Unread postby doc.exe » July 19th, 2010, 5:24 pm
I share the same opinion. Changing canon characters is perfectly fine as long as it feels believable. It has to be the result of an organic process. NGE: Nobody Dies, for example, does it very well. Despite the fact that all the characters are completely OOC, it doesn’t feel in the least like a cop-out. All the changes feel believable and there are even hints of the original personality of the characters here and there.
That’s one of the reasons why I tend to hate Dark Naruto stories so much. It just does not feels believable that someone with so much empathy (to the point that in canon he is able to forgive someone who not only betrayed him but also has tried to kill him at least three times by now) would really become an omnicidial maniac ala Sasuke or Gaara, at least not in the way the situation is usually portrayed. The worse part: Many times those stories also incur in the derailment of other characters, not only Naruto.
The usual justification is that the villagers, his teammates or the people he trusts end up betraying him, actively trying to kill him or mistreating him in incredibly horrible ways, thus leading him to the breaking point where he can’t take any more abuse and snaps. That explanation would not be so bad by itself if not for the fact that the reason for Konoha people acting like that is usually the simple and cliched “he is the Kyuubi brat and we hate him”. The problem with that kind of hand waving is that in canon it has never been shown that the people of the village really got to such horrible extremes in their hate and mistreatment of Naruto, despite he being “the Kyuubi brat”. It’s even les justified in the case of characters like Sakura, Kakashi or even Sasuke, where the only explanation for them mistreating Naruto to that extend is that the author does not like them and is actively bashing them.
Compare that with the situation on a fanfic like Team 8. While it has not been explored that much so far, is constantly hinted that something very serious happened in the past, thus leading to the changes in the behavior of many characters. Those changes feel like a natural result of the ripple effect. The fact that Naruto is more seriously mistreated there than in canon is justified as part of a shady conspiracy, not just because the author wants to bash the characters or turn Naruto into angst concentrated.
And well, I also hate the “Idiot mask” concept. First, is an easy recipe to turn the character into a Mary Sue. Two, is a blatant shortcut for lazy writers that do not want to engage in all the work that implies believable character development. While Naruto is obviously not the sharpest knife in the kitchen, there are believable methods to make him become more intelligent and less naive (as Team 8, once again, demonstrates). It just requires work and commitment on the part of the writer. Three, it actually ignores the fact that an Idiot Hero as protagonist is not necessarily a liability when managed well, as One Piece actually demonstrates. Luffy is dumb as a brick and lacks any form of common sense, yet that is precisely the reason why he works so well as a character and is so good at what he does.
Last edited by
doc.exe on July 20th, 2010, 2:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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