elspethdixon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elspethdixon) wrote2010-02-20 06:42 pm
elspethdixon) wrote2010-02-20 06:42 pm
Entry tags:
"Misaimed" fandoms
TV tropes is often eeerily correct about things, but they and I are not alays in 100% agreement (except about how wearying relentlessly grim and gritty fiction that is OMG so Dark and Edgy is).
There is an interesting post here on the difficulty of writing characters you intend to be terrible, unlikable human beings. That difficulty being that the audience will not always agree with you that said characters are lousy human beings and instead think they're abused woobies who only need love, and/or will agree, but will like them anyway, sometimes for reasons that are distastful to you.
I personally see the dilemma differently -- I don't mind if someone likes a character I intended to have as a villain, because I can't control their reading of my story, but I don't want to flaw-scrub a character that I like in part because of their flaws, just because I love them so much. I'm sure I *do* flaw-scrub and woobiefy, for example, Tony Stark extensively (and probably I did so for Snape and Sirius Black much more extensively, given that I was 19 back when I was writing them). But it's not because I'm not aware of their flaws. It's because my writing skill isn't up to the task of portraying them properly, or because my Terribly Misjudged and H/c kinks ran away with me and my fic morphed into pure Id Pr0n (well, further into Id Pr0n. I want everything I write to have at least a little Id Pr0n in it, or writing it wouldn't be any fun).
I'm not really all that fond of the concept of "misaimed fandom," because it seems to me that it's often the result of a fan having a different reading of a text, not a wrong reading as the term implies, or the result of a conflict between authorial intent ("I intend this character to be contemptable and unlikable" or "I intend this character to be a flawed-yet-human person whom others have mistakenly misjudged for valid reasons, and not a martyred saint tortured by a cast of OOC-ly evil people") and what actually ends up in the text.
Ex: In later seasons of Smallville, the writers (I think) were trying to show Lex's gradually descent into cacklingly evil supervillainy vs. Clark et al. being noble and good. Um, insofar as they seemed to have any plan at all. What they actually produced, if you look at the show itself and disregard authorial intent, is Lex's gradual descent into mental illness and insanity-driven supervillainy after being abused and manipulated by Lional and possessed and mind-raped by Zod, and his desperate attempt to prepare for a terrible alien invasion that Clark et al never bothered to tell him wasn't coming. By the seventh season, Lex hadn't been turned into the charming-yet-ruthless amoral powermonger of Superman: TAS or any of a variety of evil or amoral versions of him from the comics, but into someone far more fundamentally broken then that, while the rest of the cast stood by and let it happen (for an example of the opposite: I don't think Mark Millar intends for half the characters he writes to be hate-able assholes. They just all happen to turn out that way because he's Mark Millar).
I mean, obviously, you get the fangirls who are all "Rorschach/the Commedian/the Joker/Sephiroth/Snape/Sylar/Darth Vader/[hot but crazy villain goes here] is just a tragically misunderstood woobie who needs my Mary Sue's love to heal him," and the fanboys who are all "Rorschach/the Commedian/the Joker/various Warhammer characters/[badass crazy villain goes here] is kickass and I want to be just like him," but in a kot of cases those fans are teenagers/adolescents. In maturity levels, anyway, if not in actual age.
You also have fans who can articulate all of a character's flaws, and then explain why they like him anyway - ex: "Al Swearingen from Deadwood is clearly a horrible person, but he's fascinating to watch," "I realize Rorschach is narrowminded and violent and socially maladjusted and unwashed and crazy but there are complex in-canon reasons for this, and also he's the only guy in canon to stand up and say 'mass murder is wrong and the villain shouldn't get away with it,' and it's hard to have contempt for that," "she's a ruthless evil villain who tortures and rapes people, and I'm a darkfic fan with a torture/non-con kink," "yes, the White Witch and Milady deWinter are evil, manipulative people, but they're also powerful women who don't let anything stand in their way, and you know, a lot of strong female characters are villains -- I wonder why that is?" "he's a very *hot* murderous psychopath, and I'm shallow, okay?" (which, IMO, is not really any different from fans liking Laura Croft solely because she's hot -- why is it that only male fans are allowed to like characters for completely shallow reasons?)
And I don't think those fans' liking is necessarily misaimed, except insofar as it's not the reaction the author wanted. "Misaimed" implies that they're wrong to like the character, wrong *about* the character, and their reactions are invalid. And if I, for example, like Victor von Doom because he's a megalomaniacal borderline sociopath and I find his bombastic posturing LOLarious/awesome, I don't think that's a fundamentally incorrect assessment of the character or an invalid reaction.
As for Rorschach... Alan Moore clearly did intend for him to be an unlikable object of the readers' pity and contempt (I kind of get the impression Moore despised every single character who has a speaking part in Watchmen, including the prison psychiatrist and the guy who sells Rorschach his newspapers), but the fact remains that, at the end of the day, Rorschach is the guy who stands up and says "Killing millions of people is wrong, and I'm not going to let you get away with it." And given that, it's not surprising that a lot of readers don't have the reaction Moore intended. It's hard to completely dislike a guy who has a valid point (even if it's mixed in with other less valid points), especially when you can look at his backstory and understand how he turned out the way he did.
There's a reason, for example, that a lot of people really like and feel sympathy for Magneto despite his supervillainy, and it's not just because he's strangely hot for an old guy, or because being a fan of the villain makes some people feel cool and rebellious.
Hmmm... so, on balance, I don't disagree with arachnekallisti that writing anti-heroes and villains without falling into the trap of flaw-scrubbing them or attracting readers who will miss your point is hard, but I do think that fangirling flawed or evil or unpleasant characters is not necessarily a misaimed or innapropriate response to a text. I don't think that's what she's claiming at all, but it's what the term "misaimed fandom" is sometimes used to imply. "Snape is my favorite character and I think he got a raw deal" is a far cry from "Snape is a misunderstood saint with no flaws, and everyone in Gryffindor is slaveringly evil."
There is an interesting post here on the difficulty of writing characters you intend to be terrible, unlikable human beings. That difficulty being that the audience will not always agree with you that said characters are lousy human beings and instead think they're abused woobies who only need love, and/or will agree, but will like them anyway, sometimes for reasons that are distastful to you.
I personally see the dilemma differently -- I don't mind if someone likes a character I intended to have as a villain, because I can't control their reading of my story, but I don't want to flaw-scrub a character that I like in part because of their flaws, just because I love them so much. I'm sure I *do* flaw-scrub and woobiefy, for example, Tony Stark extensively (and probably I did so for Snape and Sirius Black much more extensively, given that I was 19 back when I was writing them). But it's not because I'm not aware of their flaws. It's because my writing skill isn't up to the task of portraying them properly, or because my Terribly Misjudged and H/c kinks ran away with me and my fic morphed into pure Id Pr0n (well, further into Id Pr0n. I want everything I write to have at least a little Id Pr0n in it, or writing it wouldn't be any fun).
I'm not really all that fond of the concept of "misaimed fandom," because it seems to me that it's often the result of a fan having a different reading of a text, not a wrong reading as the term implies, or the result of a conflict between authorial intent ("I intend this character to be contemptable and unlikable" or "I intend this character to be a flawed-yet-human person whom others have mistakenly misjudged for valid reasons, and not a martyred saint tortured by a cast of OOC-ly evil people") and what actually ends up in the text.
Ex: In later seasons of Smallville, the writers (I think) were trying to show Lex's gradually descent into cacklingly evil supervillainy vs. Clark et al. being noble and good. Um, insofar as they seemed to have any plan at all. What they actually produced, if you look at the show itself and disregard authorial intent, is Lex's gradual descent into mental illness and insanity-driven supervillainy after being abused and manipulated by Lional and possessed and mind-raped by Zod, and his desperate attempt to prepare for a terrible alien invasion that Clark et al never bothered to tell him wasn't coming. By the seventh season, Lex hadn't been turned into the charming-yet-ruthless amoral powermonger of Superman: TAS or any of a variety of evil or amoral versions of him from the comics, but into someone far more fundamentally broken then that, while the rest of the cast stood by and let it happen (for an example of the opposite: I don't think Mark Millar intends for half the characters he writes to be hate-able assholes. They just all happen to turn out that way because he's Mark Millar).
I mean, obviously, you get the fangirls who are all "Rorschach/the Commedian/the Joker/Sephiroth/Snape/Sylar/Darth Vader/[hot but crazy villain goes here] is just a tragically misunderstood woobie who needs my Mary Sue's love to heal him," and the fanboys who are all "Rorschach/the Commedian/the Joker/various Warhammer characters/[badass crazy villain goes here] is kickass and I want to be just like him," but in a kot of cases those fans are teenagers/adolescents. In maturity levels, anyway, if not in actual age.
You also have fans who can articulate all of a character's flaws, and then explain why they like him anyway - ex: "Al Swearingen from Deadwood is clearly a horrible person, but he's fascinating to watch," "I realize Rorschach is narrowminded and violent and socially maladjusted and unwashed and crazy but there are complex in-canon reasons for this, and also he's the only guy in canon to stand up and say 'mass murder is wrong and the villain shouldn't get away with it,' and it's hard to have contempt for that," "she's a ruthless evil villain who tortures and rapes people, and I'm a darkfic fan with a torture/non-con kink," "yes, the White Witch and Milady deWinter are evil, manipulative people, but they're also powerful women who don't let anything stand in their way, and you know, a lot of strong female characters are villains -- I wonder why that is?" "he's a very *hot* murderous psychopath, and I'm shallow, okay?" (which, IMO, is not really any different from fans liking Laura Croft solely because she's hot -- why is it that only male fans are allowed to like characters for completely shallow reasons?)
And I don't think those fans' liking is necessarily misaimed, except insofar as it's not the reaction the author wanted. "Misaimed" implies that they're wrong to like the character, wrong *about* the character, and their reactions are invalid. And if I, for example, like Victor von Doom because he's a megalomaniacal borderline sociopath and I find his bombastic posturing LOLarious/awesome, I don't think that's a fundamentally incorrect assessment of the character or an invalid reaction.
As for Rorschach... Alan Moore clearly did intend for him to be an unlikable object of the readers' pity and contempt (I kind of get the impression Moore despised every single character who has a speaking part in Watchmen, including the prison psychiatrist and the guy who sells Rorschach his newspapers), but the fact remains that, at the end of the day, Rorschach is the guy who stands up and says "Killing millions of people is wrong, and I'm not going to let you get away with it." And given that, it's not surprising that a lot of readers don't have the reaction Moore intended. It's hard to completely dislike a guy who has a valid point (even if it's mixed in with other less valid points), especially when you can look at his backstory and understand how he turned out the way he did.
There's a reason, for example, that a lot of people really like and feel sympathy for Magneto despite his supervillainy, and it's not just because he's strangely hot for an old guy, or because being a fan of the villain makes some people feel cool and rebellious.
Hmmm... so, on balance, I don't disagree with arachnekallisti that writing anti-heroes and villains without falling into the trap of flaw-scrubbing them or attracting readers who will miss your point is hard, but I do think that fangirling flawed or evil or unpleasant characters is not necessarily a misaimed or innapropriate response to a text. I don't think that's what she's claiming at all, but it's what the term "misaimed fandom" is sometimes used to imply. "Snape is my favorite character and I think he got a raw deal" is a far cry from "Snape is a misunderstood saint with no flaws, and everyone in Gryffindor is slaveringly evil."
no subject
I think you're touching on sort of an unacknowledged divide in fandom about the primacy of authorial intent. A lot of fandom seems to regard people who defy the way the creators seem to be pushing as actually reading wrong, and I find it really frustrating.
Eh, basically, the thing is this:
Re: Eh, basically, the thing is this:
That's what I mean by "flaw-scrubbing" -- letting your love of a character make you elide their less pleasant character traits. Sometimes without even realizing that you're doing it. Ex: if you have a fic scenario where the character could plausibly react either in a sympathetic way or like an asshole, you the flaw-scrubbing writer pick the sympathetic way every time, and even though each individual instance isn't actually OOC, they add up to a shinier, better version of the character than actually occurs in canon.
Re: Eh, basically, the thing is this:
*head tilt *
uh... yeah. LOL, oh HP fandom, shine on, you crazy diamonds.
no subject
I'm not really all that fond of the concept of "misaimed fandom," because it seems to me that it's often the result of a fan having a different reading of a text, not a wrong reading as the term implies,
*nods* I'm not a big fan of the One True Interpretation school of thought. It feels insulting, somehow; as if I'm back in my HS Language Arts class and the teacher's explaining why we're all Reading It Wrong.
the result of a conflict between authorial intent (...) and what actually ends up in the text.
Oh, definitely this. People have read my fics in ways I never intended them, found layers of meaning that I never consciously thought of. Sometimes they've been nifty, sometimes they've been cringeworthy. But it's always been an educational experience.
There's a reason, for example, that a lot of people really like and feel sympathy for Magneto despite his supervillainy, and it's not just because he's strangely hot for an old guy, or because being a fan of the villain makes some people feel cool and rebellious.
Watching from the comfort of the movie theater I can see that what Magneto is doing wrong, but if I were a mutant in that 'verse, I'd probably end up joining his army. The fact that he's willing to put everything on the line to protect his people makes him more interesting than if he were doing the same things for power, money, or just because he was evil for some unspecified reason.
no subject
I'm not even really sure it's possible for a fandom to be "misaimed". Maybe they're just aiming for a different target.
no subject
I agree, and I suspect that where you fall vis-a-vis that divide can depend sometimes on which fandoms you've been in and how long you've bene in fandom. It's easier to accept/believe in authorial Word of God as the final word on canon in a single author fandom like Harry Potter than it is in a tv show where you know that what you see on the screen is the product of several different writers, filtered through the actors' performances. And it's even harder with comics, where a single title or character has had dozens of different writers, some of whom started out as fans themselves. Snape in the HP books is pretty much the product solely of JKR, whereas Batman at this point is the work of a cast of hundreds (and sometimes it shows *cough*LexLuthor'stwoorthreethreedifferentcomicscanonbackstories*cough*).
no subject