Words do (not) mean things

[farla]

So someone posted a character on oc_analysis to get validation.

It sort of reminded me of an ongoing issue I have with a lot of fandom communication. We tend to have a lot of terms that are clearly positive or negative, but rarely any consensus on what they actually mean. Generally, everyone is against flames and in favor of some level of concrit. People are in favor of good characters and against bad ones. Generally, everyone has a long list of exactly what traits cause them to draw the line.

See, the person on oc_analysis had decided people disliked her character because they were OC haters. So she came to a place for OCs to get validation and, getting something other than "she's awesome! you're right, totally not a sue!" just decided everyone there hates OCs with a passion. So she's made this thing up about being "Original Character Reviewier Cancer Free" and her description of it basically amounts to "I'll judge OCs fairly based on the information I get rather than making a snap judgement". Which is, you know, completely indistinguishable from something someone who actually meant decent OCs might say, after they'd seen people unfairly calling good OCs sues.

Which is why I can like OCs, write OCs, and still react to hearing people talk about how unfair it is people have prejudices against OCs by immediately looking to see if they're talking about their OC Rainbow Sparkleraven. I remember hearing all sorts of how to write a good OC advice back in the day that basically amounted to how to lure readers in by things like pretending the story was mostly about the canon cast and keeping the OC in a supporting role, and then a couple chapters in making it all about the OC. And I can hate marysues but these days do the same to see if they're talking about ICKY ICKY GIRLS ARE GETTING IN MY CANON. And I demand extensive lists of exactly what we're talking about for any type of feedback discussion.

Meanwhile, and I finally figured out why this pisses me off so very much, you've got the people saying that it's possible to write marysues well. And it's because the term mary sue means "a character who is bad in a particular sort of way". If the fact she's a princess isn't a problem, it's not a mary sue. If you define mary sue to cover good OCs too, then you're taking away a word used to mean something so we can have a synonym for a word we already have, and the insistence than marysue and OC are identical just creates other groups that bash all "marysues" using the same definition. People doing this often tend to be using odd definitions of marysue to start, like it meaning specifically self-inserts. Only again, we've got a perfectly functional way of talking about self-inserts, namely by using that actual word. Instead of actually communicating what they usually mean to say (not every last self-insert/OC romance/long lost sister/etc character is a sue, which you can at least talk about), they say that sueishness is a neutral trait, and discussion starts tying itself into a pretzel as people struggle to work out what exactly the bad type of character is.

Oh, and those inscrutable tags that were bothering me on AooO? Support did get back to me and explained I can look stuff up on their wiki to figure out what tags mean. Except my problem is with tags that have vague/conflicting/overlapping definitions, in large part because they get used differently across fandom, and all their wiki does is tell me that yes, I was right and they're used differently across fandom and so are basically useless for anything specific, and all the cross-fandom tags are doing right now is making that even worse.

I don't even know why it always works out this way. Fandom and culture at large both regularly invent new terms, but fandom seems unable to ever set solid definitions (see "drabble"), and people seem to hate just making up a new term for a new idea if they can stretch an old one to fit.

In sum, I hate how if I don't already know exactly what someone means when they say a term, I have no idea what they're saying and have to either find multiple examples to get a decent baseline or else the whole thing might as be about how I really need think about how I zorphle when tendgo, and stop the rampant grenie of aewd. It renders any attempt at agreeing or disagreeing based on the actual arguments largely moot, especially any time when there are two arguing camps and they both insist the good words belong to what they're doing and the bad ones to their opponents. If I wanted this kind of thing I'd follow politics.

Comments

[negrek.livejournal.com]

To an extent I think it's just a matter of how fragmented fandom is compared to "popular culture" as it's traditionally understood. There isn't really one bastion of fandom culture--some people do forums, others are writing on LJ, there are people on FFN... it's not like traditional media, where you'd have a handful of TV stations and newspapers that pretty much everyone got their information from before the internet. Fandoms are pretty closed off from one another, so terms like "Mary-Sue" can easily take on different meanings in one place that don't propagate to others, causing difficulty when people start to cross-fandom and encounter different expectations in different places. Even within fandoms, there are so many different communities in all different formats that it's easy to hit on a pocket of people who define some terms differently, if only because whoever founded the group thought that that was how things should be, and later people arriving on the scene aren't aware of how things are in the larger fandom. People tend to gravitate towards others who write/RP with around their same style/quality (if only because they get kicked out of places with higher standards), so again if someone learns the ropes at one of these, then tries to branch out to a new area of fandom, they carry with them and will transmit very different ideas about what quality is, what certain terms mean, and so on, than someone coming from a different background. Until the point, should it ever come, that there is some central fandom board or repository of knowledge, or even just one or two very large boards per fandom that everyone knows about and tends to mimic the practices of, I don't think that there will be a whole lot of standardization of terminology, besides the vague, wishy-washy and sometimes contradictory definitions we have now.

Witness Smogon, for example. Everybody loves to bitch about Smogon's tier list, but while forums . There are certainly people who are confused about what the terminology means if they're new to competitive battling, and people who have no clue but like to be helpful anyway and spout incorrect definitions, but for the most part, there's not a whole lot of debate about what an "uber" is. There's just a debate about what should be classified as one, and even there, most people adopt the majority of Smogon's list. In this case there's pretty much one major board for competitive battling, which various smaller battling sections across the 'net tend to take their cues from. There's no real equivalent in the world of fanfiction--FFN is arguably the hub of fanfiction on the internet, but its structure is such that fandoms are still largely separate and there's not a whole lot of communication even between authors within a section; the setup just doesn't support it very well. So people develop their own little definitions of terms, or invent new terms, and hearsay and misunderstandings abound. (As a side note, how frustrating is it that all the forums, in every FFN section, seem to be RP's rather than actual fanfiction discussion?)

[farla.livejournal.com]

I used to think it was just a matter of different communities, but that doesn't explain why even within communities terms end up so fuzzy, or why panfandom discussion rarely seems to realize the terms aren't standardized, or why people seem to think they can respond to their character being called a sue by redefining the word to mean a perfectly valid OC. (Though perhaps one could make a good case that the fragmentation results in the loss of major hubs that would have things like pages listing word definitions. I don't see those often.)

for the most part, there's not a whole lot of debate about what an "uber" is. There's just a debate about what should be classified as one, and even there, most people adopt the majority of Smogon's list. In this case there's pretty much one major board for competitive battling, which various smaller battling sections across the 'net tend to take their cues from.

That's a good point...and tellingly, the term's transition into being used to talk about fanfic pokemon hasn't gone well for it.

This is probably one of those things that feeds on itself - the less sure you are there's any real definition, and the more you see people using words to mean all sorts of things, the more people do it.

(As a side note, how frustrating is it that all the forums, in every FFN section, seem to be RP's rather than actual fanfiction discussion?)

I was put off initially, but it's not really surprising. FFN tends to give people a few tools and then they use them in odd ways to fix some other deficiency. Fanfic writers and roleplayers tend to overlap a lot, and people have always treated FFN as, to a greater or lesser degree, a social site. Most of the non-RP forums I've seen are just endless spammy posts of "hi guys! I'm bored" between the same half-dozen people.

Dunno, really. The current setup has obvious flaws (a billion little forums, making it hard to actually discuss things) but being able to control your own area has points in its favor.

Huh, maybe a partial fix in this area would be to make a thread defining words. At a certain point I don't even care which definition people are using - I'll make up a new damn word if they want to stretch marysue to cover all OCs, I just want it clear what we mean when we talk.

[razorleaf.livejournal.com]

Not directly related to your post, but more the link you linked to, but it seems like someone watched Dollhouse and thought the idea would make for a nice Sue character.

*headdesk* Sounds like a bitch to write. "I hate popcorn. OMG, I love popcorn! Oh, popcorn is the devil!" Restocking her kitchen every time she meets someone new must be a hassle.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I didn't really go after the basic premise of having a character defined by not having a character at the time, since compared to being all powerful Earth Jesus it was a great idea, but...

(One of the many, many warning signs originally on that profile was the OP kept acting like she was a distinct character and everyone should be interested in hearing about her, even though she was defined by not being one. Which, come to think of it, is an issue all of itself - there's a similar badficcer behavior with OOC canons.)

I do think you could write a decent plot with them, but I suspect you couldn't really make it character-based for obvious reasons. If the storyline itself is engaging, it'd make for a creepy backdrop, but you'd have to really embrace the whole "actually a different person now" bit. Otherwise I don't think it'd work as a main character at all - maybe a side character.

I know I've seen similar things with reincarnation that worked decently enough, and also linked stories taking place in the same universe but with different characters.

Sounds like a bitch to write. "I hate popcorn. OMG, I love popcorn! Oh, popcorn is the devil!" Restocking her kitchen every time she meets someone new must be a hassle.

Actually doing this would be awesome, instead of focusing on angst and major effects and woe is me I'm a super assassin nao. I think the point of continuity would work well as memories - so she'd know that this happens, and she'd probably have developed a system for handling it, although how well she follows it would probably be a mix of personality and how many times she's ignored it to bad effect before (sort of how it's possible for bipolar people to recognize the signs that they're manic and maybe not rush out right then, even though it's pretty hard). She might actually seem a bit emotionally flat, since she'd probably want to avoid extremes of emotion in favor of following longer term plans that hold true across her changing personality. You don't want to rush out and buy trading cards if next week you'll think they're stupid.

Also, I wonder if she'd occasionally get personalities she doesn't like and then go out and try to get a new one. I mean, if I was already an aggregate personality, I might as well hug a couple happy people.

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

I remember the days when the internet was much smaller and there were central hubs like that, but even then they were fandom-specific. I agree with negrek.

As you were saying, some words have more generally accepted meanings, like Mary Sue=a character (usually OC) that is bad in one or more of these numerous ways, but people just keep trying to re-appropriate them when someone gives them a litmus test link and they realize that OMG my character got a 100! (Though it's always disconcerting to run a character through two MS litmus tests and get Borderline on one and Irredeemable on the other.)

[farla.livejournal.com]

Kind of that, but also just people using words however they feel like. It's sort of like how people say the flames they give are concrit and the concrit they receive is flames.

Or, on lj-fandom, define concrit as pointing out no more than three grammar errors at one time or something else ridiculously coddling. I've been following the discussion and it's a mess. One person was making this big deal about the distinction between concrit and unsolicited criticism, except the issue wasn't that good concrit was solicited, it's that they personally didn't like concrit that had to do with storyline, and presumably never wanted to hear it unless they explicitly asked someone. Instead of classing the stuff as "grammar and canon related" and "storyline related" or something useful that actually covered what they meant, the focus was put on the fact they just didn't like a barely explained category of comment and you were a bad person if you did it without being asked by the author. Concrit ends up meaning "exactly the type of review I most prefer". It might be related to the fandom meme that good writers take concrit, so in order to be a good writer, concrit has to only mean advice they're willing to take.

With marysues, I can certainly understand people disputing that their character is a sue, in the same way people would dispute that they wrote badfic. And debate over what makes a sue is perfectly reasonable. But once you start arguing that there is no such thing because you don't agree with all the traits, then there's no longer a word for "an OC who is bad" and we can't discuss whether a given character is done well or not. And when people say "okay, she's a sue but that doesn't mean she's a bad character!!!" I want to start stabbing and never stop. It's like saying "okay, it's a bad story but that doesn't mean it's a bad story!!!"

The OC_analysis poster's bit about original character reviewer cancer (http://sedia.livejournal.com/3847.html) suggests she's is near or at the "there's no such thing as a sues" area to the point she created her own anti-litmus test. Which means that any talk about judging OCs fairly becomes empty, since if there's only one proper response then there's no need to judge anything in the first place, and it's virtually impossible to discuss whether or not a character has bad traits.

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

Tautology is tautology.

[charizamdc.livejournal.com]

Argument through semantic hackery is certainly part of the problem. People generally seem to think that if you take something everyone agrees is bad that applies to you and change the definition it stops everyone dissaproving of that aspect of you, when all it does is make it slightly harder to articulate. Then there's the reconciliation tactic, of course. Lots of people either hate arguing (but do it anyway) or feel a strong need to reconcile, and an easy way to do this is to pretend you were using a different definition so you both agreed all along and it was just semantics haha perfect harmony. People also do this when they realise they're wrong. Of course, when terms are ill-defined (and even when they aren't, people often use private definitions) genuine arguments boiling down to miscommunication occur frequently.

The key is to get into the habit of defining the words you use right at the beginning and asking others to do the same. It's kind of tedious, but not as tedious as a two page debate over nothing. A thread of definitions would help reduce this kind of thing, though never eliminate it, but it'd take a while to percolate.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Then there's the reconciliation tactic, of course. Lots of people either hate arguing (but do it anyway) or feel a strong need to reconcile, and an easy way to do this is to pretend you were using a different definition so you both agreed all along and it was just semantics haha perfect harmony.

To make it even better, sometimes they'll define the word on a compromise basis so that it's halfway between the two meanings, and declare this ends the argument and it's time for cookies. And why are you being so mean and trying to drag the argument out?!?! Don't we agree???? Isn't agreement the most importantest thing in the world?????????????????????