Subject: Generally speaking, at least
Author:
Posted on: 2017-05-09 11:45:00 UTC
There are some examples of recruited canon characters (Agent Suicide being probably the most prominent), but yeah, in general, you would have to do an amazing job in writing them to make it work. So in general, better not.
Elcalion
http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:FAQ:ForOtherPeople#Newsections.2C_possibly.3F
This suggests two more sections, the first being "I don't need writing help!" and the second being about criticizing the work being supposedly oppressive because the author is female or LGBTQ+, instead of other sections where it's about the character.
Let me know what you guys think of these ideas!
-Twistey
http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Recruit#Newcontentneeded.3F
This asks for a few guidelines on what kinds of Sues to recruit versus assassinate.
-Twistey
Because I've begun adding some examples of recruitment to the Recruit page, and a wide variety of examples is always good. Mostly what I've added are the stories of people from World One, with the exceptions of Ranger, Surhat Roac, and Roger Walters.
The last two might be my favorite recruitment stories, because they showcase a pair of original characters finding their way to the PPC from original universes in unique ways. The stories do a great job of introducing the characters and the worlds they come from, which makes them even better. At the very least, they stuck with me enough that I thought to look them up six years later.
What are your favorites? What do you like about them, and what makes them stand out from the crowd? (Please don't nominate your own writing, that's cheating.)
~Neshomeh
There is a dwarf, her appearance is so vague that her beard appears and disappears. She ended up in medical or ficpsych, reading a manual. Before that, she was confused about the Sue that was or wasn't her friend.
I think I can recall another story where the Sue heard the agents snickering in the bushes. Maybe she wasn't recruited.
I like Derik and the realtiy room.
But this really is one of the recruitment stories I've seen that are not immediately followed by a mission, which is a thing I enjoy. I much prefer them being interludes than a pre-mission thing.
Hence why, I'm suggesting Iximaz's "Tooth and Claw"
I mean, come on, it's hS' stuff and he's one of my favorites. And, well, it's hard for anything C*l*b**an to not stand out.
Derik's was quite heart-wrenching, and the mission itself wasn't exactly anything to sneeze at, either. What can I say, I'm a sucker for characters getting everything they love ripped away from them.
Dann's can be summed up in two words: Fangirl. Stampede. That is all. :)
...I should really go and give all of those a reread, it's been far too long.
Don't.*
While there are always exceptions, and whether or not to recruit borderline Sues may be a bit of a toss-up, full-blown Sues bad enough to warrant sending assassins after them in the first place are, by definition, not salvageable.
At least, that's the conceit in-universe. Out of universe, this correlates to the notion that we shouldn't be going after fics that are only kinda mediocre but could be fixed with some better SPaG and a few tweaks; we should only be going after fics that are awful, with poor SPaG, OOC canons, irritating OCs, and nonsensical plots. Fics where the best way to fix them is to burn them and start over from scratch.
As for borderline Sues, there aren't any hard rules. It's basically just a question of whether you can get a good bit of story out of it and feel like taking on another character.
~Neshomeh
* This is not an actual rule, I'm using an ironic subversion of expectations to be funny, please don't take me too seriously.
(If you want to, it'd be good to put it on the Wiki in case anyone comes and asks the same question.)
You're kind of confusing me... The way you worded your message seems to say that recruiting shouldn't happen period, but we both know that's not true. Do we just take the background characters? Or, wait. Maybe if it's not a Suefic but still bad enough to get someone involved (like if there's an OC stuck in the middle of an Implausible Crossover a Bad Slash, or just a fic with a really messed-up plot?) I guess that works? Would that make sense?
Or maybe if you feel as if you can do some taming of the Sue (haha, get it) and make it sufficient enough to have it work? I'm guessing that last one may tie into SkarmorySilver's motives for writing EVL into the PPC, but he can jump into the conversation if he wants and clarify that. That'd be cool.
So, am I picking up the right nuances here? Thanks for the info, and I hope to hear a reply soon!
-Twistey
(P.S. About the "Don't", it's fine. It's like "Fight Club", which I know nothing about except that its first rule is "don't talk about fight club." :P)
Have a plan for them.
To the best of my recollection, I've recruited a total of two characters from actual missions: Ithalond from Celebrian, and fake!Arwen/Hypatia from Empire State of Mind. Ithalond I rescued because Tungsten_Monk asked me to; she used him as an agent in three missions. Hypatia I picked up because she makes the perfect comedic foil for Agent Kaitlyn - she looks just like her lust object, has a name that indicates they'd get on well, but is a complete scatterbrain in actuality.
There used to be a tendency (I don't know if it's still around) for people to scour every mission for a character to recruit. "Congratulations," they would say, "You Are In The PPC, Here Is A Daisy." And then that... was it. They didn't want the characters - they just wanted to be able to say they'd recruited them. That's exactly as formulaic as "every mission ends with killing something (even though we're in Floaters/Bad Slash)", or "my agent uses their powersword to kill every Suvian".
I've said recently that I have a hundred named, characterised PPC characters, but the second half of that is that each and every one of them serves a purpose. Some of those purposes are very small - Davea and Aphela exist to be Tanfin's wife and her niece, respectively, and appear in a single story - but they do have a purpose. Creating or recruiting new characters just to be able to say you have is bad writing.
hS
And it makes it even worse when they look cool and you don't go into detail with them, because it just makes your readers rage quit so hard. Some of the fan favorites in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic are secondary characters, because they're given great personalities (Lyra wants to be a human, there's a constant "war of the music genres" between Octavia and Vinyl Scratch, and Derpy is, well, derpy.)
On Scratch, I have an adoption project where I put up any OC/RP character that I've stopped using or didn't use very much in the first place. I always ask the other users what they're going to use the character for before I let them have the character, just because I don't want the OC to go unused again by a different person. It's a good idea, really, and I think that's one of the things I'm going to keep coming back to Scratch for once I've officially left. That and checkin' up on the friends I've made.
-Twistey
What are some rules for recruiting canons? I've got someone in mind who would be of good use to you. Based on evidence from her story, she's only got a specific skill set when it would come to your operations, but I imagine that she's probably pretty good at remembering the details about stuff she's read. Also, she's from a historical fiction, and a lot of stuff from the general time period in which she "lived" is used in several pieces of badfic, and even original fic by authors who think their Villain OC Donut Steel is TEH EVULZ enough to pull that kind of stunt. (Much to my chagrin!)
For those of you who read the book, you can probably guess who I'm talking about by now. If you know you have the right answer, you are officially cool.
-Twistey
If a canon has been determined to be a replacement, though, then see what everyone else has said so far about recruiting Sues.
There are some examples of recruited canon characters (Agent Suicide being probably the most prominent), but yeah, in general, you would have to do an amazing job in writing them to make it work. So in general, better not.
Elcalion
He springs from a typo in a published book that made him plural for a moment, so the Suicide we know is basically a clone of the canon character. Suicide Prime has never left his home universe. That is a hair-thin technicality, though. You probably couldn't get away with something like that today.
There are other, explicit exceptions (see: Team Phoenix), but it's one of those things that was found to be a bad idea after the fact, so yeah, definitely don't do it. Just because a thing has been done before doesn't necessarily mean it was a good idea.
~Neshomeh
[Checks] It looks like Tawaki had quite the collection of dead-and-resurrected canons (Behnashiren, Jara Hamee, Lusa...), but I don't actually recognise their names. My guess, going on how Tawaki wrote missions, is that they each had a single mention - "Oh, my new partner is Behnashiren, king of D'ni, we resurrected him".
Then there's Alec and the rest of Team Phoenix, who do seem to now be described as copies. And we have Spud Avec's Maxie Dasai, who is apparently pilfered from a Web Original series? Other than that, it looks to be explicitly replacements and clones of various descriptions...
hS
(Sort of a reply to everyone at once. Wow, huge bunch of replies I got.)
Isn't being able to write a character well part of writing fanfic that involves canons in general? I mean, there's even a bit of a stigma against fanfic that has an entirely OC cast or that focuses on OCs instead of canons, so you could say that if on knows the canons well enough to write them in a regular fanfic, then recruiting them might not be such a problem. Although I do kind of get that there is a sort of an in-universe reason for it (leaving canons where they belong, interfering as little as possible.) I see from the links that all the canons mentioned are either dead or clones.
...Hmm. Wait. Are these messages specifically for me as a newbie, or for anyone in general? Because I'm pretty sure that although I'm technically a PPCer, I won't be writing any officially PPC missions (again with my parents), and any characters I create/recruit will immediately be deemed adoptable or free-to-use. That (hypothetically only) includes the canon that I suggested earlier, or supposedly a clone thereof. Therefore, the writing of these characters, apart from initial bios, would not rest on me, but more experienced writers could give it a try.
My common sense is telling me that I should probably do some sort of OC instead, but if I did not at least somewhat consider the original thought, I would 1) have nothing to say in this post, 2) therefore be letting no one know that I read the posts and 3) miss the chance to go look for people who could be up to the challenge.
Other than the stuff in Elcalion's post and a bunch of "no, just no" (which I am not the biggest fan of, as I believe that concrit/discouragement/encouragement should have reasons why), nobody's given me any other reasons not to do this before y'all started jumping into the discussion about examples of canons used. Sidetracked, have we? :P So I would like to hear more about it. Explain further, please. I will listen, despite how I probably sound right now.
-Twistey
I like talking about this stuff. Especially when I get to talk about my own characters.
I think your other questions have been covered, though. Elcalion said what I was going to about why recruiting canons is frowned upon, and you'd already gotten that idea yourself anyway, so that's all good. {= )
I will say attempting to adopt out characters you create to other writers is probably doomed to fail, though. I think we all tend to like our own creations best, and the chances of you happening to create a character someone else happens to be looking for at that time are pretty slim. If you make PPC characters, keep them. Even if you don't write missions, you can still use them in RPs and other games.
~Neshomeh
Yep, that'd probably be the best idea.
Although it might be a problem if they're Assassins/Bad Slashers/any of the action departments... I'd have to write missions, I think. Right? Well, I am going to do some mission-esque things on Wattpad, though; pretty much the same except they're requested so I can say "well, you asked for my opinion." That wouldn't be officially PPC, though, and I've already got two characters (my hired mercenaries, Verse and Versailles) for those mission-esque things. So if the characters are officially agents, what would I do?
And now that I think about it, going back over The Book Thief's plot line, Liesel wouldn't exactly be the best for literature. Sure, she'd be a pretty sharp knife for fics with *ahem, stuff from her time period* stuck in them randomly, but she didn't seem to ever have any traits for the analysis of literature or characters; reading was more just for keeping her sane. And especially because of that, we wouldn't want her dealing with fanfic that can drive someone insane. I could do something similar to Liesel, though, due to the good traits I mentioned earlier.
Well, I'm finding it hard to think now, since I'm listening to Kraftwerk and it's hard to think when you've got synthesizers beeping at you repeatedly, am I right? As such, this is all I can think of to say. Thanks for clearing this up.
-Twistey
I think character replacements can be recruited, but only should be considered in certain situations. Such as: They aren't just a Sue masquerading. They really aren't the canon. They are interesting. You have a plan for them.
I have one. I think he is the only agent that I've posted stories with that was a fic recruit. Agent Kelok was supposed to be Todd the Wraith in the fic he is from. The author got absolutely everything about Todd wrong from basic biology to personality to speech patterns. The best I could figure the author wrote an original story and then tried to wrap a canon, any canon would do apparently, around it to get readers. I recruited him, because he was clearly not the character he was named and he was interesting as himself. The way he was described in the fic, he doesn't even look or sound all that much like the canon character. He only existed to give the Sue what she wanted, and wasn't a Stu himself. The real canon had been shoved into a plot hole.
I never tried writing him as Todd the Wraith. He just wasn't Todd and never had been. Any memories he has that should belong to Todd are hazy at best, like remembering something someone told you about that you then imagined yourself doing. He had a basic personality from the fic (one that was diametrically opposed to the canon's), but not much actual experience. Most of his real memories are as a PPC agent.
(Wow, I've been thinking way too far ahead to somewhere past the end of the animated series I mentioned in the Permission talk page and my introductory thread.)
Would it be acceptable if a character replacement got caught in the debris of a Sue's assassination and suffered burns and memory loss, then was taken in by someone and made to believe he was a different person by that someone telling him about this other person he supposedly was, and then he somehow found his way into the PPC and became an agent? Maybe the PPC put him in DOGA or something so that he wouldn't ever run into anyone who knew about his past? Hmm. (Crud, does this description make me sound like a Suethor? I think I screwed up the wording or something and made it sound like that.)
Anyway, now that I think about it, I'd have to tweak that backstory around a bit more, since it wouldn't make sense for one of the two villains (and I mean a seriously Stu replacement) to take on that other life. He would just get killed, because the agent in the story would be after him as well as another Sue in his fic. How's that up there sound, either way?
-Twistey
I don't think we're talking about the same thing. If I have parsed what you said correctly, you have a character who is the canon that has been injured and then lied to about his identity. His entire personality is based on lies that have been imposed on him by those that recruited him.
If that is what you were saying then it isn't what I was trying to say. The main distinction I am trying to make with Kelok is the Suethor did the altering, not the agents who recruited him. He's also fully aware of where he came from.
He wasn't a Stu as written in his story. I'd always recommend killing a Sue/Stu or exorcising/deglittering/memory wiping a canon that hasn't been replaced. His was a pretty specific situation with a canon replacement who isn't a Sue/Stu.
Agents aren't meant to the coolest or most super powered either (which the main characters often are in their own canons). I think it actually makes it more difficult to write good, interesting PPC missions with a highly powered agent than one who has to scrape by on ingenuity.
One final comment. If the agent is meant to be the actual canon, then it really limits what you can do with them. You have to constantly think about keeping them in-character with the canon material. There isn't much room for growth and change while respecting that. With a character who is your own (however they came to the PPC or your general fiction) you get to direct their development and decide what is in-character for them. It is relaxing in a lot of ways to be fully in charge of that as an author.
(Since I wanted to see if this would pass muster as a character. Although there are a few points:)
1-2. Actually, the character I came up with wasn't a canon originally, but rather a character replacement. Altered by the Suethor (if that's how they come to be) and then convinced of a different backstory by a different person (probably outside of the PPC, as this'd have to be someone who isn't out to kill him.)
3. Yep. In this story, the agents (whoever they are) intended to kill him, but when he had the incident that gave him the burns and the memory loss, they probably either got distracted or thought he'd died/thought he was going to die soon and left him for dead.
4. Definitely. I seriously can't consciously write a Mary Sue without it being a joke. This idea was mainly to generate some interesting plots due to administration having to keep him from finding out his identity and also due to the actual canon also probably being out to kill him.
5. That is a good point. I think I've decided against the idea for using a canon as an agent (as I clarified, this idea was separate from the canon question, and the canon I thought of using had pretty much nothing to do with it.) But still a good idea.
-Twistey
Whether the canon is a clone or not, recruiting a canon is generally frowned upon. I think the main reason is a sense that if our mission is to defend canon, twisting it by forcibly recruiting characters for the PPC is a bit hypocritical; even ignoring that the burden of characterisation for writing a canon character has the bar set very high.
As with all 'rules' of writing, yes there are exceptions. But I would not recommend recruiting a canon. If you do so, it has to be done exceptionally well, and that makes it a more difficult option.
Suicide worked because Tungsten Monk was an excellent writer, but could have easily have become a travesty.
I think the same warning also applies to recruiting Sue'd /alternate / character replacement versions of canon, albeit to a lesser extent. There's still that high standard of writing required. While it does unlock some opportunities for great writing when you have the opportunity to explore the conflict between the canon's natural personality and the Suvian influences, it can get out of hand. A great example is Agent Dafydd: well-written, and him being an alternate version of Maglor led to some great conflict when the Fëanorian side was aided and abetted by Suvian jewellery, but I can't imagine Dafydd being an easy character to write well!
TLDR version: yes, while it's been done in the past, as Nesh has said, it's a fairly shaky precedent. Definitely not something we'd recommend as your first agent. The bar will be set very high.
Elcalion
Although if the character replacement is OOC, but not Sued, and one recruits them, it looks like they practically turn into original characters - at least, that's what a lot of recruited replacements seem to be. Wouldn't that kind of situation make it less standard-y, maybe just a bit more than an original agent would be?
-Twistey
That is pretty much what happens to recruited character replacements. As replacements, they explicitly are not the canon character they've replaced, just someone who might kinda sorta maybe look like them and share a couple things in common.
But if I understand you right, no, I don't think that makes them more unique or "non-standard" than a completely original character. Even characters you made up yourself are going to draw on inspiration from somewhere—more likely multiple somewheres.
Nume, for instance, largely draws on Dr. House, another cantankerous but very intelligent misanthrope with a substance dependency and, maybe, a heart of gold. He's also a little bit based on my dad and a big bit on your archetypal `70s nerd, with a weird memory and some weird hangups about sexuality for spice.
Derik, while looking like the Phantom of the Opera, sharing a passion for music, and being a little bit off his rocker, is mostly an ex-dragonrider with all the selfless devotion to duty and protecting others that entails. He's a product of his badfic, but he's even more a product of my love for both canons, and dragons, and music, and seriousface hero types wrestling with their dark side.
Make sense?
~Neshomeh
What makes a good fanfic is not equal to what makes a good PPC mission. Writing a canon character well in a mission generally entails them remaining in the canon and writing their reactions to the Sues or other bad influences in the badfic, whether they are overcome or try to resist the Sue-influence. Bringing canons into the PPC would go against what they stand for- leaving canon intact.
You write that any characters your create or recruit will immediately become adoptable or free-to-use, so more experienced writers could attempt it. But how do you know that a more experienced writer will want to? hS wrote above that the second rule of recruiting characters is to have a plan for them- that means you would be writing them.
Besides, creating good OCs is also a difficult skill, like writing canons, but it's much closer to what the PPC is focused on.
-A. Lurker
Ilraen, Derik, and Gall are all recruits I picked up because I really wanted to write them.
Ilraen is an Andalite, which is cool to start with, and I needed someone Nume could be convinced to work with after his original partner, Cameo, turned out to be an awful person I didn't want to write anymore. Then I got to play with the idea of someone who has had to build himself from the ground up, without the benefit of normal childhood formative experiences. Now that he's matured a bit, he's going through some teenage-ish angst about who he really is, and how his human upbringing (if you can call it that) meshes and clashes with his Andalite identity.
Derik was a side-character who existed for more or less the sole purpose of being a visual gag: "LOL, wouldn't it be funny if there was a dragonrider called E'rik who looked like the Phantom of the Opera and had a dragon called 'mask' in Swedish?!?!1" He didn't really do anything, he was just there. I happen to be a PotO fan AND a Pern fan, so I couldn't leave the poor guy like that. I was interested in starting a new spin-off in the DMS to take on the Sues my DIC team couldn't, and Derik was a shoo-in for me.
I originally paired him with Earwig, a kender made up by Phobos, whose shenanigans were intended to be a foil to Derik's drama, but I couldn't write the guy, and Phobos didn't really want to, either. Then Gall came along, and she was just perfect: sassy, no fluff, no nonsense. Ideal for poking Derik in his sore spots and refusing to let him dwell on them at the same time. Since HtTYD is a bit anachronistic, she can also make most of the jokes and references I want to make, too. And she's a girl. I thought I should have at least one girl in my line-up, since I am one myself, and it lets me bring that perspective to Suedo-feminism.
I'll also note that at least one member of FicPsych is on record as hating it when agents dump helpless bit parts on them and then abandon them. {= )
~Neshomeh
I'd also add a slight corollary: "Don't write Agent X because you want an agent of Agent X's cool and/or awesome species/sect/fandom/whatever, write them because you want to write Agent X". It's a principle that served me well from right back when I started - which hS took an active part in moulding.
Wobbles the Clown appeared because I wanted to do a genuine unironic clown, and up she popped; a happy-go-lucky sort whose happiness, luckiness, and (somehow) goness came about because of her previous life as an angstfic refugee who was intended to provide comic relief in the badfic itself but who was instead basically the chew toy of every electrical appliance in a given area. This desperate desire to make people happy (as well as the obligatory FicPsych sessions) made her into the clown we know and love today, but she was in need of a foil.
Then up pops something called the Continuity Council of Gallifrey, masterminded largely by hS and largely concerning the Time Lord agents of various oldbies, veryoldbies, and similarlygeriatricbies. I wanted to take part but, not having quite read the memo, bashed out a few syllables that sounded Gallifreyan and called the woman wearing them The Notary. When hS (via Morgan) pointed out that there were a lot of Time Lord agents who were Time Lords because it was cool, I wanted to refute that, so I began to think more about who the Notary was.
Now, in previous Whovian RPs on a Nintendo fansite that were frankly rubbish, I'd often used an OC Time Lord called the Gardener: righter of wrongs, snogger of aliens, part-time planet builder, and manager of a branch of Little Chef on the A504 just outside Milton Keynes. I liked playing as her, because she was fun to be around, and the original draft of the Notary was going to be much more like her. Then I thought some more about the Notary, and how I didn't want to play into hS's hands and give him a reason to boot me out of the RP... and that's why the Notary is the way she is.
It's detailed here and there in missions and RPs and ficlet responses, but the Fourth Notary was very much akin to my old Gardener OC in terms of temperament, drive, and weird hobbies involving greasy spoon management. However, I decided that that should very much be the past of the Notary, and then I remembered The Twin Dilemma, a Sixth Doctor episode wherein he throttles longtime companion Peri. It was under different circumstances, of course, but then I thought about what that would do to someone if they couldn't take it back, if that lonely old time traveller just let themselves rot in a decaying, unloved TARDIS. Suddenly the Notary's whole life story rolled out in front of me; this tired, defeated woman whose life has just been one indignity after another, until she finally got to be a hero... and then it was taken away, so she thinks. She was everything wrong with Time Lord society, everything that was rotten and corrupt about it... but, as Nirvana Crane once said (of someone else), "Somewhere under that pile of neuroses is someone nice trying to claw their way out".
From there, the dynamic with Wobbles practically wrote itself - Ronald McDonald paired with some ghastly little Napoleon from the local JobCentre has all the trappings of a normal agent pairing. So I decided to amplify those traits, really play up Wobbles' Pollyanna nature and the Notary's superiority complex, as a commentary on how limiting the standard hot-and-cold two person dynamic can be. Then Lola kept poking her head round the door, so I decided to bung her in as an agent, too - and then her story rolled out.
In fact, the only characters whose stories don't tie directly into that of the Oncoming Form are Doktor Trollenfisch und Gabrielle, who I wrote with the specific purpose of being soft and fluffy and having happy endings. Even then, they might not be separate from the rest of my agent stable for too long... though to say more would be spoilers. =]
The only question I'd have about this is: what if you're trying to challenge yourself to make a character of a cliche/frequently-used/frequently-done-badly species/etc and successfully dodge the tropes? I know I've done that at least once by drawing a legitimately scary neko Creepypasta. Would I be correct in saying that as long as the character is done well and has a purpose as hS says, the fact that I created the character as a challenge of my character creation skills is okay?
-Twistey
Be cool to see, that! 'Specially given how very subversive the PPC, as a whole, is. It's a good thing, that, to have a proper plan for a character beyond 'They should do some stuff' or, lord help, 'They should do some stuff and be real strong and have cool powers and be real cool.' Playing around with tropes is always brilliant. Long as you give 'em more character beyond subversion, of course. Good starting point, subversion.
Also, I disagree with Scape's point.
I think you should watch Red Dwarf if, and only if, you want to see a really good show and you're real smart and cool and nice smelling and you like really good things.
There's a fun series of role-plays that I've started with my friends, called "Victims of the Plot," in which one friend and I are in a specific continuum and we gradually get hit by more and more fanfic tropes, so we have to escape the continuum or something before we turn into flat-out Mary Sues and lose our common sense. It's a lot of fun.
And for the Red Dwarf thing... I'm pretty sure that unless one is wearing perfume, one cannot tell what one smells like. Also, the "like really good things" part is out for me. I've got several guilty pleasures, oh man. Argh.
-Twistey
No, for real, if you haven't seen any Red Dwarf, fix that situation immediately.
(also if you want to see the antithesis of every kawaii neko boy, watch Red Dwarf; it has a Cat character who acts like a cat - he's a vain, preening narcissist who is largely concerned with eating, sleeping, and thinking about sex. =] )
But yeah, not only did I want to dodge the tropes of Time Lord OCs with the good old Oncoming Form, I wanted to dodge and discuss the tropes of mission writing and the PPC as an entity. Feel free to do that. Just, y'know, have a story and personality for your bad kitty too. =]
...although I do have another half-cat character in a sci-fi story who (at the very least) subverts the appearance tropes of a neko. Meaning that she's got whiskers, has teeth that are actually feline in nature (instead of little fangs and the rest just being human teeth), and is covered in a thin coat of fuzz, which is all the better for cuddling, if you ask me. :3
Heh, maybe I should make her even more cat-like. Make her feet into hind paws, give her somewhat of a feline facial structure (but not too much, this isn't meant to be anthro/furry-esque), etc. She also subverts some neko behavior tropes as well - she is benevolent and friendly, but not necessarily "kawaii" (see the behaviors associated with cuteness in the Springhole.net article below.) She's less like a housecat (as your Red Dwarf guy is, and more like a wild or feral cat with a more human level of intellect. A couple other details of her behavior are that she's carnivorous and hunts for food, and does the standard cat stretch thing when waking up. So yeah, I'm pretty sure I've done it. Yay!
-Twistey
"Notes and Musings on Writing Cute Characters":
http://www.springhole.net/writing/cute-characters.htm