emmagrant01: (woman)
emmagrant01 ([personal profile] emmagrant01) wrote2013-07-03 07:09 am
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Writing fanfic: OOC vs IC

Two recent comments on A Cure for Boredom:

→ "I'm pretty new to the Sherlock/Johnlock thing and a lot of fics I find Sherlock to be somewhat.... out of character. Sometimes a little, sometimes a whole wonking heck of a lot. I think this is the best characterized Sherlock I've ever seen. I love it."

→ "While this was certainly really hot, the characters, for me, felt OOC. I still liked reading it. But it could've been anyone, really."

And two on Just a Kiss:

→ "Ahh so brilliant!! This is definitely one of my all time favourite fics, it's just so awesome and very in character."

→ "by the end your John was an out of character asshole and there's no two ways about it. Normally I don't bother saying anything if I don't like something I've tried to read, but this was just ridiculous. I don't know why people even bother to write in fandoms if they're going to turn the main characters into out of character wankers who deserve to be slapped with sexual harassment suits. [...] at the very least for those of us who care about characterization MARK YOU WORK AS CONTAINING CHARACTERS WHO ARE BEHAVING OUT OF CHARACTER!"


I've talked about this before in various venues, but it really amazes me how widely people's ideas about characterization in fanfic can vary. What is completely OOC to one person can be perfectly IC to another. How can that happen when we all watch the same show? Assuming that most* people who write fanfic are actually writing the versions of the characters that are in their heads and are convinced that their version is as in-character as they can possibly make it, why is there so much variation?



Obviously, I think I wrote John and Sherlock in character in those fics. I can only write characters that match the ones in my head, and when I write I try very hard to capture what I imagine. And also obviously, what is in my head is not necessarily going to match what is in the head of a reader who has also spent time thinking about these characters and how they might react in different situations.

To me, this highlights the fact that, despite what many critics of fandom so often say, fanfic writers actually do quite a lot of character development in their work. This is especially true in fandoms where the canon is a visual medium and we don't have access to a character's thoughts and feelings. We must use what we see on the screen (which is itself open to a wide variety of interpretations) and then work out the rest of it for ourselves, in ways that make sense for us in the context of our own understanding of the show (and in the case of writers, of the story we are writing) . And in BBC's Sherlock in particular, we don't get a lot of backstory about the characters or discussion of their emotions onscreen. We can only go by what we see on the show, much of which consists of subtle acting choices made by the actors, along with choices by the director and editor about what ends up in the final cut.

One of the things we do in fanfic is put the characters in novel (and let's face it, frequently cracktastic) situations and then imagine what happens next. How would Sherlock respond if presented with evidence that magic is real? What would John do if he thought Mycroft and Lestrade were plotting to kill Sherlock? How would the two of them react to an encounter with an alien from another planet, or to Harry Potter or Jack Harkness? What if they weren't a consulting detective and a blogger, but instead were tennis players, or film stars, or wizards at Hogwarts? These situations are often so far removed from canon (*cough* sex club *cough*) that they can serve as exercises in character development, not unlike the ones you might be assigned in a creative writing course, or ones you might do when stuck on your original novel. I'd even argue that a lot of fanfic is a form of character analysis.

Obviously, we haven't invented these characters from scratch, so we aren't doing all the work authors do when writing original fiction. But I've read enough fanfic variations of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Draco Malfoy and James Kirk and Buffy Summers and Sherlock Holmes to know that fanfic writers are doing a hell of a lot of work to develop these characters in new and fantastic directions that the original creators might never have imagined or intended. And that is real writing, real art. And I love it all, even when I think the writer has taken the characters in a direction that doesn't work for me.

So I will never tell another fanfic writer that her characters are OOC. Frankly, it's not up to me to decide what is IC and what is not, in any fandom. The most I can do is admit that a characterization does or does not work for me, but in doing so I also have to acknowledge that it probably works (or doesn't) for other people. I'm not so arrogant as to presume to be the authority on these characters; not even Benedict Cumberbatch and Steven Moffat agree on who Sherlock Holmes is in the BBC series, so how can I judge someone else's idea of who these characters are?

This is one of the joys of fandom: we can play and experiment and imagine and create, and of course not everything one person produces will work for everyone. The important thing is that you write or draw or vid or edit whatever is in your head, and be true to your own vision. If you get comments about how IC or OOC your characters are, maybe take them with a grain of salt. What is in your head doesn't have to match what is in someone else's. And that's fine.


[* Excluding people who intentionally write characterizations that they self-identify as OOC.]

Crossposted to Tumblr

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