Hijinks Inc.

Meet Tony and Jeff.  They’re a couple of video game characters. Supporting characters.  Tony is enrolled in a boarding school, and Zero is, well, a robot.  The above image is a very old comic by yours truly (although since the copyright doesn’t include a date we don’t know how old, but I digress), in which I was expressing my frustration at people on the internet postulating theories about these characters’ lifestyle preferences.  It’s so old that it predates Shigesato Itoi, the creator of the game EarthBound (which Tony is from) pretty much saying in an interview that, yeah, Tony subscribes to an alternative lifestyle.

What’s my point?

I suppose it would be that it feels a little odd when creators make these kind of statements after-the-fact about their characters.  Harry Potter fans recently (by my standards) found out that author J.K. Rowling said the Dumbledore was also homosexual.  Now I’m not trying to state what is wrong and what is right, but it feels a little odd when creators and authors pull this kind of bait-and-switch on their audience outside their creative medium.  At best, it adds nothing to the story, and at worst, it sheds an ill light on the characters’ underlying motivations.  What exactly am I supposed to think of the headmaster helping Harry out after this information?  What am I supposed to infer about the relationship of these child characters at a boarding school in a video game?

Again, I’m not trying to make any bigger point that this - when an author makes this kind of announcement outside the actual media the characters interact in, it feels a bit like the reader is being cheated and the rules of the game are being changed, with me having a no say about a character I’ve been interpreting a certain way, my way, for sometimes years.  If the author wants to have this information known about the character, it should be made known in the work itself, in which the subject will have ramifications and repercussions.  Otherwise, it feels like the author is cheating.

Anyway, that’s just my opinion on it.  Your thoughts?  Feel free to comment.