While it's not a trope I care for myself, I'm really, really hesitant to say it's fundamentally bad fanfiction. Pretty much all fanfiction is about twisting characters to your own ends, to tell the stories you want to tell. How much you want to see the characters twisted, or how far you're willing to twist them before they become unrecognizable to you, is very subjective. One person's hideous OOC is another person's ideal slashfic.
It's arguably even more subjective in anime, which has the doujinshi culture. Many doujinshi are vastly, incredibly OOC - but the characters are still utterly recognizable, as they are drawn art. Add in the differences between manga and anime and dubs and you're often left trying to puzzle out what a character's canonical character even is!
There are definitely fanfics which are more in character, more true to the original canon, etc. But it's hard to say that they're fundamentally better fiction, or fundamentally better fanfiction. So while I'd definitely agree that there are different types of fanfic, some being truer to canon and while others only borrow random elements to apply to different story tropes, I would still call them all fanfiction.
(I admit my take on this has been influenced by being in SGA fandom, which had many crazy AUs and crack parodies and marvelous stories that strayed far from the original intent of the series and characters, but were brilliant and entertaining for all their tenuous connection to the rather mediocre source...!)
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 02:55 am (UTC)It's arguably even more subjective in anime, which has the doujinshi culture. Many doujinshi are vastly, incredibly OOC - but the characters are still utterly recognizable, as they are drawn art. Add in the differences between manga and anime and dubs and you're often left trying to puzzle out what a character's canonical character even is!
There are definitely fanfics which are more in character, more true to the original canon, etc. But it's hard to say that they're fundamentally better fiction, or fundamentally better fanfiction. So while I'd definitely agree that there are different types of fanfic, some being truer to canon and while others only borrow random elements to apply to different story tropes, I would still call them all fanfiction.
(I admit my take on this has been influenced by being in SGA fandom, which had many crazy AUs and crack parodies and marvelous stories that strayed far from the original intent of the series and characters, but were brilliant and entertaining for all their tenuous connection to the rather mediocre source...!)