Because I, like most ficauthors, have gotten both of these comments many times. One of them I love, the other fills me with frothing unholy rage.
There is a huge difference between
“I never liked this character in canon/never understood what people saw in this character until I read your fic, and I totally get it now”
“Oh I like this character when YOU write them, unlike in CANON where they SUCK ASS [optional rambling haterant about the writers or the source material in general].”
The first of those things? That’s a compliment! It genuinely is. Some ficauthors have a knee-jerk reaction to it because we get the SECOND kind so fucking often, but frankly….that is a mistake on our part, if we have it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not liking or connecting with a character until you find a fic where they’re in-character and lovingly explored in an interesting way. There’s nothing wrong with not “getting” a character, and then seeing fanwork that sparks an understanding of why other people like the character so much that totally opens your eyes.
That’s WHY we write fanfiction, to explore the characters and the setting, to pour what we love about them into our work.
If you’re thinking about saying ANYTHING THAT EVEN REMOTELY RESEMBLES the second one, though?
Unless the author has made it explicitly clear that they’re writing a spitefic–a “fixit” isn’t enough, because writing “fixit fics” does not inherently mean the author hates the direction taken by the source material, you can want to write a “fixit” where your favorite character is alive but still believe that their death was narratively appropriate–unless they’ve said IN WORDS, in the tags or an A/N or in a reply to previous comments, that they HATE an aspect of the show?
If you can’t say something nice, shut your fucking mouth.
People don’t generally dedicate hours of their lives to crafting 300k epics, marinated in lore and worldbuilding and character interactions, about media in which they hate the lore and worldbuilding and characters. People don’t write character-study fics about characters they think suck.
People who write AUs? Unless they’ve explicitly stated that they’re doing it because fuck canon (the poor, poor GoT fandom, man. And hey, I myself have a running WoW fic where the tags make it very clear that I’m writing this fic the way it’s written because Battle for Azeroth can eat my entire ass, so it’s totally fine to come into my comments and go “oh, this is so much better than BfA”)…There are a LOT OF REASONS people write alternate universes and universe alterations.
It is VERY RARE ACTUALLY that the reason is “fuck canon”. Most of the time, we’re telling a story because we think it’s an interesting story. Not the only interesting story, not a story that is more interesting and also better than the one told by canon and is the story canon should have told instead. An interesting story, one of many.
Odds are, the thing you’re about to “””compliment””” us on? That’s sooooo much better than that stupid icky canon version of the world or the character you think sucks so hard? We didn’t just make that shit up. We’re portraying accurately what we actually saw onscreen.
We’re not gonna get mad at you for not noticing it was there until we pointed it out. That’s not just a compliment, it makes us happy! I LOVE when something I created helps another person see something in the thing I love that makes me love it! But insulting something that we clearly care about enough to dedicate hours of our free time to writing about it? And insulting our own reading comprehension by acting as if we’re just…delusional, that this is just wishful thinking, that the things we dedicated time and energy to picking apart so we could accurately reproduce them, are just shit we made up?
Don’t do that. Shit’s rude as fuck.
Instead of using fanfiction that makes a character speak to you as an excuse to ruin a ficauthor’s afternoon by being a hateful snot, maybe try approaching it as an opportunity to better understand what made us care enough to write the fic in the first place.
You might just gain a new appreciation for that thing you originally hated.