#joining the war against uwuification i suppose

[rollercoasterwords]

the thing is. obviously we are all just playing pretend at the end of the day and there has always been interest in smaller side characters + rarepairs + the like, and obviously a large part of fanwork is fucking with canon and strict adherence to singular readings of the source material are just never going to happen. and yes obviously none of it is that serious and people should do whatever they want as long as they're having fun.

however. i do in fact think there is a very valid twofold critique to the haterism of anti-uwuification posting which is that:

1. quite a bit of it seems to be rooted in the impulse to remove moral impurity

like. this is particularly in regards to people taking character who were either morally gray or flat-out bad people in canon and stripping away any of the characteristics that made them Bad to rehabilitate them as Good People, so that it is Okay To Like Them. and i mean it is one thing to want to write a redemption arc, and it's one thing if ur just grabbing a name and turning that character into an oc and plugging them into ur story--because like, yeah, u can do whatever u want. but i do wonder how much of this rehabilitation is coming from this larger concerning impulse to act like characters have to be morally pure and perfect all the time. and i think it's worth reflecting just on a personal level what's driving u to rehabilitate a character. why don't you want to grapple with the ickier parts of their canon characteristics + actions? are you uncomfortable when other people read them as morally impure? if so, why?

2. breaking a character down into a series of specific labels seems to reflect a very odd view of identity

so this is like. i mean i feel like this tends to happen with very small side characters where people will go: here's my list of headcanons!! and then it'll be like. a list of labels -- gender, sexuality, ethnicity, star sign, mental illnesses, etc. which....the mental illness one is a whole other conversation that i'm not gonna get into atm but. to me the prevalence of this sort of "character-building" just makes me a little....wary, i guess. i've talked before about how i think this impulse to break identity down into specific neat labels is not healthy irl, but even beyond that it's just not very good character building! which--again, have fun, do ur thing, but if you genuinely are trying to create compelling characters for a fanfic then what matters isn't a list of identity labels, it's things like what drives the character, what flaws do they have, what relationships matter to them, their worldview--and the context of the story they exist in also matters and fundamentally shapes them, which is why unless you're creating an oc for a specific story a lot of these random side characters just leave a lot of people scratching their heads and asking "why would i ever care about this person?"

i do also think this tendency to just list identity labels for like. random characters can sometimes come off a bit trivializing. things like gender and sexuality and mental illness are not monolithic experiences, even for people who might use the same label; labels really only matter for the way they interact with the world around them and reflect someone's lived experience, which is why if your character exists outside the context of a story these labels oftentimes feel a bit meaningless and just....idk. especially the treating of mental illness as like a quirky personality trait just really rubs me the wrong way.

anyway! at the end of the day i don't think there's anything wrong with taking an interest in side characters and essentially developing them into your own ocs (clearly--look at what i've written lmao), but i do think it's worth reflecting on why you are interested in this character in the first place and i also think it's worth moving away from this sort of label-centered character building + the idea that characters need to be morally pure to like them if you want to actually develop interesting and well-rounded characters for your stories. i also think it's a bit silly when i see people acting as though there is any moral weight behind which characters you choose to focus on (i.e., talking about the girl side characters is Feminist), although that may need to be a different post bc this one is already very long lol