Characters and fan entitlement

[athenaltena]

I should be in bed right now, but I had a thought. Those are quite annoying when it comes to wanting to sleep, but oh well.

I follow a comic where one particular character has gained a fairly large fanbase and a large amount of sympathy, but the creator did not intend for this and has made this abundantly clear. He says that the character lost all of her redeeming traits over time and that she wasn't supposed to be sympathetic, and he calls out the people who treat her sympathetically. Recently he updated the first chapter she appears in and made her negative traits come out much more obviously, and to me it just affirmed what I thought of the character from the start, mainly that she's an immature, whiny bitch who pushed away anyone who might have helped her and pretty much got what was coming to her.

But here's the thing: The people who like the character are angry that he did this, and seem to think that he doesn't know his own character and what she's "really" like. This strikes me as very odd and very entitled because he created the damn character and just because what he writes doesn't match up with someone's personal version of who she is doesn't mean that he's wrong.

I've been thinking about my own antagonist, and if people do sympathize with them I will be horrified because it will honestly be missing the point of who this person is and why they do what they do, so I can understand why this author reacted the way he did to people taking his character and casting her in a light he didn't intend. I know back when Harry Potter was being published there was (and still is) a large subset of people who idolize characters like Draco Malfoy who, let's be honest, are pricks or worse, and JK Rowling had pretty much the same reaction of "WTF is wrong with you people?!"

So my question is this: What "rights" does a creator have over their character, and on the flipside, what do the fans have, if anything, and do they have the right to say that the author's interpretation is less valid than their own? That's not to say that you can't tell someone that they did not write a character well or consistently, it's more whether the fans have the right to say that they know the "real" version as opposed to the person who created them.

Comments

[aureantes.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much conventional wisdom that designated villains do tend to "have more fun" when it comes to acting, and that it's easy to make supporting characters more interesting as people than the lead roles are...the self-censorship that comes into play when trying to write or portray "good" characters for an audience can really bog and blanden them down with stereotypical expectations, and I know from my experience roleplaying that it takes a certain degree of neuroticism, shadows, sleaziness, kinkiness, sociopathy or other complications to make a character (canon or not) interesting enough for me to sustain playing them. Unequivocal (or even red-bloodedly healthy "normal") "good guys" are hard enough to play straight..."good girls" are basically impossible for me to get into, as they bear a double load (or more) of cultural pressure.