Lynn, you're mistaking my use of "real." It doesn't refer to how well a writer handles imaginary characters to whom s/he assigns thoughts, actions, or dialog in order to take them through the character arcs the writer has decided on. It isn't related to being OOC or not.
It means that for me, the Lois and Clark we saw on the screen are like real people in a universe somewhere. They can't be manipulated; they can't be made to behave in ways that they didn't. You can't arbitrarily say that I never married, or that I didn't have three children, or anything like that because I
did. L&C is like that for me. The ones who lived the lives we saw on TV are "our" L&C. All the others in all the other fanfics and in all the other scripts or scenes that never made it to the screen are a Lois & Clark who live in a different universe, some more like our L&C and some less like them.
What happens if CC didn't change a single word of the story as it was written - the entire story was exactly the same in terms of setting, characterisation, dialogue, etc. - but she added one sentence: "Lois hadn't seen Clark this upset since his parents had perished in a tragic car accident mere days before their wedding."? According to what I understand as your meaning, by adding that one sentence, this story would immediately become against-canon.
Right. WTWFO would no longer be a story about
our L&C. It would be the story of an L&C whose universe broke away at the point that Martha and Jonathan died before L&C's wedding.
Our L&C never went through that, so the story isn't about them.
And if this story becomes against-canon, does that mean that all of CC's otherwise acceptable charaterisation and dialogue become unacceptable or out-of-character? That now we are not reading about Lois and Clark but rather some version of an AltLois and AltClark? A complete devaluation of the story simply because of a single sentence??
No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that the story would no longer be about
our L&C. It would still be a well-written story about an L&C who had different lives than our L&C. That doesn't say anything about the characterization or the value of the story. And since many fanfic readers don't care one way or the other about canon, how could my opinion possibly devalue the story?
OOC is a different issue for me, and you've seen that, for me, it isn't enough to simply have Lois or Clark decide to do something different than they did on the show. If you (as a writer) don't change the circumstances, I'm not going to believe in your characterization because,
for me, the same person will make the same decision in the same circumstances. Change the circumstances and support your new premise, and I'll probably go along with your tale of another L&C very like ours.
Please don't assume from my response that being in-character is simply a matter of following canon. It's entirely possible to follow canon and write a story that is horribly OOC. A couple come to mind, and they are no more about "our" L&C than my "In the Beginning" or Zoom's "Speeding Bullets."
Besides, don't worry about it, Lynn. I'm one of the few FoLC who prefer to read stories about "our" L&C. If you check out the rest of the responses, everyone else is okay with stories about an L&C who go through different experiences than ours did.
You weren't here when we had this discussion long ago at the beginning of the Kerths as we tried to hammer out definitions of elseworld and alt-world. For me, every episode rewrite was alt-world, but the committee rightly decided that that would make that one category bigger than all the others combined, so they went with a much narrower description of alt-world, one that satisfied more FoLC. I remember KathyB being astonished that I considered most of her stories to be alternate universe, and we had a number of discussions about it, but nothing was ever settled except our recognition that we defined "real" in very different ways.