20140912.0636

One of the side-jobs I do is individual tutorial work. I have been working with one tutee for some time who had been a student in my spring literature class, going over a paper for submission to the undergraduates panels at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. In recent weeks, though, we have begun to look at some of the student's other assignments, currently for a US popular culture class. The tutee is obliged to carry out a participatory project and has opted to engage in fanfiction based upon a rough copy of a popular MMORPG.

Because I like the tutee, and because I am paid by him to do such things, I looked over the opening section of his class project, and as I did, I was minded of something I have seen in other fanfiction efforts, something that creates a problem in the writing of many such efforts: inconsistency of description. I told the tutee of this, grounding my discussion in a context he and I have from having worked together and his having been my student, and I think he will be working to correct it. But the thought occurred to me in the shower this morning that I ought to discuss it briefly in my morning blogging, and so I will.

Reading fanfiction--any amateur work, really--often reveals inconsistency of descriptions. That is, fanfiction writers will often go into exhaustive physical detail about one or two characters, vastly exceeding that accorded to physical setting, milieu, or other characters yet. Understandably, primary characters receive more attention; they are the foci of the story, and so they should receive more words. They should not generally receive orders of magnitude more words, however, and that seems to be the case with many fanfiction descriptions; the protagonist/s get three hundred words of straight physical description (and without a suitable context such as a police report, which might allow for such a thing), while other characters get three. The character is thus made inconsistent with the rest of the story, creating a disunity that makes maintaining the willing suspension of disbelief more difficult than it needs to be or can usefully be.

The inconsistency is not merely an issue of quantity, distracting though it is. Inconsistency also manifests in the irrelevance of many of the details included in the descriptions; they are not consistent with the rest of the narrative because they do not meaningfully interact with it. For a detailed physical description, such as the notable blazon in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to work, its details have to connect to the narrative. The medieval example serves as multiple juxtapositions; the virtues supposedly indicated by Gawain's escutcheon are belied by his conduct, and the riches and glory of the rest of his accoutrements do not accord with how he acts. They thus highlight his failures. Many fanfiction descriptions fail to make such connections back to their texts; they are not tied back to the narrative tapestry, and so snag and unravel the effect of the work in which they appear. Thus it is that much fanfiction begins to falter, starting to stagger in a way that presages its ultimate condemnation.