[ SECRET POST #2046 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2046 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 021 secrets from Secret Submission Post #292.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - spam secret ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[silverr]

Don't know what fandom the OP was about, but if the fic is in a fandoms that has a "generic" setting to begin with (i.e., contemporary world with no superpowers or special agencies, or a cookie-cutter quasi-medieval fantasy setting, or a Japanese high school, or the standard post-apocalypse zombie wasteland) ... well, then, what have you got if the canon characters are nowhere to be found?

[stainless]

Not much.

But some stories/shows/whatever really are about the world.

Like... I like Frodo Baggins fine, but I also like Middle-earth, you know? Maybe I want to talk about the hobbits in Bree and how they were dealing with things, not about the Quest.

Is that not an acceptable story somehow, but me writing about Frodo would be?

(Personally I don't think I would do this for LOTR, just because the work I'd feel I had to do to get Middle-earth right enough to honor it is, uh, daunting. But if someone did it well, I think it would be good, not cheaty somehow because where's Merry or whatever.)

[silverr]

Yeah, I get what you're saying - there are definitely a lot of fandoms where the setting is as much of a character, almost, as the people are. (Lexx and Ringworld are the first two that come to mind.)

What I was thinking about is a story that could be dropped seamlessly into more than one fandom without doing anything more than changing a few place names. ~ Stories that don't use any of the ... defining characters / characteristics of a particular fandom.

(I'm not a good one to talk OCs, though. I'm pretty much with the OP on this one, and the bait and switch thing is obnoxious. When I do use OCs in my own works they're never the POV character, and are only there to add color, humor, or give small bits of information that move the plot along.)

[stainless]

Yeah. I'm not trying to argue with you, just thinking. My fandom is Transformers, so there's a lot of room for OCs that make sense. It's easy to create a member of an army when the war's been going on for hundreds of millenia.

This doesn't mean I think most OCs are good. I don't.

I just mean... with something as sprawling as that particular fandom, where you're even choosing between continuities before you even start typing, the idea that the setting, or the war, or the history, might be recognizable even if the character is Wingblade, Sixth Lieutenant of Guysbuiltyesterday, isn't as weird as borrowing the setting from one movie that was propelled by character development.

When I do use OCs in my own works they're never the POV character, and are only there to add color, humor, or give small bits of information that move the plot along.

It's funny, because I don't like peripheral OCs most of the time. I'm not saying this is anything but my weird feeling, but often to me peripheral OCs make me feel jolted out of a story. I know who everyone is and then -- Lightblaze? Is that someone I don't know of? *looks up on Wiki* Oh wait, no...

Where if the story is about introducing me to Lightblaze and telling me what happened to him on Rintellus Four and I know that from the beginning, I'm not looking him up, I'm reading his story.

If that makes any sense.

[silverr]

y

[silverr]

(No worries, I don't feel argued with at all.)

I think I sort of understand you're saying. And your examples do make sense,

I suppose, not that I think about it, that most of the fandoms I've been in lately are (relatively) more character driven, at least for me. So the plots I do tend to "star" canon characters, with OCs in any spot that a canon character can't fill.

(Like - I did a fic a few years ago that had two frenemies marooned in a lifeboat. After snarking at each other for most of a chapter, they were finally rescued by a somewhat colorful captain [OC], who gave them soup and a good talking-to before sending them on to the next chapter.

[laughingpineapple]

...I just want to say that I really like your posts in this thread.

To OP if they're still reading: strong opinions aren't necessarily bad, but overgeneralizations are. If 'this COULD be done badly AND OFTEN IS' were a legitimate prerequisite for making something disappear, all fandom would drop off the face of reality. Discussing fandom in terms of worst case scenarios can surely lead to some trainwreck-fascinatingly anecdotes, but not much more than that...

[daeseage]

i would definitely agree about the setting being as much a character as the actual characters -- my fandom is homestuck and some of my favorite fics have taken place on/around the troll's planet and are absolutely chock-full of oc's. one that i'm currently following is actually a pre-ancestor fic that only has two canon characters out of a central cast of 12! it's not somehow original fiction, because alternia and the trolls are actually pretty unique, and the ocs are not somehow self-inserts.

i suppose maybe because i'm in a situation with such a large ensemble cast and there's a lot of characterization that's really largely headcanon/fanon, but i think that skipping over a fic with an interesting summary just because there's an oc or cc/oc pairing is absolutely ridiculous. sure there are better and worse ways of including ocs in your story, but i think that each one should be judged on it's own merit. =T