All shall love me and despair...

[rj_anderson]

This is an interesting review of my HP fic(s). lizbee has already made a couple of comments on one remark she felt was misleading; but it was another part of the review that particularly baffled me.

Here's the remark in question:

I was really hoping that Maud would redeem her MS qualities or something... but no-- she's the tortured girl that everyone can't help but love.

This is the second negative LJ review to make this accusation, and I am sincerely perplexed by it. "Everyone" loves Maud? I stated quite plainly in the story that she had few friends at Durmstrang and even fewer at Hogwarts, and the only students who even attempt to befriend her are the Weasley twins. Her roommate Muriel beats her up and her other roommates spread malicious gossip about her. Draco regards her with supercilious contempt. Even in the later fics, Maud's dealings with other students are merely civil at best (as when she meets Hermione in the library in PR), and at worst downright adversarial. She doesn't acquire a single friend apart from George Weasley until she leaves Hogwarts. So who is this mysterious "everyone"?

Maybe the reviewer really means that all the adults in the fic love Maud. Well, there are only four of those in TPMA. Mad-Eye raised Maud and she's his niece, so I guess he has to like her. (I should mention, for those thinking of writing fic, that heaven forbid your OC should be related to any canon character, even a lesser canon character; that automatically makes her Special, and therefore a Mary Sue. And here I just thought it would be a good excuse for having lots of Mad-Eye Moody in the story.)

Moody's got a reasonable excuse, that leaves Snape, Dumbledore and McGonagall. I think my logic behind having Snape treat Maud with considerably more decency and respect than he does Harry & co. is explained in the fic. Obviously the reviewer doesn't agree that Snape could or would treat anyone with civility or respect, much less love or be loved by anyone, so that aspect of the trilogy doesn't work for her. Fine, I can live with that. Personally I don't think even JKR takes that extreme a view of Snape's character, for all that she enjoys playing up his negative qualities through Harry's eyes. But I guess only time and canon will tell.

So back to the supposed Maud Moody love-in. McGonagall, for her part, does nothing but politely guide Maud to a meeting with the Headmaster. Unless that counts as "love" in some strange subtextual way, we're left with only Dumbledore. Who, as we know from canon, is kind and generous and benignly meddling with all his students, so... where is this "loved by all" stuff coming from again?

I don't mind having my work reviewed critically. Some of my favorite reviewers have been quite direct in pointing out flaws, as well as being honest about things they personally don't like to see in stories (Oi! for instance, never gave a fig for Snape and didn't particularly warm to Maud either, and I still loved her reviews). I can even think of some pretty severe criticisms myself (for the record, those include wobbly characterization of Maud in the first story; a number of embarrassing continuity gaffes involving numbers, dates, and architectural layouts; a really cringe-worthy bit of dialogue in the first chapter of IWS; and too much schmoop in Snape's letters, among others).

But I do object to the reviewer misrepresenting the content of my fics and disparaging faults of which they are not in fact guilty. As lizbee pointed out, that's not a valid form of criticism.

Comments

On Murky Pond...

[(Anonymous)]

I've really been enjoying this whole thread, especially since I've been writing a self-avowed Mary Sue myself, and have been thinking about these questions lately.

I think the Moral Worth litmus question is much more apt than the "does everybody like her" question, as a description of the mental process one goes through in evaluating an OC. On the other hand, one of the foundational purposes (in my view, though of course it has its limits) for introducing an OC at all is to test the moral worth of the canon characters -- a ficcer often says: I want to find out what Canon Character X would do when faced with so and so, and none of the other canon characters is well placed to face him with it, so Enter My New Character, Stage Right. And of course the New Character cannot, except under very contrived circumstances, deal exclusively with Canon Character X, so presto! one ends up testing the moral worth -- or at least exploring the personalities -- of all (or most) of the characters in canon.

In good characterization, the OC's moral worth would reciprocally be tested by the canon characters. But that tends to be limited by the fact that the focus of interest gravitates (for the reader, but in my experience also for the writer) toward the canon characters. So people writing OCs are put in a double bind: either they embrace the so-called hubris of making their OC an equally important character in a moral sense, so that their thoughts, feelings and moral developments occasionally take center stage (or even primarily take center stage!), or they embrace the opposite so-called hubris of using their OC as a lens with which to scrutinize the canon characters, without allowing the reader to see too much of the canon characters' effect on the OC him/herself. And this is the dilemma of the *well*-written OC.

A.J. Hall's aside that wish-fulfillment may or may not be a litmus for Badly Written OC Fic is also very apt, I think. In my experience of reading and writing fic, the fact of introducing an OC at all, well-characterized or not, is the act of temerity that makes people howl. Whether or not the OC in question is an embodiment of *anything* within the writer is merely, from my experience, the window-dressing Bulveristic subterfuge employed by people who don't want to admit to their purely reactionary response to the fic as a whole.

(Ahhhh. Having delivered myself of a couple of ten-pound sentences, I feel better now.)

That said, I find it interesting that the worst invective is levelled at OCs that are *not* avowed self-insertions. I haven't had a flame yet about *my* Avowed Self Insertion OC fic. (I also only have four or five readers, whereas D&L is quite famous in its fandom and out of it, so hey, take this observation with a grain of salt.) I'm not quite sure what to make of that, except maybe to say that an OC which is presented without any authorial disclaimers, excuses, or apologies, and which also exerts a lot of power as a character (whether for good or ill), is like one of those red tablecloths that matadors shake in front of the charging bull.

To which I can only say: Toro! Toro!!

Lisa
http://linman.blogspot.com

Re: On Murky Pond...

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

In my experience of reading and writing fic, the fact of introducing an OC at all, well-characterized or not, is the act of temerity that makes people howl. Whether or not the OC in question is an embodiment of *anything* within the writer is merely, from my experience, the window-dressing Bulveristic subterfuge employed by people who don't want to admit to their purely reactionary response to the fic as a whole.

Lisa, have I told you lately that you rock? You rock. I think this is exactly right.

Re: On Murky Pond...

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I totally agree also. This is one of the issues - if you introduce an OC, enough people are going to hate the fic purely for that reason for them to go looking for "respectable" insults to throw at it. And that's just what Mary Sue is. She's a respectable insult. It's like calling someone a Commie in 1950's Hollywood, or an imperialist running dog in 1970s China.