Forums » RP Discussion » Canon Characters?

Using someone else's character without their permission is a pretty great way to make them dislike you, and I think few would argue that doing so is one of the most straightforward no-nos in roleplaying. When you take someone else's original creation, roleplayers call it theft... unless said creation happens to have a popular story/universe behind them, in which case roleplayers call it playing a canon character.

Some communities I've been at encouraged roleplaying with canon characters, some communities vilified it, some had no clue what the word meant because they were too busy playing their super-badass demon vampires or whatever. Either way I've never seen any kind of debate about it that didn't rapidly involve name-calling and/or tears, so I'm hoping that the overall pleasant nature of these forums will make the difference.

To avoid leading the thread anywhere before it even starts I'll leave off with some questions as food for thought. If you are/aren't keen on the use of canon characters, why? What makes some people enjoy playing canon characters more than their own original creations? Is roleplay based around a fandom better off with or without them? Why is taking a professional writer's characters okay when taking anyone else's would be frowned upon?

Or feel free to soapbox your own thing, everyone has their own reasons why they do or don't like canon characters in their roleplay and I want to hear them so go nuts.

I tend to dislike canon characters by default for much the same reasoning you gave, but fandom characters (original characters in a setting like Harry Potter, Supernatural etc) are fine because they are still by design original even if using themes, concepts and ideas from a pre-existing setting.

The most common reasons people roleplay canon characters, in my experience, are:

- It's an established setting, with established characters and established stories and background. It takes the most difficult and time consuming parts out of creating a character and allows for instant story-writing gratification.

- There's often an existing fanbase with people willing to jump right into it with you. No need to search extensively and make others familiar with what's going on. Also, you're more likely to get along with that person OOCly for definitely having things in commmon beyond RP.

- To many people it feels like the ultimate tribute to what they're a fan of by playing their favorite characters and making new stories.

Why it's okay to play characters from commercial universes/games/books etc. but not from individuals? Because companies make money off of fans and by disallowing fanfiction/roleplays they'll hurt themselves. As long as the fans don't make commercial profits off of using the copyrighted/trademarked characters they generally don't care. (There are exceptions, but they're fairly rare.) Also, suing some individual for roleplaying their character is like trying to eat the meat off a gnawed down chicken bone - there's nothing to gain.

The difference with a regular Joe's character is that it's a lot more personal. I don't make money off my original characters. I don't have a fanbase paying for merchandise. Nobody's paying me to RP. My characters are the product of my imagination and my love for the roleplaying game and that's it. I put time, effort and often money (commissioned art) into them, so when someone takes my character, there is literally not a single benefit on my end. It's just upsetting and disrespectful.

Plus, my characters are intended for non-commercial, personal use only to begin with. A Marvel character is someone's personal creation, but as soon as you publish it for commercial use, you're sort of aiming for it to become popular and be 'adopted' by the fans in one way or another. So that's another big difference.

Personally I am not a fan of Canon Characters- at all. As to the point that I straight up just wont RP with them. I like that some people have the brass TO do this, but I have a particular way of thinking about it:

One, if you are a skilled RPer and you feel that you are really skilled enough to do the character justice, then you really ought to be skilled enough to come up with your own character/background/history/etc.

Two, who are you (or, were I to make one, who am I) to decide I am skilled enough to do a certain character justice?

Canon characters are done wrong all the time, for example, when one of the writers walked out at the end of Superman because he killed Zod. In that writers mind, Superman would have never done that, ever, and yet to see the character they adored do it infuriated them, so I have to ask myself, am I playing this Canon character the way the original creator would want it to be played? Am I honoring or insulting that creator?

I find that's a very hard judgement to make, and I would never do it personally.
On that same note, I've seen a ton of canon characters that I have adored played (horribly) by people to the point that it makes me sad.

Lastly? It feels incredibly lazy and uncreative to me. At this point, it is very hard to create an original character, everything has been thought of, written, and designed before.

It isn't the original design or history that makes the character, it is the roleplays, the events that happen to that character that make them original.

We're all in a game that focuses and relies heavily on creativity, so is it asking too much for people to come up with something totally their own? I don't think so.

That is just why I personally wont make or play with them. Not meant to offend anyone who does. Fandom based characters? Totally cool with those in every way.

What strikes me about this whole section is that you say you feel it's lazy and uncreative to you, to play canon characters, yet you also point out how difficult it is to play them right - either by staying true to the character's motivations, or finding scenarios to roleplay out that fit. Wouldn't by your own definition someone who plays a canon properly be highly respected to you because they're doing everything right and, through that obviously, also work really hard to make that happen? Doesn't this require immense creativity and skill to crawl into another person's head and roleplay the character accurately?

Original characters can still be incredibly superficially and inconsistently played, too. So saying that OC is better than canon by default through roleplay doesn't exactly hold true as an argument. An OC also doesn't have anything to compare it to in the same way a canon does, so it can be roleplayed in a moderate or average manner, not be quite good or even genuinely be bad, but people will still love it. Canons are criticized far more heavily because the have something to compare to, an original. So I kind of see this as comparing a cucumber to an apple.

Just to clarify, I'm definitely not interested in roleplaying canon myself. I just am not interested in it because it's too much work for me to keep up with playing the character right. If I was confident I could pull it off reasonably to very accurate, though, I wouldn't hesitate to give it a shot though.

Each to their own, I say.

Want to play a canon character, who am I - or anyone in fact beyond the characters creators - to say that you can't? I don't see it as being lazy, I myself have occasionally dabbled in playing canon characters but I'm also quite capable of making my own characters as well. I think the balance is to roleplay with other people who enjoy the continuity/characters/franchise/ect. and not to expect everyone to be happy with roleplaying with a canon character, so don't try to force it upon them. On the flip side, I don't think a player should be berated or attacked for wanting to play a canon character, they obviously enjoy the character and want to experience what it's like when they have the reigns of the character - and if they stray from the actual continuity? Who cares? It's not like it's harming anyone, and if you don't like don't pay attention to it.

Yes, that is exactly what it means, what I'm saying is I have never actually seen a canon charactter RPed well, ever, in the 13 years I've been doing it =/. This has pushed me away from doing it personally. I'm not saying that OCs are necessarily better than Canons in fact I didn't say that at all, I'm saying that I think, if you have the skill and the ability to do so, play an OC that is, you ought to, because that way you're avoiding the crossfire of judgement from other people, you're actually showing how creative you can be, rather than taking something someone else already came up with and using that.

I'm not trying to Naysay anyone who does it, if they do it well, all the more power to them, but because of my personal experience with them, I will never do it, or take a chance with anyone who does, out of respect for the original creators of those characters.

That said it still seems lazy, personally, to me. It takes a lot of time and effort to come up with a character from the ground up, where as with a canon, all you *basically* have to do is a good google search and a bit of research into said character, copy paste it to a place and use that. I'm not saying everyone does that, but I'm saying that's all it'd take, really.

playing a pre-existing character is an entirely separate challenge.

an "original" character is an infinite canvas. the character is defined only by the restrictions the author chooses.

a pre-existing character is a framework within which you attempt to faithfully represent the character's actions in a situation they haven't been written in before.

the sentiment that players of "canon" characters are thieves betrays a misunderstanding of these authors' motivations. they are not motivated by ego; they have no desire to create a character to impress or to gain attention, nor would anyone seriously claim that these authors are actually trying to pass off another's creation as their own. it is a writing exercise, a thought experiment, entertainment.

and it is usually much more challenging and rewarding for the author than making another generic anime protagonist that no one will care about or remember.

It's definitely harder to play a pre-existing character, no doubt.

Since I'm into comics I'll go with comics examples. The writers of DC Comics' Justice League get tons of complaints about what Superman does/doesn't do all the time, mainly because comic book nerds are awful, but more importantly because it's really hard to write him as a member of a team when he individually has the power to solve every problem in the world. Same deal with the Flash, play someone who runs at light speed true to their potential and they're unbeatable, and a lot of time writers don't respect that, and the end result is boring self-indulgent garbage you wouldn't believe made it to print.

There's good and there's bad, so I suspect canon character playing gets a bad rap because the people trying to play an existing character as respectfully as possible are overshadowed by the people that play canon characters for (to borrow your RP pet peeve) wish fulfillment writing. "Represent the character's actions in a situation they haven't been written in before" usually means "situations they'll never be written in", which usually is erotic RP with some other member of their universe/someone's original character. That second group also tends to be larger/more visible/vocal/arrogant in the liberties they take for their self-indulgence.

It's probably not a coincidence that the best playing of canon characters I've seen has been from Elder Scrolls games (Oblivion Skyrim etc), where NPCs are able to interact with players and be interacted with in a million different ways, which would give someone an excellent picture of how the characters tick. The worst playing canon characters I've ever seen was, once again, DC Comics.

It doesn't really take a lot of time and effort to create a new character.

"She's female, 18 years old, tall and sexy, perfect weight, she's giggly and shy but she kicks ass when she feels like it. She has a tragic past where her parents neglected her so she goes around looking for trouble all the time. She's a hopeless romantic and wants to find her love for life."

That didn't even take 90 seconds to write up. I also name her Shaniqua just because I can. She also fits in medieval and modern settings because she's a dimensional traveler. That was another 15 seconds tops.

I honestly think you're confusing 'original character' with 'quality character'. Just because I sucked random information out of my thumb and slapped it into a profile doesn't mean it's a character I put effort into. In fact, it will take me more effort to set up a profile for Wonder Woman because I have to research her for accurate information, which will take longer than what I wrote above.

The funny thing is that the things that make canon characters uninteresting are traits that people with OCs also have. They don't stick to sensible decisions for the character, they put characters into situations that don't make sense, they don't play the character consistently with the personality traits that they were created with and so forth. I've seen ALL these things apply to original characters too, more often than I have on canon characters actually. In that regard, some roleplayers are as unfaithful to their own creations as they can be to canon characters.



I've had similar thoughts in my head but I couldn't quite put it down into words! It doesn't just apply to comic books either, it applies to movies and tv shows too. Sometimes characters in movies and tv shows end up doing things that make you go:



Sometimes because it contradicts with the way the character was originally written, sometimes because it's obviously just a way to force something to happen that wouldn't have happened naturally etc. I think you made an excellent point there too: Superman is a lone superhero, he doesn't need a team. But people create OCs like this too and then try to shove them into group situations and forcing the plot.


I never realized this, but it makes so much sense!

Fair enough, I suppose you've made your point. Perhaps I am confusing the two. I suppose I'll hold out that someday I'll find someone who actually plays a *quality* Canon Character, as of yet, I've never seen one, which doesn't leave a pessimist like myself much hope for finding one in the future.

I've seen some wonderfully played cannon characters - and, yes some absolutely terrible ones. It really is a difficult thing to do right, and even if you do it well, there are those who may still perceive it as wrong because of their own preconceived notions. It's not that either party there is necessarily right or wrong. I know that, in a number of the things one of my housemates and I both enjoy, we often perceive the same character and their motivations completely differently, and an answer for which is more "right" usually is never given. Similarly, even in movies and such, actors will develop their own ideas about the character while trying to get a good feel for them, something to fill in blanks left by the writers - and sometimes the audience will adore and agree with it, while other times they'll despise it and claim it's all wrong or stupid; usually it'll be a mix of those due to peoples own perceptions and expectations.

That's less of an issue with original characters though, because there's less chance for preconceived notions. Someone with an original character only has to do reasonable well at portraying that character - just enough to be convincing. Someone trying to play a cannon character has to do it near-perfect, and even then they will still be told they aren't doing it right.

This is to be expected. Quality is rare by definition, otherwise it would be average. The problem is exacerbated by any medium with no quality control, and there are no editors for the internet outside of a select few sites.

Roleplaying multiplies the problem further. It is a medium that self-selects for people who believe themselves to be "natural writers" (no such thing exists), and for people who just watched an anime, had some ideas about it, and have no one to point out that their ideas are terrible.

I have the equivalent and opposite problem of yours: after fourteen years of this hobby, I can still count the number of interesting "original" characters I've encountered on one hand, without using my thumb.

Don't despair.