Some years ago, my wife and I attended a Trek con in Texas where a panel was discussing upcoming shows and movies. A number of the audience comments had focused on the fans' concern for the "continuity" of the Trek history, and it prompted one man on the panel to stand up and explain something. He said that Paramount (the owner of the Star Trek franchise) wasn't primarily concerned with character development or story continuity or anything else that Trek fans love so much. All they wanted to do was to make money. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. If they thought they could make money by making James Kirk a Bolian transvestite with a taste for Rigellian dwarfs, they'd do it.
Some of the comments in this sequence have missed out on this facet of American entertainment. The "powers that be" don't much care about the fans except where it affects TPTB's account balances. If they had believed that a new age Superman, a thin and wimpy Clark, and a lesbian drug addict Lois would grab and hold viewers, that's what we would have seen on the series. That's an extreme example, of course, but it illustrates my point.
We writers and readers of FOLCdom have the opportunity to present our characters in whatever manner we choose. If we decide to write about Lois's strengths and Clark's weaknesses, we can, and the inverse is also true. We should remember that these are fictional characters, not real people, and they'll do whatever we want them too. I seem to recall MLT making some observation about her limited deity in regards to the written word (and I, for one, thought it was funny), and that's a very good description of our function as authors.
There was a Rod Serling episode in the 70's (can't recall the name of the weekly show, after Twilight Zone but along the same lines) that showed a group of people in a diner who slowly realized that their reasons for being there and their own motivations were not only in conflict, they made no sense. They began arguing about the situation, and at that point the writer who was writing about them ending the discussion by pulling the paper from his typewriter, wadding it up, and tossing it into a trash can already full of abandoned story attempts. It was a little scary to realize that these characters on the screen were merely fictional constructs who existed only on paper and not in reality.
Maybe we should write more and gripe less.
