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Fandom Clichés

I'm a longtime reader, novice writer, and I find that when I’m writing a story, my immersion in fanon affects almost every word I type into that Word document. I want to be fresh and entertaining, and yet still resonate with the reader. When you write in a fandom such as Due South, establishing your familiarity with canon can be a fine line: you want your readers to accept that the people you are writing about are in fact Benton Fraser, Ray Vecchio, Ray Kowalski, etc. And sometimes it seems the easiest way to do so is to use some fandom shorthand. After all, our characters are well-known for their quirks and traits.

So we write Fraser rubbing his eyebrow and cracking his neck, Vecchio complaining about wolf hair on his suits, Kowalski saying, "Pitter patter." Minor characters can be even harder: Frannie and her malapropisms; Thatcher as the Ice Queen, the Dragon Lady; Turnbull cooking; Dief constantly being bribed with donuts while Fraser bitches in the background; Dewey smelling like fish and bacon bits In moderation these can work - they can ping our sense of character. In excess, they’re ridiculous. But most importantly, characterisation can't depend on them. If all they are is their quirks, the characters have no depth, and become caricatures.

Knowing the cliché is not the same as knowing the character. On the one hand, you need to figure out where the cliché comes from - what does it mean when Fraser says "understood"? Who does he say it to, and under what circumstances - what's the context? What's the subtext? On the other hand, the characters are so much more than the sum of their clichés. The stories that really persuade me, the ones I find myself rereading, are ones where something about the characters I love has been dug out of canon and explored. It's not that clichés are bad, per se, but a good extrapolation of the behaviour behind the cliché can increase my enjoyment of a story.

After all, a lot of fandom clichés are straight out of canon - we're dealing with a show in which the hero and the hero sled off into the sunrise, which is a new (context appropriate) twist on a classic clichéd ending. However, some moments catch our imagination more than others.

Take a single incident which has become a focus of fanon: in "Eclipse", Ray makes a cup of coffee, into which he carefully counts half a dozen Smarties. Having Smarties, or M&Ms, in his coffee has become something of a signature for Ray in fanfiction. But why do we focus on that and not, say, the fact that moments later he turns his answering machine off by hitting it with a wooden spoon?

What does that scene tell us about Ray Kowalski's character? He's a nonconformist; he makes do with what he's got; he's a tough guy, but despite this he's got a sweet tooth (and from this we extrapolate an inner sweetness to his nature). In theory, all these traits can be invoked through reminding readers of this single instance. But it’s been used so often that now it just reads flatly, mechanically, one-dimensionally, like this is just what he does. It's become fandom shorthand for "this is Ray Kowalski we're talking about here, okay?"

So, when it sticks in my mind, it's moments where this shorthand is twisted, like the story (sorry, I’ve forgotten its name) in which Ray only used M&Ms that morning because he'd run out of sugar. In fact, it tasted pretty terrible, and there was a mess of candy shells in the bottom of the mug. Subtext: he's a poor housekeeper, he's got too much on his mind to go shopping. Result: I'm more keyed into his frame of mind. And this says something more about his character than, “isn’t he quirky!”

When does using a cliché work? When it's illuminating the character's state of mind, when the cliché is covering for another emotion. The character must be feeling something, not just going through the motions. Take Fraser's eyebrow rub: it's possibly even overused in canon, but it's a key to Fraser's mental state, and thus in fanfiction it needs to be justified by the context. Or perhaps, more powerfully, subverted: "Fraser's eyebrow itched, but he steeled himself not to rub it."

So, when I read over the last few hundred words I've just written in my story, I look for what makes me wince, what seems stale, and try something different. Maybe I can give Ray's coffee addiction a different twist. Maybe I should just delete the section in which Fraser is so lust-ridden he contemplates taking a knife to his bootlaces. Sometimes Fraser just wants to lick his lip and there's nothing I can do about it.

Or I can sit down with the source material, and look for entirely new ways in which my favourite characters express themselves. Anyone want to watch some Due South?

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