#but I get genuinely concerned about the level of parasocial relationship some people are willing to foster

[h0neyfreak]

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[forestwater87]

hi! can i ask how you go about writing gwen? i’ve rewatched a bunch of her episodes and am still having trouble getting her on paper!

Okay, first you’re going to need to get a time machine and travel back in time to the summer of 2016, just after season 1 ended, when she had like 3 character traits and a couple dozen lines and zero fanfics, then fill her with elements of your own personality and project wildly onto her, slowly falling into deeper and darker despair as canon!Gwen becomes less like your iteration of the character with every season.

At least, that’s what I did, and it worked like gangbusters.

Fine, let’s try a serious answer. Gwen’s interesting because, despite how frequently she appears in the show and how much we love the shit out of her, it wasn’t really until seasons 3-4 that her backstory and less surface-level characteristics started getting filled in. She’s an ever-present enigma in a lot of ways.

So start with what we know for damn sure: 

She doesn’t like working at Camp Campbell.

She’s an anxious, emotional mess. 

She’s lazy when it comes to things she doesn’t care about, but is willing and able to step up when it’s called for.

She enjoys writing fan fiction and has a passion -- if not necessarily a talent -- for smut, drama, romance, violence, and monsterfucking. (Some of these things overlap.)

Her father’s an extremely successful musician, and their relationship is . . . complicated.

She’s beautiful and perfect and in love with David and also my girlfriend. Okay, that’s not true. This is where the projecting comes in, dang it.

Honestly, there’s . . . not a lot of there there. I think that’s why some fans are kind of bored by her, and why others absolutely love the shit out of her. Her personality is rock-solid -- seriously, just write “bored and seemingly uncaring with a heart of gold and a lust for monsters” and you’ve got a very solid Gwen portrayal right there -- but the backstory is virtually nonexistent, and that’s the bits you get to have fun with. 

For example, with all of our facts we have:

She doesn’t like working at Camp Campbell. Okay, but why doesn’t she like working there? Is it just because it’s dilapidated and Campbell is a shithead? Did she ever like working here and got burned out by its overwhelming mediocrity, or was she forced to take this job and hated it from day one? What’s the worst part of it for her: is it working with kids? Is it working with these kids? Is it the outdoors stuff? The lack of resources? That her coworker is an adorable goddamned idiot who doesn’t know how to adult? 

She’s an anxious, emotional mess. Anxiety, parasocial relationships (do those apply when talking about fictional characters and/or monsters?), serious doubt and/or regret about her life choices, a complicated and unclear sexuality . . . there’s a lot going on with Gwen. She is trash, and we love her. Add to it that she’s a psych major, and how little we know about her backstory, and she’s a great opportunity to armchair-psychologist and/or overidentify all over the place. Do you have emotional issues or identities you’d like to project onto someone? Congratulations -- Gwen now has all of those too!

She’s lazy when it comes to things she doesn’t care about, but is willing and able to step up when it’s called for. She’s a lot like Max in this way, which I think is why people are such a fan of their dynamic. She cares very deeply about some things and not at all about others, and it’s fun trying to parse out what will make her give a shit. It seems like high enough stakes will make her step up, but her idea of important is very different from David’s a lot of the time. Hell, for all we know her investment in her job changes on as little as her mood; that’s part of what you get to try and figure out as she takes shape in your writing.

She enjoys writing fan fiction and has a passion -- if not necessarily a talent -- for smut, drama, romance, violence, and monsterfucking. (Some of these things overlap.) Not gonna lie, as a book snob I had the hardest time accepting that my girl loves 50 Shades knockoffs. Her tastes are . . . I don’t wanna say bad, but they do tend to be what is popularly considered the lowest common denominator: reality TV, fashion magazines, bodice-ripping romances, paranormal tween novels. Basically, anything with lots of sex and violence seems to be her jam. It creates a really interesting dichotomy, in that she reads all the time, but isn’t necessarily what we’d call well-read. She’s a nerd, but the “worst” kind: a fangirl, and arguably the most adolescent kind. Yet she has a liberal arts degree, which tends to focus heavily on literary and creative arts, so snobs like me would assume she should know better. Apparently pretentious college English classes didn’t rub off on her all that much. I don’t have much in the way of leading questions for this one, because unless you want to psychoanalyze why she enjoys Prison Teen Mom Wars (as I most definitely do), you just sort of need to be aware of and use the fact that she enjoys high-octane drama, fighting, and kinky sex.

Her father’s an extremely successful musician, and their relationship is . . . complicated. Really, there’s two ways to work with this: either Gwen just has a normal “millennial embarrassed by her boomer dad” relationship, which is relatable to the max but doesn’t have a ton of angst fodder, or she’s dealing with some deep-seated issues about being a show toddler and/or failing to live up to his creative legacy (or whatever other parent-child problems you could imagine). Her mom is a complete nonentity. There’s definitely love between her and at least one parent, and that needs to be incorporated into any sort of discussion about her dad, but I don’t think their problems have been magically solved, which has to potential for lots of interesting scenarios.

She’s beautiful. She doesn’t think she’s beautiful, that’s for sure. One Direction in its early period of completely sucking would have lots of opinions about this, but if you don’t think Gwen is a snack (snacc? I’m very old and out of touch), you’re wrong and also not welcome on this blog.

The fun part, in my opinion, is trying to fill in the blank spaces. If I was starting out my own creation of Gwen, I’d focus first on these points: what they tell us about her, and more importantly what they don’t.

I think the hardest thing about writing Gwen -- at least, what I struggle most with -- is trying to soften her up. I took her “crippling anxiety and regret” and filled it in with all my own angst, and I think a lot of fans do that; it’s one of the great things about her, her potential for angst. But despite crying a lot (more, I believe, than any other character except mayyyybe David), she’s not especially sensitive toward other people. And I think it’s tempting to take our love for her and translate it into her being much more perfect and snuggly than she actually is. It’s an incredibly hard balance to strike, and in my opinion this makes her the hardest character to write besides Max, which makes sense, considering #3 up there.

So my advice for that would be: lean into the bitchiness. Let her be blunt and dismissive; she’s more than that, of course, and I think one of the reasons people have gravitated so much toward gwom-type portrayals is her genuine concern and even affection towards other people, but focusing too hard on her kindness and/or her angst tends to push aside the trash goblin Gwen we all fell in love with.

Let her be a trash goblin. She deserves it.