#I seriously wonder if people reconsider their view of canon when they write their fanfic or not

[feynavaley]

Submitted by @lotuslol:

Hi feyna, How are you? Hope you are feeling awesome today 🐥 If not and you’re feeling down, alright, here is hug 😊💜

Okay, regarding your hate following question. Yes, some people can follow the things they hate/dislike because it frustrates them to no end and they feel the need to deal with it. How would I know? Well, I used to be one when I was a younger teen, hahaha. 😂 And maybe I am still doing this but I am managing it..not sure, haha (there is this fanfic that drives me a little nuts because the main character deserves a hole to be punched in their eye, in my opinion. I follow it out of curiousity and annoyance now because the fanfic is well-crafted and decent.)

It all comes around having a source of annoyance that you can’t just do something with, whether erase it or talk to it or do anything. So, you keep facing it in hopes of dealing with it. Or..that was how it went for me 😂

- Does it cool down? Once you move on to something else, you don’t mind it or care about it that much after that anymore.

- Does it hurt? No. It just wastes time. So, the person who is dealing with it has to learn how to just let go of their annoyance and move on.

- Is it really that hard to let the matter go and just ignore it? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Some people are just that silly ( Example: me :D) Or they are not silly, it is just their way of dealing with problems, which sometimes works in real life, but it doesn’t work well with this type of situations.

- Do you stop hating? Not really. It depends, there are things that you will hate forever but you learnt to just ignore it, and there are things that you start to warm up to until you hate them less. As long as it doesn’t filter down to bullying, it is silly and fine.

I hope I delivered a good answer. It is not the most deep or academic answer, but it is my personal experience with this topic. Hope your day was nice 🌼😊

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Hi again!

Sorry, forgot to tell you that some fire of hate can decrease into something more toleratable often. So, even if someone didn’t like Canada (don’t know why) or his fans (kinda understandable because maybe they met some people who made them hate the character), maybe a genuinely lovely blog like yours could change their mind or at least make them less hateful :D.

Hope you have a nice day, again :)

———

Thank you so much for another super sweet message! 💖💖

And yeah, I know some people do the hate-reading thing. I’ve done it a few times too. But, haven’t we all? I wouldn’t consider reading something where you don’t like the main character but enjoy the story and general writing hate-reading, though. There’s plenty of books where I would like to slap the main character, but I still enjoy the book itself. And sometimes, even if I hate a character’s personality and choices, I still enjoy how he/she is written for solid characterization. A good characterization and a likeable character don’t always overlap. 

And to be honest, I’m not bothered if somebody does it with my blog. It’s their time they’re wasting like that, after all. I can’t imagine how this might make somebody happy, I would think it only makes them harbour bitterness instead, but to each his own.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also have no issues with people disliking character I instead like, obviously! There are infinite reasons one might not like a character, and each one is valid. I might (and the might is big) politely disagree with them only if they justify disliking that character by clinging to a blatantly incorrect characterization and calling it canon, but that’s it. Besides, we’re still talking about fictional characters, they’re not worthy seriously fighting over.

My perplexity came with people liking positive posts about a character they recently claimed they hated. I really wondered if I was missing something. It doesn’t truly matter, it’s just that, especially in fics, I use likes to measure how many people have enjoyed the chapter – but, if some people use likes in a different way, I have to reconsider how I view them as well. That’s all there is to it, nothing important.

Anyways, thank you so much for your detailed explanation, I really appreciate it! 😊 And I hope you’ll have an amazing day!! 💕😘 (And have a hug as well)

[tvwriteups]

The Fic Nobody Wants

Gripes about fics that people do apparently want...

...and it’s a ridiculously long post.

I think I’ve only come across 4-5 R/S fics where both characters felt mostly in-character. There’s just something in how the characters are portrayed in most fics that...well, actually inspire me in trying to write “The Fic Nobody Wants”.

The biggie is that my interpretation of the characters feels so far off of the majority of fanfic writers.

I take major issue with how Shaw is written. But then I feel like canon has written that character the most inconsistently out of the six leads. I have problems with how fic writers write Root but Shaw is a whole other level.

Oh, where to start. (And this is the kind of stuff that would make the fandom mad.)

Like, I get it that people are writing for free and writing for fun. What I don’t get is people believing or encouraging one another to believe that canon has these characters this way -- that the essence of these characters and their relationship is being portrayed in the fanfics.

How to put this simply? How is it that I see these characters in canon?

Root loves Shaw because Shaw is pretty much the opposite of what Root said about people to Harold in “The Contingency” (2x01) and “/” (3x17). The stuff that Root hated about people or felt disappointed in about people are completely absent in Shaw...because Shaw’s personality disorder.

And Shaw’s feelings for Root? Well, canon doesn’t really give us much of a storyline beyond “she cares”, she’s very protective of her when she thinks she’s going to get herself killed, and that Root wouldn’t stop “bugging her.” And the show makes her her “safe place” and all that stuff. I don’t know, I can go many directions on what the show’s canon showed us because I think different writers had very different takes on the character.

So what is it in fanfic that I object to?

1. That Root changes Shaw all that much. The finale pretty much tells us that Root loved how Shaw was a “constant.” Root didn’t want to change Shaw. The only thing that really changed was how Shaw saw herself. Oh, and the fact that she hears out people before she goes on and kills them anyway. (Seriously, we’re introduced to Shaw killing Aquino without hearing his explanation and one of the last five minutes of the show we see Shaw listen to Blackwell before killing him. Heck, she even states how she’s “different” in that scene before she goes about doing the thing she would’ve done anyway.)

And, to be fair here, Shaw doesn’t really change Root either. Root changes because of the Machine.

2. That Shaw can’t control her anger and is portrayed as feeling tons of emotions but not knowing what to do with them. Before Samaritan psychological torture, where do we see Shaw’s emotions going crazy? We don’t. She goes a little full-tilt trying to rescue Gen and she fiercely beats up someone after leaving Carter’s funeral but that’s pretty much it. The anger she expresses is pretty much controlled. Heck, even in “6,741″ she’s pretty much controlled until the sim has her shoot Greer. Then she spirals. The thing is, she spirals because she feels that she can’t control herself. You know the story about the Qatari roundabout that Lambert mentions near the beginning of “6,741″? That was about Shaw not being able to control her body so she continually put herself through the torture of the roundabout until she could control herself.

All this to say that I don’t think Shaw ever completely loses herself around Root...which is how a lot of fics seem to portray their dynamic.

And the emotions? It’s not that Shaw has lost control over her emotions. That Root is just too sexy that the woman can’t help herself. What gets Shaw angry is the lack of emotions she’s feeling or, maybe more accurately, that she doesn’t feel emotions the way other people do (or what she thinks other people expect of her). It’s not that she completely misunderstands feelings in other people. She simply doesn’t feel the same. She feels somewhat but it just isn’t the same.

And, worse than all of that, are moments where she gets all weak-kneed and gets all sexy/horny around pretty much any person she finds attractive in the fics. That brings me to...

3. Shaw is portrayed as a hedonistic bisexual and the “3 night rule” is taken seriously. I don’t know if it’s because she’s bisexual (with it being a common trope that bisexuals have sex with pretty much anybody and everybody) or people just like this idea that she’s going around and having these meaningless hookups. Not to project and/or go all TMI here but as someone with muted emotions who finds sex fun but doesn’t like dealing with relationships because inevitably someone gets upset with my lack of feels, it doesn’t really go hand-in-hand that I’d be a sexual free spirit of any sort.

It’s not that I’m not sex-positive or anything. It’s just that I don’t think Shaw is running around and hooking up with a lot of people. Why? Well, look at the middle of the conversation that Shaw has with Reese -- the same conversation where this damn 3-night rule comes from. Reese asks her if she’s been on any big dates. Shaw replies that she’s “been too busy saving the world from bad guys.”

I don’t know. Maybe these fics are written by people who feel overly-horny. The thing is, I kind of see this (as well as part of the flashback in “The Devil’s Share” as well as that part in “Liberty” where she shoots the guy through the brick wall) as Shaw getting most of her satisfaction out of her technical mastery of badassery.

The woman could have booty-called Matthew Reed or Tomas Koroa. She didn’t. She smirked and went on her way.

4. That it feels forgotten that Root killed people when they were inconveniences and that she was a huge misanthrope. Here’s the thing with Root and Shaw. Shaw may not personally care about most people, she’s still all about protecting the good people from the bad guys. Root? Root starts out thinking that there are no good guys. The world is “infinite, chaotic, and cold.” Part of why she wanted to ally with Finch when she first kidnapped him was because she believed she found a kindred spirit in Finch. They were smarter than everyone else and, in Root’s eyes, Finch created the perfect god.

The scary thing in that scene wasn’t necessarily Root but the fact that Harold sort of agreed with her.

So it bugs me when Root begins a lot of these fics like some doe-eyed innocent.

But, also, that she already sort of openly embraced having all these emotions before the Machine (or Harold, or Shaw) came into her life. Or, really, she pushed her way into their existences. This is a woman who flippantly wished that she was a sociopath so she wouldn’t have feelings.

5. Remarkably candid conversations about their relationship. Because how does this work in canon? Things are stated indirectly and Shaw often deflects (”Annoyed attempt to deflect subtext.” / “Mildly embarrassed defensiveness bordering on hostility.”). The Machine has to tell Shaw what Root sincerely thought of her.

The most direct Root ever gets is in “If-Then-Else” is when she thinks she’s gonna die and in “Sotto Voce” when Shaw threatens to kill herself. And even then, she’s a bit roundabout about it, whether that’s CBS S&P or how they really wanted to write the character. In “If-Then-Else” she talks as if it’s fated by the universe that they should be together. In “Sotto Voce” it’s more “I can’t live without you” (which is kind of emotionally manipulative in any other context but not for that scene). Heck, in “Prophets”, she leaves it to Finch to relay her message (which we assume is to tell Shaw to Root loves her because anything else doesn’t make sense).

But Shaw? The thing I like about Shaw in this show is that you get her through her actions. So to have her wanting to talk to Root about their relationship feels so far out in left field to me. She “speaks” through actions.

I’m guessing these “relationship conversations” happen as a form of wish fulfillment on the part of the fanfic writers. But if you’re gonna choose to go that way and have them have that sort of conversation, at least build it up.

I need to take a breather for now but there’s more...but maybe more in terms of general fic writing than pairing-specific stuff.