User blog comment:VedranTheII/At what point is a writer like Cardin Winchester?/@comment-11188061-20150526023219

To answer your title – which does not actually quite reflect your context, but I digress – it is at the point when I start writing him. To write about a character you have to be the character. You don’t write out a scene happening just because it’s cool, the characters have to have that kind of temperament, motivation or unavoidable circumstances that allow the meeting to happen. I often spend hours and days and weeks thinking about a character (in my story’s case, Yang at the moment) and trying to breakdown their feelings and write it out in a way that many people not only can understand, but feel that emotion that’s coursing through the characters.

So to answer your question literally, the moment I start writing Cardin Winchester is the moment I be like Cardin Winchester. This is my style of writing. If he’s there he has to act like himself and I have to think like him as his writer, and even if his presence eventually come to defy my imagined scene I have no choice but to go along with it. This is why many writers often treat their creations as if they’re alive, and say that they are not the ones who dictate how a story goes, but they.

But thus far I’ve never written him because he is too shallow of a character right now to make sense of (the unfortunate case of RWBY), though that is only my opinion.

Since you brought this up I’d like to see a discussion about a different character: Jaune Arc.

If Cardin Winchester is said to be the most ‘accurate’ character that’s written in the RWBY fandom – although I disagree that people write him accurately; for example he absolutely doesn’t have the courage or stupidity to do something like rape – then Jaune Arc has to be one who has the highest amount of ‘Out of Character’ stories ever written in fan fiction.

More importantly, the implications brought about by Jaune is no less disturb than Cardin’s.

In RWBY fandom, Cardin Winchester is the wish fulfillment of a toss away villain, whose existence is solely used to portray the most unbearable and/or detestable of common social flaws. He is a commonly written as a bully, cowardly (at the face of major decisions), fond of blame shifting, prideful, childish and defensive. More uncommonly, he is written as an evil person who will commit atrocities and crimes. I personally do not accept this and see is as traits of being OOC, but depending on the story it is possible this can happen – as it can happen to everyone else.

The point is Cardin’s flaws that are normally seen in the norm, peaceful society (if you’re from a warring country things are naturally different, but that’s another story), and is present in EVERYONE OF US. The toss away villain is NOT evil; he simply represents all the little weaknesses in mankind that separates the better and the worse, the child and the adult.

Now that we’ve established Cardin’s stance, let’s talk about Jaune. If Cardin is the wish fulfillment of a toss away villain, then Jaune is the wish fulfillment of a self-insert; the protagonist. He’s always more self-insert than the self-insert themselves, because the writers don’t need to feel embarrassed over their own creations. Perhaps ideal will be the better word to describe this, but Jaune is not perfect, and most writers of the fandom seem to believe him to be special. So self-insert is in my opinion, the better word.

Now then. I believe many of us have read more than enough Jaune fics that we scrunch our faces in disgust upon encountering another one. It’s almost always the same; he’s either super special, harem king, or both. The protagonist that always wins at the end because this is HIS story HELL YEAH (No he is NOT, people). This misconception is further worsened by the fact that he’s good-looking, cute, plays the guitar and sings (albeit poorly), which had me envisioning a bunch a pre-teen/teenagers swooning over him because… I honestly don’t know. But it’s apparent that it has transferred itself into text form and garbled the character almost beyond recognition.

The current situation of Jaune Arc in the RWBY fandom is awful. In my opinion, a ridiculously large number of writers write Jaune Arc out of character (which if you’ve read the above, you can understand why they write it so), and even those who did try to keep him in character makes one mistake: they write him to be special. Jaune Arc is NOTHING SPECIAL; in fact he is the representation of the normal human being living just around you.

See your manager? Not the one who skyrocketed because he’s actually a genius or a Malfoy with connections, but that one person who really isn’t anything but works really, really hard for years to make it to his current position? Yeah, that guy. The plain ol’ nothing who tries to swallow the bitter pill every day with a wavering smile and probably cries himself to sleep once a week due to stress but plows on anyway. Once in a long while he makes little miracles, but statistically speaking it is a matter of eventuality and really, do you know how hard he has to work to make those little miracles happen? That even after that it doesn’t mean he has overcome a wall and can toss the matter behind like in anime, but just barely popped his head above the concrete, breathe some fresh air, before dropping back to the ground with sickening gravity (reality) before he has to climb up the same damn wall, again.

People writes Jaune Arc to be special, but he is in truth just a regular person. Maybe it’s because in canon they showed too much of his ‘successes’ and not enough hard work (not his story after all), or maybe people are just suckers for the age of fairytales of a caterpillar turned butterfly. At any rate, the current state of Jaune in the RWBY fandom is horrid. Discuss.