What I find offensive isn't that some people dislike OCs. Some people do dislike OCs and that's a fact.
What I find offensive is that on the list of "standards" you have lumped OCs in with bad grammar and spelling, as if using OCs were the equivalent of TyPing liek Dis and a sign of poor writerly standards. The two matters really ought to be separated, because one of them is a matter of fact and the other a matter of taste.
If you can't spell and punctuate, you can't write, period.
The number of OCs that should appear in a story, however, is a matter of taste. In stories that centre upon the time period, exact location and subject matter of canon, then the number of OCs acceptable is a matter of taste. In stories which are set in a different time, a different place, or just told from a different point of view, OCs are a necessity. Some people aren't interested in stories like that but many people prefer to RP in settings of this nature so that they're not yoked to someone else's ending for their RP.
By equating OCs with SPAG errors as a question of writing standards, you're kind of saying that any fic that's not about people the original creator spent a lot of time on is the equivalent of an unbetaed, ungrammatical, misspelling-laden sugar high piece of shit on FFN.net, and that's not true.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-10-22 07:30 pm (UTC)What I find offensive is that on the list of "standards" you have lumped OCs in with bad grammar and spelling, as if using OCs were the equivalent of TyPing liek Dis and a sign of poor writerly standards. The two matters really ought to be separated, because one of them is a matter of fact and the other a matter of taste.
If you can't spell and punctuate, you can't write, period.
The number of OCs that should appear in a story, however, is a matter of taste. In stories that centre upon the time period, exact location and subject matter of canon, then the number of OCs acceptable is a matter of taste. In stories which are set in a different time, a different place, or just told from a different point of view, OCs are a necessity. Some people aren't interested in stories like that but many people prefer to RP in settings of this nature so that they're not yoked to someone else's ending for their RP.
By equating OCs with SPAG errors as a question of writing standards, you're kind of saying that any fic that's not about people the original creator spent a lot of time on is the equivalent of an unbetaed, ungrammatical, misspelling-laden sugar high piece of shit on FFN.net, and that's not true.