Apr 29 2009
Salvaging Canonical Characters
For many people, pre-existing settings are the way to go, gaming or writing. They save a lot of the work of world creation, freeing up the adapter to focus on plot or to create little details that would take too long to work out otherwise; they give the audience a background of things they know about the world, saving time and effort on exposition from the adapter and active research from the players; and it’s easier to find someone “in the know” to bring in as a conspirator, as people with an idea how the world works are more common.
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But there’s one major problem with pre-existing settings: most of them come with pre-existing characters. Leaving aside the issue of managing to sound true to a character who existed with someone else’s voice, there are a lot of reasons why they might just not work with the adapter’s approach to the world. Sometimes they just aren’t detailed enough, or you just can’t wrap your head around them. Some would, as originally written, kill your plot just by existing. Some (particularly in games that get reissued; this happens to me a lot) were fine a few supplements ago, but the new details just don’t work. Still others are just fine except that their original characterization incorporated a rather obnoxious stereotype that really isn’t necessary to the character (though this is highly subjective).
The easiest way of dealing with these people is to avoid them. The adaptation might be in the wrong region for the canonical character; conversely, the canonical character may currently be off solving a problem more appropriate to his skills elsewhere. Some people just write them out entirely, though that can backfire if the character’s impact on the surrounding world isn’t also written out or otherwise compensated for. Some kill them off as soon as possible. (With some of the canonicals out there, I can’t blame them.) Some just change whatever they need to and call it a project.
But some people try to write them in a way that the audience won’t object to, turning working with the canonical character into a personal challenge. The difficulty, of course, is the audience itself, and the audience’s expectations. How do you work around people who “know” the character at least as well as you do?
First, figure out who the canonical character is. This is the most important step: changing the essence of the character is the surest way to get called out for adaptation decay. The character’s mindset is likely to be one of the most unchangeable features; you can’t just turn a sociopathic zealot on a one man holy war into a friend to all. Similarly, known major backstory events and existing relationships are probably not to be too heavily altered. If you must change something (and if so, I recommend making sure people know it’s likely/going to happen; people can get touchy when their expectations are foiled), it’s best to leave it at the one change and whatever ripples that change might have, so people can still accept the results. Some of the essence of the character is what the character isn’t; keep this also in mind.
An exception to the no essential changes rule is if you have a time gap to play with. People aren’t static; the untrained pick up new skills or give up on their studies, the perceptive realize their impact on people and (usually) adjust accordingly, the driven might achieve their goals and find new ones or get worn out trying. Having a time gap means that changes can be excused to a certain point; if you can explicate how the change occurred in a character-consistent manner, you can get away with a lot more than if you’re just straight-modifying the character.
Once you’ve got the essence nailed down, the rest of the details are fair game. In my games, I favor seeing how many gaps I can fill in without contradicting the source material, or how many new directions I can go in with the information I have. Is there a power or personality quirk that hasn’t been explained, or that the original creator didn’t consider all the ramifications of? How might this character be affected by whatever changes to the existing timeline you’re considering using? What about interactions with newly created characters? Are there any interesting hobbies the character could feasibly have? What are their current plans?
Note that this is mostly from a roleplayer’s standpoint, as that’s where all my experience lies. Are there any fanfic writers or readers who can tell me what their community’s other rules are? Gamers who think I missed something? Combinations of the above? Let me know what I’m missing!
Myself, I love working with canonical characters. (My first novel was Sherlock Holmes; the only good parts of the novel were the parts involving the original Sherlock Holmes characters, the rest was rubbish.) I suppose the reason is that the characters are what attracts me to particular works of fiction in the first place, so when I encounter a character I really love, I want to do more with them.
Since I’ve started writing fanfic, that’s particularly true of characters I feel don’t get enough screen time in the original work, and these are also the easiest to work with, just because there are so many blanks that you can fill in. One thing I’ve done is like Erika’s “time gap” idea, but in reverse — in my Sailor Moon fanfic, two of the villains appear long before their first (and only) appearance in the original. At first you might think they’re completely out of character — they’re even meant to be sympathetic — but then gradually you realise this is the story of how they became the way they are, and when you finally reach the scene where they first appeared, the exact same scenes suddenly have an awful lot more depth.
With more major characters, though, there are more problems. More pre-existing, well-defined traits that have a tendency to get in the way of the story you want to tell. What you do with these depends on what kind of story it is. You can get away with a lot more changes if it’s already established that you’re writing an Alternate Universe in which readers shouldn’t necessarily expect things to be the same. I have to confess, in my SM fanfic I did change one character drastically, on the grounds that doing so made the story more powerful, and if some readers hated it because of what I’d done to that character, then that would be made up for by how much better it was made for others. It goes without saying that you really have to feel sure of yourself before making that kind of change, though.
The other problem area I’ve encountered is with putting characters into relationships. It’s pretty much inevitable that if you’re giving minor characters more prominence, relationships are likely to come into it somewhere, but some readers *really* don’t like it when you do this. Perhaps the reasoning is that if two characters both exist in canon but aren’t in a relationship, in some way that implies a lack of mutual desire to be in a relationship, so going against this would be altering the characters. Myself, I don’t agree. Sure, there are plenty of characters (but they are mainly the major ones) of whom you could instantly say that they would never choose each other without a major shift in their personality. But when it comes to minor characters, here as in other areas, you have a lot more freedom to define them for yourself without contradicting anything already there.
In the end, I think you just have to do what feels right, hope the audience like it, and take their feedback into consideration if you’re lucky enough to get any. Not too different from other areas of writing, really
Nifty! I’ve always been rather fond of character explanations; I’ve found granting background is one of the best ways to make a canonical who at first glance makes no sense to cohere properly. Particularly when the source is nice enough to leave plenty of open space for appending the alterations.
The little I know about fandoms rather implied that the difficulty with relationships wasn’t so much lack of author intent as people feeling threatened by a relationship that isn’t their personal favorite. Have you ever run across that issue?
Heh. That really only comes into play with the major characters, and I’m happy to leave them in their canonical relationships, so I’ve been spared so far. Anyway, the only real shipping war there is in the Sailor Moon fandom is over the Usagi / Mamoru / Seiya triangle, and since I prefer to pretend the fifth season never existed… but yes, you do hear about these shipping wars taking place. The Harry Potter ones are the most infamous, and I just don’t know whether it’s the case that most fandoms have something similar.
An afterthought: it occurs to me that the reason Harry Potter fans were so vocal about their shipping wars was simply that the canon was incomplete, so both (or all) sides had some justification for arguing that their ship was supported by canon evidence. So, nothing quite equivalent to that will be the case with most other fandoms.