Out of Character

"'6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.' -- Mark Twain, 'Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses'"

Out of Character, or OOC, means exactly what it sounds like: characters not acting like themselves. Some examples of this are easy to spot: for instance, if Legolas is a painfully cutesy trainwreck of a child, or if Harry Potter is an emotionally-four-years-old transvestite schoolgirl. Equally concerning are the more subtle changes authors make to characters. To some degree, this is unavoidable: even the best fanfiction writers can't replicate the characters exactly; only their creators can do that. What exactly constitutes being out of character is also subjective, depending both on how the fanfic writer has justified the changes and on the opinion of the reader.

More often than not, characters acting contrary to their normal natures is due to a Mary Sue warping the canon. Though it can happen to anyone, the Sue's Lust Object often suffers the worst, losing all of their faults and receiving major boosts to their abilities like some ungodly variation on Chuck Norris. Arwen, for some reason, often becomes obsessed with doing the Sue's hair, and Boromir frequently becomes a misogynist or a rapist.

Some fanwriters insist that it is their right to warp characters OOC, on the grounds that it's their story and they can do what they wish with the characters. This is ignoring that what they're writing is fanfiction; it isn't really their story or their characters. There are also some who honestly don't realize that they're making the characters act OOC.

Severe OOCness is displayed on a CAD as a character rupture. This status is a Very Bad Thing and must be dealt with as soon as possible.

OOC and character rupture are not to be confused with outright character replacement. In this case, the canon character has actually been replaced by an OC, usually a Mary Sue. The usual solution is to locate the canon (who has usually been shoved into a plot hole), kill the Sue, and replace the canon where he/she belongs. One of the purposes of using a CAD is to tell the difference between extreme OOCness and character replacement.

This warping of character often causes the agents' Canon Analysis Devices to display nonsense on the screen and, if the OOC is severe enough, short out or even explode. This does not help many agents, although the more experienced ones don't really need the CADs anyway. It didn't make Makes-Things very happy, though, because he had to repair them all--a job which has probably passed on to Techno-Dann now.