Clarmontinization

As I said, I write stories that contain elements of the Fantastic. That is my genre. Any form of writing is a genre, but generally the word is marginalized to mean poor writing, generally writing that serves the form rather than the story. In this case, the story is about the Fantastic rather than about character or tone or structure. The characters are defined by what makes them fantastic rather than what makes them interesting. It becomes more important that a character is an alien or a paranormal or the product of some inexplicable anomaly than who they are, what they do, how they relate to people. When one is writing a story about the fantastic, it then becomes important to introduce and define the character by these fantastic elements. This leads to some awkward exposition composed of the bullet points of the characters history and relevant dramatic points. No one does this better than Chris Claremont, long time writer of the X-Men.
As I write stories about the Fantastic, I cam in constant fear of Clarmontinizing my characters. There's always that moment when a character comes on to the page and my first instinct is to have them do a force trip, fall on a 5 foot steel spike, and then launch into a soliloquy where they explain that because they can turn their body into pudding, they could fall on that spike without being hurt, and then lament the angst of being Pudding Boy and how everyone who meets him thinks that his chat room handle and won't go out with him.
If the situation calls for it, of course I'll deal with it. Yet I find the situations don't often occur naturally. One of the reasons I'm so stoked about the layouts and script for Xrox #2 is because I give information that defines the characters by skill and role (what we used to call "character class" back in the day) without making it obvious or heavy handed. In fact, people will probably read it and not get it. And that's okay. It's more important that we get to know who the characters are.
I find this is true to my real experience. It is no longer important for me to define myself by my sexual orientation so I don't make the point of bringing it up when I meet people. It does come up, it's there the whole time, I don't know if people pick up on it or not, but it's there. Sometimes I think I'm Claremontinizing myself, like sometimes I fear I'm Clarmontinizing my stories. Sometimes I do make a declaration that is dangerously Clarmontesque. Old habits and all that.
Identity is make up of all these parts, sort of like Ken Wilbur's holon theory, a whole/part. (at least it was Wilbur who first introduced me to the term) All of my characters have a "character class" that I define them, or I define them by their fantastic quality, so it's there all the time, I just like to think I get past all of that and think of them as people and not as tokens.
So, let's all just chill out people, and stop Clarmontinizing each other. I ask you, can't we all just get along?