Yes, again.

Look at the time this entry was posted. This is getting fucking ridiculous. I have never been this badly jet-lagged in my entire life.

I've been awake since three am. I woke up from an odd dream that had something to do with Gilderoy Lockhart, for which I blame language_idling, and have been trying to get to sleep on and off ever since. I give up, I really do.

Why didn't this happen yesterday? That at least would have made sense. But no... making sense is too much to ask, ne?

I don't have anything to do except inflict my insomnia on you people, so that's what I'm doing. Just... kill me now.

Original characters in fandom

I blame hathy_col, too little sleep (fell asleep at seven, got up at one!) and too much time on my hands for this latest set of fannish musings...

I hate original characters in fandom, hate them. The reasons for this are not quite clear. One of them is clearly a fear of Mary-Sue-ism, of course, and as far as I see it, there are two ways of creating a Mary-Sue. One is the classic method, the creation of a fascinating, perfect-in-ever-way original character with strange-coloured eyes who then goes on to have sex with/be fallen in love with/screw over the canon character of your choice. The other method, less common but equally annoying, is to take a minor canon character and flesh them out. This is a good thing to do, but not so good when you make them captivating in every single way and immensely desirable to boot, despite the fact their inherent perfection has so far been miraculously unnoticed by the rest of the canon until you took a hand in it.

But that doesn't go all the way towards explaining my hatred of original characters, as it's perfectly possible to fall into the Mary-Sue trap without using an original character at all. And I ought to make clear, I don't hate all original characters. My favourite original character anyone has ever created is from Anais' Dr Jackson's Diary. The character's name was Sam Jones, commonly known as "Jonesy" and he was well-imagined and very funny, and despite the fact he was in a relationship with a canon character, no footfall of a Mary-Sue was ever heard in his vicinity.

But I hate creating my own original characters. Even when all they do is say one line, pass someone the ketchup, appear in a list, I hate them. Even when they're vital to the plot, I hate them, and it's a sad truth that most fandoms do need original characters to a greater or lesser degree. MWPP need classmates and teachers, the M*A*S*H doctors need patients, the SG teams need aliens. You need them.

But then we reach the inherently stupid part of my mind. For me, what defines an original character is his/her name. It's naming a character that makes them real, in my ever so humble opinion. In one of my latest M*A*S*H fics (the Mulcahy one, Hallelujah) there is an original character who is a vital part of the plot. He's a fairly well thought-out character - although the story was only 2500 words long, he has something of a personality, a thorough physical description and even something of a backstory. What he doesn't have is a name, and that was how I avoided setting off my own alarm bells. Because the moment I gave him a name, I would have immediately have started thinking, no, no, no, and scratched him out of the story, which would have meant the plot would have major holes in it, which I'd try to fix up and fail miserably at, and then the whole fic would just fall apart. I decided beforehand it would be easier if I just avoided giving him a name at all.

I can carry this to the other extreme, too. The Fic From Hell is a Harry Potter fic, and at the beginning, at least, it features a character named Milicent Bagnold. I would be prepared to bet that hardly anyone knows who she is. However, she is a canon character, mentioned just once in passing in the books, and all we know about her is the fact she was Minister of Magic before Cornelius Fudge. In my fic, she's an old lady, rather severe and given to pomposity and condescension, but in her own way she's one of the good guys. She just relies too much on bureaucracy. These are all characteristics I could have given an original character, whose only difference would have been a different name, but I couldn't do that without my inner voices shrieking, "No!" As things stand, she has a canon name and my writing is therefore made mysteriously easier. I might be well and truly jossed come the next two books - JKR might reveal her to be a ditzy blonde airhead or a Death Eater in disguise - but I won't mind. Which I find weird, as what I have basically done is created my own character. It's all in the name!

So, yes... all this rambling did have a point. Am I the only one with this particular problem? From what I know of you people, you don't seem to have the same difficulties in writing as I do, especially judging by how well some of you write, but I thought I'd put this out in any case. Any thoughts?