when your favorite character is written out of the show, write your own story

Creating is complicated. Particularly creations that require multiple participants inherent to their creation, such at television shows. They have so many moving parts - the showrunner, the script writers, the storyboard artists, the set designers, the costumers, the casting directors, the actors and actresses, the camera crew, the editors... the directors. The writers put down the dialogue, but the actors are the ones who voice the words, and the directors block where said actors are supposed to go, and sometimes actors ad-lib and that makes it to the final cut, but then editing will chop their scenes and switch back and forth.

Being a viewer watching a television show is easy, but it also leaves you unsure who to blame when said show devalues your favorite character's storyline to the point she has been written out of the next season. Was the actor cast in some secret project she is reluctant to promote just yet? Were the producers unhappy with her performance or the audience's reception of said performance? Every interview by a higher up made the entire show seem like it was heading further from what made it watchable, what made good television. You almost felt sick reading about how inaccurately the executive producer understood his own main character.

You were not, however, a passive viewer, someone who simply took what the television networks provided and moved on. No, you were a creator in your own right, albeit ones who was not involved in a collaborative process the way a television production inherently was. No, you were a writer, a hobbyist, a creator within the much-maligned genre of fanfiction. You could take the travesty that this show had made of your favorite aspects of the show, the themes and foils from season one that remained entirely untouched in season two, as the character who best acted as a foil to the lead was written into her own little corner, away from the interesting relationships and dynamics that had drawn you to her. You could, but did you really have the desire to? Did you really want to invest more time and energy in a character than her own creators did?

Deep down, you knew the answer was yes. As you read article after article interviewing producers, writers, and the actors who still had jobs, as you read posts by fellow disappointed fans and fans angry at those of you who were disappointed, you knew you would wind up creating a creation in response to that television show that left you heartbroken. First, you were taking some time to grieve the end of the show, but you would write about the show eventually. The show wasn't actually ending, in fact they were likely filming even as all the criticism flooded in. But the show you have fallen in love with, the character dynamics you obsessed over, that was over.

That was over, and yet you struggled to bring yourself to rewatch the show, to return to what you loved knowing what you knew now, knowing who the creators behind the show were and how they thought about fans like you. How little they thought about the characters they had created, how they turned a fan favorite into a plot device easily able to be written off. You struggled to come up with characters full stop, hence why you preferred using ones that already existed. The thought of having created a character with their own personality, with faults and the ability to be interpreted multiple ways, and instead of furthering her development, sanding down her edges to use her as a plot device to further the middle aged man's backstory reveal...

You didn't know how someone could do that. But you also weren't in the business of selling characters and plots to corporations for profit, which was a large part of the television industry. You weren't in the business of selling anything; you wrote free stories about pre-existing characters to pass the bus rides on your way to and from your boring office job. And at the moment, you weren't even indulging in that because the television show you normally obsessed over had left you so angry and depressed.

Except then, an hour into your day at your boring office job, inspiration struck. Inspiration partially obtained through the many articles about the show you had been reading and linking on the talk page of the shows Wikipedia article, but inspiration was for the fanfiction ideas you had been struggling to write. The memory of the plotline the story had thrown away unexamined popped back into mind as your work duties were nonexistent, so you took out your phone and began typing an outline.

She had been overlooked for the fellowship, for even a recommendation for the fellowship, the recommendation her now-disgraced colleague had obtained without even asking. She had been told repeatedly that working in medicine meant making a mistake that would kill someone. That was an unavoidable aspect of the job, albeit one less avoidable when pressured to move through patients at the speed her superior requested. Still, until now, she had been managing to avoid mistakes. Only now she had made one by trusting a medical student. She was supposed to know better. She did know better, usually, she just...

You weren't supposed to be writing at work. Especially not fanfiction, especially not by typing on your phone, a way of not working that is openly defiant in a way typing on your work computer at least wouldn't appear to be. But you were a terrible employee, two weeks into the new job, and you didn't want to beg tbe interns for work for the third time in as many hours.

Instead you just tapped and typed away at your phone, creating a creation of a medical resident (someone with a job that mattered, unlike your own) despondent over having failed at her responsibility to oversee medical students (what you would be if you ever had the courage to try to improve your lot in life rather than merely watching and obsessing over television characters doing and being what you never could) since one such medical student overlooked a finding that killed a man. The man was unimportant. The killing was the important part, the medical resident being at fault for the very action she became a doctor to try to prevent. The parallels were the point, the parallel between the fourth year resident and her failure of a mentor, who was meant to also be grieving the loss of a father figure, who was in some ways meant to act as a father figure in that like a child, she was a near constant failure at meeting expectations.

You were also failing to meet expectations today. You eventually gave up at even the pretense of working, leaving the office before any of your coworkers had, not telling your supervisor. You didn't want to care about how real people thought of you; you wanted to throw yourself wholeheartedly into the fiction of a resident, the resident who wouldn't be returning next season. So you began creating your own creation, a written reinterpretation of the barely coherent plotline the character had been given in season two.