Té Rowan wrote:All generalisation is wrong. Period.
False.
Generlization is just placing a bunch of things in a broad category, this is not a good or bad thing. It can be used for bad things, but there's plenty of things that are easily generalized as a wrong or bad.
In this case, character bashing is put in the catagory of "elements of bad fanfiction" which is 100% true.
Té Rowan wrote:
Although… I wonder how PH can even watch anime or read manga, what with the character bashing going on in some. Like how Gendo (Ikari) is set up as an utter bash-tard in NGE.
I'm sorry, but you clearly have no idea what "character bashing" even means.
Gendo Ikari is an awful, terrible human being but Neon Genesis Evangelion does not
bash his character.
For one thing, character bashing is only something that can be done in fanfic. If an author wants to make a character that's a 2 Dimensional Eeeeviiillll character that everybody hates and exists only to be dunked on by the main character, that's not character bashing. Becuase, well, the character was created for that purpose. Granted, it's still
bad writing but it's not character bashing.
Gendo Ikari, for all his awfulness, did everything he did because he desperately loved his wife Yui, and wanted nothing more than to bring her back to him. And he was willing to do
anything for that, abuse and alienate his son, use everybody else as pawns, and even risk bringing about the destruction of the world for that goal. That's not character bashing. That's a very human, but awful as a person, character.
A fanfic bashing Gendo would do something like strip out his motives, make him nothing more then a laughing stock for whatever warped Gary Stu the author puts in their NGE fanfic.
Character Bashing is a uniquely
fanfic writing issue. Because by it's very nature it's a author's response to a character they don't like in canon. It's a poor response, and bad writing, but it's there.