Giving Characters New Crap

The more I read of fiction, the more I've come to understand that giving random crap to characters is a sign of either personal wish fulfillment, a lack of plotting for a story, or simply a sign of character favouritism. The author likes the idea of something, so they give that character a cool weapon, or a cool living space, or a cool new technique which is totally awesome. The author needs to fill a chapter, so screw it: Here's three chapters of describing just how wicked-gnarly the character's house is now that it's improved. Or the author feels like the character they like would be improved by having better abilities or items, and so they come up with an excuse to give them these things for no other reason than to make the character "cool".

The problem is that giving any character anything new for any reason is not only pointless, it's crappy storytelling because if the author is giving a character something simply for the sake of giving them something, they're just writing pure filler. They're wasting the audience's time by doing so. This is doubly apparent in fanfiction, where characters already have an array of awesome abilities and items at their disposal.

When you get right down to it, characters shouldn't get new items at all. Certainly not unless it becomes a pivitol plot point later on in the story, and it shouldn't just be given to them. Characters should have to earn their cool new attack, or their cool new item. The new thing loses its meaning and significance if some Deus Ex Machina comes along and just gives it to the character.

If the item or ability is totally cool, it more or less becomes recognizable as wish fulfillment. And guess what? Giving things which are totally cool to a character is only a small step below writing the author themselves into the story as a Mary Sue, because the canon character becomes the vehicle for the author anyway. They stop giving a crap about the pace and plot of the story to revel in the cool new thing the character has, for no other reason than to have it.

If the item or ability takes a few chapters to describe, it's useless padding, especially if the thing isn't even going to be brought up in subsequent chapters in a plot-related fashion. One of the jobs an author has is editing what they think is cool out of a plot to keep things tight and focused on the things which matter. If an element of the story doesn't benefit the plot in some way, it's padding. If the padding is taking more than a paragraph or two to describe, it's useless padding. The occasional useless padding is fine. Chapter upon chapter of it? That's just silly.

If the item improves the character... Well, this can actually be done well, provided that the author makes the character work for the item or ability and that the character isn't learning an ability or taking the item from another character, which is where most fanfiction authors stumble. The hero does not need to learn his rival's techniques. He does not need to steal the awesome weapon a side character has to make him more cool. Those abilities and items are a part of the character and it's poor storytelling to just give those things away. Each ability or item a character has defines their place in the story. If all of the characters could do the same things, they'd only need the one character in the first place.

I guess what I'm saying is, an author shouldn't change the fundamental capabilities of a character or their equipment unless it's absolutely necessary Unless the author can sit down and ask themselves exactly why a character needs to lose or gain a given ability or item to advance the plot and come up with an explanation beyond "because it'd be cool", they shouldn't do it. Curing Ranma's curse or giving Naruto the ability to use a dozen Jutsu isn't going to make a story more interesting by itself. These things have to be accompanied by a lot of character development and action which allows the reader to naturally accept these rather fundamental changes.

Update: Wow. That's a new record. Within fifteen minutes of posting this, someone asked me if I could justify every item or ability I gave any character in any story I've written for this site. Warning, there's going to be spoilers on this list of crap I've given characters in my stories.