why people don't write fanfic about inumaki toge
okay, so.
let's talk about characterization.
specifically, static vs dynamic characters:
(warning: kind of rambly because i'm still doing my apartment move and i'm a little all over the place)
so, i've gotten two comments like this on FIYM. which, given the length of the work, is an extremely small amount of unsolicited concrit (i'm very lucky - thank you guys for being wonderful). but both of them had the same complaint, which is:
"in FIYM (child era), X doesn't act the way I think they would based on JJK's portrayal of them as an adult"
personally, as someone who was born at the age of 47 and has never changed in my entire life, i fully agree with that.
i only go to AO3.com to read chatGPT-generated fanfic of Gojo Satoru as he exists in canon reading the script of The Bee Movie. AI is the best author because it directly scrapes the source material with none of that damn 'creative license' these newfangled authors are doing. that's intelligence, baby. but for all of you heathens that want, like, stories or whatever: what the hell are these libbed up lit-pilled genz authors doing?
while Sam Altman is busy voice acting Gojo Satoru reading the script of The Bee Movie, i want to talk a bit about my favorite mid-as-hell white haired twink who should, by all accounts, be a fandom darling:
toge inumaki
why people should write about toge inumaki:
white hair
hot mouth stuff
implicitly traumatic backstory
there's a boy to pair him with (okkotsu)
twink
why people don't write about toge inumaki:
he is not a real character
well, hold on. what do you mean, hana? toge has a good bit of screen time, though. and he's plot relevant. he's a real character? he's a main character in JJK0, and he's at least relevant in S1 of the anime. kind of. look, the girlies have shipped for less - far less. (looking at you higuruma.)
the problem is, while inumaki has the bones of a fandom darling, jjk never actually does anything interesting with him.
higuruma at least has an interesting moral dilemma (and a jawline that could cut glass). we see his backstory unfold, giving him nuance and hot divorced dad energy. he struggles, he acts, and the consequences of his actions deeply affect the plot.
inumaki doesn't do that. he does like, fight and shit. but his mindset never changes, his power capacity never changes, and his relationship with the characters around him really never changes either (excepting a veeeeeery light acquaintances to lovers friends arc with yuta)
this makes inumaki static.
it's true that sometimes, you can just goon for a character based on what they are - sometimes even just how they look (i have no idea what's going on with those ino girlies). but more often, we're here for a character arc. we are drawn to a character's story - the choices they make, the reactions they have, and their unique relationships with others.
in order to tell that story, things need to happen, and characters need to change.
that means that we need to get from point a to point b, and those points need to be different enough that the reader can see the character(s) change along the way.
According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly-
WAIT shit SAM wait i'm not done i'm not done. sorry, sorry i'll speed up:
"well hold on, that comment is just saying that your characters are ooc, it's not asking you to make them flat. just, like, dynamic but in character"
yeah, yeah, i'm getting there.
so we have to establish our point a and our point b. if those are both canon points, then canon gives us our boundary conditions to work with. if, say, i write a fic that is set only on the night of the shibuya incident, then I should know where the characters start and end character-wise (if I want to keep everything canon - i might not, and that's valid too). point a is the start of the night. point b is after nobara gets a new glasses prescription.
now, if i want to do canon divergence, AU, or points not within the canon timeline, i don't necessarily have canonized boundary conditions. if i understand the character's main traits, though, i can use that to extrapolate how I think they might act and react to changing conditions. one good example of this is origin story fics - prequels to canon. this is sort of what FIYM is. here, we don't really know point a, but we are working towards point b.
Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground.
christ almighty sam this shit takes TIME.
since we are working towards point b, we need to establish a point a that allows for the characters to have clear and obvious growth towards point b, portrayed by obvious changes in their behavior. some things to look out for in FIYM are:
gojo's reaction to physical touch
gojo's insomnia
geto's smoking habit
geto's control over his curses
haibara's whimsical existential dread
let's go to geto, since gojo's changes are a little more subtle to see from the outside. in canon, geto smokes and he's a special grade (somehow) curse user with no issues with his technique. however, in FIYM, he struggles with it, and you may notice that he stopped smoking entirely once he started kissing his boyfriend on the mouth a lot.
well, that's not canon, like, at all. but it's a good way to show the changes in his character that gojo has imposed on him. similarly, i gave gojo insomnia despite there not really being canon support for that (although it's got lots of fanon support), because it is a great meter for us to see geto's influence on his perceived safety level (and to justify heavy overuse of the sleeping in the same bed trope, my beloved).
these changes throughout the story take them in and out of 'character', if you define character by their portrayal in canon under canon conditions. but really, characters are a set of traits that are then squished into shapes based on the events that happen to them. in AUs, that means you sometimes have to do a lot of forensic work to make a character feel consistent without necessarily having the same backstory in your kpop setting. (although i think kpop idols are probably pretty close to jujutsu-traumatized child soldiers).
that is what i absolutely love about AUs (and canon divergence), though. i love seeing people translate known characters into new settings, and giving them new obstacles to face and settings to be shaped by. it is the most creative type of fanfiction, in my opinion. for me, it hits the sweet spot between familiar comfort reading, and new original work that keeps me excitedly guessing what will happen next.
The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.
okay, okay, i'll cede the stage to Samtoru Altjo.
in closing:
the reason you like these characters is because canon gives them depth through dynamic character arcs.
fanfiction can and should do the same, even at the cost of making the characters temporarily unfamiliar.
gojo satoru obviously likes horror movies in canon because his goth boyfriend made him watch them so they had pretense to cuddle