Uzobono wrote:Tecknophyle wrote:*snip*
For Alpha Woman, I don't believe Doc has ever said she's anything but lesbian, so (just my opinion :p) it's the *wrong* way to write her as being attracted to men for example.
But there's also nothing there to indicate she isn't, and that's largely because there haven't been many men on the good side of the ledger we've seen her interact with (since there are so few anyway) to say otherwise. The only Y Chromosome she's been shown in the presence of moderately regularly is the (reformed) Ted Twiss, and there are obvious reasons why she'd have some personal issues with him.
While I respect the fact that the creator of a character has certain views on what they want the character to be like, and those views should be respected, in the end when you allow someone else to use the character there will be changes. Things that perhaps you, as a creator, possibly never thought about. Given the stories she was in I suspect that--to use the same example--Alpha Woman's possible bisexuality simply wasn't an issue. Never came up. I don't know if the original writers even thought about it. And so someone made a reference to her flirting with a specific male character, which in no way changes anything else about her character and doesn't conflict with anything else.
But then even the
dialogue inflicts changes. For instance there's is absolutely no way I could write the "Fiend! Release my friends at once!" style dialogue without being sarcastic about it. Not a chance in hell. So if I were writing a character that another writer had using that style of speaking, my version would sound completely different, which could lead the reader to complain about characterization differences. Similarly, there might be aspects about the character that are canon, but which really don't get looked at too closely by other writers but which I do find interesting and might explore.
I'll give you a concrete example of what I mean to demonstrate. I just uploaded a...call it a "pilot" issue, of a proposed Metrobay story to my free gallery here (
http://www.mccomix.com/gallery2/main.ph ... emId=52924). It's something I did last year, that for various reasons never went further, but it shows what I mean. The Ms Metrobay seen there is a pretty far cry from many of her portrayals in existing stories, even ignoring the purely cosmetic examples of what she looks like, but there's nothing (except the glowy eyes: by now it's pretty clear I like the glowy eye thing) that's against canon: her powers work as previously described and shown, and her physical abilities aren't out of line for someone who should have both superhuman endurance (thanks to said aforementioned powers) and decades of practice and training. I even intentionally placed it within the timeline so that it wouldn't conflict with her later brainwashing by LISA, and it would have helped explain why she warmed up to Ted Twiss apparently so easily despite what a mess he was responsible for.
The main things that makes it different are dialogue (external and internal) and that I didn't have her as the victim she typically ends up as fairly quickly. I focused in this little snippet instead on the fact she's a
superhero. (The whole erotic bits would have come in not to long after this: it would have been robo-fantastic, the way I had it written let me tell you. Cyborgs and drones and alternate realities and so on. And appearances by about ten different versions of Kelly West.)
Now, my version isn't
better (whatever that means) but the role I had planned for her would have been different from her standard place in stories, and so I had to focus on different things.
Pretty much the only way for this not to happen is to either not allow someone else to write a character, or to lock down the character to a very hard set of guidelines and not allow any deviation from them. The latter can work (see, for instance, characters like Archie, Betty and Veronica who haven't changed in decades) but you need firm editorial control to do it. The other option is to simply declare the work non-canon: all the Kirk/Spock slashfic in the world isn't going to change the fact that James Kirk is officially pretty much straight heterosexual.