all just people? folk/citizens etc.

our heroes in the 'verse are complex disharmonious types, all of whom, through an alchemical mix of writing and actor performance, buck the generic clichés.

but how true is this of those beyond Serenity?
from the steampunkish trappings of Londinium to the rim worlds in Safe and Jaynestown via the Core and its denizens in Ariel, Trash etc.
are these folk more than a studio adjusted cartoon? if so or if not - how does this influence your fic writing?

The crew itself and the villains I've always considered fairly archetypal. They do have some twists, they do have depth and layers, but they are also something very easy to grasp the character concept.

so once you establish the basic, THEN you can explore the depths, put them in situations where you can discover how they react.

Bytemite wrote:The crew itself and the villains I've always considered fairly archetypal. They do have some twists, they do have depth and layers, but they are also something very easy to grasp the character concept.

so once you establish the basic, THEN you can explore the depths, put them in situations where you can discover how they react.

i sometimes find that hard, what with 9 main characters to juggle - and i expect the firefly writers did too. i was wondering therefore if one of the benefits of a single character fic, is that not only do you get to explore them - you also get to deepen the background as well, a chance to let some breath in.

and i love the picaresque nature of firefly which encourages character grotesques - i'm just aware of how easily someone (especially a brit like myself) could lazily stereotype, be it 'slack-jawed yokel' or 'all blue bosses are bad', 'education makes them dangerous' etc. entirely without meaning to.

do you find it tricky to balance out when you are writing a lighter story? i mean; a lot of the broader strokes in firefly are for the funny (jaynestown).

I do think the characters have depth, and despite being archetype-derived (and some even cliche-derived, like the HWHG (whore with a heart of gold) and the PWP (preacher with a past)) they tend to buck the stereotypes. When I write characters other than the 9, I try not to write stereotypes, and I try to give them interesting backgrounds and depth, but let's face it, in some stories you just need a quick, sterotypical bad guy or gal, or a side character who behaves exactly as expected (shopkeeper, sells stuff; bartender, pours drinks; etc.) and you can't be bothered to invent 40 years of backstory for them. I tend to write gen fic (with a Mal-centric bias) so I write scenes for all 9. Perhaps not everybody gets a fully developed treatment on a regular basis, but as the story or series goes on, eventually each character gets a turn to have some more in-depth time. I could write Mal-focused single character fics til the cows come home, but if I developed his character in such detail without treating the others similarly, I think I'd run into the problem of having a detailed, evolving Mal character interacting with flat, unchanging charicatures of the other 8 main characters.

wytchcroft wrote:do you find it tricky to balance out when you are writing a lighter story? i mean; a lot of the broader strokes in firefly are for the funny (jaynestown).

I was thinking about this again, about the stereotypes. As you say, in Jaynestown, there are stereotypes a-plenty, and they're well-used for comic effect, but that episode perhaps has the most stereotypical characters per acre of any of the original ones. The dramatis personae (or however you spell it!) other than the main characters:

overbearing, mean magistrate who bullies and belittles his son
son who starts out weak and grows to defy his father
bad guy bent on revenge
foreman and his crew of prods who act like prison guards in a WWII movie
repressed workers
hero-worshipping woman who clings to Jayne
hero-worshipping man who takes a bullet for Jayne
hero-worshipping kid who tells all the townsfolk about Jayne
bartender who gives Jayne the best whisky in the house
contact man for the job, who knew Kessler, and who seems to have no explicable reason to be on Canton at all, except he's needed to further the plot

And yet, despite this abundance of stereotyped characters, the episode as a whole manages to be fresh and original -- perhaps because when the BDH's are inserted into this stereotyped setting, they start turning things on their head. They don't walk the well-trodden path.

The other thing I'm thinking is that all it takes are a few quirky details, and your stereotype side-character is transformed and made into an individual unlike any other. Your "slack-jawed yokel" or "greasy used car salesman" reveals he has an unusual hobby like creating kinetic sculptures or that he actually has PhD in mathematics or something like that. Much like real people do.

I think it might be how specifically the archetypal characters interact with each other that makes them entertaining. And that's why stereotyped minor characters become interesting when the crew interact with THEM.

And of course there's performance, actors bring an extra ingredient to the table.

doesn't make life any easier for a ficster though!

and yes, the list for Jaynestown could probably be equalled by Shindig and H.O.G but, again, on screen it works; guess that's modern folk/fairy tales for you.
interesting that only The Train Job directly attempts to subvert expectations in terms of generic character behaviour..