On Sun, Jun 30, 2002 at 10:36:14AM -0500, Kevin Callahan wrote:
I also disagree. My main fanfic project at the moment is all first person,
but it's based on KOR. Although the TV series wasn't always first person,
most of it, and both of the movies were narrated by the main character,
Kyosuke. In order to maintain the feel I want, I have to write in first
person. There is no other choice really.
KOR is a bit tricky from a point of view perspective. I'd have to say that
the story itself is third person limited, but Kyousuke's narrations are
first person. The narrations almost sound like they're coming from an
older, wiser Kyousuke (apparently the guy managed to avoid winning a Darwin
award... :) who's watching along with the viewer and stopping the action
every now and then to add his narrations. It's a nice effect, IMHO.
Actually, I don't remember there being any narration at all in the first
movie. The POV looks to be third person objective to me. The thing is,
though, that they seem to be presenting the whole thing as a flashback by
Kyousuke. Unfortunately, they show things that Kyousuke never would have
seen, and further, nobody could have told him about afterwards, either!
Whoops.
When you're in a flashback, you are absolutely limited to the POV of the
person who's flashing back. Apparently even 'professional' writers forget
that on occasion. :)
Another problem I noted with this movie is that Kyousuke, in particular,
just struck me as being OOC. Perhaps if we knew exactly what he was
thinking, it may have been possible to understand why he was behaving the
way he was, but the objective POV they selected didn't allow that.
The real problem with first person is that most stories are difficult to
tell from only one character's POV.
In this case, I've had no problem, since the series is told from one
character's POV, but I can see where that can become a problem, especially
if it's a long fanfic or a series of fics. I don't think it's quite as
problematic with shortfics.
Notice in KOR that they don't hesitate to show scenes that are obviously not
from Kyousuke's point of view when they feel it necessary.
I remember getting to the end of my first first
person fanfic and then realizing that for dramatic reasons I *had* to
show a scene at which the narrator character *couldn't* possibly have
been present; I had to cheat and have him say "I wasn't there for this,
but they told me about it later."
I try to avoid that, or if I have to let the reader on something like that,
I'll put it in another character's dialogue.
As I was saying above, there are a number of scenes in the first KOR movie
that it simply isn't possible to maintain the POV for. In particular, any
scene involving only Hikaru in the last half of the movie. She obviously
couldn't have told him afterwards, and there was nobody else around who
could have told him. So they just fudged it and changed the POV anyway.