rosemoonweaver:
They are mostly standards out of habit – its become fanon because everyone is used to reading the characters that way.
I mean, yeah, I get that but I question why these things happen the way they do. I get the Meg thing and the Benny thing (to an extent) but I don’t get the Balthazar thing. Or the Lisa thing. Obviously, no one has to like these two characters but the way I see them presented is so wildly different that I boggles my mind. The common fanon versions of these characters just doesn’t make that much sesne to me. Now, granted, I prefer fanon!Jimmy in all his promiscuous glory. And I *almost* screwed Jo over in a fic I never finished (I did have a recovery plan but I don’t care to actually finish it now) so I’m not exempting myself from this critique. But I just wonder the standard tends to be that past relationships were terrible and now that our characters have found The One it’s all sunshine and rainbow.
Obviously, it’s partly because someone did it one way and then someone else did it the same way and then a popular fic did it and now everyone does it. On one hand, I’m curious about the origin of fanon trends and on the other, I’m curious as to why the trends become popular standards. I actually think it has a lot to do with timing and less to do with “quality” but that’s just my theory. (Also my theory as to why some fics are more popular than others. Though talent plays a role for sure, there are some I’m convinced are a combination of niche and timing.)
It does, however, bug me when it taints other parts of fandom. Like, when I worry about clicking on fics with certain past relationships because I know what they’re most likely going to be and I Do Not Agree. (But the way past and minor relationships are tagged is a whole seperate issue, too, so…)
I totally get that I’m being a picky little shit, but it’s mostly the character thing that bothers me. The character thing is actually a beef I have b/c it’s a pain in the butt to find a fic where some of my favorite minor characters aren’t jerks. I get that you gotta break a few eggs to make an omlet but it always seems to be the same few eggs. I know, I’m picky, and I’ll still read fics where my favorite minor characters aren’t the way I see them if the writing is good but it bugs and makes my multishipping heart sad. And it also bugs me that so many past relationships were either all awful or meaningless.
I mean I basically agree. I personally don’t mind seeing Balthazar made into a bit of a jerk, because I happened to not actually like him very much, but it makes me really sad how consistently Lisa is made into a raving bitch. On the other hand, though…I get it. Like, canon has options for putting Sam in a bad relationship – Ruby – and for putting Cas in a bad relationship – April, if he’s bi or het, or Uriel or Zach or some such if he’s not – but I can’t really think of anyone that Dean had a relationship with who wasn’t basically good? Especially since Dean is so often cast as bi, which means people want to have his past bad relationship be with a woman, which nixes the most obvious choice, Alastair. As to his relationships with women…I mean, I guess Anna went a bit south, and I don’t personally like Cassie as much as a lot of fans seem to, and Lisa ended badly but that was WAAAAY more on Dean than on her…but yeah…anyway I think exactly as you say a lot of it is just people getting in the habit of seeing certain characters certain ways, and it’s heavily influenced by a BNFic getting written and then emulated, though I think that’s harder to trace for the relationships than, say, BDSM (so many Carry On clones. So many.)
I do find I’m intrigued why I’ve basically never seen a fic where Cas’ bad relationship is with Uriel. Including me, I’ve never written one, and the more I think about it now the more I think I should, since he’s the most obvious “bad” relationship choice for Cas – they’re contemporaries, Uriel is good looking, he abused and manipulated Cas flagrantly, etc. And, well, I think we all know why it doesn’t get written.
*screams for the people in the back SYSTEMIC RACISM IS A THING*
And, well, as to why we so often see bad relationships in their pasts…well, if you’re going to write some drama into the story there aren’t many choices, are there? For a shorter fic that doesn’t matter, but for a long fic, there has to be SOMETHING to generate drama. They’re either:
1. Going to have had tough childhoods in some fashion, or
2. Going to have gone through difficult times as adults, or
3. Going to have a tough time navigating their relationship together or apart, or
4. Some combination of the above.
And in the end these are going to fall into certain set categories, in part dictated by our desire to link AUs to canon, in part dictated by the tropes we’ve been exposed to our whole lives. Having a Terrible Ex ™ is such a standard of ALL romance genres that if the story is more romance than any other genre it’s a pretty automatic direction to go in, so when people conceive these stories, they go, “hey, maybe someone in Dean’s past was terrible to him! Who can it be…who can it be…hey, Lisa!” and then there we are.
And I think you know all of this, and just wanted to vent, and that’s cool – it frustrates me, too, and depending on how things are handled I’ve noped out of fics that do these things, but from a writer/narrative stand point, we get bound up by the fact that there are a limited number of canon characters who make any sense in certain roles, and that plus habit means the same people tend to get shit on over and over again.
(I know I make a conscious choice pretty often to try to buck that – I didn’t like Michael or Balthazar much so I personally don’t mind being terrible to them, and of course I think everyone who reads my stuff knows what I think of John Winchester and how I usually use him as a character, but I try to write Lisa into fics in a more positive way than I usually see because I liked Lisa and I think she gets the shit end of the stick way too often in fics…)
The Lisa thing drives me nuts. I mean, I get it, for the reasons you’ve mentioned but she was actually a really supportive character. She was a big positive in Dean’s life so I can’t do that to her. The most I’ll do to her and Dean is to have them realize they’re just not right for each other because she was kind and understanding.
I do have an alternative for Dean though, and that’s Lydia. IDK if you remember her but she was the woman who used him to have a monster baby in season seven. That basically opens up a whole can of shitty ex material like lying and manipulation and even the whole baby-daddy drama I’ve seen with Lisa in some fics. Plus, she’s not in a lot of canon so I can make her anyway I like. She’s my go-to awful ex. Abaddon could also be an option even though they never actually had a relationship but she was a villain and I have no issue with casting people who died as villains as bad exes.
Uriel though is tricky for me. I definitely get that he could work as Cas’s ex but I’m hesitant to put black characters in the asshole role. I realize this is also a symptom of systemic racism but I do worry about putting certain characters in negative roles. I mean, I did give Gordon a role as a guard in Under the Surface and even though I disliked him and he creeps me out and I think it’s justifiable to put characters who were antagonists in antagonist roles I still worried about that and have wondered if I should go back and change that. Granted, I know that characters who were jerks in canon can be jerks in fanfic and no one will batt an eyelash but still. I can name, off the top of my head seven black male characters and half of them were bad. No matter how they show up in canon I still worry about putting them in antagonist role. I’ve never talked about it super openly but I have family members who are in the klan and I’m constantly worried about how I’m doing things and thinking about things because I don’t want to be like them and I don’t want to offend. So, you know, it’s racism but because I’m trying to aviod it in an odd way and I probably should write Uriel as Cas’s ex.
That being said, Uriel is a good ex for Cas for the reasons you’ve mentioned.
And yeah, you’re write about the limited stuff we deal with but I guess I’m constantly looking for ways that involve personal growth and change. Plus I guess I’m odd because I prefer a good story first and a good romance second. But you’re right about the way things happen and why certain characters get the roles they do, I’m mostly just irritated.
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