Not a request for recs, I swear.

[dira]

terrio and I were talking last night about the tragedy that is fanon!Rodney McKay's childhood--rivalled, she pointed out, only by fanon!John Sheppard's.

Oh, I don't know, I said. Fanon!Daniel Jackson and fanon!Xander Harris could give both of them a run for their money.

Hmmm, I said a little later. Surely there is a way to determine ~empirically~ who fandom has bestowed with the most horrible fanon!childhood! How about a poll?

But I can't do an ~authoritative~ poll until I have had some help coming up with contestants, so, fandom, tell me: who has the worst fanon!childhood?

To be clear: this is neither about who has had, say, for instance, a canonical childhood bad enough to turn him into a canonical serial killer, Dexter, nor about the fact that one time you read this one story where it turned out that the Kents belonged to a Satanic cult that tortured young Clark over and over and he developed multiple personalities in response so that while Clark/Superman is totally well-adjusted after an idyllic Kansas childhood, Kal-El is a time bomb of psychotic rage.

Uh, not that that story exists. As far as I know.

Anyway: I'm looking for the general trend of fanonical horrible childhoods, not canon or outlying crackfic/evil mirrorverse, is what I am saying. Help?


This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/536931.html.

Comments

[dira]

Harry, Snape, and Draco, Jim and Blair, all definitely on the list. :)

[kinetikatrue]

Good times, good times. But going back to the Smallville example you gave . . . do we think Lex Luthor had too terrible an actual canon childhood to qualify for this?

[dira]

I don't actually know anything about what's canonical for Lex's childhood. But he's already on the list. *g*

[kinetikatrue]

Yeah, I finally made my way over to the LJ version of this entry and spotted that, so. Heh.

I was also thinking about whether i could come up with any girls who would meet the criteria and . . . not really, no. I think partially because going to that sort of place with female characters tends to get you accusations of MARY SUE. And partially also that there just isn't as much of a drive to give female characters that sort of emotional mud to crawl out of. Because, like, it's transformative for male characters but not for female ones.

[dira]

I think it goes right along with ~MANPAIN~.

I guess, uh, maybe Aeryn Sun? She's the closest I can think of.

[kinetikatrue]

Yes, definitely, re: ~MANPAIN. But I do think there is some stuff about how we think about female characters, as well. And, well, how the creators think about them. But I am not sure I can articulate it better than that, right now.

Eh.

Anyway, yes, Aeryn Sun is close. And I was thinking about some of the Vorkosigan-verse women and just hitting the point of, well, yeah, they had screwed up childhoods, but you REALLY don't need to invent anything. Also, they're mostly sane-ish. Eh.