Fandom Gripes Thread

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

 

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

Spoiler: why do i talk so much

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?

and then why do so many people give those fics ten million kudos and let them cluster at the top of the search results

 

(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

Spoiler: LL07

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