My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - Page 538

On April 05 2012 09:50 Camail wrote:


Anything that makes your OC look super unique makes it a bad OC...hmmm, I disagree. You qualify that with the phrase "something you likely wouldn't see in the show" so it might just be a wording problem. Because having unique traits, even LITERALLY one-of-a-kind traits, is used by so many writers. It is an exciting feature. When you get down to it, having an aspect of a character being considered unique is what helps it become distinguished in the story. This also goes for aesthetics, I could come up with cases for both if I sat here awhile but I'm sure everyone reading this could too.

Now, maybe you meant that it can't be something that we have not seen explicitly in canon, or maybe even things we have been told are impossible in canon (I don't think we have been told anything like that). This is where you have to start defining the term 'fanfic'. Exactly how close to the implicit boundaries do you have to stay? You can make a convincing narrative for just about anything, where on the spectrum to we say it is no longer relevant to the show? We have one extreme (the show itself) and the other (let's go with Fiddler on the Roof), do we want to draw the line at the implicit boundaries being set up. An implicit boundary in my opinion is just an assumption that we take from the world, like that they have no communication with aliens or that humans do not exist, things we simply take as true because their counter parts seem irrelevant to the story.

Maybe its somewhere in there, maybe its a case by case basis. Taking the aliens example (which is different from trans-dimensionality in some fairly important ways),surely the aliens will be different, we aren't changing the implicit boundary of probability in this case. Now we have another completely different race, well they had to get here somehow, this would inevitably lead to an explanation if it was to truly fit into the story. Then we start to realize that the genre kind of changes, we have to take space into account and vastly different cultural subtleties . It begins to switch genres, and maybe this particular story starts focusing on the alien culture much more than the ponies. In fact, we don't even need to see or interact with any active alien character to make it centered around the alien culture. Some sort of sociological study through the mind of the narrator, who has a very important reason to do it. Then all of a sudden we have entered a land that most would not call fan-fics. Sure, there are ponies, but the ponies aren't central. Even with ponies being the only characters you could easily make them secondary tools. I don't find it too hard to imagine someone developing characters you never see with characters you are always presented with, until the mouthpiece slowly blends into the background of this dynamic cultural story.

My point with that example is that it is VERY fuzzy when we try and use the term "something you likely wouldn't see in the show" because fiction offers almost infinitely complex details that really need to be addressed on a case by case basis. There are points in the above example that the story could have turned to making the ponies relevant, but that's the point. It could have or it couldn't have, there is no right answer for it being a story, but it seems there is one for it being a fan-fic. We just really don't have the necessary mental tools to map out what is and is not a fan-fic before we read it.

I already made my second point somewhere else, but basically I think you have to judge an OC on aesthetics and character as separate criteria.

Aaaand that's about it. It may seem like this is too much to write about a single sentence, but I think it is really important to understand how vague some of our standards are. I was gonna make a few examples of OCs that could blur the lines as well but I have already put too much time into this >_>.