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...

Comments

[petronia]

This made me realize I almost never wrote Kagetora. XD It was always Naoe or Chiaki or someone else.

1) Doesn't ratiocinate. Is why I didn't write him, probably - I don't usually write out feelings so much as external actions indicative of emotional activity.

2) Abuse victim with no baseline for normal relationships. I wouldn't say he has borderline personality disorder, precisely, but he had the sort of background that creates BPD. Takaya gains friendships with a few genuinely nice people - Yuzuru, Ushio, et al - that are not warped irreparably by power dynamics, but he's not allowed to be saved by them

[petronia]

Sure, go right ahead - I may not answer comments though, this week is really crazy for me. XD;

[narie]

I totally read fic for the same reasons - I read voraciously so I can decide on what bits I like and dislike and watch everyone else prototype characters so I can refine my own. It's awesome.

But I'm an absolute fandom monogamist, that said.

[petronia]

I'm not XD - well, there's almost always something that interests me above and beyond the others, theories still being formed. Possibly I lose interest somewhat once there are no more theories, actually.

[narie]

I think that happens to me with some fandoms, but not with all - I read some Inception fic last year and it was ok but ultimately I got tired fairly quickly, because the only character I was interested in was Robert Fisher, and he was not enough of a protagonist to merit lots of fic on any of the memes/comms. The fandom felt rather centred around the kink meme, also, which I think is a function of its age - it tends to be the first thing that pops up, and then, if you reach critical mass, you get all the splinter comms and the shipping comms and the gen comms and the fic challenges, but I came into it at the wrong time, at least for my interests, so the love affair was brief and ultimately unsatisfying

[naiyad]

Schuldig. I was rereading your The Berchtesgaden Debriefing recently and it remains one of my favourite characterization of him. Ever. =)

correcting typos, I was nearly asleep writing this

[petronia]

Schuldig~~~~~~~~ Maybe this is not TBD!Schuldig, though, this is grown-up Schwarz!Schuldig. The one who prowls around my head like an outdoors cat.

1) Novelty-seeking. Like to the point of genuinely enjoying unpleasantness, as long as it's new and unexpected unpleasantness and you can't quite predict what it's all leading up to. I was writing about Kagetora up there, how he's all emotion inside, and Schuldig is all sensation.

2) Maybe as a corollary to 1, has an immense aptitude for just rolling with it. Not much truly gets under his skin - Crawford and the spectre of institutionalization basically cover it, and both are devils he knows very well. Shit happens, mostly it is lulz. He never stops to think about how his life is effed up because that would imply it could theoretically be normal like everyone else's, and he's not a human being, really.

3) My favorite Schuldig was ladyjaida's, because she made his telepathy a physiological trade-off. My Schuldig, if anything, is just hyper-environment-aware. He sees a lot too, he takes

I like this a lot esp #1-3 :D

[bladderwrack]

And had never directly considered #4 but it is /right/ in terms of making sense of a load of other traits that go with the character - impulsiveness, lack of long-term planning &c. #1-4 combined make up a major point in favour of me taking to any fictional character: poise. The quality of being precisely and unselfconsciously oneself. And never mind whether that poise corresponds to any kind of external ideal whatsoever. #5 is just cute. XD

Please to do Johnny Joestar? Or JoJo character of yr choosing. *sparkles* Or Crawford, actually, although it rather feels like the most important point has been discussed above viz. Crawford and Schuldig's differing thoughts on freedom.

Re: I like this a lot esp #1-3 :D

[petronia]

Poise, yes, precisely. He can afford to be impulsive, too, in a way normal ppl can't: TBD-verse, this is someone who's constantly criss-crossing the globe with no need to worry about 1) money and 2) not speaking the local language.

I can do Johnny... there actually is stuff to say about Crawford, mind you, so little of it came through in the actual fic. XD;

[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]

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

[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

[petronia]

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.

[canis_m]

Asami? lol after all this time I've been reading Viewfinder, why. Or Ten if you'd rather.

I like this meme but am not sure I could swing it; so much of my understanding of characterization is, like, intuited, so trying to verbalize it in nice neat insightful top 5 lists would be exhausting. And/or I would just make a series of super-vapid obvious statements.

[petronia]

Asami. Srsly? XD ---And man, I have been doing this meme thus far completely wrong, since there is almost no Mirage fic written by ppl who read the books, and it's been eons since I've read WK fic, so I just barfed out the stuff informing my characterizations. In most cases I don't think generic-you have to write it exactly like me in order to be "getting it right" - some stuff pings me as wrong-wrong, but there's room to move around. Sometimes I even think other ppl have the better ideas.

I started to say, I would rather do Ten, but the thing about Ten is that ppl like him or don't like him as the case may be, but no one really gets his characterization wrong. XD;

[canis_m]

IC and OOC are ranges, for sure, and it's not necessary for someone else's characterization to precisely overlap mine in order to fall within the IC range. Though for me the IC <--> OOC ranges are often pretty inextricable from OTPing. XD; Like, the other day I read this gen Spirited Away futurefic in which Haku had no place of significance in Chihiro's life or memory or subconscious or worldview or...or anything. In a sense it was the ultimate anti-ship fic. Didn't hold water for me obv because the author didn't account for Haku's non-importance, she just sort of took it as a given, whereas I assume a Chihiro for whom Haku is significant in some way, romance negotiable. ...Sry for tangent but I've been needing to get that off my chest ahaha.

[petronia]

Asami. OK! This is more one where I don't agree with every characterization out there.

1) He doesn't do moments of self-doubt. Not repressing or anything, nature just made him a magnificent bastard. It's that or bust. He doesn't have a lot of sympathy for other people's self-doubt, either. Either you want something or you don't want it; if you want it, do your best to get it.

2) He thrives on challenge. It's kind of that Ayn Rand thing. XD; He likes strength, competence, resilience. Anything he can run roughshod right over doesn't hold his interest. I think his fondness for Takaba (which implies respect, although he takes Takaba about as seriously as a toddler) is predicated at the most basic level on Takaba's indestructability... by Asami, at any rate. As ukes go, Takaba is a 4WD off-road vehicle with body armour that can stop tank rounds.

3) He's very protective. Incredibly territorial. But he's not paranoid-jealous, which is nice. I mean, he's usually given a good reason to scowl and shoot ppl in the face. XD; There