#anyhow I still ended up making this kinda vague bc I guess I still don't want too much drama on my blog

[loregoddess]

Violence breeds violence or... Something.

Anyway, 1, 16, 25 and one of your choice?

And the cycle never ends? or something I suppose.

1. the character everyone gets wrong

Oh, so many. I won't go on a list or anything bc I know 99% of them are "I seem to have a really specific way of reading characters and it seems to be very different from how pop fandom reads them" but god are there a lot. I think the most recent that I'm fine pointing out would be Ferdinand, Ashe, and Cyril from FE3H (amongst other characters), but I won't go into details bc I know you're holding off on spoilers.

Not specific to those characters but I still have a bone to pick: I think the general commonality is just that some fans latch on to some sort of surface aspect of characterization and decide the character's entire existence revolves around that instead of like, the actual nuance that the writing clearly shows otherwise. This especially irks me for characters explicitly stated or shown to mask or suppress a lot of their emotions but don't fall into the "stoic and emotionless" trope, like, whenever a character puts up some sort of façade that comes off as friendly or snarky or really anything that isn't an obvious "this is a mask to hide their inner emotions", then suddenly the fanon for the character becomes as interesting as a sack of flour. Which is an insult to sacks of flour to be honest.

Sometimes this is the fault of the writers or developers, like Fates is a goldmine of "I swear this character is really super interesting if you actually look at what writing they get" bc there's over 70 characters and I can imagine that was difficult to juggle on top of three different routes. But sometimes it's "this is literally one of the main characters who got all the writing, how did you miss all this about their characterization!!!" But again, this is very much probably a me thing, and it's not like I'm gonna fight people over how they chose to interpret a character.

16. you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

Hmm, I'm not actually wildly fond of most "tsundere" characters bc they have to be a really, really specific flavor of tsundere for me to actually enjoy the characterization, but most of the time the character is so abrasive and rude that they just come off as an asshole.

Also--and this is not a jab at literally any artist in existence who's done this--but when shippy fanart emulates Gutav Klimt's "The Kiss" I want to throw a chair across the room. It's not that it's a bad painting, or even that I dislike Klimt bc I don't! Something about the figure posing for that painting specifically just gives me whatever the visual equivalent is to hearing nails on chalkboard, and I just. Really, really think there's more romantic historic paintings with less visually grating anatomy poses out there that can be emulated for shippy art. This is very much a Me thing, so again it's not like I'm gonna tell people to not draw fanart based on "The Kiss" bc everyone's free to do whatever they please and all, but the popularity of that one historic painting specifically is wild.

25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

Oh hmm, all the "Fates is bad" complaints (it really wasn't), almost everything around 3H, people comparing Engage's art-style to Genshin (it's not similar at all), complaints about how simple Engage's story/characters are (they aren't, but I'm not here to write a narrative analysis).

As a general rule for not-FE-specific examples, people ragging on what I call "black sheep games" (games in a series that are almost universally disliked by the fandom regardless of whether the game was good or not)--oooh, discussions and complaints about black sheep games drive me insane, no matter if I enjoyed the game or not, I just really, strongly dislike seeing hateful rants about how bad a game was for not being An Exact Copy Of The Series' Golden Child Game. Like sure, vent the frustrations, that's healthy and all, but keep the negativity out of the tags or at least tagged in a way that can be filtered for people cruising the tag and not looking for negativity at the very least.

for my personal choice, 10. worst part of fanon

Circling back to the first question, for me it's fanon character interpretations and headcanons that become so popular they end up as fanon. I find it frustrating because I like to theorycraft and think about characters based as closely to the canon text as I can, but revisiting the source text for accuracy sometimes isn't easy (especially if a game script hasn't been uploaded for a game that requires lots of hours to play). So while the experience of the original text can take up a lot of time, revisiting it isn't a constant or continual thing, whereas fandom continues the "story and characters" in a sense beyond the bounds of the original narrative. Which is a great way to keep things alive and stuff, but it also means that what a character was actually like in the original text can get warped through the simulacra of fandom, and popular fanon just speeds up that warping process. So if I want to revisit a character or even sometimes just worldbuilding lore stuff to have fun crafting some theories, I have to take a step back and try to figure out how much of the fanon stuff I've seen is actually accurate or not, and often have to go back to the original text anyhow and then be disappointed or frustrated with how much less interesting and nuanced the fanon typically is and how little discussion there is around what actually occurs in the original narrative.

Mind this isn't for like, every character or every bit of worldbuilding, since sometimes the fanon is "wow the writers were super sexist, maybe we should reinterpret this female character in a kinder light" and so while I'd still have to revisit the source text to understand the original characterization, the fanon might actually be more interesting in that regard. But this is...a rarity.

Also, sometimes a character's entire characterization gets sucked into the black hole that is fandom's obsession with shipping, and that's also frustrating bc then the character doesn't seem to exist in fan works outside of the ship, despite (very often at least) being their own individual character in the original text. Like listen, I don't hate shipping, I've got my own fleet of ships I enjoy or am partial to, but I wish it wasn't so central to some fandom spaces that occasionally a character's characterization vanishes into "part of this one popular ship".