On Fanlore, users with accounts can edit pages including user pages, can create pages, and more. Any information you publish on a page or an edit summary will be accessible by the public and to Fanlore personnel. Because Fanlore is a wiki, information published on Fanlore will be publicly available forever, even if edited later. Be mindful when sharing personal information, including your religious or political views, health, racial background, country of origin, sexual identity and/or personal relationships. To learn more, check out our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Select "dismiss" to agree to these terms.
Character Assassination (essay)
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Character Assassination |
| Creator: | Queen of Cups |
| Date(s): | early 2000s? |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Buffy & Angel |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Queen of Cups essay, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Character Assassination is an essay by Queen of Cups.
It is one of many essays at Octaves, a Buffy and Angel website.
"The Queen of Cups takes a look at some of the most common blunders made when writing characters."
Excerpt
The words I dread most in beta are "warning: OOC" Out Of Character.Characterisation. It's a vital part of any piece. If you can't recognise the characters, then it ain't fanfic - simple as that. It doesn't matter if you take the characters and read them a little differently - God, I make Spike and Angel gay fairly often (as well as quite a few others) and it works.
The reason it works is because the characters are true to their known personalities. Take away their most common traits and you have just a couple of vampires getting it on, and though that may be lovely, it's not fanfic. If you just want to put people together - change their names and make it original fic - don't kill my favourite people.
All characters are prone to being altered, but for some reason Spike has been getting it bad lately. The urge to pair him with Buffy has had people falling over themselves to show what a sensitive guy he is. Ugh!