Apparently, there’s a hot fanfiction debate I’ve missed. I’ve accidentally avoided the fracas on Tumblr and non-AO3 fansites, and I don’t engage that much on Twitter and other ‘instant’ social media.
People seem to hate original characters (OCs) in fanfiction. The mere inclusion of a tag of ‘OC’ in a story somehow seems to bring out the worst calls of ‘author insert!’, ‘Mary Sue!’ or ‘Marty Stu!‘ The assumption is that, most times, OCs in a fandom story tend more to indicate the author’s lower skill and wish-fulfillment fantasies, rather than heralding a coherent and entertaining story.
That assumption is not baseless, in my opinion. I can tell within five paragraphs or less whether a fanfiction story with prominent OCs is going to be tasty reading or a waste of my effort. Many times – though I haven’t bothered to numerically organize the data – the presence of OCs can be an indicator of an awkward story.
But my benchmark isn’t whether or not an author uses an OC, it’s whether or not the author can write. Period. I’m thrilled to read fan stories with well-written OCs who act as great plot movers and foils to the canon characters. I cringe when I see yet another clumsy author-insertion of the bright, brave girl (or boy) swooping in to save the denizens of Hogwarts – or Lothlorien or Avengers Tower, or whatever fandom – from themselves. Especially if there are other signs of sloppy writing.
Fanfiction has a structural advantage in that the worldbuilding is often complete already, and writers only need to plug in their variants of characters and situations. In such settings, original characters not only have to be well-written themselves, they have to ‘blend’ with the canon characters. This isn’t easy to do for newer writers.
Currently, I have two benchmarks for great original characters, at least in Avengers fandom. I’ve written about these stories in my fan fiction rec list, but here are specific reasons I love them:
Lucy Piero from Scifigrl47’s ‘Fairytales and Clockwork Hearts’. Lucy is a brilliant, quick-thinking young engineer: fiercely passionate about science, deeply aware of her luck hinging on an internship at StarkIndustries, and caught up in a plot of shapeshifting and magical revenge. All because she’s had the bad sense to fall in love with a quirky boy who is much more than he seems. She has a boss speech about the legacy of survival that any minority reader or writer should learn and internalize, and some of the best lines in Scifigrl47’s already amazing Toasterverse/Tales of the Bots epic series.
Alex Richardson from VenusM’s ‘Born From the Earth’. Alex is an Omega like his universe’s version of Tony Stark, but utterly unlike Stark in key areas. Alex is playful but deadly, having turned his sweet nature into a weapon. His loyalty to Tony is unswerving, his friendship to Captain American deep and honest, his recognition of the utter hell his society visits on Omegas answered by his black-market crime-ring attempts to make their lives better through illicit chemistry, corporate espionage, and some targeted assassinations if necessary. Alex, in the world of BFtE, is as real a character as Tony Stark or Steve Rogers – and that’s what makes him strong enough to carry his own part of the story.
These are just two examples that I can think of in scribbling down notes for this post.
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I love fanfiction not only because it is a guilty pleasure, but because it keeps challenging my fossilized assumptions. In 1991 I assumed all fanfiction was the horrible Trek stuff, slavish MZB Darkover stories, or treacly Misty Lackey-inspired Valdemar author-insertion pieces I’d seen at media conventions. I even wrote an anti-fanfiction filk song about it, though you’ll never find a recording of ‘There Are No Black Companions in Valdemar’.
Then a friend introduced me to fanfiction I could handle, much of it astonishingly well written. A few years later, I even crafted poems and artwork* for several Lackey fanzines. I learned to set aside those first assumptions in the face of overwhelming evidence that, yes, fanfiction was real writing.
VenusM’s ‘Born From the Earth’, as I’ve explained earlier, completely shredded my disdain for much of the Alpha/Beta/Omega fanfiction and original erotic romance I’d seen before. Rather, I still loathe the bad stuff, but now I see how the concept can be handled flawlessly.
My ultimate point: quality should matter. I’m tired of lower standards, in fanfiction or original fiction.
We shouldn’t a champion a bad story just because it contains our favorite tropes. (Like the Chocolate Effect: horrible domestic chocolate is only good when that’s all you can get, and loses ground after one discovers single source chocolate and the better examples of the chocolate world.)
We shouldn’t excuse bad writing for either canon or original characters.
* To firmly establish 1) my bad art and 2) my two decades of messing about in fanfiction, go here and look at the cover art for the first group of Companions’ Grove fanzines.
Thank you for all of this, but MOST ESPECIALLY that I had NO idea that Tales of the Bots was an ongoing series. If this stupid cold doesn’t leave me alone tomorrow, then I have a lovely, lovely, LOVELY plan.
If you haven’t been introduced to the glorious madness that is the Toasterverse, ‘Tales of the Bots’ is a lovely place to start. Happy reading!
I wrote a Transformers fanfic with a human OC partly to go beyond some of the tropes – that a human OC wants nothing more than to hang out with a robot, that she’ll turn the most evil Decepticon into a lovestruck woobie, that the story will describe how awesome she looks in her Hot Topic outfit, etc.
The story was a ton of fun to write, but I know some readers were wary going in. I’m sure some might never have tried it if I didn’t have quite a few other fics starring the robots, so the readers knew they weren’t in for the literary equivalent of “Presenting Shia LeBoeuf and Megan Fox… oh, with a few guest appearances by the Transformers too”.
That’s why fan fiction is such a great cauldron for experimental writing. You put in the time to ‘hook’ your readers, and make them trust your skill. Once you achieved that, you could indulge in the corny crack parts of fandom.