On Fri, 4 Jul 1997 13:22:11 -0700, Henry Cobb wrote:

My problem with most fanfics is that the writers rely too much on the
personalities of the established characters, as they see them.  When
this interpretation differs from my own, I'm suddenly dumped into a
confusing inconsistency, out of the blue.  (Why should he think that?)

First person, unreliable is natural.  This is how each of us will live
out our lives, never intruding into anybody else's thoughts.  By
choosing one character and sticking with them, I can show how this
character ticks, and if nobody else agrees with me, at least they can
see the logic behind my choices.

Best of all, since I never touch the thoughts of any other character, I
am forced to place all of their reactions into dialogue or action and
since I bring no pictures, I have to describe these.

Third person is natural for anime and manga.  The author is given a
window that they can move about the scene and it would be very
restrictive if this window was limited to one character's line of sight.

Despite your obvious preference, there are legitimate reasons why only a
minority of prose is written in the first person. There might not be one
character who is present for every event the writer wishes to show. The
writer might *want* to give the readers insight into more than one
character. If nothing else, the author might have a simple desire for
variety -- if I wrote my last ten stories in first person, my hordes of
loyal readers might appreciate a change. (I do have hordes of loyal
readers, right? Right? Hey! Where'd everybody go? :-))

As an experiment, feel free to take my next fic and translate it from
third person to first; then we can take a poll to see which version
people prefer.

If I was writing a screenplay, I hope I would be honest enough to put it
into script format from the start, so as not to waste too much of the
readers time.  (I find the presence of the "d" key on the home row to be
quite comforting somehow...)

That's your choice; but I for one won't lose any sleep if one reader
deletes my fic just because of its choice of perspective -- without even
considering the nature of the particular story as to whether my choice
was appropriate.

Gary Kleppe
kleppe@execpc.com, Home page http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe
My fanfics and the FFML map are on my comics/manga page,
       http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe/comics