Sometimes, it's fun to explore things that never actually happened in a book or show, or that you know will probably never happen.

Characters whose paths never crossed getting stuck in a room together... plot threads that were left dangling being tied up... deleted scenes being fleshed out... characters who would never drink getting absolutely plastered.

(That last one is especially fun; sometimes, my siblings and I pick a show or book, and just theorize our way through the entire cast.)

In my latest music video, I took a character who's probably the mentally strongest in the entire Farscape cast, and explored what would happen if his resilient mind finally snapped.

Scorpius tends to have his inner demons very much under control, but what would happen if he fully and permanently lost the battle to his pain, rage, and long-suppressed Scarran side, and plunged full-tilt into PTSD and psychosis?

Let's take a look:

Have you ever had a time when you loved something so much you wanted to write it… but it didn’t belong to you?

Confession: when my brain isn’t occupied with other things, I spend an insane amount of time maneuvering my mental avatars through other peoples’ fictional worlds. Worlds that contain a favorite character - especially one on whom I have a crush - are frequent destinations.

I end up building intricate cannons around my original characters, weaving them into the other characters’ backstories, and creating a cannon-compatible origin and role for them to occupy.

They make enemies, they make friends, they make new plot threads… and in the cases of my favorites, it’s only a matter of time before something wonderful and terrible happens:

They outgrow their roles as roleplay characters, and demand a story of their own.

It’s usually a relationship that makes this happen. My OC and a cannon character develop a friendship, a love, a rivalry, or all of the above mixed into one, and it’s awesome. It’s intricate. It’s fascinating to watch.

And it makes me sad to think of it staying forever trapped inside my head, unable to escape onto the pages of a book where it belongs.

At that point, fanfiction is an option. Sure, that would create the potential for accusations of Mary Sues, but my characters are always flawed and unpopular enough to make such complaints irrelevant, so that isn't really a factor.

But sometimes, I simply like the whole thing too much. The original character is too complex, the relationships too interesting, the additions to the backstory too intricate, and the new plot threads too big to relegate them to the realm of fanfiction.

At that point, I’m faced with a choice: whether to leave the story locked in my head, to settle for writing a fanfiction, or take on the challenge of extracting the aspects of the world, characters and relationships that make the story work, and making them my own.

I usually go for the last one.

The process is never instantaneous. It takes time to let go of the parts of the story I don't own, and for the parts that are original to me to flesh themselves out and learn to stand on their own two feet, separate from their parents.

But when you're really in love with a story you've made, it's always worth the effort.

Have you ever tried to write a fanfiction specifically designed for someone who's unfamiliar with the story you're writing about?

Normally, when an author sets about writing a story, one of two things happens.

One is that she has an entire novel in which to build her world, establish the characters, create foreshadowing, and reveal the backstory.

The other is that she's writing for an audience that's already familiar with the story world for which she's writing a fanfiction, so the worldbuilding, character establishment and backstory are already done for her.

In this writing exercise, neither of those was in play. I'd been asked to undertake a most unusual challenge: writing a very short fanfiction, featuring an original character from a manga world and set in a sci-fi TV series, for a person who was unfamiliar with BOTH stories.

The result was that I had to pack a HUGE amount of information into very few words. Every description had to convey not just the tone and feel of the scene, but also information about the characters, species, setting and history that was needed not just for that scene, but to understand the basics of the story itself.

Every silent musing on the part of the characters had to reveal a bit of their backstory, fears, personality and motivations. There couldn't be any pointless filler; every word had to count.

And through it all, I had to make sure that I was actually telling a story, not just delivering an overly busy info-dump.

The result was possibly some of the best writing I've ever done. Not polished to the point where I'd be willing to publish it, but so good that I'm planning to take this relationship and scenario and turn it into a novel.

Do you think you'd try an exercise like that? If so, which story/stories would you do it for?

If a character will do whatever it takes to stop a disaster, and they don't have the time or emotional capacity to form bonds with the people they're trying to save, people will often focus on the "whatever it takes" and "can't form emotional bonds" aspects, rather than the "stop a disaster" and "people they're trying to save".

If you want to start a lively debate on a forum, saying the relentlessly pragmatic character isn't evil or a psychopath is right up there with advocating an unpopular ship or deriding a beloved character who died a tragic death.

And no matter how many lives this character saves, or how horrible the catastrophe they avert, it seems that the most effective way to make a highly practical character likeable is... to show their less practical side.

Forget about objectively proving the rightness of their choice, demonstrating that they're saving more people than they kill, or showing that they had no better options. People don't care about that.

Instead, tell the audience that this cold monster is doing it all because they really love one of the people they're trying to save, and they instantly become more relatable and easier to root for.

How powerful is this tendency in our collective psyche?

Consider these two scenarios:

1. The antagonist is trying to stop an alien invasion that will eradicate his species, and he tortures a protagonist who refuses to help him in order to obtain information that could lead to the salvation of his race.

2. To save the scientist, the protagonists blast their way through the antagonist's stronghold, leaving bodies scattered in their wake.

Which side do you reflexively root for? The calm, cool antagonist who hurts your beloved protagonist in order to save billions of lives, or the passionate brigade of Big Damn Heroes who will kill dozens of people in order to save their friend?

From what I've observed, people don't tend to care which side's sins are objectively worse, or which side kills more of the other side's people. They care about the characters whose personalities and worldviews resonate with their own, and they love it when the side they're rooting for is proven right.

Have you noticed this tendency in one of your favorite fandoms?

And which side of the debate do you tend to take?

I look forward to seeing your opinions.