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characterisation, musings, meta
I'm in the middle of a conversation with someone who seems to really hate Rodney. As in, 'he has no good points, only bad ones and doesn't deserve to live' kind of hatred. I'm a little flabbergasted, to be honest - the same way I'm flabbergasted by people who hate Teyla or Weir...I don't think anyone hates Sheppard...
I can't be the only person who sees good points about all characters and not just the negatives. But so often I come across fans who write off a character because he/she/it is not exactly what they'd like to see in a show or because they don't like the most prominent aspect of the character.
Rodney would be a pain in the ass to live with, but the Atlantis folk manage it. Shep is a smug bastard who doesn't have much respect for authority, but his team manages him. (Can you imagine working with him, day in, day out?) And Elizabeth doesn't seem to have a gradiated dial switch when it comes to hardline stances: it's all or nothing - and I'm sure that Shep and Rodney have their share of 'women are exasperating creatures' discussions regarding her - possibly with Ronan regarding the two of them with great amusement.
Teyla wasn't being written very inclusively in S1, but neither was Ford. At least in S2, Teyla's holding the team together (see her actions in Aurora - while Shep plays the hero and Rodney does his thang, Teyla is the one keeping everyone on the ball), while Ford's gone darkside with a vengeance.
In S2, the consistent, repeating storyline for Elizabeth is that she's falling all over Sheppard. Maybe that's a good thing for the Shep/Weir shippers; I don't think it's such a great thing for the character as a character. And, frankly, I wouldn't be up for any kind of shipping if the characters weren't being used in other areas instead of listing dangerously to one side.
Maybe I'm just being too...enthusiastic about the characters - looking at both their good sides and their bad sides?
I like the characters. I like people. I like the characters as a study of people and their possibilities. Some characters speak to me stronger than others, but I'm not about to write someone off as a bad debt just because they're not the way I think they should be.
It's the little things that make characterisation real for me: Elizabeth's appeal to Simon in Letters from Pegasus, and then her careful stiffness on the trip back to Atlantis during Intruder. Ford's little jokes through the series, his initial reticence and shyness that gradually develops to the kind of leader he's seen to be in Lost Boys. Teyla's formality that reflects the self-control she holds over herself and everything she does.
My own bias in this is plain. I like characters as people. It pains me to see them written off or ignored.
The worst part in all this is that I feel as though the people who write off a character as 'uninteresting' or 'unlikable' are being lazy or bigoted. No, I don't expect everyone to have the same favourite characters or preferred 'ships, but even the less-favoured characters are fascinating studies in human nature and personality to me. When it comes to BSG, I'd happily run Gaius Baltar through with a sword, but I'd love to be able to write him.
*sigh*
I think I once said to someone that this was why I don't read much fic. Because you can tell when a writer doesn't like a character: they either don't write them at all - ever, they stick them in the background, or they smack them down through the chosen hand of justice (ie. their favourite character).
And I like the characters. All of them.
ETA after further consideration:
I like all the characters in Atlantis. Okay, so not Kavanaugh, or Kolya or the 'bad guys' - I don't 'like' them, but as a fanfic writer, I don't actually have to like all the characters. I just have to see them as a whole. All of them.
They can't embody a single aspect or they'll be flat, one-sided characters. They must act according to their previously-defined nature or they're just puppets to my whim. They should be people - adored and disliked, with their ties of affection, their terms of endearment, the people they dislike and the people who dislike them - or they're just little caricature people, no reality to them.
I don't like Kavanaugh, but the man is a fascinating character study. I didn't think much of Weir until 'Before I Sleep' but she intrigued me as the female leader of Atlantis dealing with a male military leader. I didn't like how Ford kept being given the 'yessir/nossir' lines, but as at the end of S1, I could - and did - put together a list of his quirks and personality traits - the ones that were hinted at but rarely received screentime.
If I think about it, I don't like Evil!Ford. I want back my good-natured marine Lieutenant who named things, made jokes, and was youthfully innocent. That doesn't mean that Ford's not intriguing as a bad guy, it just means that he had things that made him interesting before he 'went bad and got interesting'. But the show didn't explore it. That doesn't mean it didn't exist. Just that people weren't looking at the character as a whole.
I feel as though the people who say 'there's nothing interesting about X or Y' are missing the point. There's plenty interesting about everyone if you've got eyes to see it and a willingness to look. It would be like dismissing someone who's gay purely because they're gay: their sexuality is one aspect of who they are - they've got other things that define them other than their 'gayness'.
Just because something's not screaming in your face doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Subtlety can be a good thing.
So, yeah, holistic approaches to character definition.
I'm in the middle of a conversation with someone who seems to really hate Rodney. As in, 'he has no good points, only bad ones and doesn't deserve to live' kind of hatred. I'm a little flabbergasted, to be honest - the same way I'm flabbergasted by people who hate Teyla or Weir...I don't think anyone hates Sheppard...
I can't be the only person who sees good points about all characters and not just the negatives. But so often I come across fans who write off a character because he/she/it is not exactly what they'd like to see in a show or because they don't like the most prominent aspect of the character.
Rodney would be a pain in the ass to live with, but the Atlantis folk manage it. Shep is a smug bastard who doesn't have much respect for authority, but his team manages him. (Can you imagine working with him, day in, day out?) And Elizabeth doesn't seem to have a gradiated dial switch when it comes to hardline stances: it's all or nothing - and I'm sure that Shep and Rodney have their share of 'women are exasperating creatures' discussions regarding her - possibly with Ronan regarding the two of them with great amusement.
Teyla wasn't being written very inclusively in S1, but neither was Ford. At least in S2, Teyla's holding the team together (see her actions in Aurora - while Shep plays the hero and Rodney does his thang, Teyla is the one keeping everyone on the ball), while Ford's gone darkside with a vengeance.
In S2, the consistent, repeating storyline for Elizabeth is that she's falling all over Sheppard. Maybe that's a good thing for the Shep/Weir shippers; I don't think it's such a great thing for the character as a character. And, frankly, I wouldn't be up for any kind of shipping if the characters weren't being used in other areas instead of listing dangerously to one side.
Maybe I'm just being too...enthusiastic about the characters - looking at both their good sides and their bad sides?
I like the characters. I like people. I like the characters as a study of people and their possibilities. Some characters speak to me stronger than others, but I'm not about to write someone off as a bad debt just because they're not the way I think they should be.
It's the little things that make characterisation real for me: Elizabeth's appeal to Simon in Letters from Pegasus, and then her careful stiffness on the trip back to Atlantis during Intruder. Ford's little jokes through the series, his initial reticence and shyness that gradually develops to the kind of leader he's seen to be in Lost Boys. Teyla's formality that reflects the self-control she holds over herself and everything she does.
My own bias in this is plain. I like characters as people. It pains me to see them written off or ignored.
The worst part in all this is that I feel as though the people who write off a character as 'uninteresting' or 'unlikable' are being lazy or bigoted. No, I don't expect everyone to have the same favourite characters or preferred 'ships, but even the less-favoured characters are fascinating studies in human nature and personality to me. When it comes to BSG, I'd happily run Gaius Baltar through with a sword, but I'd love to be able to write him.
*sigh*
I think I once said to someone that this was why I don't read much fic. Because you can tell when a writer doesn't like a character: they either don't write them at all - ever, they stick them in the background, or they smack them down through the chosen hand of justice (ie. their favourite character).
And I like the characters. All of them.
ETA after further consideration:
I like all the characters in Atlantis. Okay, so not Kavanaugh, or Kolya or the 'bad guys' - I don't 'like' them, but as a fanfic writer, I don't actually have to like all the characters. I just have to see them as a whole. All of them.
They can't embody a single aspect or they'll be flat, one-sided characters. They must act according to their previously-defined nature or they're just puppets to my whim. They should be people - adored and disliked, with their ties of affection, their terms of endearment, the people they dislike and the people who dislike them - or they're just little caricature people, no reality to them.
I don't like Kavanaugh, but the man is a fascinating character study. I didn't think much of Weir until 'Before I Sleep' but she intrigued me as the female leader of Atlantis dealing with a male military leader. I didn't like how Ford kept being given the 'yessir/nossir' lines, but as at the end of S1, I could - and did - put together a list of his quirks and personality traits - the ones that were hinted at but rarely received screentime.
If I think about it, I don't like Evil!Ford. I want back my good-natured marine Lieutenant who named things, made jokes, and was youthfully innocent. That doesn't mean that Ford's not intriguing as a bad guy, it just means that he had things that made him interesting before he 'went bad and got interesting'. But the show didn't explore it. That doesn't mean it didn't exist. Just that people weren't looking at the character as a whole.
I feel as though the people who say 'there's nothing interesting about X or Y' are missing the point. There's plenty interesting about everyone if you've got eyes to see it and a willingness to look. It would be like dismissing someone who's gay purely because they're gay: their sexuality is one aspect of who they are - they've got other things that define them other than their 'gayness'.
Just because something's not screaming in your face doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Subtlety can be a good thing.
So, yeah, holistic approaches to character definition.
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