Why am I suddenly seeing a bunch of “OCism is killing good writing” posts oh my GOD some people are just having fucking fun that’s literally what the majority of people are doing with their OCs. They’re playing around and having fun and exploring different ideas in the process. They’re playing dolls. God I hate you fucking people you’re all so fucking miserable.
I absolutely baffles me that people are so against
writing stories
Like what do they think is happening when someone writes a sequel? Especially in a setting that existed before? Must all characters have precedent in an earlier work?
Take that to fan works, which are inherently not “official” or are folkloric, and that’s the least of the creative liberties taken, so why is it a problem? Is this somehow preventing the sorts of stories they want? Are they alleging that labor spent on a type of story they don’t want is theft of time spent on stories they approve of? This isn’t a job…
Sigh. If people get to write stories, they get to write stories even if someone doesn’t want that story.
In the early days of online fandom for Star Trek: The Original Series, there was a lot of ridicule of the Mary Sue character– a term which back then was used with a very specific meaning: a self-insert female character who was there to act out the writer’s fantasies of interacting with the canon. Usually by being devastatingly attractive and brilliant and mysterious and fascinating to everyone, having characters fall in love with her, and saving everyone in some heroic act of self-sacrifice.
…now, there definitely were Mary Sue characters who ended up just living happily ever after with the author’s favorite character. The stereotype that they went out in a blaze of sacrificial heroism was not all that reflective of reality.
But the fact that there was any trend of Mary Sues dying at the end– or being tragically separated from the canon characters who loved them– should have been a dead giveaway that it wasn’t all about author-insert fantasy.
Because, if you actually looked at the list of tropes that defined the Mary Sue, they were pretty much exactly the same tropes that described female love interests who appeared in actual episodes of Star Trek TOS.
The fan writers who stuck to those tropes weren’t even making up their own thing. They were just creating a non-recurring character that followed the same rules as the ones canon had shown us a hundred times. And maybe making that character a bit like themselves, for fun. Horrors.