"Presley H. Cannady" <revprez@MIT.EDU> wrote:

At 05:11 PM 5/14/99 GMT, Gary Kleppe wrote:

I'm gonna agree with Krista and Reid here. This tired old argument is
your basic logical fallacy of "all or nothing." I think just about all
of us would agree that any reasonable reader should be willing to accept
some variation in the characters. But it doesn't follow that a reader
should accept anything a writer does with the character.

That sounds offly capricious.  How do you define when a fanfic writer
has "deviated" from the source too much?  It's an arbitrary call, and
any feeling on the matter is subjective and therefor shallow.

Of course it's subjective. As a reader, I have a right to be subjective.
As a C&Cer, what I'm essentially doing is reporting the way in which I
experienced the fic, and that is by nature subjective. If C&C were
limited to things objective, about all that would be left would be
spelling corrections.

Does subjectivity mean that the author shouldn't worry about it? That's
up to him. If it were me, I would. What Krista and Reid and I are
telling him is that his cliche characterizations have turned us off from
reading his fic. That's something I would take seriously, and would
certainly want to know about.

Any variation is acceptable, because you cannot quantifiably prove that
audiences will NOT accept Dagwood renamed as Ranma.

I can prove that one member of the audience wouldn't, namely myself. I
don't need a "quantifiably provable" reason not to like a fic.

As far as why audiences might accept some forms of OOC and not others,
Krista and Reid have explained this already. Go and read their posts in
this thread.

 What about parody,
the obvious example of where such incredible variations have been
successfully received by their audiences?

Parody is different, because reader expectations are different. However,
parody is irrelevant because the fic in question was NOT a parody.


Gary Kleppe
http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe/comics.html