Part 4

Character Theory

(we venture into the widespread phenomenon of OOCness)

Because I really, really should have covered this earlier.

Apparently, you can't point out faults in any type of story without touching upon character mutilation. I didn't know that when I started. But halfway through the Story Formats section, I realized that if I'm going to be covering things like High School Aus and Pregnant!Annabeths, I really needed to provide some background ranting on character mutilation. "This is Annabeth acting OOC," is just not going to cut it anymore.

When you're writing fanfiction, what you're generally doing is kidnapping someone else's characters and dropping them into a situation of your own. I mean, sure; other people annex the situation and drop their own characters into canon territory, but for the most part, it's going to be the former.

I'm more a Type A kinda girl, because what really attracts me into any series is (a) narrative capability of the author and (b) their skills at characterization. I go gaga over well-written characters, irrespective of their age, sex, species or alignment. Charismatic seductresses, classic heros, badass damsels in distress, miserly superdragons, psychopathic ax-murderers, Action Girls, Non-action guys, Wolfmen warmasters, vampires who are complete slobs, neanderthal barbarian elf-cheftians, fashionista warrior-princes, Fallen heros, Machiavellian strategist clowns, No-nonsense governesses-

I'm getting carried away here. Let's just say that if they're written well, I'll fall in love with them. Even if they're vampires, and I hate vampires as a matter of principle. And no, I'm not talking about Twilight here. Twilight pales in comparison to some of the other things floating around the YA genre these days.

Anyway;

And so, it should come as no surprise that even with the many, many evils that plague the PJO fandom, character mutilation is the one thing that can piss me off like nothing else can. Nothing else. I've sat through pages and pages of illogical romances, clichéd plotlines, bad spelling/grammar and Mary Sues at a strech, but I don't really start despairing till I stumble across someone slashing a canon character to bits.

Of course, when a ficcer goes over to the dark side, the first crime they commit is character mutilation. It is to fanfictioners what killing a random bystander is to any comic-book villan. This means that it's almost always found in conjunction with a bad story. Illogical romances, clichéd plotlines, bad spelling/grammar things and Mary-Sue stories are always accompanied by one (mostly more) of the canon characters acting in a way which is nothing like how they behave in the books.

This is probably the first thing you want to try and avoid when you write a story, not counting the whole grammar/spelling thing, which still has precedence. Mutilating a character to someone (thing) unrecognizable from the parent character and then accepting it as an unavoidable part of writing fanfiction is the equivalent of Anakin Skywalker becoming apprenticed to Senator Palpatine. Or Luke joining forced with Kronos. Insert any other Face Heel Turn moment you can think of here.

Ie; you have turned evil and redeeming yourself is going to be a messy, messy affair.

/end drama.

But seriously. Character mutilation paves the way towards everything else. Once you accept it, you're crossing lines and destroying limits set by the canonverse. Which is why this is going to take a few chapters to cover.

Note: I've also heard this interesting… observation; "Nobody who's writing fanfiction can write the PJO characters in character. They're OOC by definition. Only Rick Riordan can do IC."

I applaud the person who came up with it, I really do. It's one of the most creative excuses I have ever seen.

And here's the counter-statement: Nobody, and I do mean nobody, is expecting you to writing like Rick Riordan. On the other hand, people do expect you to respect his work. If you completely alter his characters to fit general Archetypes, you're not writing his characters any longer. It's just a bunch of people who look like the canon characters and have the same name. But who are in no way identifiable with them.

You have now moved on from writing fanfiction to writing Original fiction. Congratulations.

IC does not mean 'writing like RR', it means sticking as much as you possibly can to his characters so that a reader would be able to identify them with the book characters. So yeah. Not an excuse.

Note 2: Alternate Realities sometimes deal with changing a character's backstory; and with that, their personality. This is an entirely different kind of fic and deserves a chapter (or so) of it's own. And yes, they can also be OOC or IC, but it's all very… *makes vague hand motions* different. And complicated and really not something I should go into in the intro chapter.

A Note addressed to the Readers:

Next up is Annabeth Chase and what you're supposed to do (or no do) with her. Again, I doubt I'll be able to remember all the different varieties of OOC!Annabeth, so inputs on the subject are welcomed.