Thought this would be a fun topic to discuss. When an author doesn’t illustrate their characters, I wonder how many different interpretations of that character’s appearance there are in people’s minds.
Are there any interesting examples of fans illustrating a popular character and found that there is a wide range of opinions on what they might look like?
by FlyingKanga
2 Comments
Taylor Hebert from Worm has a whole range of nicknames for variations on the character.
“TINO” (Taylor in name only) is the biggest one because a large swathe of the fanbase has unironically never read Worm. They read fanfics of Worm, and then some of them wrote fanfics based on the fanfics rather than on Worm. And there’s so much fanon running around a lot of us who have read it lose track of what was and wasn’t in Worm.
As a result, there is a very large body of Worm fanon, but Taylor being the consistently central figure because of her ‘Joan Everywoman’ qualities and bullied girl background has just been written, rewritten, and flanderized in all kinds of different ways varying from only mild off-shoots/twists in the character to ‘this isn’t even the same character.’
There are fics that hype her as the ‘queen of escalation’ who just escalates to extreme violence at the drop of a hat.
There are fics that really lean into her angst, be her social awkwardness, her body insecurity, or her emotional state.
There are fics that just go all the way with the cynical side of her the personality she developed over the course of Worm and others that cling to the idealism she had at the start underneath her cynicism.
There are fics that complete redfine Taylor’s entire persona. What if she was never bullied? Would she be a chatterbox? Happy go lucky? Optimistic? There are straight Taylors. Gay Taylors. Bi Taylors. Trans Taylors. Guy Taylors. Eldrich being Taylors. There are so many Taylors some people have played at the idea of fanfics featuring multiple Taylors from different fics.Taylor is shipped with most other characters in the fandom with most of them having catchy nicknames (except Brian, her canon boyfriend, who gets the short end of the fandoms stick most of the time).
Giving Taylor alternate powers from another piece of media is the fandom’s biggest past time and Taylor is usually the recipient. Taylor is the swiss army knife of fictional characters. The Worm fandom does everything and anything with her.
I’ve always found it interesting how Gollum was depicted in one of the original [book publications](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/24/2b/b9/242bb938d3411f13963df923fd10fdde.jpg) of The Hobbit as well as the [later cartoon](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/09/55/93/095593860b23b12fb54bf79c02cb8136.jpg).
Tolkien describes him in a vague enough way, a “small slimy creature” with “lamp-like eyes” that the version most people think of today wasn’t set in stone.