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Date Posted: Wednesday, January 26, 10:35:15am
Author: sk
Subject: I am supposed to be doing 3 other things
In reply to: Genevieve 's message, ""Designated Dead Innocents" and their role in canon and fics...(r)" on Tuesday, January 25, 11:48:17pm

So of course I'm thinking about this, and about non-canon characters in general. (it's probably pretty obvious that I like thinking about non-canon characters...)

On one level, it seems a bit small to introduce someone only to knock them over. I know that there are actors who specialize in being "part of the crowd" (a resume full of entries like "third dead girl" and "shopper in brown sweater") and that they work hard to bring a kind of focussed realism to their part of the total picture. In the past there have been directors who were known for their work with huge groups of people, creating a unified impression by orchestrating sometimes hundreds of individual performances. With some directors (stage or film) you could randomly approach any of these actors and they could give you a miniature biography of their character and action arc for the scenes they were in. The conceit sometimes is that you could look at any person in a crowd and find something in their story -- we just happen to be following Harrison Ford's story today, or Hillary Swank's, but there would be equally engaging stories in all the other people on the stage or the screen.

We make up people all the time, and although there are some example of "new main characters" in fanfiction, most of them are extras and walk-ons, sidekicks and SOTWs -- most of them are disposable. And it can be difficult to write a clearly defined character without spending lots of space on them, which could put the general balance of the story out of wack.

So it can be tempting to use simple devices -- the worshipful newbie, the attractive bystander, the wide-eyed kid -- all of them in their own way "red shirt ensigns." The trick is to make them specific without making them overly important.

Not to pick at a scab, but Gen has an excellent example of a very minor character in her ongoing saga, BOP. Towards the beginning of the story, there is a waitress at a restaurant who gets, maybe, a total of 10 lines -- a couple sentences of description, maybe three or four of action, and a brief tangle with the Mick character. She doesn't come back later (or at least, hasn't yet), I don't even think she had a name. But she had dreadlocks that bounced as she walked, and that image has stuck with me all this time. If this had been a different part of the story, and she'd wound up as a casualty in a shooting, I would have been very sad, in part because she had such a specific identity to me. If Section is indeed fighting crime, then we need to see the world they live in, and the results of bad actions include dead, red shirts on the floor. I just think that the people wearing the shirts could have actual identities.

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Replies:

  • You know...(r) -- Cyanide, Wednesday, January 26, 02:24:22pm
  • Ahhhh, our Cyanide is back! (r) -- JayBee, Wednesday, January 26, 02:32:14pm
  • Off with their heads! (r) -- Nell, Wednesday, January 26, 02:46:08pm
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