I have a bad case of fic!rage at the moment.

[jaina47]

Do you know what makes a good AU?  It's writing characters in a different situation and showing how those characters would react in different circumstances.

Know what it's not?  It's not putting two unrecognizable people, who have not the slightest, vaguest resemblance to the characters that I know and love, and slapping character names on them and putting them in a completely different situation.  

That's why say, a crossover with Harry Potter can work and something as simple as a character choosing left instead of right can be epic fail.

Comments

[jaina47.livejournal.com]

I don't know. AU can accomplish a lot of things. Anything about the setting that has been changed really. Alternate universe is pretty open. It can be as simple as say Ziva choosing not to stay with NCIS and going back to Israel after one episode or as complex as Ziva and Abby being medieval pirates together, or even Ziva and Abby suddenly attending Hogwarts or something.

The point I was actually trying to make was about characterization. I've seen...well, look I've seen a Guiding Light/Star Wars crossover that works for the most part. But that's because of all the things that changed the characters were still true to themselves and the way that they usually act on the show while they were in the Star Wars universe.

Olivia was still sarcastic, left of the moral center, loves her daughter more than anything, etc. while Natalia is still practically a saint who always has to do the right thing and feels terrible guilt when she doesn't. The settings changed, the characters were still themselves. That's all I was getting at.

[demoka.livejournal.com]

now I'm just scared to write the characters in any fanfiction all wrong.... *but I will perservere and practice!* XP But yes, I can see why you'd get angry about it.

Although I must admit, I think at times, my fics don't always fit the characters as much as the characters fit the fic, if you know what I mean

[jaina47.livejournal.com]

Nah, don't be scared. Fan fiction is supposed to be fun. :D Practice is what it's all about. I still get nervous as hell about what I write, very nearly every time I write something and just the other day both of my betas told me I needed to take something out and fix it because it just was not working. And that's cool. That's why I love betas: because I would rather fix it before I show it to the whole internet and if something is "off" about a story I've written, I'd like to know.

I mean, a story is to some extent your personal view of the characters, their actions and storyline, but at the same time they should also be true to their own natures as established in canon. Heh. But then you could argue that almost all femslash that starts as subtext shouldn't be written, because it's not "true to the characters" as written.

Yeah, and I'd like to emphasize that I wasn't angry at the author. So far as I can tell the author is a perfectly fine person, it's just the fic that has me all in a bother. I happen to be very fond of the characters and their story and I didn't want to see them "ruined" in that way.

[demoka.livejournal.com]

Mmm... that is true! XP But ah, how I love subtext.


and to your last paragraph, oh, okay. I guess everyone just has a certain way of seeing characters and sometimes it doesn't quite mesh with others.