Membership Canon Timelines

[CovertSphinx 710]

This is a question for people who enjoy (or even dabble in) playing canon characters from various fandoms. It can be any genre or medium. When you choose a Canon, what type of history do you prefer in your choice of character: Do you like to take a character who's series/story is already completed or do you prefer to work with a canon who's story is still "in progress". If you take a character from the "middle" of a series, do you then incorporate the new information in your RP as its released, or try to work the same "reveals" into your RP in order to make the transition more organic? 

 

For example, about half way through season 2 I decided to try a hand as RPing Lucifer Morningstar from, well, Lucifer. But now that we're starting season 3, I'm finding myself at odds at whether I want to play him as "current" after the Mom Saga is taken care of, create a new "mom saga" in RP to bring him up to speed organically, ignore the Mom Saga all together for the time being and hope that certain character traits he currently has return for season 4, or ignore the show and treat RPing with Lucifer as an Alternate Timeline. 

[Quell 249]

I prefer to take characters at their beginning or middle and create alternate timelines. Especially characters who are evil, I like to dabble in the ideas of "what if".

 

That said, I'm kind of a weirdo with canons. I usually play minor and/or dead characters because the more information about a character there is, the less I feel like I can do a canon justice. 

 

In regards to fixing timelines or updating the character, I don't have that drive, so I can't offer ideas about that, but! I will say that I have played against people who updated their character (like reapped them) every new installment, and it was infuriating because there was no way to make headway with any relationships unless you also reapped for the new canon.

 

(Hopefully that helped in some way...)

Edited October 21, 2017 by Thyme

[Josie 198]

Most roleplays that I'm familiar with that involve canon characters are considered to take place in an alternate universe. Therefore, whenever I play one, I do not feel obligated to follow their canon series of events or include any new material released for them.

 

A good example would be the Star Wars characters I'm playing at the moment, with lots of new information being released in preparation for the release of The Last Jedi. I've been writing one in particular for over a year and a half now, and there is no way that what's happened with him in my RP will happen with him in the movie when it's released. To go back and try to include all that stuff would mess up other peoples' stories, and to try and create a story arc like that on the forum now just wouldn't make sense based on what he's already been through there. I'm having fun with the story he's doing now, everyone else involved in having fun, it's no bother to us that it's not going to be what's in the movie.

 

On the matter of the sorts of canons I like to play: I love playing canons that are in the middle of their stories, or at least aren't at the end. I enjoy speculating on what they're planning, on what resources they have or don't have, what they'll think to do next. I am confident that I can create a compelling story with them, even if it doesn't match with the material that will later be released for them, so I don't worry that what I've done with them doesn't match that material.

[CovertSphinx 710]

Everything is helpful   I figured I'd ask what other people like to do with their canon characters, because I only play them very rarely - and 99% of that time its because of necessity for the plot. Otherwise I have to be utterly in LOVE with a character to even think about attempting it. 

 

The last time I played a canon character I took him between two arcs...pretty much 2/3 of the way through the series itself.  It was Yusuke Urameshi from Yu Yu Hakusho, so being that each "saga" was like a Long Version of a monster-per-week case it was easy to just usher him off down whatever path of alternate reality and include references when necessary to certain things happening (like if there was a parallel Yusuke would reasonably make note of in his head). He himself didn't really have major "changes" until the end saga that my Yusuke was...prequaling I'll call it. 

 

But Lucifer's sort of turning into a different animal, because how he handed the Mom situation actually ended up changing a couple of things pretty drastically regarding his abilities. 

[Cypher 4]

If it's an AU, I tend to pick and choose bits and pieces from various renditions and go from there. But if it's something that specifies a specific point in time, the point where I pick up from depends entirely where in the timeline the board setting starts, and what part of the character's history would tie into the story more. That might be in between stories or it might be in the middle of stories, it just all depends.

 

If it's in the middle of an arc, I'll try to do a thread or two to close that loop, but I don't always go out of my way to do something the canon did if I say, picked up a character in the middle of season 2 and then by the end of season 2, it added a bunch of stuff. I might ignore it entirely or I might work it in and put my own twist on it. If the canon doesn't jive with what I wanted to do, then I just won't do it until I reach a point with the character where I can tackle that story.

[Sailor Chrome 43]

My only preference for what canons to play is ones that I connect with in some way. Where I like to play them from depends on the canon. For some I like to play them at their current canon points (whatever that might be) and for others I like to take them from past canon points; either because I don't like the way their canon went or because I want to explore them from a different point in the canon.

I've never done in game canon updating, thought it something new in canon happens that shows more about a character's past of personality I might use that information to further inform the way I play them.

[Icewolf 258]

I've never seen the point in using everything from canon in a role-play or a fan fiction story because it just seems like I am retelling a story that I already know, and this is even more so with canon characters, espeaically those that have a lot done about them in official material. Incorporating new canon all the time presents its own problems because aside from ruining the storylines of people you write with, how do you keep up with it and remember everything that's happened to them?

 

Take Legends Thrawn from Star Wars - the only things I knew about him was what was written in the novels and some short stories that bantam (when it was bantam publishing the Star Wars EU novels) but I find out that there was a magazine of short stories that was published and some comic/graphic novel material with him in that expanded his character. You can't add these events into a character's background if you don't know about them and a similar problem would arise if you wanted to play Worf from Star Trek but had only seen the Next Generation and skipped DS9.

 

I don't think it's that unusual to take a minor character and rp/or write about them because I have done this, usually because there is an aspect of the character that I liked, or felt that their story had ended too soon. (It doesn't matter to me if the character was still alive or dead in the canon storyline, - if I feel inspired to write them, I will.)

 

There are times that I want to keep the main timeline intact and don't want to change anything that happens to the main canon characters. When that happens, I just write original characters and use the canon situations as a back drop to what I'm writing.

 

If you are writing a canon character, don't feel that you have to put all the canon events into your version of it because there will inevitably be things that you forget and situations that won't matter for them, and even professional writers make mistakes. Going back to the bantam Star Wars Legends, there were lots of inconsistencies in those because different writers worked alone (and some of the books even contradict what is in the films and that was before Disney came along and did their own thing.)