Questions I'm asked at the store: Entitlement thoughts part 2

[msagara]

Having covered probably the most common reader complaint I've heard over the years in the bookstore, I'm now going to move directly to one of the next most common.

I hate LKH for turning Anita Blake into such an oversexed solipsist. Doesn't she realize that she's losing all her fans?

This one, oddly enough, I have more problems with, for a variety of reasons. And this one follows more clearly amber_fool's question, which spawned the previous two posts indirectly.

The first problem would be: LKH regularly hits NYT #1 with her later books. She is clearly not losing all her fans. The argument made here isn't based on what I can see as objective fact, unlike the previous argument downstream; in the previous post the base fact is: Book 5 or book 3 do not exist, which is immutable.

In this case, however, it's clear to me that LKH's writing choices are not losing her all her fans. An author doesn't climb to #1 on the NYT bestseller list consistently without any fans.

When it comes down to brass tacks (and where does that phrase come from?), what's being said here is: I hate what she's done with the series I used to love. Hate it. Hate it.

And I have no problems with that. But that's not how it's worded (let me just add: I get a lot of the flat-out Hate it comments, and those don't push entitlement buttons for me because there's no point for discussion; the reader hates the book. I can't very well say "no you don't!" and not seem insane or inattentive).

Did I read the early books? Yes. And I enjoyed them. Do I like the direction she chose to go in? No. No, I don't. Did I stop reading them? Yes, because I didn't like what she was doing. Do I hate her? Well, no. Do I make dire predictions for her future career based on the fact that I didn't like where she was going? No. I can see that if I didn't care for the direction Anita was taking, a lot of other people did; she's selling. She has a lot of fans; some people clearly did enjoy where she took her characters, and they wanted to go along for that ride.

I got off the bus.

It's her right as an author to write what she feels compelled to write as long as she has a publisher who agrees that it's viable; hell, it's her right to do so even if she doesn't. It's my right as a reader to stop reading when I don't care for what she feels compelled to write.

What I don't understand are the readers who still read those books, while hating on them so ferociously. The hate-on isn't going to change what she chooses to write because if you read her blog, she's clearly dedicated to her vision. I admire the dedication; I don't admire the results.

So, bottom line for me here is: I don't like where this book is going, and I'm not willing to shed money to get it there.

This, however, is the bookseller and reader response. The author response is different. So I'm now going to talk a little about me-in-my-writer-hat response, because in this case, the author response is a little more visceral.

I write a series of novels, which I distinguish from a multi-volume single story in a variety of structural ways. I try to keep the books as self-contained as possible, while allowing the characters the room to grow or change. I haven't been entirely successful at self-contained writing--but I'm continuing to reach for that in the Cast novels. As I write, and continue to write them, the world does change as consequences of previous actions come to the fore; the characters change as they grow. And here's the thing about that: some of the changes will not be the ones that some of the readers are hoping for. Do I know which changes those are? No, actually, I don't. But I do know it will happen, because it seems almost inevitable.

Am I aware that I, like LKH, will lose readers for making choices that seem natural to me--and don't to some readers--within a series? Yes. Yes, I am.

Does this fill me with joy? Why, no, now that you ask, it really doesn't. No one wants to disappoint their readers. And not just for mercenary reasons, although those exist. It's hard, when you put the time and work into a book. to have it fall flat or fail with readers, especially with readers who liked and supported the previous volumes in a series. They feel angry, or even betrayed, because the characters they loved are wandering off in a direction they didn't anticipate when they started reading the series. And as a writer, I feel insecure and worried because I did somehow have their attention, and I failed to maintain it. I failed to write something that could sell the changes and the story I was telling to that segment of readership so that said changes naturally seemed the only possible outcome.

What I hope is that those readers don't then assume that I'm writing a book that disappoints and annoys them with the intent of doing either; I'm not.

But, like LKH, I have stories I want to tell, and on some base level, they're my stories. I want to write them well enough that they're clear to the readers who read them; I want to make them compelling enough that the story I'm trying to tell works for them.

That's the important phrase for me: the story I'm trying to tell. There are hundreds of ways to fail the story I'm trying to tell. When I see reviews which point some of these things out, it's clear to me that I did fail, and it's clear to me how. Not all of the choices that seem clear to me while I'm writing are as clear to readers who don't have my brain.

But when readers don't care for the book because it's not the book they wanted, as opposed to not a well-executed book, it's trickier. When they are angry--as they are with LKH--about the fact that the books are not the books they wanted to read, it does push my buttons on the writer side, in a way that the reader/bookseller side fails entirely to notice.

I think it's ultimately a losing game to attempt to write novels--or TV shows--to a vocal subset of the readers a writer does have. Because while I understand what some readers want to see, I'm not at all convinced that a story that comes solely from a desire to placate readers, and not as a consequence of a writer's deep investment, is going to work for anyone.

I think a writer has a responsibility to their story.

I think a writer has a responsibility to write that story to the best of their ability.

I think a reader has the right to react to that story in whatever way they react: love it, hate it, fall asleep half-way through it. Throw it against the wall. Refuse to buy anything else by that author Ever Again. Tell people how much they hated the book, and why.

But. I don't think a reader has the right to expect or demand that the story be something entirely different; I don't think they have the right to demand that a writer's responsibility to them is much, much larger than it is to their story, because while a given reader may hate the story, not every reader will or does.

I can tell you what I hated about the LKH books. I can tell you exactly where I stopped. I can complain bitterly about what the books had become. But I don't hate LKH for not writing the books that I wanted to read. I don't, in my anger and disappointment, assume that because I didn't like the books, she should understand what she should have written instead, because it is not, in fact, all about me. I know that she feels strongly about the story she needs to tell. And it's clear to me that there are readers who want to read the story she feels she has to tell.

Comments

[rhyssafireheart.livejournal.com]

<3 and thank you for this.

In fact, you could substitute "online game" for "book" and "developer" for "author" and not change the meaning of this post at all. I wish more forum posters understood that about gaming development (not that I'm in the field or anything, mind you).

As for LKH's books, I never picked them up because even the initial ones didn't catch my interest, and when the hoopla started around what she was doing later in the series, I still wasn't interested. As you said, it's her right to write what she chooses and the publisher to put it out there. Writing a story with little fandom in-jokes and things the author knows the fans will get a kick out of is completely different than writing something only because you know that's what the fans want to read.

I personally don't think I'd want to read the second kind of book because pandering to readers just to keep sales (if that's the attempt) still doesn't mean it's going to be what I want to read. It's doubtful that what reader A wants is the same as what readers B, C, D want. If I wanted an author to write something just to please me, then several of my favorite series wouldn't be nearly as exciting as they actually are.

[axisor.livejournal.com]

I do believe it was Gaiman that said something like "Authors aren't trained monkeys, meant to write at the reader's demands"

I probably butchered the quote, but that is my opinion too. If I don't like what a writer is writing I stop reading. I struggle enough to get through books I love with everything else going on in my life.

On a side note:

"GET DOWN TO BRASS TACKS" - According to the American Heritage Idiom Dictionary, it first showed up in the late 1800s, believed to refer to the brass tacks under fine upholstery, though other potential sources are that it is a Cockney rhyming slang for "hard facts." A third option "alludes to tacks hammered into a sales counter to indicate precise measuring points."

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

I don't think a reader has the right to expect or demand that the story be something entirely different

I'm not sure if I completely agree with this. If several books in a series have already been published and the author has established a certain tone for the series, then I don't think it's unfair for a reader to expect that the later books will be similar in tone and feel, or at least close enough that they don't feel like a completely different series. This is especially true if the author didn't drop hints about the direction that the story would be going in. Not having read much of LKH's work, I can't say whether or not she hinted at the changes that would eventually take place or if it just came out of left field.

In the end, the story is the author's, yes. But when a reader has come to expect a certain thing from a series brand, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some level of tone continuity. I'm not saying that authors should keep writing something they're not passionate about just for sales purposes (which must be absolutely awful--I can't imagine writing a book I'm not intensely passionate about). But I do think that an author makes certain unspoken promises to the reader (to keep to a certain level of age-appropriateness, to keep a certain gritty feel, to answer a certain story question that stretches out over several books, or even to make sure that when the series ends two characters wind up together). I'm not sure we can blame the reader for expecting that those promises would be kept.

This certainly isn't the case every time a reader gives up on a series, though. For example, I know for me that Goodkind was more of a war of attrition. I kept on slogging through his books until I just couldn't slog anymore, but the things that bothered me about his books are things that were there right from the beginning. In that situation, I would have had no right to expect Goodkind to change his story just for me because, at least as far into the series that I got, he kept every promise he made in the beginning.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I completely agree with this. If several books in a series have already been published and the author has established a certain tone for the series, then I don't think it's unfair for a reader to expect that the later books will be similar in tone and feel, or at least close enough that they don't feel like a completely different series.

Tone is a difficult thing to judge, but I think in this case it's irrelevant. It seems clear to me that if the reader-base grows over time, which LKH's has done, there's no argument that can be made that her work is not working for readers, since no one is forcing hundreds of thousands of people to buy her book in hardcover.

The argument you can make is that you feel the tone of the work has radically changed -- but when she's consistently hitting the NYT list in a position that most authors can only dream of doing, it's clearly a matter of personal preference.

And in this case, a single reader's (or even a vocal minority's) personal preference doesn't trump hers, because hers is clearly working for a larger number of readers.

I don't like where she went. But honestly, when she was writing what I liked, she wasn't NYT #1. She's writing what she likes, and she is.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

But I do think that an author makes certain unspoken promises to the reader (to keep to a certain level of age-appropriateness, to keep a certain gritty feel, to answer a certain story question that stretches out over several books, or even to make sure that when the series ends two characters wind up together). I'm not sure we can blame the reader for expecting that those promises would be kept.

I don't see this. In the case Karen Miller mentions below, when an author writes Book One of a series, I do think there's some promise implied that there will be Book Two, Book Three, and etc., until Book Last. I've written about that before, and while I wasn't perhaps as emphatic as karenmiller was in the previous thread, I do agree, for my part.

However, a promise that an author will finish the series is exactly that: it's a promise to finish. It's not a promise to write a specific story that is somehow intuited by the reader's response to the first volume. The genre does imply that things will stay within a broad set of boundaries. I don't however see how you can intuit a specific promise, even unspoken, that the story will be what you want it to be when it comes to a close.

Unless it's clearly labeled as a Romance, in which case you have every right to expect an HEA.

Can you give me an example of something you consider a breach of that unspoken promise? An example might make clearly what you mean, or how you're using the phrase.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

re: Brass Tacks: Thank you :)

[djonn]

Disclaimer: I read the first couple of Anita Blake novels (and as I recall, gave the very first one a reasonably favorable review, way back when), but let that series fall by the wayside a book or two before the point where -- according to most of Early LKH Fandom -- the series jumped the shark. I have since glanced into a few of the newer ones in the bookstore, and haven't been inspired to return. (I admit it, I keep looking for the hot sex scenes she's supposed to be writing nowadays...and not finding them. Evidently either I have really unlucky page-flipping skills, or LKH's idea of hot sex isn't mine. But we digress.)

Anyhow. From what I've read of the anti-LKH arguments (and seen in deconstructions of other literary and TV series), the case the anti-LKH faction makes is very, very similar to yours....

....except that where you describe an author's obligation to story, the opposing case argues an obligation to character -- and therefore argues that the paradigm-shift in the Anita Blake books arose because the author forced her heroine down a path that the character, as she'd previously been established, would never have taken.

From a reader's perspective, I think that's a defensible premise. As noted above, I haven't read enough of the right books to judge whether LKH forced Anita into OOC (out-of-character) action when that series switched gears, but I think the idea that inconsistent characterization is a violation of reader expectations is valid, and that it can be usefully discussed in relation to particular works.

An example: when Laurie R. King's second Sherlock Holmes pastiche (A Monstrous Regiment of Women) first appeared, opinions on a key event in the story were very sharply divided, with one camp arguing that King had adopted an extremely out-of-character portrayal of Holmes in order to arrive at the event in question. Myself, I thought the portrayal of Holmes was among the most effective and nuanced I've encountered -- but I could see where the complainers were coming from.

Now the King case is complicated by the fact that she didn't actually create Sherlock Holmes, so there are actually two authors in play: King herself, as immediate storyteller, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as source of the canonical Holmes. If one judges the King series solely by King's own portrayal, then there's little room for objection; the Holmes of the first book and the Holmes of the second are clearly the same character, portrayed consistently from one volume to the next. By contrast, if one seeks to discern whether King's Holmes is consistent with Doyle's, there's more room for discussion. (I think she fully justifies her extrapolation -- unlike most other authors who've tried to pull off that particular plot. But whichever way one comes down, the discussion is clearly a discussion of the texts, not the authors' intentions.)

A further point of contrast: the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, now referred to by most as a "reboot" of the Trek franchise. Trek fans have several decades of emotional investment in Kirk, Spock, and the "classic" iterations of those characters. Abrams and his writers definitely see them through slightly different eyes -- but via clever writing, they presented the new story in a way that upheld the validity of the prior timeline (and its forty-odd years' worth of associated characterization). In so doing, they afforded viewers/readers a significant degree of respect -- something first-gen Anita Blake fans might argue that LKH failed to do when she paradigm-shifted that series.

[tammy-moore.livejournal.com]

I loved the early Anita novels and stopped reading them around two books after I stopped enjoying them. It makes me sad to see the direction that LKH has taken the books because I don't think she's ever going to write a book/character I want to read again. I think there's some of that in the LKH anti-fans, like calling an ex in the middle of the night to tell them how much you don't love them.

I think it's also trying to make sense of where the books went wrong for us as readers. Anita and her world worked and worked for me and then, quite abruptly it seemed, they really, really didn't. It's hard not to poke the corpse to try and work it out.

[djonn]

I'll take a swing at a "breach of unspoken promise" example, albeit via TV rather than prose fiction:

A number of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans -- myself included -- were severely annoyed by the sixth-season episode "Hell's Bells", in which the wedding and relationship between Xander and Anya is forcibly and permanently derailed. By that point in the series, many of us believed, Xander had matured to a degree that he'd earned his (relatively) happy ending...but in the episode we were shown, Xander showed little sign of the character growth he'd achieved over the life of the series, and was instead written as a weak caricature of his earlier self. (In light of the climax of that season's final episode, in which Xander does totally transcend his original schmuck-ness, this was especially frustrating.)

Thus many Buffy-fen will argue, with not-inconsiderable justification, that "Hell's Bells" violates the implicit contract with series viewers to portray its characters as they've been drawn for the prior five-and-a-half seasons. The Buffyverse being what it was, we weren't expecting a fairytale Happily Ever After...but we, and Xander (and Anya), arguably deserved not to have the wedding derailed by what many of us regarded as authorial fiat.

[manga-crow.livejournal.com]

Totally agree with this.

Along with character, though, there is also theme. Though I see that betrayed more often in longer running series, especially manga. Naruto, for example, spent a great deal of time at the beginning building the theme of "hard work overcomes inborn ability/limitations" only to have that theme completely contradicted by the second half of the series.

While I've never seen the change in LKH's work as a character reversal (actually, I think Anitia makes a fine villain) but the early themes of "moral choice" and "the price of power" were completely scattered to the winds later on. Personally, I never enjoyed them very much to begin with, so I didn't get worked up about it, but I can see why some people do.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

What you said, absolutely.
I get a certain amount of flack in my non-fiction life over the issue of women in mediaeval Celtic cultures. The popular myth is that they were all equal, sword-swinging, self-empowered etc etc. The truth is precisely the opposite. There are no reliable early sources to support the popular image. There are no authentic 'pagan' sources that prove that the women were Free! until Christianity arrived. Rather the opposite, in fact. Celtic cultures were very masculine, very divided and no paradise for women, and the arrival of Christianity in fact improved female status somewhat. But people do not want to hear this: they are entitled to their Free Celtic Druidess Ancestors. I've lost track of the number of times I've been ranted at, accused of various sinister agenda, required to justify why I think I know anything (PhD and 20 years teaching and research experience is not enough for some people) and had it explained to me how I am wrong because the speaker's guardian spirits/coven/personal link to a god say otherwise. I understand their feelings, I really do, but they could be polite and refrain from forms of ethnic abuse at the very least.

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

The contract between writer and reader isn't "Write what I tell you to" or "I wrote it, you'd better read it", but "I write what I want (subject to editing, etc.) and you read what you want."

Now, I believe that an author should feel obliged to remain consistent to the ground rules within a series, but it's not something that an author required to do. Just as how I feel that once a story went off the rails, I'm no longer obligated to read it. I don't hate the writer for that, but I am disappointed.

One thing I do wonder at is whether writers enjoy having their work critiqued in the same fashion that the classic works are picked at in a school/university setting. I imagine that it doesn't come up in the discussion very much, but I recall doing a term paper on the Foundation Trilogy back in high school (Foundation's Edge had just come out, so I didn't count it).

[snapsnzips.livejournal.com]

This entire discussion is fascinating for me. I'm just a reader. I don't write, and I prefer to read in a vacuum. I avoid reviews prior to reading a book and I often don't want to know what other people think of books that I've loved, lest they point something out that ruins it for me. I also have no desire to deconstruct characters and decisions by characters the way I've seen done on some discussion lists. I prefer to go back for second and third reads and learn more about things through those additional read-throughs.

I also find the constant speculation on lists and forums about who will end up with who endlessly frustrating. Who cares? I want to know what happens period and the constant talking about people "getting together" irritates me. So many readers reduce complex stories to romance novels and get upset when their chosen couple doesn't "get together."

I try to avoid feelings of reader entitlement, although I have been bitterly disappointed on a few occasions by authors I've loved. I have also wandered away from series that have failed to hold my interest, although my level of reading compulsion makes this a high barrier.

I did wander away from LKH after about 6 books or so because my fingers got tired from page turning past all the sex scenes that started to bore me. What I'm reading here in the comments makes me think there's something else interesting going on in the story line though and maybe I'll wander back and see.
(sascha commenting via LJ ID)

[beccastareyes]

I can see people reading series that they once loved after they go in a different direction in the hope that the author will bring back the thing the reader loved about it. But... this is why I read book reviews. If I liked books A-C of an author and hated D and on, then I'll stop buying the series. And maybe keep an eye out every time the author writes something new.

There are also series for which I only buy in paperback, because they are a balance between 'I like this' and 'this annoys me', so I never know what the balance will be.

Granted, there is a fun element to ranting, but I try to keep it to the book, not the author. Mostly the fun is in figuring out why I am having such a strong emotional reaction, working out ways I could do it in a way that pleases me more, and generalizing to other writing.

[slrose.livejournal.com]

I don't remember who wrote it, but a number of years ago I read an sf novel that was if not YA, YA friendly. The sequel... was not. (It was long enough ago that I don't remember who the author was. Just my memory of the icky feeling.)

[oakwind.livejournal.com]

I think I disagree with this. While it would be nice if a reader's expectations could be met by the books it isn't something that is the writer's responsibility. Expectations are created by the reader from their unique set of life circumstances, mental/creative abilities, and desires. The writer may see their series quite differently. Each reader most likely has a different set of expectations. Even the word expectations is interesting. I would rather read a book that is going to give me something I didn't expect to keep it interesting. Of course, I also want it to meet some of my expectations, like if I pick up an SF book I want it to be SF. I can still enjoy it with elements of romance, or mystery, or fantasy as long as it is still primarily SF. But beyond those kinds of broad expectations I feel like I am stepping into the writer's world, which they are sharing with me, and as a guest I am prepared to be entertained and delighted.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on LKH -- enjoyed the first few books, then stopped reading. I'm glad others enjoy the direction she took the series and there are plenty of other books out there that are just what I want.

[lithera.livejournal.com]

I think you could replace 'book' with a lot of things in this case. You see something like this in music when bands are accused of 'selling out', which has never made sense to me at all. Isn't making money a part of the whole idea in the first place? Don't you want to be happy for the people who made what made you happy now that they can do it /and/ make money? Pretty much anything that has passionate fans will get this sort of reaction, I've found.

While on one hand, I get it, people are passionate and they care and when a person worries about something they care about they can get a little (or a lot) worked up. I don't like when it gets negative and personal and as if there is some sort of right to have the as of yet unpublished/unproduced/uncreated works. Creating is hard work and it is rarely a smooth process.

[rowyn]

Oddly, I do feel like LKH changed the tone in just that fashion in the series, but I *don't* feel like that was a violation of implicit promise. In fact, showing Blake do a 180 on some of her key premises is, I think, exactly what LKH wanted to do from the outset. So even though I am firmly with Ms. Sagara in the "do not like any more and stopped reading" camp, this isn't a gripe that I have with the books.

[(Anonymous)]

"What I don't understand are the readers who still read those books, while hating on them so ferociously."

Yeah, I'm baffled by that one. If I have liked several of an author's books but then try one I don't like, I'll often (though not always) give them another chance... but after I've tried TWO books and not liked them, I stop reading that author. TWO books is one book too many for me to keep thinking of this as an author whose work I STILL like, even if I used to like it or liked his/her earlier work.

I gather from their own comments that some readers continue reading a writer when they no longer like his/her work because they're longing to repeat the reading experience they had with the author's earlier work; and each time they AGAIN don't get it and find they STILL don't like the author's newer work, they get upset. This attitude represents a tragically flat learning curve. ESPECIALLY in cases where the reader has had this experience with more than one author. Indeed, it exemplifies the popular definition of INSANITY, i.e. doing the same thing over and over and yet expecting a different result.

Another common reason is that readers get attached to characters and, in a series, want to know how the characters will end up, and/or want answers to still-unresolved questions/mysteries/conundrums introduced early in the series, back when they were still enjoying the books, and which have YET to be anwered. I'm much more sympathetic to this reason for continuing to read a writer whose work keeps disappointing in more-recent volumes, since "wanting to know the end" even after no longer liking the authors work makes some sense to me--especially after a reader has read 700,000 or 1,500,000 words about the characters and their world. (OTOH, frankly, having pushed all the way through to the end of Diana Gabaldon's ECHO IN THE BONE... I now regret the effort, regard it as two weeks of my reading life that I'll never get back, and find I DON'T CARE what happens to the characters or the gazillion dangling story threads; so I'm certainly done with -that- author's never-ending tale.)

[rowyn]

See, that's what I thought. I didn't like the character change or various other things about the later books so I stopped reading them. But I didn't feel like the change was a sharp, authorial-fiat thing that made no sense. It made sense, even if I was disappointed by it. (There are other things that I could criticise the books for -- I do think some things were handled poorly even for what LKH was trying to do -- but this isn't one of them.)

[groblek.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on this one - if an author I'm reading takes what I see as an unpleasant change partway into a series, I may stop reading the series and possibly the author (depending on a lot of factors), but I don't see a reason to rant and rail about the author just because I dislke their choice of story.

[slweippert.livejournal.com]

I liked the early books, but got off the bus too when the plot took a turn into boring for me. If I wanted to read lots of sex I can find that in that subset of Romance with all the sex, which I don't read either. IMHO, she turned it into a sexy romance series, which is fine, but not what it was at the beginning.

You make a good point that LKH should take her story where she wants to. I just wish she would have started another series with the qualities Anita used to have. For me, her struggle to keep her humanity against the supernaturals' onslaught was what was so great about the early books.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

A number of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans -- myself included -- were severely annoyed by the sixth-season episode "Hell's Bells", in which the wedding and relationship between Xander and Anya is forcibly and permanently derailed. By that point in the series, many of us believed, Xander had matured to a degree that he'd earned his (relatively) happy ending

I understand this point -- but this is a criticism of what was actually aired, and ummm.

I thought, given the way he'd been written after Joss stopped handling him, he was, even *by the time of the wedding* still destined to be a misery and a miserable husband, so although I felt it was painful, I also felt it was *finally* honest.

Which is my way of saying that I respectfully disagree with this opinion.

The fact that I can, and that what was offered worked for me (in as much as any of that season did, but I'll stop now), makes me see this is a discussion topic and an argument about viewer filters.

And it's an interesting discussion.

Let me try this a different way: I've said above that a reader (or viewer) is entirely free to react to the book/show in whichever way they want. Rant about it, pull it apart, dissect what went wrong with it. But when an "implicit" promise, such as this particular example, is only felt to *be* implicit by *some*--not all--of the audience, I can't quite *see* it as a promise on the part of the creators.

Whereas, the Book One/Book Two...Book Last promise seems clear, to me, because it's not interpreted.

I see it as a hope on the part of the viewers.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

....except that where you describe an author's obligation to story, the opposing case argues an obligation to character -- and therefore argues that the paradigm-shift in the Anita Blake books arose because the author forced her heroine down a path that the character, as she'd previously been established, would never have taken.

My story rubric does include character, plot, structure--all the components. The character is a creation of LKH's, and a part of the story, and it's clear to me that she feels that the character has grown and changed in a way that's natural to the character.

And there's nothing wrong with disagreeing with her view. To be honest? I hated the choice she made at the end of Narcissus, but I didn't feel that it was out of the blue or unreasonable; I found it uninteresting.

There's more of an argument to be made in the Holmes case, because that character is in every way in the public domain; it's not a character that King created out of whole cloth.

However:

In so doing, they afforded viewers/readers a significant degree of respect -- something first-gen Anita Blake fans might argue that LKH failed to do when she paradigm-shifted that series.

This is the crux of the entitlement issue for me, stated in a different way. I think an argument can be made--you have :) -- for this, but it is an entitlement issue. Wanting respect for your affection and devotion is natural. Being unwilling to be bound to continue in a direction that you, as the creator, feel is the wrong one, is also natural. I don't feel LKH owes me anything. I enjoyed her early books. I didn't enjoy her later ones. I don't feel her shift in story is a signal of disrespect to me, and since it's entirely her creation, I can't feel it's an act of disrespect to her character.

One can argue that you lose your fans if you offend them enough. If she wasn't selling, that would be a totally practical and pragmatic argument. But she is. So it's clear that she still has a large fan base that doesn't share this view. If we depend on the market for correction, as we increasingly do, the market isn't offering any incentive to correct. Ergo what she personally feels is the correct direction for a character that's entirely of her own creation is clearly the correct direction for many.