[...ground control to...]

So I was pondering (yeah, ponderponderponder, that's me), and I can't decide if this is just my own experience, or a specific writing philosophy at work, or what: basically, I find I can't -force- characters, most especially fanfiction characters, to do things-- I can't control them, if(!) controlling them and/or making them bow to my godly will is in fact the point of writing fics.

I suppose I -could- go into all sorts of way-out meta directions like wondering what this says about Creator-as-God, whether original or fanfic, vs. Creator-as-Voice-of-a-Greater-God or whatever, but that's all sort of irrelevant, in the end. For once, I'm thinking in more practical terms (I know, I know).

Just recently sistermagpie had a post that mentioned this, in terms of the fanfic writer having ultimate power over their fanfic, in the end, to make the characters do things they wouldn't in canon. And obviously that's true, in so far as fanon can clearly get rather divorced from canon pretty successfully. But general definitions of fanon/canon aside, in my own experience, the things that fanfic characters just refuse to do both transcend and include both areas.

    I guess it all revolves around my personal conception of them-- I mean, not that they're so deeply predictable or consistent, but rather that I see an inexorable logic-- a sort of arc, I suppose-- in how characters & people act, even when they're acting illogically. I feel that human behavior, in other words, just isn't either random or so easily changed from its most likely course depending on context and overall circumstances that would influence it.
    That's why I see transcendence of this personal 'arc' to be such an amazing/worthy goal, and it's actually been a driving force in my obsession with H/D, btw, and my frustration with any serious attempt to simplify the struggle to escape our own selves (which is the closest I come to seeing destiny-- your basic self-fulfilling prophecy).

On some level, I just honestly don't know how much of this is just my style of writing, my frequent inability to think in terms of projecting into the future and so on, and how much-- well-- some semi-objective way of seeing writing, as in what works better to create 'truer', more powerful narratives, given that's the goal.

In the end, I just don't actually have a clue: how -does- one control fanfic or even original characters, anyway?? (Oh, and have them make sense as still being themselves at the same time-- I mean, if you don't care about that, all bets are off. And I don't mean this takes crackfic or surreal fic out of the running-- take Kafka's Metamorphosis: the man may have become a cockroach, but in all other ways, he was still a man.)