From: Natasa Tucev tucev@tesla.rcub.bg.ac.yu To: blakes7@lists.lysator.liu.se Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 12:38 PM Subject: Re: [B7L] liking 'character'
Neil wrote:
One thing that leaps out at me from the scripts, now I've had a chance to look at them, is how short most of the lines of dialogue are.
I agree completely - the original world of B7 series is much more stoical, much less is spoken directly and much more is just intimated or remains hidden inside, than in fanfic.
And then I said:
What I find generally irritating is that the regular characters
(especially,
but oc's often too) are often nowhere near 'tough' enough.
If I understand this correctly, you dislike fanfic where (male) characters behave like stereotypical women: they babble, express interest in food and clothes, display their emotions overtly and gossip about each other.
Okay, so suppose I change it to 'nowhere near *stoical* enough'?
To be honest, I'm really not sure if you've understood me on this one or not. As I hope I made clear when I wrote that paragraph, I'm well aware of how 'tough' can equate to male, and 'trivial' and/or 'soft' to female. But I'm not sure that's the whole of the story and it might not even be the real story at all. Rather than male characters behaving like stereotypical women, might it be rebs and crims behaving like respectable law-abiding citizens? Might it be people who regularly face violent death behaving like people whose closest brush with danger is making a right-hand turn on a busy road?
Doing the things they do, having experienced the things they've experienced, the regular characters should be emotionally brutalised beyond the experience of most fan writers, and in ways that I would expect very few fan writers to have experienced first hand. (I can't know for certain, of course. Maybe some fan writers really are ex-SAS or former terrorists or bank robbers etc. Probably not many, though.) What's more, they are brutalised in ways that the mythical average fan writer might not want to contemplate. They are characters he or she might not want to write about. Solution: turn them into people that s/he does want to write about. This amounts to wholesale character assassination in my book, though it depends a lot, of course, on just how brutalised you perceive the regulars to be. I would say 'very', other writers might say 'not very' or even 'not at all'.
I'm not entirely convinced this is a male/female thing, or at least not entirely so. I've read stories by male writers that also fail to capture this sense of brutalisation, though not in the same way. (Attention to things like food and clothes is not a 'fault' in itself, rather it's a symptom. The 'problem' lies in the way such things are included. Take, say, a thriller writer like Patricia Cornwall, who invariably devotes a page to cookery somewhere in her novels - it's pretty clear that cooking is a stress-management device for the central character, and in the average Cornwall thriller she certainly needs one. I can't recall a comparable passage in a fan story where a focus on food is integrated into the thematic structure of the story.)
Likewise, I don't think it's a male/female thing in terms of how the characters are affected by their experiences. All that I've read suggests that men and women both respond to dangerous lifestyles in a pretty similar way. And a way, incidentally, that is generally not reflected in fanfic - crude humour, cruder practical jokes, behaviour that in more comfortable surroundings would be taken as outright nastiness, sarcastic putdowns, emotional silence, and apparently inappropriate or tasteless responses to shocking situations (laughing at corpses, for example). These are all coping strategies developed by people who desperately need coping strategies.
Instead we get characters who wear their hearts on their sleeves, say what they mean and say it at length, mean what they say (some fan writers seem to have an abhorrence of lying), and lengthy heart-to-hearts on the importance of trust. When all the evidence seems to suggest that when your ass is on the line, you know who you can trust, you know who trusts you, and no one needs to agonise over anything.
Admittedly, it's very hard to please me when it comes to fanfic.
You and me both. Actually, you might be even pickier than me. Damn, a rival.
Neil