whoβs your favorite fictional character of all time? :]
I don't always feel a strong emotion in response to fictional characters but... the Gends
This was something I wanted to say when I posted that about the "Genders," but I also realized that I had a feeling that was so strong it couldn't be stated without going into specifics.
If you don't know who the Gends are, they're the characters who appeared in The Southern Reach trilogy (by Jeff VanderMeer). Each book has a "gender" and a name that has a gender. At first I was very interested in writing one of the Genders, because of their potential as a protagonist in a different kind of story. But after finishing the trilogy, I realized that the Genders were so well written that my interest in writing them fell away, as it was clear that there was really nothing to write -- they were just characters, and not much more than that.
So my feelings about them in relation to fiction is just that -- feelings. And the fact that they (as a character) felt like a person was enough to take them to a new plane of narrative resonance.
My feelings in response to them are complicated -- there is the desire to take what the Genders were (not the Genders themselves), write them in a different genre, and see if something new and meaningful and strange is born out of that. (The desire for this is much stronger for Gender 2 than for Gender 1.)
On the other hand, the characters were so beautifully rendered, that the desire is much weaker to look for the things that were missed -- not things that are missing from Gender 1 and could be added later on, but the things that would have been in Gender 2 if it had been a different story altogether, and could not be recovered even though Gender 1 exists.
If the Genders were ever written into a different story, they would need to have a new context, a reason to exist in that story rather than the one I had written in mine.
And that in turn means that it seems pointless to write a new story with them, or to rewrite the story I wrote with them so that they have a different role. "They are the characters that are there in that story," and it was good in the way it was because it was that story, with that set of characters. To move them to a new place requires a different genre.
So I cannot write them in a different genre, nor can I (easily) rewrite the story I have done with them to get a new story in the same genre. They are as they are.
(When my first novel came out, this post made a similar argument. It was about how I could not easily rewrite my own story once it was already written; I had to create a new one in its place.)
(In response to the tags, the Gender was "Gender 3," and not just because I was hoping to get at an insight about Genders.)
