💚💛 for the ask game!
💚 Green: Do you ever feel inspired by and/or jealous of other people's writing?
Absolutely! Both. I'm only human, after all.
In the past I have beaten myself with the stick of numbers and engagement and my AO3 statistics page and compared it to writer friends and contemporaries and also just the most popular writers in that given fandom. Sometimes I read something so fucking good (fanfic or original) that I wonder why I bother writing because I don't feel like I'm ever going to express myself as well as whatever I just read. I try to not wallow in that part and I don't do the numbers comparisons on AO3 anymore. Instead, I try to let those pieces of work that I really admire/love inspire me to push harder and do better and grow instead of falling into despair. Like, "Okay I loved this thing, let me dissect it and figure out how to replicate it. Let me take a small piece forward into my own work." I'm still working on that though! <3
💛 Yellow: Do you ever alter, highlight, or de-emphasize certain canonical traits in a character? If so, why and describe how.
My approach to characterization is very canon-compliant/canon-informed tbh.
So, okay, fanfiction is transformative work, it's adding something new to the universe of that piece of media that did not exist and is often also changing the medium (from visual to written) and is thus "out of character" by the very nature of that. (I've talked a little about approach to meta analysis vs fic writing here before.) But I revisit the source material quite a lot as I work on these stories, to keep locked into the canon. Even though I may reach my own headcanons that make sense/fit the story I'm trying to tell, those headcanons are extrapolated and informed by the existing evidence as heavily as possible. So yeah of course I highlight or ignore traits simply by the dint of being fallible and having my own biases and preferences, but I try REALLY HARD to steer as close to the original character as possible. Cuz like, I was compelled by that character as written :DD I wanna dig into them, yknow?
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Thanks for the questions friend <333










