User blog:VedranTheII/At what point is a writer like Cardin Winchester?

Well…”writer”. I guess you can replace that term with artist, fan, friend, person, etc… but this…Idea? Thought? Concern? Inquiry?...let’s stick with curiosity, sprung from that particular corner of the fandom that get’s everyone groaning, the RWBY fanfics, so I might as well give them some credit in the title (weather most of them deserve to be called writers is up for debate, but these thoughts are aimed at the ones that either are or want to become ones). So without further ado:

Cardin Winchester…is not a very complicated character, from a viewers perspective at least. He was introduced as an antagonizing bully, acted as an antagonizing bully, and get’s his ass handed to him for being an antagonizing bully, because this is a show set in one of those magical places where bullies actually get hit by karma, as oppose to the RL ones I’m sure everyone had at some point.

Cardin isn’t meant to be to be sympathized with, which is to be expected. Bullies are people that for various reasons, want to make life miserable on those that can’t fight back. Their reasons vary but their results are the same: they make happy people unhappy, unhappy people depressed, and depressed people miserable. They abuse the fact their target’s can’t or won’t fight back and never seem to know when to stop...look, I’m sure somewhere in their head they think what they are doing is right…but that’s a sentiment I don’t share.

So naturally, Cardin is a bit of a rarity in fanfiction, since fanfics are a byproduct of the fans overflowing hopes and fantasies for the show…and there aren’t a lot of people that fantasize about Cardin. With that said though, he does appear there occasionally, but the context in which he appears has left me…curious. See, most people that use Cardin, bring him in one scene, get him hurt or humiliated (with or without context), and make him disappear the next scene. It doesn’t contribute to the plot, it serves little to no purpose to the theme and it sometimes even kills the tone of the story.

It’s understandable…I guess? I mean most writers don’t come out liking the guy, so it’s to be expected they don’t mind making Cardin unhappy, depressed or miserable, and I guess having him suffer physically or emotionally might give them some sense of gratification. He is a fictional character after all, in a work of fiction the writers have full control of, so it’s not like he can fight back and try and stop them, plus he already did something wrong so clearly it’s ok if you are mean to him, because he’s in the wrong, so you can justify bad stuff happening to him as being right….so I can see how some people could justify this…but that’s a sentiment I don’t share.

But should I? I mean at the end of the day I don’t mind seeing Cardin, or anyone in the show, suffer for the sake of the plot. If you want to write a oneshot about the horrors of death and want to show it by murdering Cardin, be my guest. If you want to make him a more complex character, explore his possible reasoning and maybe inner conflicts caused by Jaune saving his life while his team left him for dead, be my guest. If you want him to still be an ass and use him as a tool to get two characters to interact (hello almost every Velvet fic), be my guest. If you want him to be a villain, like an actual one, be my guest. If you want to write Cardin and Jaune slash, be my guest. But when bad stuff happens to him for no other reason than you wanting bad stuff to happen to him…at what point does Cardin stop being fictional to you? At what point do you picture someone else in his place and hope the stuff you do to him happens to that someone else? I guess what I’m trying to ask is…

At what point is a writer like Cardin Winchester?