“Out of Character”
Jan. 9th, 2022 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI take issue with the concept of “out of character” (OOC).
It comes up frequently in meta spaces, in discussing tropes or ship dynamics or reviewing fics, and every time I see it, I want to scream a little bit. Mind, that’s a me problem, not a fandom problem. But this is my space, and I am screaming.
See, the issue I have is that OOC is nearly always used synonymously with disliking a fic/ship/etc. “Character A was OOC in that fic” means “I didn’t like that fic.” “Ship A/B is OOC” means “I don’t like ship A/B.” And disliking a thing is fine—my tumblr is a testament to the idea that I dislike many things—but what gets me is that by reframing a personal dislike as an objective truth, one can more easily condemn the fans who like the things that are ‘OOC’. There’s a veneer of respectability to it, even.
My tastes are better than your tastes because my ship is in-character (IC). My set of traits for A are IC. My favorite fic is IC.
It’s the same argument used to condemn alternate universes or original characters or readerfic—“Well, I read fanfic to see more of the canon characters and canon world, so why would I touch that stuff?” Except now the argument can encompass characters who exist in the canon, too, because someone writing A or A/B or whatever not to your tastes is interpreting canon incorrectly. Character A would never.
My problem with this is that interpretations of canon are inherently subjective. What I see as the core set of character traits for A aren’t likely the same as what you see, nor the same as what the hundreds, thousands, millions of other consumers of the canon see. There will be more and less common interpretations, fandom will coalesce around a few different definitions of a given character, but everyone has some line from the canon, some scene they can cite that gives them the impression that character A has a given trait. If we’re all basing our understanding of these characters in our subjective read of canon, how can anything actually be OOC?
I’ve got this theory that the label OOC gets used primarily for two reasons: bad writing and a mismatch of expectations.
Lots of fanfic is written poorly. That’s something to be celebrated, others have written about this topic, I won’t rehash it here except to reiterate its truth. And a hallmark of poorly-written fanfic, aside from the spelling and grammar errors and the like, is when a fic fails to live up to its ambitions. You’ve seen it before: an epic adventure plot that resolves too quickly and easily, a romance that drags for 50k words longer than it needs, the fic that balloons to hundreds of thousands of words without a clear plan, etc. Plenty of authors start with the core ideas that would make a successful story (A/B, enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity with a slow-burn romance), and then blow it because their pacing or dialogue or plot or whatever just isn’t good. It’s a bummer.
It’s also not OOC, in my mind.
I can see the blueprints underneath the story that align with canon characterizations. Often, it’s a matter of looking at the summary or tags or first chapter, where it’s clear that A and B both fit some widely-accepted standard for their characters. Things go off the rails from there because the fic doesn’t show us the emotional growth, or it wallows too long in their inner lives, or or or. But a poorly-written fic is no more proof of OOCness than stick-figure fan-art is proof that the artist drew the wrong body type for a character.
So, onto the next: expectations.
I mentioned earlier that fandoms tend to coalesce around a few different interpretations of a character. Protagonist A is written a certain way in het fics, a slightly different way in slash fics, and maybe there are some subtypes out there for when A is paired with someone on the same side versus someone on the opposite side of the main conflict, or when A is the older versus the younger character in the relationship. In gen land, A’s traits might center more around their trauma in gritty-realistic fics and more around their badass heroism in power-wank fics. And the more popular the character, the more likely there are to be a lot of subtypes with their own particular fanbases.
It’s usually also the case that fans of A are not fans of every single version of A. Maybe a fan is happy with all of the slash characterizations but not the gen or het, maybe someone is primarily here for the power-wank and will read any type of ship as long as it does the power-wank tropes, maybe someone really identifies with part of A’s backstory and that must show up in a fic for them to enjoy it. And what I see is that, when fans peer out across their boundary/preference walls and are confronted with other styles of writing the same character, they react negatively. OOC is one of the major categories of this negative reaction.
Which all makes sense in the way that their A, with a given subset of A’s canon traits and particular emphasis on a subset of A’s canon scenes, probably wouldn’t be a good fit for ship A/B or whatever it is that throws the reader off. But those A/B shippers aren’t writing that version of A—comb through discords or tumblr posts or Twitter threads about A/B and you’ll find plenty of citations of canon text or canon ideas that are used to justify why A/B is a fantastic ship, why it’s the best match for these characters and why it’s such a perfect distillation of who they are. The disconnect isn’t that A/B is OOC for A, it’s that people who read A in a different way expect that all stories featuring A must be written in the way they most like, the way that they personally interpreted the original canon. And that’s just not true!
Our subjective interpretations influence what we enjoy, what we’re primed to even consider possible. And, hey, proof of that is that plenty of the poorly-written fic I discussed above is perfectly popular with readers and interpreted as IC because the readers, like the author, understand the intent and can follow along from the same starting point, even if the journey is a bit rocky. Are there probable edge-cases where OOC truly is the most accurate label for a given fic? Sure. Are they nearly as common as a fic being poorly-written or the reader and author having mismatched expectations? I don’t think so.
So I’ve excised OOC (and IC) from my fandom vocabulary. I would rather say what I mean: I don’t like reading a given character that way. It results in far less needless debate over the ground truth of canon, and far more interaction with people who connect with the same things I do.
It comes up frequently in meta spaces, in discussing tropes or ship dynamics or reviewing fics, and every time I see it, I want to scream a little bit. Mind, that’s a me problem, not a fandom problem. But this is my space, and I am screaming.
See, the issue I have is that OOC is nearly always used synonymously with disliking a fic/ship/etc. “Character A was OOC in that fic” means “I didn’t like that fic.” “Ship A/B is OOC” means “I don’t like ship A/B.” And disliking a thing is fine—my tumblr is a testament to the idea that I dislike many things—but what gets me is that by reframing a personal dislike as an objective truth, one can more easily condemn the fans who like the things that are ‘OOC’. There’s a veneer of respectability to it, even.
My tastes are better than your tastes because my ship is in-character (IC). My set of traits for A are IC. My favorite fic is IC.
It’s the same argument used to condemn alternate universes or original characters or readerfic—“Well, I read fanfic to see more of the canon characters and canon world, so why would I touch that stuff?” Except now the argument can encompass characters who exist in the canon, too, because someone writing A or A/B or whatever not to your tastes is interpreting canon incorrectly. Character A would never.
My problem with this is that interpretations of canon are inherently subjective. What I see as the core set of character traits for A aren’t likely the same as what you see, nor the same as what the hundreds, thousands, millions of other consumers of the canon see. There will be more and less common interpretations, fandom will coalesce around a few different definitions of a given character, but everyone has some line from the canon, some scene they can cite that gives them the impression that character A has a given trait. If we’re all basing our understanding of these characters in our subjective read of canon, how can anything actually be OOC?
I’ve got this theory that the label OOC gets used primarily for two reasons: bad writing and a mismatch of expectations.
Lots of fanfic is written poorly. That’s something to be celebrated, others have written about this topic, I won’t rehash it here except to reiterate its truth. And a hallmark of poorly-written fanfic, aside from the spelling and grammar errors and the like, is when a fic fails to live up to its ambitions. You’ve seen it before: an epic adventure plot that resolves too quickly and easily, a romance that drags for 50k words longer than it needs, the fic that balloons to hundreds of thousands of words without a clear plan, etc. Plenty of authors start with the core ideas that would make a successful story (A/B, enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity with a slow-burn romance), and then blow it because their pacing or dialogue or plot or whatever just isn’t good. It’s a bummer.
It’s also not OOC, in my mind.
I can see the blueprints underneath the story that align with canon characterizations. Often, it’s a matter of looking at the summary or tags or first chapter, where it’s clear that A and B both fit some widely-accepted standard for their characters. Things go off the rails from there because the fic doesn’t show us the emotional growth, or it wallows too long in their inner lives, or or or. But a poorly-written fic is no more proof of OOCness than stick-figure fan-art is proof that the artist drew the wrong body type for a character.
So, onto the next: expectations.
I mentioned earlier that fandoms tend to coalesce around a few different interpretations of a character. Protagonist A is written a certain way in het fics, a slightly different way in slash fics, and maybe there are some subtypes out there for when A is paired with someone on the same side versus someone on the opposite side of the main conflict, or when A is the older versus the younger character in the relationship. In gen land, A’s traits might center more around their trauma in gritty-realistic fics and more around their badass heroism in power-wank fics. And the more popular the character, the more likely there are to be a lot of subtypes with their own particular fanbases.
It’s usually also the case that fans of A are not fans of every single version of A. Maybe a fan is happy with all of the slash characterizations but not the gen or het, maybe someone is primarily here for the power-wank and will read any type of ship as long as it does the power-wank tropes, maybe someone really identifies with part of A’s backstory and that must show up in a fic for them to enjoy it. And what I see is that, when fans peer out across their boundary/preference walls and are confronted with other styles of writing the same character, they react negatively. OOC is one of the major categories of this negative reaction.
Which all makes sense in the way that their A, with a given subset of A’s canon traits and particular emphasis on a subset of A’s canon scenes, probably wouldn’t be a good fit for ship A/B or whatever it is that throws the reader off. But those A/B shippers aren’t writing that version of A—comb through discords or tumblr posts or Twitter threads about A/B and you’ll find plenty of citations of canon text or canon ideas that are used to justify why A/B is a fantastic ship, why it’s the best match for these characters and why it’s such a perfect distillation of who they are. The disconnect isn’t that A/B is OOC for A, it’s that people who read A in a different way expect that all stories featuring A must be written in the way they most like, the way that they personally interpreted the original canon. And that’s just not true!
Our subjective interpretations influence what we enjoy, what we’re primed to even consider possible. And, hey, proof of that is that plenty of the poorly-written fic I discussed above is perfectly popular with readers and interpreted as IC because the readers, like the author, understand the intent and can follow along from the same starting point, even if the journey is a bit rocky. Are there probable edge-cases where OOC truly is the most accurate label for a given fic? Sure. Are they nearly as common as a fic being poorly-written or the reader and author having mismatched expectations? I don’t think so.
So I’ve excised OOC (and IC) from my fandom vocabulary. I would rather say what I mean: I don’t like reading a given character that way. It results in far less needless debate over the ground truth of canon, and far more interaction with people who connect with the same things I do.
