Case study in this trope.

Welcome back to another edition of Trope Tuesday, our weekly sojourn into the abyss that is TV Tropes. Each week we aim to look into a literary theme, device, or quirk that gives some color to our favorite entertainment. On the docket this time around: Depending on the Writer.

In some stories, a character is very different every time they appear — so different that it’s almost a different character with the same name. This is particularly common with Long Runners and comic books, due to the large number of writers on staff. But there are some characters where even the same writer makes them different every time.

This is not Character Development — nothing happens in the story to justify the personality change. Writer on Board or Creator Breakdown might, though.

Don’t get this confused with characters with some actual depth. Just because you can’t predict a character’s moves 100% of the time doesn’t mean they’re inconsistent. Now, if you can predict a character’s moves 100% of the time only when you know who’s writing, then they’re definitely inconsistent.

Different writers with different ideas and understandings of the work are also the usual culprit of Continuity Drift.

Talk about a trope that is tailor-made for the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Let’s just take a look at the last major series that wrapped up, Fate of the Jedi. In my review of the series as a whole, I hit on something that really hurt it in my mind: the stark differences in how Luke Skywalker was written. On the one hand, you had Aaron Allston who erred towards the Luke you saw in the films. Somewhat optimistic, someone who hadn’t strayed too far from his Tatooine farmboy roots. On the other hand, you had Troy Denning’s Luke Skywalker, who regularly says that family members and sixteen-year-old girls are beyond redemption. Yeah.

Two ends of the personality spectrum for one character. These are the kinds of things that happen when you have so many different authors working with pre-established characters. You might get a Allston-style Luke, who feels very grounded into the source material. You might also get a Luke that veers perhaps too much into Darker and Edgier territory. When it gets really strange is when you get these different Lukes in back-to-back books. Going from Vortex to Conviction was a relief in one sense because the latter felt significantly more like Star Wars than the former, but there’s no denying the jarring shift in tone and themes when jumping between authors in a series like Fate of the Jedi.