#character variation

HIIII OK SO! I'm currently in my hotel and TFcon will be later today (since it's 12 am Saturday rn) and I thought I'd post this lil page where I've doodled my idea for a variation of Hawk's outfit!! Had this idea a while ago and finally got to draw it~ that variation will actually be my cosplay for the con today (minus the visor, since I didn't have time to find/make one 😳

(I'll have pics of that with other stuff I get at the con sometime today or Sunday 😌✨)

Was hoping to finish my first page or so of Vancha and Gannen’s backstory this week, then suddenly realised I’ve hardly ever drawn Steve before…

Cue an emergency character design I’m going to call Anatomy of a Fuckboy. Enjoy!

I've been reading fanfiction for almost a decade now (holy shit, now I'm feeling old), and over the years I've grown quite used to the concept of “bashing” cropping up wherever I look.

I could go on to explain that this is a writing-technique that I've long since classified under the “bad writer”-route of using a plot and its character. In part due to how the traits that cause these characters to “deserve” bashing in the eyes of the author, are traits that are also very much present within the characters that are often glorified to no end in the same story.

This type of action generally stems from hypocrisy in regards to the author's desire to label everything in black-and-white, even if they often vocally insist on how they're see things in a “gray scale”. Their hero can never do wrong, and their villain can never do right, and they cling to this black-and-white mentality even if they convince their hero to apply some very “edgy” gray-scale type of tactics in order to achieve their goals.

In fact, bashing (and the Mary Sue trope, which is the aforementioned glorified hero that can never do wrong) is so common among fanfic-authors that I've become too enured to its presence in fics to do more than sort of sigh in disappointment every time it rears its head.

But here's an interesting little thing regarding bashing that might not be commonly understood.

Authors that make use of bashing are the people who don't actually know how to turn certain characters into actual proper villains. Instead deciding to simply create a very generic “bashing-OC” that is actually fairly reoccurring in its personality and actions, even across different fandoms.

The bashing OC:

is arrogant due to some type of “born with it” privilege

believes that everyone should do as the OC says

has a serious issue with personal boundaries (not understanding that “no means no”, both in regards to friendship and to romance)

is delusional

Amusingly enough, this actually describes Tatewaki Kuno (Ranma½) to a “t”. But unfortunately it rarely does the same for other characters.

For example:

Ron Weasley, Draco Malfoy, and Sasuke Uchiha are all three very well-used candidates for being placed in this generic “bashing mold“ by various authors. But they actually have very little in common.

Ron has serious self-confidence issues, a horrible temper, and a tendency to say hurtful things.

Draco is spoiled, raised by racist, and has a loving and very powerful family.

Sasuke is obsessed with hate and power, and has no interest in any social ties whatsoever.

So, whilst I could see Draco forcing himself upon someone in a sexual manner because “they secretly want it”, Ron and Sasuke would never have that as some kind of motivation.

See, if Ron is rejected by a girl who then looks down her nose at him and classifies him as “below her”, he's going to hate her. He's going to look at her and know that he's not “good enough”, because that fuels on his shitty self-esteem, and that hate could easily turn into violence, and that violence might turn into sexual assault on behalf of “hurting her back”. But he'd never try to convince himself that she “secretly liked it”, he'd do it out of hate and spite and anger, and nothing else.

Sasuke is probably a more complicated case, because he wouldn't want to risk the potential social ties that comes from having sexual relations with anyone. Therefore he'd never try doing it on an emotional level. However, it's entirely possible that he might try to do it based on a logical argument on his own part. As in, he knows that he'll probably die in his quest to kill Itachi, so he makes sure that there's a “back-up” around to pick up the slack and go kill Itachi once he himself is dead. But that would likely be counteracted by various other logical arguments of why forcing himself on someone in order to have a child with them might be a really bad idea.

Three different people, three very different motivations for the same act, and as such making it necessary to apply three extremely different situations in order to achieve the same result of attempted sexual assault.

This is where the “bad writer” complaint generally appears.

If you feel the need to support yourself on a bashing-OC instead of actually using the characters given to you from within the fandom itself, then you're taking a shortcut. And if you're consistently taking this shortcut time and again in your stories, then you're probably doing it because you can't write these characters as the people that they actually are.

We've all heard the whole "write a super-long backstory for any character that appears"-thing. And we all know that it's more or less bull (because it's a fuckton of work and nobody gets that engaged in it unless the characters actually MATTER), but I think it's still important to have at least some vague idea of who this character is, even if they only make a brief (and in some cases fairly pointless) appearance.

So, this is my attempt to explain the importance of it all.