Hypothetical Question

gailsimone:

And this is GENUINELY hypothetical, I post it because I think it’s interesting for readers to face the kind of odd scenarios that actually happen pretty regularly for comic book and other writers of licensed characters.

Okay, you are a writer, you have a name for writing licensed characters, doesn’t matter if it’s comics, television, games, tie-in novels, whatever.

Now, there’s a character or set of characters you love. And recently, they seem to have taken a turn you strongly disagree with, and that is in canon, you can’t change it.

And you are offered a job writing those characters.

Would you:

a) Take the job and hope to explain or mitigate the recent canon stuff you disagree with, even if you can’t change it, or…

b) Avoid the characters even if you really love them because of the canon addition, or…

c) Some other option.

Again, this is hypothetical, I am not talking about a book I’m writing, have written, or will write.

I’m just curious. Even if you are pretty secure in your ethics, questions come up all the time that require lots of thought.

So, in this situations, what would you do?

I already answered this in the post but… Figured I would post here too, go into a bit more detail… Option A all the way. Not that I am actually any good as a writer. plotter, maybe, but scripting? pffft. But assuming I could, I couldn’t make things worse, and I might be able to help fix the damage, or at least get the characters beyond that point so the bad part can fade away. Maybe I could play with the change to take it in a more agreeable direction. Someone else may just run with the changes and dig them ever deeper.

The characters I would want to fix currently, and this should come as no surprise to my followers - the Authority characters. They’ve been damaged badly since the reboot, especially The Engineer. I went into it at great length a few days ago. I have an idea for Apollo and Midnighter which ties them to Team 7 and makes it so they can share an origin again, and I think Jack just needs to be written by someone who gets his unusual powerset and how it can be used rather than just constantly having chats with cities… He mostly suffers from being completely under-used. Angie is a tough case, but I’d do my best.

I’d have also loved to try and get Nightcrawler back to being fun and swashbuckler-y back when he was still alive… But I don’t think it would be in good taste to bring him back now. (the AU versions they’re using are fine though, and will have to do)

Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/37385163604