I like your idea of a "Continuous Mess of Nonsense" lol. Optimus Prime contains multitudes, in a manner of speaking. But re: different 'versions' of the same character, a lot of what I find myself doing when writing fic is bridging the gap of the lack of information we have from the source material? For most non-book fandoms, you don't have any canon material told from the point-of-view of individual characters. In G1 we never get OP's inner thoughts. If I want to write a fic that's told from 3rd person limited, with internal monologue and thoughts and motivations, I'm pretty much making that up.
So I approach it as, the actions the character takes in canon are a fulcrum that their core personality revolves around. (Though, in fairness, there are a lot of things about G1 that I just wholesale ignore because...it's G1.) Like, you have a set of actions or statements, and you have to tie them together with a personality. The more detailed the set of canon actions etc, the less flexibility you have on defining the character's personality. So that's what I'm thinking about when I say 'wiggle room' about a character. (And I do still thinks that's true even in cases where you do get inner thoughts, to an extent.)
To go off for a bit about G1 OP—part of why I think his character is flexible is because we don't get nearly as much information about his motivations for *being where he is* in canon present day, than we do for most characters in leadership positions. Because he's the dockworker who wakes up in a new body and then, uh, surprise becomes the leader of their entire race? But none of that was *on purpose*—so how he feels about it is an open question.
And he could have any number of different feelings about that without contradicting canon necessarily: from 'this is a horrible burden and I wish anyone else were in charge' to him enjoying power and buying into his own myth—with lots of different possibilities in between.
(hehe @ 'Red-White-And-Blue Boyscout Values club' so true. I really want to write a fic that's focused on his humor but I haven't figured out the shape of it yet.)
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Date: 2019-03-16 10:58 pm (UTC)I like your idea of a "Continuous Mess of Nonsense" lol. Optimus Prime contains multitudes, in a manner of speaking. But re: different 'versions' of the same character, a lot of what I find myself doing when writing fic is bridging the gap of the lack of information we have from the source material? For most non-book fandoms, you don't have any canon material told from the point-of-view of individual characters. In G1 we never get OP's inner thoughts. If I want to write a fic that's told from 3rd person limited, with internal monologue and thoughts and motivations, I'm pretty much making that up.
So I approach it as, the actions the character takes in canon are a fulcrum that their core personality revolves around. (Though, in fairness, there are a lot of things about G1 that I just wholesale ignore because...it's G1.) Like, you have a set of actions or statements, and you have to tie them together with a personality. The more detailed the set of canon actions etc, the less flexibility you have on defining the character's personality. So that's what I'm thinking about when I say 'wiggle room' about a character. (And I do still thinks that's true even in cases where you do get inner thoughts, to an extent.)
To go off for a bit about G1 OP—part of why I think his character is flexible is because we don't get nearly as much information about his motivations for *being where he is* in canon present day, than we do for most characters in leadership positions. Because he's the dockworker who wakes up in a new body and then, uh, surprise becomes the leader of their entire race? But none of that was *on purpose*—so how he feels about it is an open question.
And he could have any number of different feelings about that without contradicting canon necessarily: from 'this is a horrible burden and I wish anyone else were in charge' to him enjoying power and buying into his own myth—with lots of different possibilities in between.
(hehe @ 'Red-White-And-Blue Boyscout Values club' so true. I really want to write a fic that's focused on his humor but I haven't figured out the shape of it yet.)