on naruto and characterization...

[askerian]

recycled Naruto rant that makes me come off like an elitist, controlling bitch.

I don't begrudge people the right to enjoy fics using a looser sense of canon, they can be very fun as well; I just get a bit twitchy when that fanon is so accepted that it becomes strange to actually use stuff that's not totally raping canon. Also, I desperately needed something to rant about, so here. Whatever.

oh god i can't read NaruSasu fics anymore, I just can't find any new fics that don't make me barf. noooo. I don't want to lose all enjoyment of that pairing, damn it, they're the closest thing I've ever had to an OTP. T_T /whine

Comments

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I think it's also because, having seen others pave the way, each ensuing wave is able to take the shortcuts created by the previous wave. Sasuke glowers, Heero has a death-glare, Inuyasha's eyes turn red, Alphonse worries. Eventually people don't even bother telling us what a Gundam is or what a jounin is, or what the frickin tetsusaiga-whatever is. They just mix, match, and drop in the cliches created, and embroidered, by the waves before, until the last wave is nothing but a series of patched-together retreads of simplified characterization and old plot lines.

This is also how we get things like cutter!Naruto, or cutter!G-boy, or even (yegawdz) cutter!Inuyasha; it's a mish-mash of an earlier trope recycled for the newest fandom (and always for the most unlikely of characters in that new fandom, it seems).

And it's how we end up with -- using GW as example because it's easiest for me, and far older than Naruto, FmA, or any others I know: no setting description beyond 'safe house' (even though such never occured in the series at all); no characterization beyond 'Heero glared', 'Duo bounced', or 'Wufei nosebled'; no mechanical elements beyond the scantest mention of the six-ton megarobots so neatly parked in the frickin size-of-a-stadium garage; mannerisms are reduced to short-hand like 'Quatre made tea' or 'Trowa stared blankly' or 'Duo braided his hair'; no personal descriptions except for the most outlandish (usually involving orbs, cerulean*, obsidian, or otherwise) or the flattest, like 'banged boy', 'perfect soldier' and 'braided boy'.

* BLUE. The eye color is BLUE. Have you EVER met someone and said, "wow! your eyes are cerulean!" Do you even know how to PRONOUNCE it?

But that's part of what makes an overdone pairing, is that the storytelling skills themselves are cobbled-together shortcuts. If a writer comes along, no matter how late in the game, and refuses to use these shortcuts, the pairing can seem all-new again. And if several of these writers come along at the same time, you can end up with a reinvigorated fandom as it discovers the original canon held so much more than the shortcuts being used for so long.

And then the wheel turns and the second wave uses this new group's cross-fertilized shortcuts, and so on, and so on. The best treatment (as there's no cure) is to find, encourage, and stimulate those writers willing to refuse shortcuts and stereotypes, who try to push at the edges while not sacrificing the heart.

Err.

[/rant]

Ahem.

*squishes Asuka*

[decorchan.livejournal.com]

Wow, that right there is everything I've been thinking about various fandoms put into words. Very eloquent.

[askerian]

*squished* x_x

nngh. you make such pretty sense. (also i'm sick. wheee. shiny. nothing intelligent to say right now)

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Have you EVER met someone and said, "wow! your eyes are cerulean!" Do you even know how to PRONOUNCE it?

Actually, I have. In my entire high school of 2000 people, I remember this one girl who had the most incredible eyes I've ever seen. They weren't just blue; they were this unbelievably rich and intense blue color, tinged with green. They put Elijah Wood's eyes to shame, really. The rest of her wasn't so impressive, from her mousy brown hair to her thick-rimmed glasses (so no, they weren't contact lenses) to her rather dumpy figure; but MAN were her eyes beautiful. You'd notice them from accross the room. People would ask her to take off her glasses so they could look at them. And yeah, I would have tagged the word "cerulean" or perhaps "aquamarine" onto her eyes, because they really weren't the same color that "blue eyes" invokes.

But the point being that 1) this was ONE girl out of the two thousand in the high school, and I've yet to meet anyone else like her, and 2) they would have immediately shown up as distinctive in any picture. In other words, her eyes would not have turned up as plain dark blue in an animated frame, so if they aren't that color in the canon source, they won't be that color in the fanfic. :p

And sometimes you DO get characters with coloring that is actually distinctive and significant; Kenshin's vivid red hair in Ruroni Kenshin (the eye color I feel is rather superfluous) or Edward Elric's gold eye color in FMA. There's plenty of wildly impressive and/or unlikely colorations in anime series without needing to invent them just because you don't want to describe Trowa's eye color as "hazel."

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

There's plenty of wildly impressive and/or unlikely colorations in anime series without needing to invent them just because you don't want to describe Trowa's eye color as "hazel."

Which amuses me, rewatching the series, and noting that Trowa's eye color really isn't a true green, or emerald (as it's often described); it's more of an olive-hazel. Which, compared to the blue-green of Quatre's eyes, is a far more realistic, toned-down shade. Hrm.

But you're right, coloring can be significant, and sometimes it's a calling on a specific trope. I think it was _branch_ who catalogued the hair/eye color against personality types. Brown hair, brown eyes: everyman, hero of the story (with Heero being the rare exception, but Sunrise normally does brown/brown for its lead male roles). Pink hair, innocent but also the one who speaks truth (Sakura, Merle, that pink-haired chick in Bleach). There was also something about purple eyes, and some debate as to whether Duo became the precursor in a braid-related trope (of which Edward, the demon from Chrono Crusade, and...crap, some other recent character, are all examples).

Uhm.

Just ate. This is entirely produced by too much good food. Really.