Fandom Gripes Thread

Discussion in 'Fan Town' started by keltena, Feb 6, 2017.

  1. vuatson

    vuatson [delurks]

    Fandom is fll of people who are more attached to their particular wish fulfillment fantasy than they are to any specific fandom or character. Not that wish fulfillment is bad, and I can definitely sympathize with this example, but it's kind of annoying when you come into a fandom because you love the characters and then find masses of people who apparently don't care about them at all and just want to hammer them into whatever shape is required by their fantasy.
     
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  2. unknownanonymous

    unknownanonymous i am inimitable, i am an original|18+

    i think part of the trick with those kinds of wish fulfillment fantasies and fandom is finding a canon(s) where they fit and/or finding good ways to stretch the canon(s) to make them fit. cause, like, i'm pretty sure that everyone has their own wish fulfillment fantasies and fave tropes and fave songs and whatnot - some people are just better at fitting those things into each other than others are, and figuring out which fandoms are the best for fulfilling which needs for them. and it's a matter of, i think, recognizing the structure and the building blocks of the canon(s).
     
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  3. unknownanonymous

    unknownanonymous i am inimitable, i am an original|18+

    quotes this in this thread 'cause it reminds me of what i said about tropes and wishfulfillment fantasies and canons and how applying faves and wishfulfillment fantasies in fandom is normal but how good people are at it varies
     
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  4. swirlingflight

    swirlingflight inane analysis and story spinning is my passion

    Come to think of it, this would've been a good thread for me to post that. Because man, I love so much of the stuff that we (fandom) do. I love the variety! The thing of breaking it down into pieces and reshaping those pieces into all kinds of new things! (I played with legos a lot as a kid, fwiw). And I also, simultaneously, get so buttmad when the thing that I loved about the original thing is so frequently lost in the breaking down. Like you're saying, the interest driving people to make derivative works might not have much to do with that original spirit. And past that, even for people who do want it to feel like the original may not have the skill to succeed at it. Tricky stuff.
     
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  5. unknownanonymous

    unknownanonymous i am inimitable, i am an original|18+

    yep. and furthermore, what i was saying was that it is possible to find a canon that works for your fave thing or vice-versa or stretch the canon in a way that works to make it fit.

    like, there's a kind of tragic, devoted, do-anything-for-them, change-the-very-fabric-of-the-universe-to-save/keep-them, romance trope that i love, and it doesn't work for all pairings in all fandoms. like, i don't see it fitting pearl/amethyst from steven universe, for example. but it does work for steven universe's pearl/rose and undertale's chara/asriel and red vs blue's church/tex and madoka magicka's madoka/homura.
     
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  6. spockandawe

    spockandawe soft and woolen and writhing with curiosity

    I could arguably put this in the shipping thread instead of here, but hey :P Because I'm usually up for all stretching canon in odd directions, in terms of setting/backstory/plot/whatever. But I just don't understand when the characters are totally wiped in fan creations. Because if I like a character, I like... their character, I like the way they think and feel and what drives them. Even in a drastically different setting, I love love love seeing how that person is cousins with the original, and how they diverged and how they're still the same. I'm up to my elbows in multishipping, because as interesting as people are on their own, they're ten times as interesting when I'm looking at two distinct personalities bouncing off each other in every possible combination, and seeing what could make it work.

    So it's so frustrating when people brute-force these characters into the most generically fluffy and conflict-free personalities and relationships the human mind can imagine. I just don't get it. If I love a character, I... want to see the things I love. If [character] is an asshole, they're not going to feel like themselves if they're suddenly sweetness and light. They can try to be sweet, but they're still a natural asshole trying to act sweet. If they're cold and restrained, they're not going to be effortlessly attentive and romantic and open with their feelings of PASSIONATE ADORATION. A character can be a natural asshole, or cold and restrained, and still be in love. That character can be trying their best and still having those things cause problems. The delight is in working past problems and fighting towards a happily ever after, not just skipping all the in between steps do just get to bland, effortless happiness.

    Maybe [character] is an ass and it causes friction, but their partner knows/trusts/whatever them well enough to nudge past the moment of ouch. And then maybe [character] feels actual human emotions about what their actions cause instead of flat happiness for the rest of forever. Or maybe their partner rolls with the assholery or jokes in the right way, and the scene can develop into something more playful than antagonistic, and there's fresh attentive happiness, and maybe even extra happiness because 'I didn't do right by them but they're so good to me and how did i ever find someone who fit up against me so well.' It doesn't have to be romance driven by angstangstangstangst, it can BE happiness and fluff. But the happiness doesn't make sense unless they have a personality of their own, and haven't just been sanded down to fit into the Generic Romance Protagonist mold.

    If you've got two traumatized, damaged characters who are all about those millions of years of fighting in a brutal war, I'll totally cheer for them to be in love. And I'm cheering so much extra because of the thought of how much they'll have to work past. I want them to be happy! Okay, they've connected. They have a Romantic Confession, they're perfectly happy and... scene. Like, no! They've been fucked. up. Show me them trying to adapt. Show me something to care about. It doesn't even have to be conflict with the other person, they could be totally in sync, but they have trauma and damage clawing at the inside of their brains. There's so much open territory to play with in a scenario like that,so then to see someone zero in on the blandest, most personality-free path forward made of 100% stale romantic cliches? If these characters don't feel like themselves, I've been given no reason to be invested in their happiness, nothing has made me believe they're in love except being told they love each other. I want to care, but I have no way to do that.

    I've been frustrated by this in fandom for ages, but it didn't bother me quite so much until I started running into intensely strong personalities in homestuck, and transformers has been similar. Like, flip side. One of the latest transformers issues has a thing with quiet, bland romantic domesticity. It's a longtime soldier, one with a history of murder, war crimes, etc., where it's his private, secret dream of 'but what if I was married to my commander and we had a nice little house with a shared bed and he told me he liiiiiiked me.' That kind of generic romance is so great here, because in the story, it's so far removed from his actual reality, and he can see how unlikely and unattainable that future is. And then someone hacks into his brain and digs up this fantasy (it starscream). Starscream mocks the dream specifically for how sugar-sweet it is. And then he uses the possibility of making that dream real to help pressure/persuade/threaten the guy into helping with an underhanded scheme. And without rehashing the whole comic issue, Blast Off ends it knowing that the dream was never likely to happen, and now Starscream has manipulated things so that maybe now it will. But Blast Off's choices mean there won't be true emotions or sincerity to any of it, and he's effectively poisoned the entire platonic and/or romantic relationship. It was a quiet, generic, romantic dream, and it gets completely hollowed out and ruined for him.

    And it's so! so! good!!!! That's the most emotionally hooked I've been yet in that particular series. Because the setting can do all kinds of things, the plot can change, all kinds of things are there to be played with. As long as the characters feel like people. Not even necessarily like themselves, just like they're actual people with thoughts and emotions and more than a single bland dimension. I don't understand how aggressively some people iron that out of them. I get the wish-fulfillment thing in some contexts, but sometimes I'm just at a complete loss as to how anyone is getting anything out of this creation. Which is often super frustrating, because you get interesting setups, and it feels like the author has actively worked to iron the interesting out of the characters
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2017
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  7. BunjyWunjy

    BunjyWunjy Frabjous

    @spockandawe I don't want to quote your post and clog up the thread, but I totally agree with everything you've said here, especially that the Homestuck and Transformers fandoms are probably the worst offenders at character-wiping (or even introducing completely different personalities than the character had in canon *coughcough eridan coughcough*) and I'd like to introduce the idea that maybe this is so noticeable with these fandoms specifically because of the sheer size of the canon.
    Both Homestuck and Transformers are expansive universes to start with, with a HUGE number of well-fleshed out characters, and even different VERSIONS of the same character depending on timeline/continuity. could this complexity have a role in how easily the fandoms can either misinterpret or completely wipe a character personality?
     
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  8. artistformerlyknownasdave

    artistformerlyknownasdave revenge of ricky schrödinger

    ugh, yeah, i don't transformers, but i absolutely agree with the analysis re: homestuck, and i think @BunjyWunjy has a great point with the complexity playing into it. there's so much going on it's easy to miss a lot of the complexity and nuance, maybe?

    another thing i've noticed is, to steal a phrase from a friend, canon relationships having all their teeth pulled in homestuck--i see this most with davekat because that's My Hole, It Was Made For Me, but it definitely happens in rosemary a lot too (and dirkjake). characters that mesh in really crunchy, interesting ways in canon get watered down to these perfectly healthy, conflict-free versions of the relationship because otherwise is...interpreted as bad somehow, i think? especially with rosemary and davekat, since they are still together and i think are overall healthy relationships. but the parts where they clash are still important i think, and it sucks to see these really fascinating, hilarious characters get turned into cardboard cutouts
     
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  9. BunjyWunjy

    BunjyWunjy Frabjous

    you have some really good points here, and honestly I think most of the problem with fanon davekat and rosemary being watered down to uninteresting, "healthy" versions of the canon is the current "ship relationships must be Completely Wholesome And Healthy OR ELSE" mindset on Tumblr.
    actually, that current mindset may also have some influence on the wiping of character personalities to force them into a wholesome granola romance trope that Spock mentioned, too.
     
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  10. artistformerlyknownasdave

    artistformerlyknownasdave revenge of ricky schrödinger

    oh man, yeah--i think there's a lot of fear about portraying these relationships (especially because they are m/m and f/f, which is rare enough as it is and even rarer to be seen as healthy) incorrectly, or that by showcasing the conflicts they have you're maybe damaging the credibility of the overall relationship somehow?

    and in general, yeah, i think the granola romance trope is likely because people are unwilling or afraid to do anything else. like, that they'll be a bad person for doing anything less than happily ever afters? that and then on some level i think wish fulfillment; skipping to the end where everyone's worked through their issues instead of seeing how people work through conflict
     
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  11. Charlie

    Charlie I got no strings to hold me down

  12. spockandawe

    spockandawe soft and woolen and writhing with curiosity

    YESSSS, there we go, that's the thing I wasn't finding words for. I'm always buried deep enough in rarepair hell that I don't usually notice this with canon pairings as much, but it definitely happens on an individual character basis too. And all the sharp edges are usually what makes me love a character most, and having that all disappear is like being at the pool as a kid when the guards blow the whistle for adult swim. No swimming, no splashing, everything is quiet and uninteresting. You can sit on the edge and stick your toes in the water, but that's about it.

    (though also.... this is me being a total killjoy jackass over times when people just want happiness and sweetness, and I am sometimes in the mood for the same thing. so, uh. whoops :PPPPP too late I typed an essay now and i'm not deleting it no takebacks)

    @applechime described my treatment of starscream being like watching him try to climb out of a deep pit, and sighing happily over how hard he's trying, all while I pile the edges of the pit higher and higher. That's fair. And every so often he sits on a ledge to catch his breath, and that's when I start dropping rocks on his head :V

    If character A has been rewired so hard from years and years of war that they have an alarming disregard for life, have them alarm someone. Maybe they're upset over a stupid nothing argument with character B and A looms, and B flinches a bit too hard. A loves B and never, ever wants to hurt them, but they were still frightened of them, and there's all kinds of delicious emotions in there. B is feeling awful because of course A wouldn't do anything bad, they should know they can trust A by this point. And now A is hurting and it's their fault. Emotions! Emotions everywhere! Things aren't perfect, and you can have simultaneous comforting, miserable avoidance while they circle around a reconciliation, one of them working themselves up over how they're sorry, they're so fucking sorry. Whatever flavor you want!

    A and B are in love. A has some ugly abuse in their past, where their partner mistreated them for a long, long time. Don't just dive write into the perfectly open heart-to-hearts, where B presses A's head to their bosom and offers them perfectly, flawlessly written reassurances. Have A dancing around certain aspects of intimacy and being frustrated with themself and being angry that they're still being affected by the old damage. Have B trying to tread carefully but not knowing exactly where the sore spots are, and accidentally tripping over something bad. EARN that comfort, send them low first so the high feels even higher!

    A and B are in love, but B is secretly pretty sure this is temporary and A's going to leave them when someone better comes along. Even with them knowing that they're WRONG, that this is real and A cares, have their brain quietly whispering ugly things to them and having to work around it. Have them keeping quiet about the insecurities because they know how unjustified they are, and they don't want to bother A with them. Have some tension and frustration, because B is stressed and A can feel something is wrong but doesn't know what, really let the quiet unhappiness sink into the reader's mind before they manage to reestablish open communication. It doesn't even have to be anything theatrical. It can just be a quiet moment of intimacy and devotion when they work it out, but feeling the unhappy emotions first makes it stand out.

    Even in something totally happy, similar principles hold true. Work in some degree of emotional variance, so the reader doesn't just get numb. But wow, it sure is hard to do that when you won't let your characters have anything more than superficial nothing flaws. They have an ugly past? Well how about staging a theatrical pouring out of the heart, let's have A make a speech that comes out suspiciously well-composed and have B make the perfectly dovetailed responses designed to provide maximum comfort. But if A is avoidant as hell and dodges the subject for as long as they can, that adds tension and interest. Are they telling obvious lies about how nothing is wrong, but B isn't going to push them before they're ready? Tension and interest! Maybe B is completely taken by surprise by the confession and accidentally says something upsetting because they're off-balance and trying to respond to something incredibly intense and they stumble, then have to fix the extra damage that their stumble did.

    If a story is at a happy plateau with no variations, I'm not going to be moved by a slightly higher peak of happiness. Even in a light, fluffy story, there are dips and peaks that keep you engaged, but if characters have no actual flaws, there's no actual conflict, and nothing ever deviates from that comfortable, boring plateau. Even on the plateau, there are interesting things to be had. A's damage meshes with B's, they're both in a position to really understand what hurt the other, and that brings them closer together and like... creates a tension between them and the rest of the world, even while they're happy on their own. This is way harder to articulate than I thought XD

    It's just so frustrating, because even without thinking through a character in enough depth to pick out clear, easily defined flaws, it only takes like.... putting a little pain into a story. That can be an easier approach than pinning down patterns of behavior, and it just deepens things out enough for characters to feel like they actually EXIST and have emotions with depth. I said a thing before about just wanting characters to feel like themselves, but that's not even right. I read and enjoy some fanfic with incredibly jarring characterization choices compared to canon. But if that new flavor of the character bounces off other people and shows depth and dimension to them, that's all I really need. It gives me some kind of texture to grip onto emotionally. It's everything that's appealing to me in a story. If I can't get an emotional hit of some kind, it's just an energy sink where I come away with nothing to show for it. I just....... a flawless character is rarely interesting. It's not impossible (see: thunderclash :P), but people do tend to latch onto the badly hurt and damaged characters. And you know they're hurt and damaged because it informs the way they act. So why on earth would you take that away if you wanted to put them into a fanfic? :psyduck:

    and then why do so many people give those fics ten million kudos and let them cluster at the top of the search results
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2017
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  13. garden

    garden lucid dreamer

    yes. i'm down with alternate flavors/characterizations, as long as the different characterization isn't just "the canon character, but with their sharp edges, their flaws and failings, smoothed away."
     
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  14. tinyhydra

    tinyhydra a dingus

    In TFA, Han makes it pretty clear that he gives nearabout zero fucks for Rey and Finn. Like, he's not their surrogate dad. He wants them gone, and then he can't get rid of them, and then he dies. He offers Rey a job, yeah, but he's very clear that he's not gonna pay her well and he'll prolly be a dick to her, and you could argue he wouldn't and that's just him posturing, but he's still only know her for all of ten minutes and when Finn tells him she's been kidnapped he basically brushes him off. Leia and Han don't know Rey and don't give a shit about her. Han prolly would liked her if he'd gotten to know her, and Leia prolly will like her well enough when she does know her, but in TFA, nope! It's not much, but I really dislike the TFA fandom's whole Thing about skipping over interesting character growth in favor of just. Putting people in relationships immediately. It happens with Rey and Luke too, and that's even worse, especially if they're going the Reywalker route, cause then it's "hey dad, you left me alone on a hellplanet for fifteen years" "lol yeah", like. What is with this fucking fandom and holding all potential drama and interpersonal friction off with a ten foot pole?
     
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  15. unknownanonymous

    unknownanonymous i am inimitable, i am an original|18+

    this satisfied animatic i was watching had angelica enter into a door in her memories labelled "ball" and i just dissolved into a fit of laughter 'cause it invoked a stream of memes (the undertale ball game, "ball is life," "balling" etc.) in my head. and like, i know exactly what ball was supposed to mean there and it does fit, but... memes. memes. memes and totally inappropriate laughter. the mood: wrecked.
     
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  16. ZeroEsper

    ZeroEsper Well-Known Member

    Noncon, fandom. That's a tag. USE IT WHERE IT APPLIES.
     
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  17. spockandawe

    spockandawe soft and woolen and writhing with curiosity

    (no lost light spoilers, I haven't actually seen or read anything, I've just seen some obnoxious reactions)

    So when you've got an ongoing series. That will wrap up in some hopefully-satisfying way at some eventual future point, but there's lots more to go before then. You need some way to maintain the tension.

    I'm sure there are exceptions that mean this isn't an absolute, but generally, bad things happen to sympathetic characters!!

    People who usually have thoughts I like are super upset about this and I don't get it. Like, I just completely do not get it. This is so confusing to me. Clearly that is what is going to happen. It's the basic basic BASICS of story plotting. It's adapted a bit for, say, a years-long comic book about giant space robots (or any sort of ongoing comic in the american comic industry paradigm, quality varies), but you're going to have story arcs within the series that roughly follow the basic form of a story plot. Where characters have to suffer for the stakes to matter. I don't know, I perseverated on writing for like three straight years and read every nonfiction book about writing in my library, but ??? I'm just so confused about what kind of story someone expects if characters aren't allowed to suffer before the ending. I've seen this pop up here and there with some regularity, but this one incident is fresh in my mind and I remember all the particulars.

    I'm pretty sure I know what they want. They want the boring happiness plateau I complained about before, where characters get brute-forced into Not Another Generic Romance and nothing bad is ever ever ever allowed to happen to them, but then they'll complain that the series isn't as interesting as it used to be. Until we're supposed to be extra happy because the author tells us we're supposed to be extra happy, annnd scene, that's a wrap, publish that book.

    (and/or any unhappiness is introduced by one-dimensional Bad People, who are thoroughly denounced as Bad People and get trounced and sent to Bad People Jail where they remain totally irredeemable, and there's probably some kind of emotional speech about how this particular Bad Person was Bad and Wrong and gagggggggg. I live for finding the sympathetic angles on the worst characters, everything is so much more fascinating when people's motivations make sense, people are trying their best, and tragic shit still happens.)

    I still can't see the appeal of that when you sand interesting characters down into bland nothings to make it work. But I do get where the appeal of happiness ever after comes from. You want to write that fic? Go do you, have fun with it.

    But a story shaped like that is probably not going to be acceptable as a commercial product created by a professional writer.

    I want to suffer over these characters. I don't want to be DONE feeling new painful emotions over them. I want them to struggle and fight and get punched in the face by the rest of the universe and keep fighting, because that is going to make the happy ending they're fighting for that much sweeter. I want to have some tension in there that oh noooo, I hope they make it work. I want to worry that maybe this is going to be too much, I want to wonder how they're going to manage to get past this difficulty. A story without tension is usually a boring story. There are fics that make it work, usually short fics, and none of that applies to commercial products that have to sell and have to hold people's interest in the long term to ensure that the series lives on.

    I'm just so confused, genuinely so confused. I get being frustrated if you want an arc to resolve and it's not resolved yet (but omg, I want ten times more of this arc, I want to wallow in it forever), but making a competent, publishable product doesn't mean the author is incompetent? I don't get it. This is good professional skills, from a writing perspective, and the guy does it well. I don't... get it

    And we've already got one disgustingly sappy married couple, I like having a couple madly in love and on the verge of a relationship and trying so hard to connect across that last painful distance between them. What happened to enjoying romantic tension, this is JRO refusing to blow his romantic load early and making them drag the plot calmer instead of ramping it in exciting ways. My heart aches, I'm fairly sure JRO won't leave us hanging without giving us something that will fix it (and it'll feel even more glorious because of how bad it hurt), and this is everything wonderful
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2017
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  18. LadyNighteyes

    LadyNighteyes Wicked Witch of the Radiant Historia Fandom

    Does it count as a fandom gripe if I am currently seething with rage over the remake of my special-interest favorite game?
     
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  19. KarrinBlue

    KarrinBlue Magical Girl Intern

    Right! Like I saw a post saying 'well character a and b have obviously been shoved into the trash and will never be used again' Like! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE PURPOSE OF A CLIFFHANGER IS.

    And yes tez it counts
     
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  20. BunjyWunjy

    BunjyWunjy Frabjous

    @spockandawe agreed!
    personally I really enjoyed the new issue because what we've seen in the past from JRO is that when we get consecutive awful, terrible, horrible things happening in different places to different characters, we also get an overarching resolution arc that solves all those problems at once. and is oh-so-satisfying. I'M PUMPED FOR FUTURE ISSUES.
     
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