scott’s talking about how he has to play the « social game » for now. him saying he lied about his sick mother for empathy points. his whole exchange about loyalty with pyro. how does it feel to be on point with ur analysis bc i know it feels good 🙂↕️🙂↕️
I LOVE THAT PEOPLE ARE REALISING NOW. IT’S SO GREAT. ohh it’s so great and I love how this has worked out and I love scott and all his freak behaviour.
anyway. that conversation about loyalty:
REALLY GREAT CONVERSATION ALL AROUND. GREAT DISPLAY OF HOW SCOTT USES EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION TO CONTROL PEOPLE. HE’S ALREADY ISOLATED AND MANIPULATED PYRO INTO APOLOGISING TO HIM AND AGREEING TO DO ANYTHING HE WANTS. CAN WE KILL THIS FUCKING GUY WHO IS MY FAVOURITE CHARACTER IN ALL THE WORLD!!!!!! ANYWAY
You’ve mentioned idiolects a few times now and how you’ve gotten really familiar with Scott’s, and I find this kind of stuff incredibly fascinating — the way different people have their own little habits and tells in how they talk is genuinely so fun to examine. I’d love to see a longer analysis on Scott’s way of talking (and any other characters’ you want) if you ever feel like making one!
when analysing characters’ way of speaking, there are several things I take into consideration. the most important of those is striking a balance between canonical register and narrative functionality. fictional characters don’t usually speak exactly like real people having a real conversation, for many reasons (not least of which is that seeing all the vocal fillers spelled out like that would get very irritating—scott also understands this, which is why he tends to edit those out of his own pov half the time), but walking the line between “perfectly polished dialogue” (often overly quippy) and “hyperrealism” (super annoying) is tricky.
also, when fictionalising roleplay characters’ dialogue (not exclusive to mcrp), how much of the actor’s personal style of speaking do you want to preserve? you can get really meta with it too. does scott actually have a scottish accent in the minecraft universe if the country itself doesn’t exist? should references to real-world things that don’t exist in the video game, such as cell phones or christianity, be considered “canon”? I don’t personally want to have these characters mention jesus but I’m fine with them saying oh my god, for instance. everyone’s lines will be different here. figuring out those details is half the fun of writing dialogue imo.
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for scott specifically: a lot of how he talks is dialectical. half the server is british, half american, with a few outliers; different dialects (different englishes, if you will) often interact and intersect. for example, the americans would mostly say “it’s you who’s got the new one,” while the rest would mostly say “it’s you that’s got the new one.” you don’t have to know all the intricacies of this though. does anybody remember britpicking? there used to be a whole cottage cabin industry around that for fic writers.
none of this is meant to be a hard-and-fast rule for How Scott Talks; scott doesn’t always do all of these, but these are all idiolectic quirks I’ve noticed whilst (<- british) or while (<- american) spending a frankly embarrassing amount of time transcribing scott’s dialogue.
repeating himself
this has been such a pain to transcribe, honestly, because scott will very frequently start saying something just as someone else begins speaking; either he’ll repeat himself (often with slight variations in word choice or phrasing) until he steamrollers the other person into letting him talk, or he’ll wait until they’ve said their piece and then repeat what he’d been initially trying to say.
for instance (LiL ep 5):
usually scott will talk over someone, or someone will talk over him, but you can see how he says the same thing multiple times.
another example (PL ep 3):
^here scott interrupts what etho’s saying (this is difficult to notate when transcribing; I usually put a flag off to the side saying “crosstalk” which is a nicer way to say “people being fucking rude and not waiting their turn” lol), but etho doesn’t pay attention, so scott just repeats what he was trying to say. again, he does this all the time.
shortly thereafter, in the same conversation, this exact situation happens again (PL ep 3):
^as a bonus: scott starting to say “is” instead of “has,” another substitution he does pretty often.
of course, everyone does this pattern of interrupting and being interrupted, to an extent; scott does it A Lot. he’s a very forceful conversationalist. he’s good at commanding a narrative, and it shows in the way he speaks, not just his word choice or phraseology.
confusing past participles/past tense
scott will frequently use past participles in a way that is grammatically incorrect (3L ep 1):
^this is actually a great example of how scott talks overall when he’s not trying to curate his dialogue: saying “I’ve just ran” instead of “I’ve just run” (“I have ran” vs “I have run”); the format of “I was like, [example of what he was thinking]”; interrupting his own sentence partway through to insert a related thought (“it means—thinking ahead, when it comes to like, third life, it means...”); dropped articles/dropped words in general (“when it comes to like, third life” vs “when it comes to [when everyone is on their] third life”); opposing word substitution (“you can only attack from two sides” vs “you can only be attacked from two sides”)... all of these are things he often does when he’s excited and talking quickly.
in third life scott trips over his words the most (whether in his own pov, where he will edit his dialogue to make himself sound better, or in other povs) when he’s talking to jimmy. make of that what you will. personally I think it’s actually kinda cute.
hypercorrection of past tense
this is a dialect thing and by no means exclusive to scott (jimmy, joel, and martyn are also likely to do this, although never as frequently or reliably as scott). scott almost never correctly conjugates the past tense of certain verbs, namely “see” (this is the most common one) and “be”; he’ll say “you seen me” instead of “you saw me” or “I been over there already” instead of “I was over there already.”
similarly, scott will drop auxiliary verbs (again, this is not exclusive to scott), which often manifests in phrasing that is commonplace and recognisable, phrasing that wouldn’t be out of place in anyone’s mouth (“how you feeling?” instead of “how are you feeling?”). what’s more specific to scott is his use of “been” and “seen”—especially the latter. of all the times scott has used the past tense of “see,” I’ve only caught him conjugating it as “saw” maybe twice ever. it’s almost always “seen.”
for instance (LiL ep 2):
I consider this one a bit of a cheat code to writing accurate scott dialogue, honestly. again, it’s not like he’s never said “saw,” but it’s almost always “seen,” unless he’s mimicking someone else intentionally.
another example (LiL ep 7):
^here you can also see that he interrupts one sentence (“I didn’t know ... you got the kill count for grian”) to start to say something else (“and obviously I didn’t—”), which makes the actual statement nigh incomprehensible if you don’t know what he’s intending to say.
other examples of this sort of hypercorrection/tense fuckery include the verbs “come” (“they had came over there” instead of “they had come over there”), “go” (“you gone there before” instead of “you went there before”), “run” (“I’ve just ran” instead of “I’ve just run”), and of course “do” (“I done that already” instead of “I did that already”).
on a related note, scott will also leave off words (usually not the main S/V/O of a sentence, but the rest of it) if he’s speaking quickly or has something he considers important that he wants to say, e.g. (DL ep 2):
^multiple false starts + a sentence fragment + lost words. classic scott dialogue. he’s so eager to talk shit about jimmy that he forgets how to speak :')
“I was gonna say—”
this is a bit mean of me because I also say this all the time and I do recognise that it is annoying. the way this typically happens is that someone else will say something, and scott will jump in to point out that he was thinking the same thing (3L ep 4):
^here, you can see that grian says something that could be interpreted as him suggesting jimmy (now a red name) will leave scott in favour of going to the desert; scott interrupts to say his own piece. was he actually “gonna say”? resolving that question is not really relevant imo.
or here (3L ep 5):
^scott switching up which verb he’s using, often only a slight variation (“get” vs “buy”), is also relatively common.
or here (DL ep 1):
or here (LiL ep 7):
or here (SL ep 5):
if he’s not saying “I was gonna say,” he’s saying “to be fair,” “I’ll be real,” or “I’ll be honest” (or “to be honest”) in the same context. or occasionally just “I said” (LiL ep 7):
^usually scott goes for the “I said” when he’s being impatient or fed up though 😅 in this instance he was annoyed because jimmy was paying more attention to something else (figuring out where grian and joel were at) than to scott; hence also the suggestion that jimmy push him off the bridge.
as a side note: these are similar to the “voicelines” that every character has; scott’s tend to be easier to ignore than, say, jimmy’s (“wait, what?” and “what d’you MEAN?!” and “not a chance!” and so on; or his particular word/phrase substitutions, e.g. “rock and roll” instead of “go”), probably because they come across as more “normal” speech to most people, but they’re no less frequent. for every “fandabidozi” there’s a dozen “I was gonna say”s.
just not finishing his sentences
scott mostly does this with martyn or cleo, people he knows very well and trusts to understand what he means without him having to spell it out (contrast this with how he talks to jimmy like jimmy’s a dog who can only follow basic commands).
one of my favourite examples (3L ep 4):
^this is from the third life nether date, which is honestly a wonderful source of examples of martyn and scott being drift compatible. and finishing each other’s thoughts.
everyone will do this sort of thing to some extent, and ending one’s sentences with “so...” or “you know...” or “like...” is hardly unique to scott. what is more scott-specific is the way he’ll just trail off like he’s expecting the other person to understand the rest of the sentence without his having to articulate it.
word substitution
this is really common for people who’ve undergone speech therapy for stutters (I do not know if Real Scott had a speech impediment as a child but I would not be surprised to learn that he did). scott will occasionally trip up and say the opposite of what he means, e.g. saying “you should pay for that” instead of “you should charge for that”—antonyms but both words that are related to the subject at hand. or he’ll say “you’re on three lives” when he means “you’re on your third life.” for example (3L ep 6):
^note how, even with the corrected phrasing (“third life”), he leaves off a possessive pronoun (“he’s on [his] third life”).
scott usually catches these and corrects himself mid-sentence, or just cuts up the line of dialogue and edits out the mistake if he thinks he can get away with it.
(as a side note: a similar thing scott will sometimes do is parroting a particular word or phrase, tone or phraseology, from someone else; often it’s something he doesn’t normally say, and often he’ll repeat it multiple times, e.g. in PL he decided he could say he and joel “settled the beef” and then he kept saying it like three separate times in one episode. this is a normal human thing to do and I personally think it’s cute, but it’s also very funny when he’s talking to someone very different from him.)
or this (DL ep 3):
^this is a classic moment of scott insanity but for once the jimmy bashing isn’t actually what I want to focus on. scott’s freudian slip of starting to call jimmy his “soulmate” (because he’s talking to pearl, so he’s thinking about soulmates, so he says the wrong word) is another good example of this kind of word substitution.
(I’m hesitant to make fun of most linguistic quirks for the above reasons, and this is also definitely one that’s very relatable.)
laterally relevant: scott will also sometimes combine two related statements into one sentence, resulting in something that doesn’t make sense per se. usually he corrects himself when this happens. frequently he edits it out of his own pov, such as (DL ep 5):
^“it was such a good shot” and “it was too good a shot not to [take]” initially got combined into “it was such a good shot not to,” which scott then says correctly a moment later; he cuts out the (insubstantial) bits of the conversation between his initial statement (“I shot him”) and the “corrected” sentence (“it was too good a shot not to”), thus splicing together both pieces into one smooth line of dialogue.
using people’s names a lot
this is a fun one because it speaks to his manipulator nature <3 no that’s mean of me, I shouldn’t be mean. when speaking directly to someone, scott will use their name to address them more frequently than anyone else whose dialogue I’ve looked at. I don’t have statistics, unfortunately, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this one. pay attention next time you watch him; he uses names a lot. honestly scott and joel do this to each other all the time (LiL ep 7):
really it’s just a good social strategy. it makes a lot of sense in a group setting to clarify who you’re communicating with, and it makes sense in a one-on-one setting because people tend to like hearing their name. it’s a good way to command focus. other notorious manipulators like grian and gem also do this a lot, usually with “their” person (scar and pearl respectively).
side note: ren also does this quite a lot! but how different people use names is a topic for a different post, as is the topic of jimmy’s various names and nicknames.
recounting what happened via invented dialogue
I love when he does this, I actually think it’s so charming, although I also understand that it is very annoying. for example (3L ep 4):
^that is of course not what scott said verbatim earlier! but scott loves to do this: “so I was like...,” “then they said like...,” etc.
relatedly, he also loves to tell people about his day and what he’s been doing (LiL ep 4):
this is less an idiolect thing and more of a personality thing. scott is generally very chatty and likes to talk about things he’s experienced or things he’s interested in. as you can also see, he will often remove those conversations 😅 personally I think he gets embarrassed or self-conscious about it, especially when his collocutor has a lukewarm response.
another example, also featuring some classic scott phrasing (LiL ep 6):
and a more recent one (PL ep 3):
^you can also see that scott once again splits up a sentence (“it’ll be the last ... time you play the game”) with an extra phrase (“that’ll be the end”). obviously what scott was trying to say was what bdubs correctly said a moment later, but he got tripped up because—once again—he was so excited to tell everyone how he was messing with jimmy. lol lmao.
saying things out of order/dividing sentences with random clauses
this has already been mentioned in various other sections, but it’s something scott also does quite frequently. he almost never does it during his monologues to camera, it’s nearly always when he’s speaking with someone else, so I suspect he does it a lot more than we actually see onscreen. another great example (PL ep 3):
^he gets ahead of himself and the things he wants to say (“it was nice in episode one when me and etho were together”) get all jumbled together. again, I find this charming! he has a lot he wants to say and tries to say it too quickly and trips over his own words. it’s cute.
occasionally, very occasionally, this will translate into fucking up an actual word, e.g. in PL ep 5 (ren pov) scott said “memorance” instead of “remembrance.” but genuinely he doesn’t tend to do this; he had no issue with “serendipitous” for instance, or “rumpelstiltskin,” or any of the other words the rest of his team were fumbling around with. I’ve caught a handful of other examples in other videos, usually older ones; an example I find particularly cute is when scott accidentally said “gunpaper and powder” (instead of “gunpowder and paper”).
scott is actually quite well-spoken when he wants to be, when he’s making a point, but he’s not as articulate when he’s excited or scared. he’s also not as articulate as he wants to be (or wants to think of himself as), hence why he’ll often chop up his own dialogue to remove filler words (“I was like,” “um,” “it’s kinda like,” “you know,” “so...,” and of course the classic “I was gonna say—”):
^this (LiL ep 7) is a great example of what inspired me to start the spreadsheet in the first place. I find this kind of thing so fascinating.
fun fact: the only other person whose dialogue he occasionally gives this treatment is cleo (DL ep 3):
he’ll do microedits on other people’s dialogue all the time, but that’s often to present a certain narrative rather than to make them seem more articulate. for instance (3L ep 1):
or, y’know, to lie via selective editing. but that’s a topic I’ve covered elsewhere in great detail.
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there are a lot of other things I could say, but I think most of them would stray into analysis of tone of voice and inflection, and that’s trickier to do when you’re working off spreadsheets instead of video clips—and, consequently, tricker to incorporate into fic dialogue and suchlike. for instance, scott tends to say “oh my god” when he’s surprised or appalled (e.g. if something scary has just happened) and “oh my goodness” when he’s flattered or pleased (e.g. if someone has just complimented him), but typing that out mostly just makes me look insane without actual hard evidence to back it up... just trust me here.
I actually think scott is better than average (better than most people on the life series server, at least) when it comes to grammar and diction, and when he’s focusing on it he’s quite well-spoken—which is why I find it so compelling when he fucks up—I do not think most other people would know what an ellipsis is, for instance. many of the grammatical “mistakes” he makes are either dialectical or intentional slang, so I don’t blame him for those. the thing he does where he randomly loses words because he’s talking super quickly is all him though!
anyway! this is predominantly about how scott talks in general; the way scott speaks to people (which of course varies depending on the person and his relationship to them) is a post for another time. again, I have no hard stats to back me up here, this is based purely on vibes, but I’m pretty sure scott has said jimmy’s name more than anyone else’s. (close contenders include everyone else he’s been teamed with, and also joel.)
in conclusion, I believe the most stereotypically scott example of dialogue I can think of at the moment would be this (DL ep 2):
^shortly after this he threatens to kill himself just so he can mess with jimmy. fun character! love how he talks. hopefully this has been helpful or at the very least interesting. I have spent so many hours of my life writing down things this man says.
two of my favourite scott phrasings are are “to be fair, [least fair thing you have ever heard]” and “I was gonna say, [thing I was definitely not gonna say]”
hi mochi! I'm very out of my depth and wanted to ask if you have any advice on how to write jimmy dialogue and expressions? also does this change depending on who he is talking to? - murphy <3
hi murphy!! I’ll do my best o7
when it comes to jimmy, note that much of the style of his dialogue stems from his position as a youtuber, particularly one with a younger audience; I tend to handwave this a bit when putting him in a more serious context, but it’s up to you how much of the youtuber voice you let bleed into characterisation. however, he’s very loud and emphatic even when not putting on a façade for youtube… that’s just an innate part of his personality. as always, when transposing dialogue from the semi-roleplay context of the life series to the fictionalised context of fanfic, I’ll allow some leeway because 1) dialogue that reads like how people actually speak is really annoying both to write and to read, and 2) most of these videos are pg, but sometimes you gotta say “fuck” in a death game.
some things I’ve noticed from watching/transcribing jimmy’s dialogue and manner of speaking:
firstly, jimmy tends to have relatively simple dialogue. he’s a very surface-level character, which isn’t to say that he lacks interiority or complexity, but that he’s more straightforward and blunt in what he’s trying to convey. he isn’t going to be using therapyspeak or detailing his emotional state most of the time, he’s going to shout “hey, HEY” and say he’s cross and then probably try to hit someone. he’ll often repeat what he’s saying multiple times (occasionally with slight variations) for emphasis. he’s easily riled, he gets bored with long conversations,* and he doesn’t use a lot of complicated words most of the time. if someone else says something he doesn’t understand, he’ll usually ask what it means; he’ll sometimes play stupid about something he obviously knows, as a joke, although this is less common.
jimmy will frequently mix up singular/plural forms, typically with a noun and associated verb not matching, e.g. “why is there frogs?”… typically this happens when he’s distracted, flustered, or frustrated; one of my favourite examples is him telling grian “we’re an idiot” when they couldn’t figure out how to solve part of an escape room. another one of my favourites is “we have came to the conclusion that there is so many animals on this server that need a good home.”
similarly to the above, he’ll often mix up conjugation (kind of like scott, although less consistently; scott’s tend to be more dialect-based, whereas jimmy just isn’t always the best at grammar), e.g. “we have came to the conclusion” (when it should be “come”) or “the effects done it to me” (when it should be “did”). often jimmy will drop auxiliary verbs, e.g. “you sacrificing that easy?” (or something more along the lines of “you okay?”), and sometimes he’ll lose the words “to” or “and” when combining clauses, e.g. he’ll say “try get” instead of “try to get”/“try and get”; my personal favourite example of this is, of course, “I’ll try sweet-talk him.”
occasionally jimmy will use the american version of something, e.g. “trash can” instead of “bin” (or just “trash” instead of “rubbish”). he tends to say “you guys” as second-person plural. he’ll say “ain’t” when playing up a voice or character (often to make himself seem more confident or to reassure himself), e.g. “he ain’t got the nerve.”
like other pg youtubers, jimmy favours minced oaths, like “oh (my) gosh” and “jeez.” some common ones include “holy moly,” “jeez louise,” and “(oh my) sweet heavens”; he’ll often exaggerate these when playing up his reaction to something. basically, he swears like an old lady (and, similarly, will occasionally call people “love” when he’s peeved at them). he’s easily flustered when people talk about or imply anything sexual, and gets extremely flustered when someone directly flirts with him or compliments him.
there are also a handful of what I call “voicelines” that are unique to or characteristic of jimmy. these vary from word substitutions like “rock and roll” for “go”/“start” (e.g., “get these flowers rocking and rolling”) or “fandabidozi”** for “fantastic” to things like “wait, what?” or “(ex)cuse me?” that function more as stock phrases. also “have [someone],” which is one of his default threats: “I’ll have you,” “I’m having him,” that sort of thing. lately he’s also been quite fond of that one grey’s anatomy quote (“pick me, choose me, love me”).
relatedly, if there’s one thing jimmy’s good at, it’s begging. he’s very polite in the sense that he’ll often say “please” and “thank you (very much)” regardless of context. he also apologises frequently if pushed or threatened; one of his default patterns (for lack of a better term) is to run away saying “sorry sorry please I’m sorry I’m sorry okay” and then, as soon as he’s safe, turn around and start insulting whoever was chasing him. as much as jimmy will ask for/demand attention and praise, he does get easily flustered; if someone’s being nice to him, he’ll often say something like “stop it, stop it, dude,” regardless of whether he actually wants it to stop.
I remember seeing a post that said jimmy wouldn’t use pet names, he’d just call everyone “dude” or “bro,” and that’s Not True (he calls joel “babe” or “babygirl” all the time, and he’s also called various people, including scott and oli, “babe” or “baby” or “petal.” also irl he calls his girlfriend “my love” if that counts for anything) but what is true is that he says “dude” and “bro” and “man” (or “guys” if in a group) A Lot (in roughly that order of frequency), usually in an apostrophic sense, but also often as a filler word or interjection.
one detail that I find very charming but almost impossible to convey via text is jimmy’s frequent use of the open-mid back unrounded vowel (aka turned v), which can be observed in this clip from esmp1 or this clip from wild life. if I were properly transcribing that one bit from the esmp1 clip, it would be something like, “people, ⟨ʌ⟩, doing, ⟨ʌ⟩, titled”… pronunciation is its own thing, however; I’ll sometimes note in dialogue tags or descriptions that jimmy drops his hs when he’s excited or exasperated, and there’s some occasional th-fronting as well (although nowhere near as common as it is for joel). one pertinent example would be his pronunciation of the phrase “who throws a vase over?” his accent gets stronger when he’s stressed or frustrated, as do his general britishisms.
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the second part of your question—how jimmy’s dialogue changes depending on the interlocutor(s)—is a bit more complicated, but generally what I’d say is that jimmy’s behaviour changes based on how comfortable he is with someone, and his dialogue adapts accordingly. he’s much more likely to act out and be a problem when he’s with someone he knows well, such as joel or lizzie, or even martyn or grian. in the life series in particular, jimmy tends to be more hesitant to antagonise grian and martyn, and usually scott, although this has changed recently and he’s much more confident now. I’ve talked a bit before about how jimmy’s a social chameleon and capable of adapting his personality and behaviour to suit whatever group or circumstances he’s in, and this is absolutely reflected in his dialogue and register. he’ll yes-and practically any bit and mirror whatever tone someone’s using; he does tend to pick up phrasing or vocabulary (to be fair, everyone does this) from people he likes. he loves being annoying and pestering people, and you can tell he likes someone by how much of a menace he is towards them.
as always, my recommendation remains that anyone interested in (reasonably) accurate dialogue for a character do some transcription of a scene that’s relevant to what they’re trying to write—whether that’s a fight scene, a dramatic confrontation, an affectionate conversation between close friends, et cetera. also, feel free to ask me any more specific questions and I’ll do my best to answer them! or if anyone else thinks of any jimmy dialogue must-haves that I’m forgetting, feel free to tell me those as well; these are just a few that I’ve noticed, and certainly not a comprehensive look at how he talks.
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*relevant to everything about jimmy characterisation is that he absolutely has adhd. whether it’s diagnosed or not irl I don’t know, but literally everything about him points towards it. no dsm-5 in the death game though :/
**from jimmy krankie! (ngl I have no idea if jimmy has actually watched the krankies or if he’s ever talked about it.)
scott cutting out the conversation where martyn and cleo call him out for trying to cause problems is very funny on its own, but I also really like this scene as a demonstration of how martyn’s brain works in ways that make absolutely no sense. or, rather, they make sense but you have to think about it for a while, because on the surface he’s just dropping complete non sequiturs left and right.
for example, obviously the spoon thing here is because cleo called out scott for trying to cause trouble, and martyn was like. causing trouble -> stirring the pot -> with a spoon? -> but he’s doing it a lot so it’s a big spoon -> “awfully big spoon for stirring.” without that context it sounds absolutely insane! but martyn just makes mental connections that no one else does, and usually doesn’t explain them at all. he’s very smart, and his brain is constantly going a mile a minute; it just manifests in silly ways sometimes.
don’t worry, scott, I know where you got that from
“like, I’m not even that big a fan of my own content in that way. that’s crazy. crazy, crazy. [pause] I also don’t know where my ‘crazy, crazy’ came from. you know like sometimes you pick up mannerisms from other people? like, I do that a lot, but I don’t know anyone else—like, cam does it from me, but I don’t know where I’ve picked that up from, I don’t know where I’ve… imprinted that off of.”
I don't know how much you know about exchange events, but I always get a little sad knowing that I can't ever request a Lifeseries fic with Scott and expect anything that resembles him in return. His image has been so warped by fanon, that it is just what people consider his baseline to be like now
yeah, I can commiserate. I told kel a while ago that the quick-and-dirty way to determine whether someone actually understands scott as a character is to ask them what’s the past tense of “see.” and obviously that’s a bit facetious, because scott’s personal idiolect is not the be-all end-all of characterisation—dieu sait I myself have not strictly adhered to it, namely because writing dialogue the way people actually talk irl makes it insufferable to read—but imo it’s a good shorthand for “do you pay attention to how this character actually behaves in canon?”
it’s interesting to observe on a meta-fandom level because there are a handful of fics out there that are what I would consider quite in-character (that is, scott is behaving the way he does in canon, except slightly extrapolated for usually sexual purposes), but the authorial framing is entirely in opposition. oh isn’t it so romantic when [thing that is not actually romantic]. oh isn’t it so noble and heroic when [thing that is neither noble nor heroic]. it’s fascinating. I really don’t quite know what to make of it. and yes, death of the author, I can take this cute fic and make it sinister with the evil powers of my mind, but still.
and obviously it’s also just A Shame. I really like the canon version of scott, I think he’s so interesting and fun, and I wish more people would write about the actual character as he exists in the life series, instead of this weird ship-of-theseus version of him that exists in fanon. wdym he’s Actually nice instead of Literally nice. absolutely not. get that guy the hell away from me 💢
