Dear Armies of Crazed Aya Fujimiya Fangirls (First Fanpoodle Battallion),

Yes, yes, we the rest of the Weiss Kreuz fandom - all three of us - get it that you love and adore your cuddly little bundle of contradictions. We get that you want him to be your Squishy and you want to call him Squishy and make him yours. We understand that you want to hug him and pet him and squeeze him until he expires, or at least until he grabs the nearest pointy object and runs you through, which would take him about 0.00025 seconds. Granted, we also think you're suicidally insane for wanting to cuddle a guy with contact issues and a slight penchant for swords with three-foot blades, but we understand. Hell, we're a pretty tolerant bunch here considering the surprising lack of wank about shipping and what color Ken's eyes are supposed to be.

What we don't understand is why, when you write about Aya - your Squishy - you turn him into a complete and total Gary Stu.

Now, we're fair-minded souls, mostly. We get it that Aya (and I'm talking, to clear things up, of Kapitel-era Aya here) is an extremely pretty thing, but once we've finished going into hyperbolic reveries over his rose-scented beauty, flawless porcelain skin and dizzying heliotrope orbs, there are several other things that are just as essential to who he is as the thing where he's as beautiful as a fallen angel in a black leather trenchcoat. In fact they're pretty much the first things one would go on to notice once they've torn their eyes away from his face. They're that obvious.

The first is that he has the slightest tendency to be a self-absorbed jerk.

The second is that all that flawless marble skin is encased in the world's most butt-ugly orange sweater.

( Aya rant written by a hopeless Ken fan. Don't say I didn't warn you. )

As if that wasn't enough - yes, there's more - all too often GaryStu!Aya's total perfection is used for little more than to show up the rest of the cast.

In fics like this, GaryStu!Aya often becomes a demi-god among his often fatally flawed teammates, who are only too human in the face of Aya's total perfection. Indeed, he should be pitied for having to put up with mere mortals like the others. He's never wrong. Nothing he says can possibly be at all hurtful or out of place, or indeed anything less than an Amazing Revelation of Profound Truth. Often, it should be noted, one or the other of them - usually Youji or Ken - will end up hurting him in one way or another, because they're only human and Don't Understand. But, by the end of the fic, they will come to realize that they were Wrong, and be Very Sorry that they ever dreamed of harming the perfection that is Aya.

(Ken comes off particularly badly. All too often, when he argues with Aya, he automatically ends up in the wrong not because he's asking for anything unreasonable or has no excuse to be upset, but because he's Ken Hidaka arguing with Aya Fujimiya. Of course he's going to be wrong.)

Weiss Kreuz Fanfiction: Like Chick Tracts, in a way.

Is there a solution? Search me if I know. This fandom's been writing fic like this for years and it'll take more than one rather overlong rant from a single aggravated Ken fan to change things. I can't help thinking, though, that it might help if some of us stopped basing our own writing on nothing more substantial than bad fanon clichés and actually sat down and watched the damn show.

If you the ficcer really have to turn Aya into the Charming and Noble Sir Gary of Stuland every time you write about him, I'd venture to suggest you don't like him half as much as you think you do. You like his face and body and rather wish it came packaged with a totally different personality - so you don't really like Aya Fujimiya at all. You like what he has the potential to be but ISN'T.

If you like Aya, you like the grumpy bastard in the butt-ugly orange sweater who gives his teammates Death Glares and who Ken can beat unconscious, because that's Aya too. And if you don't? You don't like Aya.

Simple.


Post totally inspired by alanahikarichan's small but perfectly formed rant on Youji x Ken Fiction, Lack Of.