellow Others over the pregnancy problem, the one who's still having to pick up the pieces as the fertility specialist brought in hasn't been able to solve anything. It's not a good idea to get me started on character development for the Others because I can go on forever about this.
So, when it comes to writing, do you prefer the favourites, the main characters, or would you consider the lesser ficced characters? How obscure will you go? If someone's had very little screen time (see: the above mentioned Harper Stanhope or Mads Nielsen) do you find that makes it easier, or harder, to write them? How much do you need to know about the character to be able to work with them?
For example, for me, let's take the Once Upon a Time characters Greg and Tamara, generally disliked, Greg fleshed out more in canon than Tamara. While I was able to write a post-Welcome to Storybrooke Greg backstory fic, I found Tamara hard to attempt because we knew so little about her.
For those who do attempt the more obscure characters, do you find that those fics get less feedback/kudos/hits than those about the main characters? Do you find it ever varies by fandom? I always used to think that I got less feedback on those, although looking at my AO3 now, one about Peter and Veronica Hastings and Jessica DiLaurentis, and another on Byron Montgomery, seem to have a lot more hits than I'd expected. This may be a fandom thing - Once Upon a Time fics about the original Prince James and Sneezy the dwarf haven't got anywhere near as many.
If you know me at all, you will know that I love to tackle those characters who don't get a lot of attention. I find myself now considering doing something with a character who's barely been seen on screen (Dark's Mads Nielsen. I may have only just started season 2, so don't know if he'll appear more than has been seen so far, but there was a line in my recent Dark fic where Michael/Mikkel considers the possibility that 1986's Mads has taken his place in 2019, which had me starting to think more about what if that actually happened).
For me, this dates back to when I was 13, and it did start out for me due to dislike of a particular character: the lovely Zoey Passmore . Thirteen year old me used to devour this book series, although I got frustrated that there seemed to be so much focus on Zoey. About half the series was centred on her, with her name in the title, where other characters got one book named after them and one person never gets his own book at all; the series had a format where we'd see diary entries from the characters, usually taking the form of them answering a question such as how they'd define friendship, but it didn't matter who the centric character was, we always got Zoey first. And the thing was, over the course of the series, I found myself getting irritated with Zoey. Maybe it's because I've always been a "talk things out, get the other person's side of the story" person that I'd get irritated about her default response being to run (at one point she runs out of an out of state trip).
Flash forward to when Lost aired, and there seemed to be an excess of Jack episodes at the expense of others - I would have preferred to have seen backstory for Libby, Charlotte, Frank and Ilana instead of Jack's tattoos. To be clear, in this case, it's not about a dislike of Jack at all, I have no issues with him as a character, just with the balance of centric episodes. And I'd actually have been very interested in seeing more about the backstory of the Others, where there's a lot that's hinted at but not spelled out. Take Ethan. We know that he started out as DHARMA, yet he survived the Purge and joined the Others, which canon doesn't really explore - I tackled this by killing off Amy, having Ben lead Ethan towards blaming DHARMA's experiments for that.. Take Danny Pickett, who displays an extreme dislike of Sawyer which is never really explained - what could make more sense than him being ex-DHARMA and this dislike being rooted in something involving LaFleur? Or Harper, disliked and dismissed, yet consider her role as therapist - she's probably been the person who's had a lot of involvement in counselling her fellow Others over the pregnancy problem, the one who's still having to pick up the pieces as the fertility specialist brought in hasn't been able to solve anything. It's not a good idea to get me started on character development for the Others because I can go on forever about this.
So, when it comes to writing, do you prefer the favourites, the main characters, or would you consider the lesser ficced characters? How obscure will you go? If someone's had very little screen time (see: the above mentioned Harper Stanhope or Mads Nielsen) do you find that makes it easier, or harder, to write them? How much do you need to know about the character to be able to work with them?
For example, for me, let's take the Once Upon a Time characters Greg and Tamara, generally disliked, Greg fleshed out more in canon than Tamara. While I was able to write a post-Welcome to Storybrooke Greg backstory fic, I found Tamara hard to attempt because we knew so little about her.
For those who do attempt the more obscure characters, do you find that those fics get less feedback/kudos/hits than those about the main characters? Do you find it ever varies by fandom? I always used to think that I got less feedback on those, although looking at my AO3 now, one about Peter and Veronica Hastings and Jessica DiLaurentis, and another on Byron Montgomery, seem to have a lot more hits than I'd expected. This may be a fandom thing - Once Upon a Time fics about the original Prince James and Sneezy the dwarf haven't got anywhere near as many.