The 3S method

I'm so fannishly disengaged right now that I want to start this post with an example of a character and I'm literally sitting here thinking, "OK, who do I care about that other people also care about?" So I'm going to skip the example and just tell y'all the thing that just came into my head, which is:

- every fanfic story can present a slightly different version of a character
- these versions can be plotted on three S scales, thusly:

How straight? (In the character's own mind, anyway)
How smitten?
How stupid?

and that if a character is boring me, the answer is probably to move him a little further out to the extreme of one or more S scales.