Characterisation and Canon

[quillori]

Further to a discussion elsewhere as to what counts as OOC, it struck me that there are a number of approaches to writing fanfic, each of which aims to a have a different relationship to canon, and that there is little point discussing appropriate characterisation without considering

Comments

[quillori]

That's a very good point. I did sort of start this post with the idea of making it easier to get on with a certain sort of canon purist: you know, divide up the territory and let them have their area and the rest of us have ours, and make sure any debate was properly focused on what writers tried to do with their stories / what readers liked to get out of them, rather than pointless cries of "But that's not canon!". But I suspect that even my Category 1 is too broad for some people, since it still has an element of 'what would happen if', not just 'more of what's on screen / on the page'. And you're quite right, however you start out, if you write a long story, or set it well in the past or future, or make it strongly AU, you are likely to end up in Category 2 whether you wanted to or not, because it just isn't realistically possible to stick close to canon.

I think I would argue some AUs can be Category 1, if they are tightly focused on asking what we would expect to follow from some specific change to canon, but of course, what

[azdak]

I find myself thinking increasingly that there's no such thing as "in character" or "out of character", but rather that there are only well and poorly motivated characters. This is partly because I recognise that my interpretation of canon characters, as presented in canon, often differs widely from other people's; and partly because I will happily accept characters who seem to have used the canon character purely a as a jumping-off point, if the story they're in is well told and the characters convincing within that story

[quillori]

I will happily accept characters who seem to have used the canon character purely as a jumping-off point, if the story they're in is well told and the characters convincing within that story.Oh, so will I, definitely. Actually, not just for characterisation specifically, but in general as well, I am very, very happy with canon being the jumping-off point for the writer's own story (where the story is worth reading, obviously). Many of the stories I have most enjoyed have done just that. But I know that not everyone feels that way, and I do feel it's worth making a distinction between stories trying to fit with canon, where those who like such things can argue about how good the fit is, and stories that take canon as a springboard, where the question makes little sense. (This post largely sprang from another discussion I didn't think it was profitable to link to, since it largely consisted of a mouse telling a writer I admire that her fic didn't belong in the fandom, because it didn't fit the mouse's view of the characters. Between

[azdak]

I do feel it's worth making a distinction between stories trying to fit with canon, where those who like such things can argue about how good the fit is, and stories that take canon as a springboard, where the question makes little sense.

I agree, completely. I'm just not sure that I'd include characterisation in that. Because characterisation isn't a matter of checkable facts - it can't even be reduced to a list of features, like "irritable" or "remarkably intelligent", because what counts is the way those characteristics are revealed on context (even in canon, supposedly brilliant characters often act as if they were no more intelligent than their writers). It's one thing to say "This story ignores this, this and this event from canon", which everyone can agree on. It would be much harder, I think, to get people to list a set of characteristics that must be displayed in order to be "in character