#that was the one ‘evil Victim’ interpretation I was willing to accept prior to AvA6 XD fascinating and ghastly

[inksandpensblog]

That makes sense. I like to stick as close to canon as I can, though with some characters canon characterization can be difficult to pin down, so with them I’m left trying to build on minor details that I hope mean something indicative XD

Maybe I can provide that explanation for why so many fanon Victim interpretations contradict canon? If you’ll allow me to ramble on for a bit ^_^

tl:dr fanon Victim contradicts canon Victim so much because we were interested in him long before the series decided to address him again and so we didn’t bother waiting for canon to shift attention back to him and instead just forged ahead with our own ideas o7

I became a fan of the show sometime between Animation vs YouTube and AvMs1ep1 The Rediscovery, but I didn’t really find a community within the fandom until after The Showdown aired. Most of us were also pretty sure that Victim was never coming back, but that sure didn’t stop us from talking about him. I mean, the whole thing started with him, and yet nobody except Alan knew he’d ever existed. Talk about thematic potential XD We had speculations aplenty, from what might’ve happened to him after AvA1, to how the color gang might react if they learned of him and what Alan had done, to roles the sticks might play in his reappearance if he were to somehow return.

I remember there used to be an idea floating around that Chosen was Victim, reincarnated somehow (because noogai almost reused the name when creating Chosen, and Chosen didn’t even take time to look around before going on the offensive), and how that might affect Chosen’s characterization. I remember friends pointing out that Orange shares more similarities or parallels with Victim than he does with Chosen, leading some to wonder if Orange was actually the second coming of the victim, despite his title announcing him The Chosen One’s Return.

(I remember a bunch of us being frustrated by conversations in the official server where people were calling Victim evil. As in, AvA1 Victim. That guy. Before the rockets and boxes and whips, back when he was just a little stick whom god picked a fight with. They were calling him canonically evil. As you can probably tell, I didn’t agree XD)

I remember void Victim: there was a time in the fandom when it seemed like most people who wanted to include him in their stories would handwave his apparent death with the explanation that he was “in the void.” (We actually tried to figure out where this idea originated, a while ago, and as near as we can discern it seems that multiple people had the idea independently of each other at around the same time.) Others instead made him a ghost, lingering on and witnessing the events of the series without being able to influence them. Either way, this saved many of us the trouble of having to figure out plausible mechanics for how he could’ve survived, and let us get right to the fun stuff: character dynamics.

And that meant a lot of us started filling in the giant blank slate that was Victim’s canon characterization, at the time, with whatever suited our fancy.

I don’t know if there’s a term, for this phenomenon of fandom fleshing out a bit character to the point where they’re almost completely divorced from their canon representation, and the character in turn becoming recognizable mostly by their fanon portrayal rather than their canon depiction; but AvA isn’t the first fandom to do it and I’m sure we won’t be the last.

What I haven’t witnessed before now is that bit character being brought back for canon to fill in that previously blank slate. So this is a new experience for me XD

(For my own part, my characterization of Victim took shape when I looked at the tragedy of his situation and all the talks about how awful his experiences must be and went “okay but what if he’s not angsty actually?” It was a bit of an intentional departure from what seemed, to me at the time, to be his general fandom characterization, which from what I saw mostly focused on how pitiful he must be. My Victim’s story also involved prolonged solitude in the void, so contact and connection became a theme with him, for me.)

(Handshakes and hand-holding were a big thing, with him; every friendship in canon seemed to start with a handshake, or at least a grasp of hands in camaraderie, so I used that. He’d also insist that he won the fight with noogai and refuse to hear otherwise. I wanted him to be scrappy and resourceful, since that’s how I saw him in AvA1, so…he doesn’t start fights, but he can finish them. Unfortunately his understanding of what constitutes “starting a fight” is…not finely honed, let’s say.)

(I also gave him a fondness for small, enclosed spaces. Like boxes. As a contrast to Chosen’s possible dislike of small, enclosed spaces.)

(Like boxes.)

(…revisiting some of my old headcanons feels really bizarre now.)

Did Vic already got asked for the bingo?

nope!

the reason i put a question mark above the 'everyone is weird about them' is because ava 6 is SUPERRRRR recent and the main thing i don't like is the previous interpretations that had a completely different idea of who they'd be (more kind and friendly)

so basically i dislike the non-canon interpretation but canon is recent enough that it's understandable that there's still takes from before they reappeared floating around