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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
In the last post, I talked about seeing characters as collections of tropes put together. This can seem a bit reductive, as characters are more than their tropes, and the interactions between tropes and other characters is often equally as important to building a character that the audience knows, loves, and is unique enough to be distinguished among the cast.
Here's the thing, though. A large amount of fanwork, as we pointed out earlier, is based in speculative questions. "What if the hero did fall to the forces of evil?" "What would it have been like if i was the Hero's female best friend were the real hero?" "What would happen if [x] and [y] [fought/banged/seduced/allied/teamed up?" (That last one has a lot of canon answers if you're looking at the shared universes of comics and graphic novel productions, depending on the needs of the overarching mythological arc.) Several works will stay within their source's universe, but engage in a few small changes to the story as we know it to produce the desired characters they want to work with. Or rearrange the tropes and identities of the characters and work from there. "What if" stories are a lot of fun to write and read, and one of the things that ties them together is someone taking the time to think through what the ramifications of those changes would be. If the setting and the author are interested in that, anyway -- there's plenty of perfectly good "Plot? What Plot?" material out there and others that take either the MST3K Mantra or Bellisario's Maxim as their guiding principles (along with several of the various Rules of [Z] tropes, where things are handwaved away as to whether or not they work because it looks cool/it's funny/etc.). There's no need to have to plot out justifications for everything being the way it is and writing a voluminous backstory for your work if you don't want to (and sometimes that can be a trap to avoid actually writing the thing). You certainly can, if that helps, and the longer a work goes on, the more likely it is to accumulate a certain amount of this just to make sure that it holds together against itself, but it's not necessary. As I told that small who had done all of that work, it's lovely, it's wonderful, and now it needs to be put to service in writing the actual story/ies that are going to come from all of that research.
Some of the "what if" stories, though, are the ones that bring together characters from different universes together, through any sort of manner, and have them interact. Comics properties are rife with these crossovers, which are fairly easy to do when all of the characters are housed under one company's aegis. (Which, incidentally, has been why the Marvel Cinematic Universe has operated the way it has - Spider-Man was sold to Sony some time ago, so Peter Parker's appearance in an MCU film had to be negotiated. Similarly, a certain amount of the X-Men were owned by 20th Century Fox, and so they weren't around, either (and Deadpool makes fun of this in his own fourth-wall-breaking sort of way) without extensive negotiations between the two studios about appearances, compensation, and the like.) Crossover issues and series are pretty easy to do, and work as a way of cross-promotion of the titles involved, in an attempt to get people interested in one character's books to start reading another character's books and spend more money that way. It doesn't always work, and crossovers and their respective multiveresal events sometimes provoke a backlash from the fans who want their stories to stay self-contained in one book so they don't have to go buy a run of six other titles just to get everything that happens in this plot arc. (The trade paperback compilations, if a story makes it to them, help mitigate this issue, but that also means having to wait to see that arc through.)
Fanworks take it one step further, though, and more than happily run crossovers between completely separate properties that would be pretty nightmarish for rights negotitations if they were even to come into existence as an "official" anything. Steven Universe characters in the RWBY setting? No problem. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder investigating a strange event with the assistance of Olivia Dunham and the Fringe division? Sure. Harry Potter taking a trip to the Disc and meeting DEATH and his granddaughter? Sounds fun. And it's not just two franchises put to work - some settings work equally well for massive multi-franchise crossovers, like the Triwizard Tournament, the Vytal Festival, or any other setting where visitors could be equally from around the block as around the galaxy. (Super Smash Brothers, the video game, is essentially this - "What happens when we get the characters from first-party Nintendo titles, along with selected guests from other studios, together in an all-out fighting game whose plot is essentially 'a small child is playing with their dolls and imagining what this setting would be like.'?" All sorts of characters could drop into and out of the Smash universe, and the characters inside wouldn't bat an eye.)
Crossovers work on the idea of putting an established character(s) into a new setting and seeing how they work with an environment that may be radically different than their own. This is where having your trope characterization can come in handy. Some characters are more likely to charge off into the wilderness, others are going to make assumptions about the new space (that often turn out to be very wrong, and sometimes injuriously so), and some will want to get out of here as soon as possible. Some are talkers, some are fighters, and some are going to seem like they don't understand at all, except it turns out they have the best handle on the new setting out of all of the characters, because they've been patiently observing the whole time and building a model in their own heads about what's going on. Selecting which tropes apply to those characters helps them get integrated into the new setting in believable ways.
There's a special crossover set that deserves its own bit of attention. The fusion crossover idea (usually just mentioned as a fusion) doesn't pluck characters from their original space and drop them in a new one. Instead, it casts the characters from Universe A into the various roles of Universe B, creating an amalgam (fusion!) of character traits that may be applicable to the composite character created. For example, if you wanted to fuse Steven Universe and Harry Potter, you might assign Steven the role of Harry, since they're both kids with magical powers and destinies that haven't had the training on how to use them until much later on in life, as well as (at least one) absent parents and being raised by others. The trick to a fusion crossover, though, is that the characters from Universe A still have to remain recognizably themselves, even as they take on the characters of Universe B. A friend of mine said "Peridot is the Draco Malfoy of Steven Universe," which is to say they share certain characteristics, but Peridot has to remain Peridot -- brash, hotheaded, and usually clueless about the social impact of her words -- while also being Draco, who is much more concerned about class status and who doesn't generally get personally engaged in something if he doesn't have to. The two of them both like to think of themselves as the smartest in the room, or at least the most powerful, despite it not being anywhere close to true at all, so Peridot!Draco might play up that trait and their shared swiftness to resort to insults as the way of expressing distate with someone. There are still some decisions that have to be made, though - does Peridot's hotheaded nature come through as a way of making her recognizable? How does living in Draco's circumstances, where there's power and money and henchmen available, change Peridot, who generally has had to rely on the threat of power from Gems stronger than her, or mechanical advantages, to get what she wants? This is another of those times where figuring out the tropes of your characters can sometimes help in crafting them in a new setting. Making a decision about which tropes are primary and which are secondary (or nonexistent) can help build the framework of a composite character, or give some ideas on how a character might react if dumped into a world where everything they know is wrong and they have to quickly rebuild their view of the world.
One of the things that's been really helpful to me when it comes to thinking about characterization, and especially on how to approach characterization in new settings, is the idea of Three-Point Characterization. Any given character in any given medium has a multitude of mannerisms, tropes, and concepts attached to them. Generally speaking, though, there are some of them that come through more strongly than others to the viewer/reader. The creator may have some in mind, but once a thing gets out into the wild, the viewer/reader contributes as much, if not more, to how they understand the character and what parts of that character are the most important bits. Three-Point Characterization suggests that people have at most three parts of a character that they consider absolutely core to that character, and that if a creator touches on all of the points that the reader considers to be part of a character, then the character reads correctly. If there's a mismatch between the creator and the reader, then something feels off about the character, which can be anything from "this doesn't feel right" to "oh great gods of Fandom, smite this foole who has taken my character and destroyed them."
How does this help when writing new settings for characters, or engaging in crossovers, fusions, and other works of transplantation? Well, if there are really only three points of core characterization, that makes the rest of it mutable in at least one way or another, right? So long as the truly unchangeable bits stay together, it's still that character, yeah?
How do you put Peridot in Draco's role? Figure out what makes Peridot Peridot to you, preserve those elements. Figure out what makes Draco Draco to you, preserve those elements as well, toss them in the blender and sort out any contradictions. It sounds easy, but that's the essence of pulling off the successful fusion. Or crossover, for that matter, because you can keep the core elements of the character intact, and use them to inform how they react to the new setting, while making them capable of growing and learning and changing to the environment around them as needed. And yes, tropes are shorthand, but they're still effective shorthand for when you want to keep an idea in your head without having to keep all of the detailed bits together. You can set your character as "Trope [Z], but not [A] or [K]", or "Trope [J], but really heavy emphasis on the [Q]" and go from there in helping keep them intact when blending them.
At least, that's how I do it. Your mileage may vary, and it'll bet you have some neat ways of doing these things that I haven't even considered. Let's have a conversation about it.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]In the last post, I talked about seeing characters as collections of tropes put together. This can seem a bit reductive, as characters are more than their tropes, and the interactions between tropes and other characters is often equally as important to building a character that the audience knows, loves, and is unique enough to be distinguished among the cast.
Here's the thing, though. A large amount of fanwork, as we pointed out earlier, is based in speculative questions. "What if the hero did fall to the forces of evil?" "What would it have been like if i was the Hero's female best friend were the real hero?" "What would happen if [x] and [y] [fought/banged/seduced/allied/teamed up?" (That last one has a lot of canon answers if you're looking at the shared universes of comics and graphic novel productions, depending on the needs of the overarching mythological arc.) Several works will stay within their source's universe, but engage in a few small changes to the story as we know it to produce the desired characters they want to work with. Or rearrange the tropes and identities of the characters and work from there. "What if" stories are a lot of fun to write and read, and one of the things that ties them together is someone taking the time to think through what the ramifications of those changes would be. If the setting and the author are interested in that, anyway -- there's plenty of perfectly good "Plot? What Plot?" material out there and others that take either the MST3K Mantra or Bellisario's Maxim as their guiding principles (along with several of the various Rules of [Z] tropes, where things are handwaved away as to whether or not they work because it looks cool/it's funny/etc.). There's no need to have to plot out justifications for everything being the way it is and writing a voluminous backstory for your work if you don't want to (and sometimes that can be a trap to avoid actually writing the thing). You certainly can, if that helps, and the longer a work goes on, the more likely it is to accumulate a certain amount of this just to make sure that it holds together against itself, but it's not necessary. As I told that small who had done all of that work, it's lovely, it's wonderful, and now it needs to be put to service in writing the actual story/ies that are going to come from all of that research.
Some of the "what if" stories, though, are the ones that bring together characters from different universes together, through any sort of manner, and have them interact. Comics properties are rife with these crossovers, which are fairly easy to do when all of the characters are housed under one company's aegis. (Which, incidentally, has been why the Marvel Cinematic Universe has operated the way it has - Spider-Man was sold to Sony some time ago, so Peter Parker's appearance in an MCU film had to be negotiated. Similarly, a certain amount of the X-Men were owned by 20th Century Fox, and so they weren't around, either (and Deadpool makes fun of this in his own fourth-wall-breaking sort of way) without extensive negotiations between the two studios about appearances, compensation, and the like.) Crossover issues and series are pretty easy to do, and work as a way of cross-promotion of the titles involved, in an attempt to get people interested in one character's books to start reading another character's books and spend more money that way. It doesn't always work, and crossovers and their respective multiveresal events sometimes provoke a backlash from the fans who want their stories to stay self-contained in one book so they don't have to go buy a run of six other titles just to get everything that happens in this plot arc. (The trade paperback compilations, if a story makes it to them, help mitigate this issue, but that also means having to wait to see that arc through.)
Fanworks take it one step further, though, and more than happily run crossovers between completely separate properties that would be pretty nightmarish for rights negotitations if they were even to come into existence as an "official" anything. Steven Universe characters in the RWBY setting? No problem. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder investigating a strange event with the assistance of Olivia Dunham and the Fringe division? Sure. Harry Potter taking a trip to the Disc and meeting DEATH and his granddaughter? Sounds fun. And it's not just two franchises put to work - some settings work equally well for massive multi-franchise crossovers, like the Triwizard Tournament, the Vytal Festival, or any other setting where visitors could be equally from around the block as around the galaxy. (Super Smash Brothers, the video game, is essentially this - "What happens when we get the characters from first-party Nintendo titles, along with selected guests from other studios, together in an all-out fighting game whose plot is essentially 'a small child is playing with their dolls and imagining what this setting would be like.'?" All sorts of characters could drop into and out of the Smash universe, and the characters inside wouldn't bat an eye.)
Crossovers work on the idea of putting an established character(s) into a new setting and seeing how they work with an environment that may be radically different than their own. This is where having your trope characterization can come in handy. Some characters are more likely to charge off into the wilderness, others are going to make assumptions about the new space (that often turn out to be very wrong, and sometimes injuriously so), and some will want to get out of here as soon as possible. Some are talkers, some are fighters, and some are going to seem like they don't understand at all, except it turns out they have the best handle on the new setting out of all of the characters, because they've been patiently observing the whole time and building a model in their own heads about what's going on. Selecting which tropes apply to those characters helps them get integrated into the new setting in believable ways.
There's a special crossover set that deserves its own bit of attention. The fusion crossover idea (usually just mentioned as a fusion) doesn't pluck characters from their original space and drop them in a new one. Instead, it casts the characters from Universe A into the various roles of Universe B, creating an amalgam (fusion!) of character traits that may be applicable to the composite character created. For example, if you wanted to fuse Steven Universe and Harry Potter, you might assign Steven the role of Harry, since they're both kids with magical powers and destinies that haven't had the training on how to use them until much later on in life, as well as (at least one) absent parents and being raised by others. The trick to a fusion crossover, though, is that the characters from Universe A still have to remain recognizably themselves, even as they take on the characters of Universe B. A friend of mine said "Peridot is the Draco Malfoy of Steven Universe," which is to say they share certain characteristics, but Peridot has to remain Peridot -- brash, hotheaded, and usually clueless about the social impact of her words -- while also being Draco, who is much more concerned about class status and who doesn't generally get personally engaged in something if he doesn't have to. The two of them both like to think of themselves as the smartest in the room, or at least the most powerful, despite it not being anywhere close to true at all, so Peridot!Draco might play up that trait and their shared swiftness to resort to insults as the way of expressing distate with someone. There are still some decisions that have to be made, though - does Peridot's hotheaded nature come through as a way of making her recognizable? How does living in Draco's circumstances, where there's power and money and henchmen available, change Peridot, who generally has had to rely on the threat of power from Gems stronger than her, or mechanical advantages, to get what she wants? This is another of those times where figuring out the tropes of your characters can sometimes help in crafting them in a new setting. Making a decision about which tropes are primary and which are secondary (or nonexistent) can help build the framework of a composite character, or give some ideas on how a character might react if dumped into a world where everything they know is wrong and they have to quickly rebuild their view of the world.
One of the things that's been really helpful to me when it comes to thinking about characterization, and especially on how to approach characterization in new settings, is the idea of Three-Point Characterization. Any given character in any given medium has a multitude of mannerisms, tropes, and concepts attached to them. Generally speaking, though, there are some of them that come through more strongly than others to the viewer/reader. The creator may have some in mind, but once a thing gets out into the wild, the viewer/reader contributes as much, if not more, to how they understand the character and what parts of that character are the most important bits. Three-Point Characterization suggests that people have at most three parts of a character that they consider absolutely core to that character, and that if a creator touches on all of the points that the reader considers to be part of a character, then the character reads correctly. If there's a mismatch between the creator and the reader, then something feels off about the character, which can be anything from "this doesn't feel right" to "oh great gods of Fandom, smite this foole who has taken my character and destroyed them."
How does this help when writing new settings for characters, or engaging in crossovers, fusions, and other works of transplantation? Well, if there are really only three points of core characterization, that makes the rest of it mutable in at least one way or another, right? So long as the truly unchangeable bits stay together, it's still that character, yeah?
How do you put Peridot in Draco's role? Figure out what makes Peridot Peridot to you, preserve those elements. Figure out what makes Draco Draco to you, preserve those elements as well, toss them in the blender and sort out any contradictions. It sounds easy, but that's the essence of pulling off the successful fusion. Or crossover, for that matter, because you can keep the core elements of the character intact, and use them to inform how they react to the new setting, while making them capable of growing and learning and changing to the environment around them as needed. And yes, tropes are shorthand, but they're still effective shorthand for when you want to keep an idea in your head without having to keep all of the detailed bits together. You can set your character as "Trope [Z], but not [A] or [K]", or "Trope [J], but really heavy emphasis on the [Q]" and go from there in helping keep them intact when blending them.
At least, that's how I do it. Your mileage may vary, and it'll bet you have some neat ways of doing these things that I haven't even considered. Let's have a conversation about it.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-10 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 02:03 am (UTC)Figure out what makes Peridot Peridot to you, preserve those elements. Figure out what makes Draco Draco to you, preserve those elements as well, toss them in the blender and sort out any contradictions. It sounds easy, but that's the essence of pulling off the successful fusion.
This is on my mind because I've been talking over fusion details with a friend lately for something she's writing, but to me, the most important element by far is keeping the essential details of the original character. That is, what's interesting to me about AUs and fusions is seeing how the canon characters are different under different circumstances. I'm not familiar with Peridot as a character, but as a reader, I really don't want Draco characterization elements infused into the other character; what I want is to see what the other character would be like if they were raised like Draco, and how they might end up similar and different.
I'm not sure if this sets me apart from the majority of readers or not, but I do know that I have a knee-jerk "do not want" reaction to fusions in which the canon characters are being warped too drastically into their AU roles. I would much rather see the fusion canon flex and bend to accommodate in-character behavior from the characters I'm reading it for.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2018-12-21 09:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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