What you and I know that the character doesn't… · 7:32pm Oct 25th, 2019
...and what I (the writer) knows that neither you—or the character—do.
I had talked about something similar with Vren55 some time ago about a slightly related (but not exactly the same) topic, and he suggested that I write about writing characters that profess one thing, but believe another. And I will, get to that at some point, but I think touching on these topics I'll discuss first will eventually get us there, and thanks to some discussions with a friend, I'll start with today's topic because it's at the forefront of my thoughts right now: Meta Awareness..
This is a fascinating thing from the fanfiction perspective, I think, since slightly different rules apply to fan fiction than they would for an original story.
So what is Meta Awareness?
We know. We know who the characters are. We know (for the most part) their past, future and present. We watched the series, and if we've kept up with it, we know details that apply to each of their lives.
We know that when Twilight and Co. blast NMM with rainbows and get a wild Luna, she is going to have issues with Nightmare Night until Twilight and the others blast her with rainbows again explain what it's about, etc. Oh, we know.
Meta Awareness is not necessarily unique to fan fiction, but it is a constant thing to remember. It has pros and cons; we can describe less, because we know others know what we need them to be aware of, or we describe less and cut off a potential reader because they're not familiar enough with the material.
We mention an event, and we expect our readers to be aware of it, and why shouldn't they? Here specifically, since it's a MLP:FIM page?
It's not a bad thing. It frames the whole experience of fan fiction, after all. The real problem arises when we let this knowledge interfere with a story.
You see, Meta Awareness is something like Disbelief. As a reader, you have to suspend it to a certain degree in order to fully enjoy a story. In my opinion, good stories are not going to follow the episodes directly.
If something radically changes at the point where the story starts, and then the future develops exactly as in the show regardless… what's the point of things changing for that character at all? If I'm going to experience the exact same thing as in the series… no offense, but I'll just watch the series.
In long form stories, a character that starts as close to the original in the series as possible, is not going to continue being that same character, no matter how much we authors try to keep them close to it.
If your character doesn't change at all during a novel-length story, then you didn't do a good job writing a story. Just saying.
Meta Awareness puts readers and authors in a bit of a pickle, you see. Meta Awareness creates expectations, and sometimes those expectations are valid—sometimes (most of the times) in they're not… precisely because things are changing. And also, because authors, also having a Meta Awareness, have a different understanding of what's happening in a story.
So let's break this down a little bit.
In Fan Fiction specifically, the Author Knows Everything about their story in plot terms, and that knowledge supersedes the Canonical Meta Knowledge.
Why, you might ask?
Because it's not the show. A fanfic is not the show. IT IS NOT THE SHOW. No fanfic is the show, no matter how the author feels about how accurate their portrayal is.
Now, I'm not saying that you have to sit down and assume that you missed something obvious. Communicating the story effectively IS the author's job, and while authors can't account for everyone getting it regardless of how clear they think it is, owning the story doesn't get them off the hook if they completely mislead their readers through bad writing.
No, what I mean here is that the Author is aware of the Meta Knowledge, but in their story, the Meta Knowledge is secondary to the happenings therein. Let's use a basic example:
In A Canterlot Wedding, the Meta Knowledge provides us with something like this:
1) Twilight discovers her brother is getting married.
2) Twilight discovers it's to Cadance, but then in a bit of slightly-hysterical drama, accuses Cadance of being a fake!
3) Cadance is indeed a fake, and manipulates the situation into Twilight's friends basically disowning her.
4) Twilight finds the real Cadance and together they escape and confront the fake Cadance revealing the changeling plot to control Canterlot!
5) Eventually Cadance and Shining Armor use the Force use their love to expel all the changelings from Canterlot!
6) The fun continues!
But. A fanfic tweaks something.
Points 1 to 5 take place as in the show, but when the blast of love expands, one of them is revealed as a changeling!
Do we get to point 6 like in the show? Nope.
Naturally, the wedding doesn't continue exactly as planned, and the group has new issues to deal with and solve before the status quo can be engaged again. And after that, can you say that the rest of the series should take place exactly the same?
Of course not. A significant event has taken place and it affects everything. Possibly available in print form by December!
With the new canon for the story, several future episodes in the series would either not take place, or go completely different, unless the author is a lazy writer.
In this example we can see what Meta Knowledge applies and doesn't apply to a story, and how it relates to reader expectations. Basic, but it gets the point across.
Similarly, a definite knowledge of the series and movies cannot be applied into the expectations of what's happening in a story as a reasoning for what should—or not—happen. A story happens from the perspective of the main character or characters, and their perspective and experience is not only limited to what we see in the show.
Just because we didn't know Shining Armor was a thing before A Canterlot Wedding, it doesn't mean that pre-season 2, Twilight had no brother.
This goes into the suspension of Disbelief aspect of reading fan fiction. By definition, fan fiction is already a "what if", that means that things are not going to stick to canon and the interpretations of what's happening are left to the author to explain to the reader.
If a character has different life experiences, naturally they will not react to things in the show exactly the same way. This is something that is made clear even in the series and Equestria Girls.
While it's not declared directly in the series, we do know that in Equestria Girls Rarity and Applejack are a thing, but in the MLP final episode Applejack and Rainbow Dash are. Whether you agree with this being canonical or not is irrelevant to what we can extrapolate from these two facts, and that is that different experiences ended up with different pairings.
The girls from Equestria Girls are NOT exact copies of the Mane 6 (as I have pointed out many, many, times before). Because their life experiences were different, so were the end results. This is the same in stories: the moment the change happens and it deviates from canon, then those new life experiences will dictate how a character will act, ideally while being informed by their canonical experiences prior to that change.
This is why the same author can write seven different stories about Sunset Shimmer and have all seven versions react in a completely different manner each to a similar situation. Going to my own works, Gunsmoke Shimmer would not react the same way to things as Blood Witch Shimmer would, even if they both use guns frequently, and Isekai Shimmer would never act the same way as either of the two would—even if they generally share the same/similar basic moral values, or the same/similar basic canonical origins. And for that matter none of them would go and do what the Sunset in Parting did.
This is because they have gone in completely different directions in their lives at some point, and even though they share a common origin, their life choices and influences have been very different. If they all acted the same way to everything, then the author is not doing their job right.
And this is all because a fanfic is immediately headcanon.
While all stories have their issues, and an author should be able to defend their decisions (or at least indicate that the answer will come in the future), this doesn't mean that a story cannot be criticized for twisting a canonical aspect of the show if it happened before the change.
But, it also doesn't exclude characters for pointing out inconsistencies that the show itself allows canonically because it wasn't important to it at the time. In other words: just because the show ignored something, it doesn't mean it's irrelevant to a story.
Examples of this could be: Why is it that if Cerberus, who is supposed to be INSIDE Tartarus, escaped and found himself all the way to Ponyville and was sent back… literally nopony took that as an excuse to check if Tirek was still trapped inside? Since both Celestia and Luna knew he was trapped in there and happened to be one of their worst enemies? I mean, wouldn't that make sense?
In fact, how come there are NO guards outside of the prison that houses at all?
And wouldn't a character that lives in that world and stops to think about that be entitled to wonder in the most polite way, "What the hell?"
Of course this doesn't excuse every story out there of honest criticism or observations, nor is it an excuse to say to a reader "shaddup! I know better!" Sometimes, since we know more about the story than the readers, we also become complacent and don't clarify things that should be.
Think of Meta Awareness as a three-sided sword #Sheridan, #JMS: there's the canon, your headcanon, and the story.
The bottom line is, this just a blog pointing out that Meta Awareness is a thing we have to be… aware… of, both as readers and writers.
Next blog on this topic: Meta Awareness vs Character Awareness
That was a neat post! Never thought of it that way that thoroughly.
I was trying to describe this while defending Snap and Mane after Last Crusade. Metacontextually that was their first appearance, and Scootaloo of course treats this as a rare occasion. But there isn’t proof they haven’t been able to see her during the series, either with a quick stop at Ponyville, or a meet up at one of the other locales Scootaloo has visited. Plus they were together before the series started. Although it’s hard to say how long that’s actually been, considering this show’s difficulty with calendar years and stating character ages. Actually if we go through the episode again, I don’t think there’s anything saying that Sweetie Belle or Apple Bloom couldn’t have met them once before either.
That logic would make it fair to come down on Magnum and Cookie Crumbles as well. The last time they did anything was back in season four, and they’ve had like, three background appearances since then in the entire series. They were never anything close to being protagonists, so Sweetie Belle was drawn into the plot through her relationships with either Rarity or the CMC. Rarity’s sisterly relationship ends up being pseudo-guardianship (unless Sweetie and the CMC were running around unsupervised). Making it seem like these two are just always on vacation and hoisting her off.
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The thing to apply here would be two fold, I think:
1) The reader should remember that if a fic takes places before their appearance, then the fic's continuity takes presedense over what is canon in the series... and...
2) In the case of Scoot's parents, there's more evidence than not that they were indeed actively not part of her life, but as you point out, it doesn't exclude it from being a possibility that they did actually visit occasionally. It really boils down to interpretation by the author and reader, but because we have so little information about them, saying that they were never there is as debatable as saying that they were there often and we never saw them. Neither side can be absolute in that instance, I feel, and therefore should not make the other impossible.
This is too dang relatable
Tell that to the SoL writers. Not every story is the protagonist's coming of age journey, though 'change at all' does give a fair bit of wiggle room to argue they changed a little one way or another.
Even if I bought that particular bridge, I would point you to 'death of the author' and its place in both New Criticism and Postmodernism. In case you're unfamiliar with the term... I am not threatening you. I'd point out that it's not uncommon for a fan to know an author's story better than they do. While they're busy writing more the fans are obsessing over what's been written more than the author ever did. That may not apply to you personally; perhaps you have a perfect memory for every story you've written and have never made a mistake in their portrayal. But that is certainly not a universal truth. Authors slip up, mix up details, forget characters and plotlines; these things do happen. From your point of view those slips may not count, but to the reader, engaging with the text? Oh yes they do. Three-sided indeed. B5 references don't make you right (though at least 20%... righter).
Hey I read that tweak awhile back. The fun did most certainly continue, for a varying interpretation of 'like in the show'.
This was good. Bear in mind that keepers of such knowledge have a certain responsibility to treat it with respect and use it responsibly, since it's power and all. You can use it for the characters or against them. You have that choice to make, and it's more important as a fanfic writer than someone writing in more 'traditional' mediums. This is all the more true with the show now over: trends in character interpretations are in your hands. You can ask 'why were there no guards?' or you can create a reason that's reasonable. Instead of opening up the floor to 'why does this character seem lobotomized half the time?' you can write that reason in their favor (or not, depending on how you want to portray them in your story). The reason you put forth was never in canon, because in canon it wasn't important, as you point out. But as the keeper of all the knowledge of your story if you bring up the question then it's clearly important now. How you reconcile it... that's the power you have to decide how to use.
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One pair is definitely more physically present than the other.
One good example I can think of is SAPR.
The beginning of the story takes place at the same time as the start of RWBY, but by the time the Vytal Festival starts, things have gone so far off the rails that there's no way that they could follow the Volume 4 storyline. That's a good thing in this case. Most of the changes stem from Sunset's appearance in Remnant, and the existence of the mirror portal in Solitas.
EDIT: This also could tie into reader vs character awareness. The deeper lore of RWBY isn't really explored until Volume 3, but it's presented to the reader early in SAPR. Mostly because the reader is already aware of it, but also because we see the POV of characters that are aware of it.
I came here expecting an essay on the Meta-Awareness of characters. i.e., that of characters being aware of their medium, something I play with a... bit more than is probably healthy.
I found a well thought out discussion on OUR awareness of events and ideas outside the fic. Very thought-provoking and, well, interesting... but nothing I feel strongly enough to argue. This really is kind of the way things are. No matter how compliant you try to be with the show, it isn't the show. By telling it in story form through words alone CHANGES it in a way, since the medium itself has a away of changing the mood, the possibilities, and the cohesion. It's very surprising how different fics of all sorts feel from watching the show itself.
((Now, try writing a character who knows more about the story than you, the author, are supposed to. That's a fun headache.))
-GM, master of them who are Aware.
Yeah, the whole expecting stories to stick 100% to your interpretation of canon when reading fanfics seems kind of silly. And yeah, the stories that throw in massive monkey wrenches into the world, then go almost exactly word for word how they did in the show (bonus points if a new character is randomly frozen by the villain so that the dialogue can be exactly the same) drive me crazy.
I mean, chasing a bride out of her own wedding rehearsal in tears and being proud about it is a bit more than slightly hysterical, and Twilight accuses her of being evil, not a fake. She didn’t even get disowned. Yes, the others were upset at her, but at no point did they imply they were done with her.
Another aspect to consider is genre awareness. Some fanfics only change genre and reinterpret everything through that. During the show we all know that their is a 99.99% chance that anyone who looks like they might be hurt or dead (and wasn't like that in the first place) is fine because it's that kind of show, but changing the genre and rating throws that expectation out. If done right, that adds tension and suspense that wasn't present before.