Y'know not to be a party pooper but I think ppl should start thinking abt their queer hcs for more than five seconds when making hcs for characters. Like I think ppl get too comfy in the "fuck you, they're all gay/trans/whatever!" mindset sometimes and that sort of spiteful gut instinct way of going abt it can lead to some. Honestly rly gross hcs. Like I mainly just think ppl should examine their gut instincts before just stamping it on, because sometimes gut instincts are unconscious bias, and like it's not inherently evil to have a queer character that somewhat lines up with a stereotype sometimes, real people can as well, but like you've gotta handle that shit with care and caution man, looking at you non lesbians having mean lesbian hcs

on the ubiquity of the word ‘bride’ in fanfiction, regardless of gender, and the role it has in reflecting the biases of wider society.

Alright. This is applicable to a lot of fandoms (and I mean a LOT, especially m/m), so I thought I’d address it. To be honest, I started attempting to say something about this back in January, but the extreme deconstruction of gender that I was initially going to discuss required a level of understanding and nuance that I really hadn’t achieved yet. I’m certainly not saying that I’ve achieved it now, but I think a more simplified version of what I wanted to say will get the point across a little better.

An innumerable amount of times in fandom content, whenever the more ‘feminine-coded’ character (for lack of any other better way to put it) is promised/engaged to the love interest, they’re generally referred to as their ‘bride’. Even, and sometimes especially, if the ‘bride’ in question is male. And this rubs me the wrong way for a number of reasons.

Firstly, and mainly, it really plays into gender roles and gender stereotypes. Casting a character in the moulds of ‘bride’ or ‘wife’ to connote them ‘more feminine’, ‘less dominant’, or especially as having a lack of agency in regards to their own marriage reinforces the beliefs that women, and by extension, those who are more feminine, have inherently less agency in a marriage than men or those who are more masculine do. It also forces non-heterosexual characters to be viewed through a lens of heteronormativity - like shoving your dolls in boxes they don’t fit into. This also has spillover effects into the way we view non-heterosexual relationships in our communities - we equally shove these people into neat labels and boxes and gender roles and stereotypes where they don’t necessarily belong, because we’re used to seeing, consuming and producing media which portrays them in this way. 

It’s the same for sexual dynamics. The ‘top’ doesn’t always have to be the more masculine-coded character, and the ‘bottom’ doesn’t need to always be the more feminine-coded one - isn’t that unimaginative? Why continue to play into heteronormativity, when it really isn’t like that in real life? M/M fandom is especially guilty of that one, I find - why continue to put the same characters in the same roles where you could instead explore the interplay of gender and sexuality in a more nuanced way? 

Writing and characterising your blorbos in fanfiction like this may seem harmless and self-indulgent, but it’s important to consider that the language that you use to elucidate connotations and characterisations can serve as a showcase of your biases, and should be examined once in a while. 

I mean, just take a look at our lovely ‘feminist’ nutcase JK Rowling, for example. Even in Harry Potter her biases are revealed through the way she demonises hyper-femininity (unless the women in question are mothers)— she ridicules Petunia Dursley, the Veela, Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil, Rita Skeeter, even the lovely Fleur Delacour (who Ginny constantly called Phlegm), and the main antagonist of Book 5 is a woman who adores pink and wears a bowtie in her hair. JK Rowling was one of the reasons I spent my tween years thinking it was cool to hate pink and demonise femininity and be ‘not like the other girls, rather quirky and intelligent’. I’ve gone on a tangent here, but this is why it’s so important to know how to consume ‘problematic media’ critically - deconstructing exactly why something is problematic can teach you so much about the use of language as a subtle weapon, and can help you look out for it later in the different ways news is reported and framed. (I was taught this in high school Social Studies, and it remains one of the most important things I’ve ever learnt.)

So back to what I was saying. To cast characters as more submissive/having less agency/weaker and to ascribe all these traits simultaneously to femininity - isn’t that too archaic?

Let’s move forward from the stereotype that women and traditional femininity are in any way lesser, one fanfic at a time.  

Neurodivergence in Generation X Part 2:

The Rich Bitch

There is one other obvious narrative trope that Monet fills, one that is not typically associated with neurodivergence.

Monet, when we first meet her and in her later, restored state, is a bitchy, bratty, pretty rich girl.

As rare as it is to see depictions of female characters with autism, it is perhaps even more rare to see those women portrayed as pretty and feminine. And the “spoiled bitch” angle seems completely out of left field, right? Right?

Lemme take you on a wild ride…

Monet is kind of a Bitch

Monet is often more than a little bit bitchy. She makes snide comments, chides the others (especially Jubilee and Paige) over trivial things and is overall very abrupt and inconsiderate.

A lot of these comments are out of the blue and unmotivated.

And they also often read like a man’s version of what a bitchy teenage girl is like.

Now the idea of an autistic or autistic-coded character being a bit mean isn’t new (e.g. Sheldon Cooper in the Big Bang Theory or Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock), but it is rare to see this feminine pretty-bitch type get associated with autism. I actually think it’s a really fun idea, and a better fit to be honest.

Sheldon is a dick - he’s a misogynist and he’s just awful to everyone - and he’s also autistic-coded, but these two aspects of his character don’t interact in any way that interests me. He mostly feels like he’s fully aware of how he comes across, but he believes he’s superior to others so he doesn’t care. Whereas, I think the mean-girl bitchiness of someone like Monet has more room for nuance. Namely, this vaguely sexist bitchy mean-girl trope can be very effective at depicting someone who’s difficult to get on with, but isn’t really aware of why that is.

Obviously, bitchiness isn't an autistic trait, but if you're going to write an autistic or autistic-coded character as bitchy, then it's good to incorporate the different ways in which an autistic person might engage with others into their bitchy behaviour.

Okay, to explain this I’m going to talk about Buffy for a minute.

Cordelia Chase

Cordelia, as she’s portrayed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (not so much in Angel) is really easy to read as autistic. I swear. Bear with me.

Cordelia is a pure manifestation of the “dumb bitch” trope BUT because this trope is made up of an amalgamation of stereotypes about teenage girls, she comes across as more complicated than that. She’s written to be dumb, frequently misunderstanding very basic things BUT with the occasional joke about how she’s actually very successful academically. She’s one of the “popular” kids BUT it’s clear no one likes her and the only real friend she makes is Xander who, unfortunately, treats her pretty badly. She’s loud and often out-going BUT she is also clearly very self-conscious, fixated on superficial “girly” things. She seems almost desperate to fit in. She’s always saying really nasty things BUT it comes across like she’s trying to make a joke, but no one ever laughs. In contrast, Xander’s remarks towards her seem intended to hurt her. She is shown (through mind-reading shenanigans) to have basically no filter and just says whatever she’s thinking.

Cordelia is, undeniably, someone who has difficulty connecting with other people. She frequently misunderstands social situations and speaks inappropriately. To me, this makes her really easy to read as neurodivergent. Her shitty comments really do sound like attempts at banter from someone who doesn’t quite get the unspoken rules of the game. Her obsession with “shallow”, “girly” things is easy to interpret as hyperfixation.

Now, obviously none of this is intentional but I think it’s a fun way to read the character. Cordelia comes across as way more relatable than the writers intended (or at least how one specific writer intended) in no small part because she clearly struggles socially. What’s so interesting about it is, to me, how this feminine “bitchy” character is a much more relatable depiction of how an autistic person can come across as mean than any Sheldon or Sherlock. She really does feel like someone who’s abrasive but isn’t really in control of that.

I think a lot of this works with Monet too. She’s clearly hyper-concerned with things that the others deem trivial and shallow. Her mean comments are definitely coming from someone who doesn’t get why they’re inappropriate. Yes, she has an ego, but she’s more layered than just “up herself and mean to people”. She struggles to get on with people due to behaviour that other people have decided is bitchy. I can really relate to that.

Emma Frost

Monet doesn’t really get on with anyone at first. Jubilee in particular doesn’t like her, ironically preferring Penance to Monet. Penance, despite never speaking and seemingly not understanding pretty much everything going on around her, is preferable to Monet because at least she never says the wrong thing. But then again, Monet is actually pretty catty towards Jubilee so it’s understandable that there’d be some difficulty. What’s more interesting I think is the relationship between Monet and Emma Frost.

Emma is hostile towards Monet from day one. She openly doesn’t trust her and dislikes her. While she’s right that Monet is keeping secrets from them, this isn’t actually why she has a problem with her. She thinks she’s too confident and doesn’t feel she’ll be able to manipulate her. She literally says that.

She also offers Penance up to Emplate in a pretty nasty move. She wasn’t intending to go through with it but still. Emplate tortured Penance for years so it counts in the “Shitty things Emma’s done to Monet” column.

What’s interesting about this is that it isn’t anything Monet actually does that makes Emma dislike her initially. She’s never mean to Emma like she is to Jubilee. She clearly had nothing against her. Emma just doesn’t like the way she acts, thinks she’s not ashamed of the things she should be ashamed of.

There is, of course, an immediate racial reading of this. Emma Frost is the quintessential gaslight/gatekeep/girlboss wealthy white lady and her attitude towards Monet is something a lot of Black women tend to receive from women like her. She puts Monet down out of her own insecurities in a way that just screams “racist micro-aggression”. I’m not Black but from what I understand, this phenomenom (being interpreted as a threat, as over-confident and as needing-to-be-taken-down-a-peg) is something a lot of Black women experience and it is especially true for neurodivergent women who are even more likely to be mis-interpreted as aggressive or “trouble”.

So, I think this is a genuinely cool aspect to the series. Its depiction of (what I’m sure is intended as) simple catty bitchiness is able to (imperfectly) reflect a lot of real experiences of autistic women. Namely, alienating others without realising, being socially isolated from your peers, being unfairly interpreted as a bitch due to difficulties in reading people, and being the subject of unnecessary and arbitrary disdain simply because you don’t act the way you’re “supposed to”.

Speaking of social isolation...

-------------------------

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4

I just reread Wuthering Heights for the first time since high school. Thanks to @theheightsthatwuthered, @wuthering-valleys, @astrangechoiceoffavourites and others for inspiring me to do it!

Here are some of the things that stood out the most for me.

1. I can’t believe how ambiguous all the characters are! “Morally gray” doesn’t begin to describe it. Even the most sympathetic characters are deeply, deeply flawed, yet just when a character seems unredeemable, they’ll show their capacity for love and altruism. It’s hard to say how Brontë meant us to feel about any of them. I won’t even touch on Heathcliff or the other leads: the example I’ll use is the short-lived yet important figure of Mr. Earnshaw. On the one hand, he’s framed both by Nelly Dean’s narration and by Cathy I’s diary as a kind, benevolent man. He takes in the homeless, orphaned young Heathcliff, raises and loves him as his own, treats his servants almost like family, is reasonably warm and indulgent to his children before his illness worsens his temper, and is very much loved by little Cathy in particular. After he dies and Hindley becomes the tyrannical new master, Cathy and Nelly remember his lifetime as a paradise lost. But he blatantly favors Heathcliff over his own children, sewing the seeds for Hindley’s abuse and degradation of Heathcliff, and during his illness, the disparaging way he talks to and about Hindley and Cathy definitely feels like emotional abuse, at least by modern standards. His harsh words to Cathy are especially heartbreaking given how clearly she worships him and it makes you wonder if her future arrogance is really a cover for self-doubt. But since Nelly depicts Hindley and Cathy as difficult and bratty from childhood, and both become truly toxic adults, maybe their father’s harshness is meant to be justified or at least understandable, and since Heathcliff was a poor orphan who faced who-knows-what horrors in his first seven years, we might argue that he needed more care and affection. But Heathcliff also becomes a toxic adult and Nelly implies that being the favored child made him spoiled and arrogant. And none of the above even touches on the theory that Heathcliff might be Mr. Earnshaw’s illegitimate son, which would definitely cast the latter in a less favorable light. Any claim of “This is how we’re supposed to feel about this character” can only fall flat, because there’s so much ambiguity.

2. The recent reviews by @astrangechoiceoffavourites of the 1939 and 1970 film versions point out something interesting: that in both of those versions, which only adapt only the first half of the book, Cathy (I) is more of the protagonist than Heathcliff. This insight raises a good question: who really is the protagonist of the book? Of course the traditional answer is Heathcliff. He’s the character we follow from beginning to end, whose actions drive the entire plot. But he’s not the viewpoint character; we mostly see him from Nelly Dean’s perspective, and Heathcliff sometimes disappears for months or years at a time from her narrative. Yet Nelly can’t be called the protagonist because she’s more of an observer than an active participant. I think we can argue that, at least in terms of plot structure, the two Cathys are the book’s real protagonists: Cathy I leads the first half, with Heathcliff as the deuteragonist/love interest, while Cathy II leads the second half, with Heathcliff as the villain. Of course this is debatable, but so is nearly everything else about this book.

3. I never realized until now what a perfect inversion Cathy II’s character arc is of her mother’s arc. There are so many parallels, but they happen in the opposite order. Just look:

** Cathy I is born and raised at Wuthering Heights, but as a young girl she ventures to Thrushcross Grange, meets her future husband and ultimately lives there./Cathy II is born and raised at Thrushcross Grange, but as a young girl she ventures to Wuthering Heights, meets her future husband and ultimately lives there.

** Both are raised by widowed fathers whom they adore, although Mr. Earnshaw is stern and critical to Cathy I while Edgar dotes on Cathy II; eventually both fathers die prematurely, leaving their daughters in a tyrannical new patriarch’s hands (Hindley/Heathcliff).

** Cathy I initially loves the rugged, dark haired Heathcliff, who lives as a servant at Wuthering Heights; she helps to educate him and they wander the moors together. But as she spends more time at Thrushcross Grange, she absorbs its snobbery, treats him with increasing disdain (though she really does still love him), and favors the refined, prissy, blond haired Edgar, whom she eventually marries./Cathy II initially loves (or at least cares for) the refined, prissy, blond haired Linton, whom she eventually marries. Having been raised with Thrushcross Grange’s snobbery, she initially disdains the rugged, dark haired Hareton, who lives as a servant at Wuthering Heights. But as she lives at the Heights after Linton dies, she looses her snobbery and becomes increasingly drawn to Hareton; ultimately they fall in love, she helps to educate him and they wander the moors together.

** Because of the above, Cathy I’s story ends tragically, while Cathy II’s story ends happily.

It really is too bad that most screen and stage adaptations only adapt the first half and leave out Cathy II, because it seems to me that Cathy I’s story was always meant to be juxtaposed with her daughter’s mirror-image arc.

4. If I was ever half-tempted to believe the theory that Branwell Brontë was the book’s real author, I don’t believe it anymore. There’s no way a 19th century man, especially one who was allegedly a bit of a womanizer, could have written such nuanced, realistic, non-objectified female characters. Even male authors whose characterizations of women I respect, both of the past and of today, tend to have problems with sexualization, madonna-whore stereotyping, etc. But the women in Wuthering Heights are thoroughly non-sexualized three-dimensional characters: all of them flawed yet (arguably) all sympathetic, no better yet no worse than the men around them, all fully human.

5. The circumstances of Cathy I’s mental and physical breakdown are different than I remembered from high school. I was under the impression that Heathcliff married Isabella to hurt Cathy the way she had hurt him and that Cathy’s brain fever was caused by jealousy and heartbreak at being “rejected” for another woman. I think the screen adaptations tend to frame it more that way. But really, Heathcliff marries Isabella less to hurt Cathy emotionally than to gain power over her husband by gaining a claim to inherit his property and fortune. Nor is Cathy’s breakdown caused by jealousy (she knows Heathcliff doesn’t really love Isabella, after all), but by the conflict between Heathcliff and Edgar that the Isabella scandal triggers, which culminates in Edgar punching Heathcliff, making him flee for his life, and demanding that Cathy choose between them. It’s the crumbling of Cathy’s attempted double life with both men that breaks her, not rivalry with Isabella.

6. When I first started the reread, my dad suggested that I try to see if I could find more sexual tension between Heathcliff and Cathy I than I did in high school. But I didn’t. Their love is just as strangely, fascinatingly sexless as I thought it was. I suppose the question remains: did Brontë purposefully write it as sexless, or does it just reflect her own lack of sexual experience?

7. If I were to write the screenplay for a new film version of Wuthering Heights, I think I’d present it in anachronic order, similar to Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Scenes from the first half would alternate with scenes from the second half. This way the second half would really be given its due, the mirror-imagery between Cathy I and Cathy II’s character arcs would be especially apparent, and the Hareton/Cathy II romance could be highlighted as a healthy alternative to Heathcliff/Cathy I. I would also make a definite point to de-romanticize Heathcliff, not only by portraying him as a tragic man-turned-monster and not downplaying his cruelty, but by leaving it ambiguous, as I think it is in the book, whether the love he shares with Cathy I really is romantic love or a strangely intense, codependent brother/sister bond. I definitely wouldn’t age them into young adult lovers on the moors the way most screen versions do; I’d portray them at their correct ages, just 12/13 when they roam the moors together and still just 15/16 when Cathy accepts Edgar’s proposal, and highlight that they were only truly happy together as children. That in some ways their love is always the love of two children, both in its selfishness and in its purity. Cathy’s ghost at the window would be portrayed as a child, as in the book, and if I were to show Heathcliff’s ghost joining her in the end, I just might have them both transform back into their 12/13-year-old selves. That could make for an interesting contrast with Hareton and Cathy II in the end: Heathcliff and Cathy I reunited as free, half-savage children, while their foster-son and daughter appear as a mature romantic couple embracing civilization and adulthood.

This isn’t related to anything, but frozen 2 was actually...pretty good of a movie, and you can literally see the disney profit model holding it back. firstly, the music was really good -- i was really impressed with the writing team and with the vocal performances, especially by idina menzel. the songs that didn’t make it in because the plot was rearranged were also excellent. wrt to the visuals, i’m not the biggest fan of this specific animation style, but it’s clear it’s very well done -- i’ve no choice but to be impressed. the plot was whatever (also they fully put a couple of trolls in charge of the kindom for a bit -- is there no fucking line of succession in this goddamn kingdom?? maybe the plot of the movie should have been establishing a functional bureaucracy) and they really yada-yada-ed the magic system, which was basically of the central conceit of the movie so...why did they not put more effort into it? the explanation, such as it was, of the magic system was both confusing and ultimately pretty meaningless -- it added next to nothing of value to the lore or theme or worldbuilding. the themes were clearly meant for a more mature audience (which is i guess what you get for waiting 7 years to make a sequel [which btw just wrenched out a memory out of me that frozen 1 came up literally constantly in my 7th grade latin class -- i cannot emphasize enough how bizarre of an experience learning a dead language throughout the entirety of your teenage years along with 400 more of your cohort is]) -- but anyway, they establish all these themes and then don’t commit to them. Like, the central plot conflict of the movie is literally colonialism lmao. it’s such a strange place to discuss it. My suspicion is that they decided right away to go with a “connecting with mother” storyline, since the “women in the same family connecting with each other” bit worked so well in the first movie; then they were like “is this too basic?” and decided that they should wrap that into a “reckoning with ancestry” thread to cash into that “young leftist with white guilt” market. Then they had somebody on the writing staff who was like “what if we made this about colonialism?” So re: those elements, first of all the mother plotline is boring as shit. Like it doesn’t ring true even to losing a loved one early, but it especially rings soooo hollow wrt the actual relationship that is portrayed in the first movie between elsa and her parents. like we see the parents be so misguided it borders on abusive. and that’s a really interesting dynamic, story-wise, bc the parents are dead and can’t redeem themselves but the baggage they left behind is still there, so the burden of processing that falls exclusively on the daughters. i dare say this is something probably relatable to many of us, bc it’s my sense that most people grow up with pretty misguided parents! (lowkey i feel like the best parenting i’ve seen in my circle are parents who basically went off of vibes rather than idk a philosophy or whatever) i actually would have loved to see a children’s movie address dealing with parents in a nuanced way that isn’t just “one of us is right and the other is wrong” but rather addresses what responsibilities parents and children have to each other, how to navigate intent versus effect, what the value (or lack thereof) of forgiveness is, how to uncover your identity when your entire life was shaped by societal and parental expectations, etc. And the Frozen premise is ideally suited for this! Moreover, a lot of these beats actually DO happen in the movie! Into the unknown is basically elsa trying and failing to convince herself that she wants the life she has and any thoughts to the contrary should be dismissed (and it’s gay as hell, but we’ll get to that later). The climax of show yourself literally says that it was the truth about herself rather than her mother that will bring her peace. But all of these beats are facilitated supernaturally rather than by the very fitting preexisting character background, which makes it lack the satisfaction you’d expect in such a resolution. it never features any reckoning with what made her feel the way she did in the first place -- a projection of the mother’s face singing the climactic realization literally undercuts the entire plotline. like here you can see how basically being propaganda for the american lifestyle (in this case the nuclear family e.g.) undercuts their message. this predictably only gets more egregious when they attempt to tackle colonialism. so quick summary of this plotline: anna and elsa’s grandfather basically genocided an indigenous people -- the northuldra -- after tricking them into building a dam that stifles the power of the forest or something. also their mother was actually northuldra. also magic comes from the northuldra forest? it would probably be pretty problematic re: the magical native stereotype if it was clearer what was going on lmao. at the end, anna breaks the dam even though it’ll flood Arendelle; however, elsa (who was literally frozen because of the sins of the past) swoops in at the last moment and freezes the wave so it causes no damage. However, in an earlier version of the story, the wave actually DOES destroy Arendelle and then they rebuild it with a mix of Arendellian and Northuldran architectural styles. this version actually proposed a genuine vision for how to deal with the impacts of colonialism instead of the final movie where sisterly love absolves everyone of consequences. 

ok, so about the gay: i know people read a coming out into let it go, and maybe this is just cause i watched frozen 1 when i was still straight, but i didn’t really see it. but the lyrics in frozen 2 elsa’s songs match up so well with the coming out experience, i have difficulty imagining the song-writers weren’t aware of it, especially since people were already calling for elsa to be gay. Like let’s take a look at these songs -- into the unknown first. She sings

“Everyone I've ever loved is here within these walls I'm sorry, secret siren, but I'm blocking out your calls I've had my adventure, I don't need something new I'm afraid of what I'm risking if I follow you”

This idea of having being afraid of ruining relationships even (and especially) with the people you love most by coming out is something that a lot of queer people can relate to. Then she sings:

“Are you here to distract me so I make a big mistake? Or are you someone out there who's a little bit like me? Who knows deep down I'm not where I'm meant to be? Every day's a little harder as I feel your power grow Don't you know there's part of me that longs to go”

How much do i need to explain this? (like all my 7 followers are some form of queer anyway lol) But again this battle of trying to hide but knowing deep down that you can’t, longing for “someone a little bit like me” --  it’s classic queer. Then she sings a bridge-type thing:

“Are you out there? Do you know me? Can you feel me? Can you show me?”

I mean, again, what is this but longing for community. Then in the climactic song “show yourself”, she sings this:

“Something is familiar Like a dream, I can reach but not quite hold I can sense you there Like a friend I've always known”

this is literally just about reading stone butch blues.

The climactic lyric is  “You are the one you've been waiting for all your life” (sung to her rather than by her) and i mean again, this is about finally giving yourself permission to live as your true self. And not gonna lie, i dug that shit. it felt quite authentic. obviously they didn’t actually make her gay, bc of course, but she is gay in my heart!

Ok, so what would have made the movie live up to its full potential?

1) fixing that stuff i already said about the parents; it felt like such bs that anna and elsa were dealing with ancestral sins but also their parents were saints whose love fixed everything? how much more interesting would it have been if reckoning with their parents’ impacts on them led them to reckoning with the impacts of their entire ancestry and in turn their society? if reckoning with their personal responsibilities to each other led them to consider their society’s responsibility to fix the past wrongs that allowed it to flourish? this wouldn’t even be counter to disney’s individualism, but it allows for a slight reconceptualization of it that i think would feel fresh.

2) having actual consequences for the colonialism and genocide

3) either cutting all the new magic system stuff or developing it in a way that in turn helps develop the themes. frankly, the “sometimes people are born with magic” that was implied in movie one was enough.

4) making elsa gay, and i say this not just because i want gay characters but because that genuinely makes sense within the story

5) basically, the central theme should have been “i have all this baggage and i can’t resolve it by looking for answers only within my society; in order to be fully at peace with myself, i must work to right the wrongs of my society that obscured the different ways of knowledge that could help people like me; sometimes you must go into the unknown in order to understand the known” which is a message i think very well suited for the united states!

Do you think if we take a step back we can view what happened w/the recent SW movie thru the lens of creative growing pains for Hollywood as they attempt to have better rep & inclusion? I haven’t been tracking this issue & don’t know if I have the life experience/perspective to say it’s true. But I am a member of the queer community, so I have seen that in attempt to have more rep on screen (which is progress), it seems normal that not everyone will do a good job & there’ll be a learning curve.

Obviously that doesn’t mean we don’t call creators out when they do something wrong! But for me even w/the SW movie ending bad I still see progress there. They’re changing the picture of who we see on screen. Who is important & explored in depth & fleshed out. They’re just bumbling the narratives & stories. Which makes sense if they’re not used to telling those stories. I think the right people being on screen is the 1st step. And/Or getting the right rep in storytellers behind the scenes.

Actually maybe getting the right storytellers bts is actually the key to what will take this move toward better rep and inclusion to the next level. Don’t get me wrong, like you I believe creators can tell thoughtful, nuanced stories about issues they haven’t experienced or communities they’re not a part of. But if they don’t have any of those people on their teams on in their ears, I think they’re taking a big risk and doing a disservice to themselves and the stories they want to tell.

+++

This is, I think, a very insightful question and something to look at. To be honest, it’s such a big question with so much IN it that I’m having trouble answering.

I think you’re right. That the current wave of “diverse” content, created mostly by white men, lets be honest, is problematic. And there are reasons for it being problematic... mainly telling a story that represents diversity when your life is... not diverse, is, well, really hard. And to get to that point where you can tell that story without falling to stereotypes and harmful tropes or cardboard characters is a process.

You can’t tell that story without doing a lot of work and really examining your view point. And ok, it’s not that ALL white men can’t tell these stories. Or that “diverse” creators (lgbt, poc, jewish, disabled or otherwise minority) are telling stories that AREN’T problematic. The truth is we live in a racist, homophobic, heteronormative, christian, ablist society. And it takes a lot of active work to rub off those layers of inherent bias. 

I HAVE been watching this happen for a long time. And there has definitely been improvement in both representation of minorities in the media and people BEHIND the scenes. 

I do think the key to improving representation in the media is to allow us to tell our own stories. Like for instance, while it’s not perfect, if we look at Witcher in comparison to Game of Thrones, you can TELL this is a story told by a woman. The writer of the book is male, but this version has a feminine voice. The way women are perceived. The way men are presented. Things that are valued. 

Or like Ava DuVernay. A black director of A Wrinkle in Time, written by a white woman. You can tell that the voice in this story, is a WOC, and it’s NOT just because Meg Murray is portrayed by a black girl. It’s because the story sees black people as part of the human experience, rather than just an addition for flava and ratings. 

Diversity makes the diverse people the subject of the story, rather than characters who are objectified as exotic poc of the day, or tragic lgbt movie of the week, or a terrible thing that must be magically cured because disabled people can’t be heroic. :/

I honestly don’t have the answer to this, except to keep telling our own stories, and to value the voices of traditionally underrepresented people.

I think that having white men, first, start writing us into their stories is a first step. It’s like we didn’t exist before?  At first we get to be cautionary tales, like the old fashioned “tragic mulatto” where the beautiful passing part black girl is doomed by the stain of her heritage and ends up dying. We don’t really do that anymore. But we do see Bury Your Gays and the Dead Lesbian Syndrome, don’t we? Like maybe before we get to exist as “real” people, we have to show up as tragic, sad tales of how hard it is to be us. :/ 

Sometimes we get sick of all the stories about minorities being about how hard it is to be minority, and the terrible suffering we go through yadda yadda yadda. Ghettos and immigration and poverty and harassment. But you know what? 

When we tell our stories, we find out they aren’t just about tragedy but about the full spectrum of human experience. Love AND heartbreak. Joy AND suffering. Struggle AND success. 

I think also we’re entering a time when there’s some backlash from people getting to tell our own stories, and speaking up about how we are excluded. But maybe people who don’t really believe that our stories are worthy are still into, you know, killing us off in chains, or at the hands of our abusers or reducing our characters to grinning cartoons, or magically making our disabilities go away? And we start to complain? 

Have you seen what’s happening with the Romance Writers of America? A writer’s organization that banned a half Chinese woman for complaining about racism in a woman’s novel? Yeah. THEY IMPLODED in the last two weeks. I watched it go down, because I follow the woman who was banned on twitter National news. They wanted her silenced. They said she was bullying when she questioned racism. Wow. It was. Wow. 

They were working within the organization to make it more equitable and some people within the organization resisted. Because, you see, if we allow POC and LGBT folk and other minorities to tell their stories, we’re questioning the default humanity of straight white christian men. The closer you are to that center, the more social and political power you get, and having people ACTIVELY start telling non-white stories is threatening to the white men and Nice White Ladies because it takes away their dominance of what it means to be human. 

There is bound to be backlash. And in a way, I think we’re deep into that backlash now. They’re starting to fight dirty. And what they’re doing is also obvious to a whole lot of us, because we see it now, where we didn’t before. When there was one Wonder Woman and we were glad to get her and we didn’t complain about her wearing high heels and a swimsuit. 

Did I answer any questions? I don’t have answers. But this is very important to consider. Keep asking the questions. 

Hi y’all! So, this isn’t gonna be my most polished post ever, nor am I sticking it in all the relevant tags, but it’s something I’d very much love to hear your thoughts on, if you have the time/interest/energy, and it’s very much okay to reblog.

Captain Philippa G/eorgiou has come to mean a lot to me over the past year and a half, and I have seen how much she meant to many other people as well. Even after she was killed off on Discovery, I harbored the wistful hope that maybe in a decade or so Michelle Y/eoh would headline her own Trek spin-off show, and we’d get to see the further adventures of this badass, inspiring, trauma-survivor, principled Asian woman captain. And then, incredibly, Michelle Y/eoh did end up headlining a Trek show...but it isn’t about Captain G/eorgiou.

So. I did cry for a couple minutes this afternoon after I heard the news. I spent the months between the trailer and the pilot of Discovery bracing myself for Captain G/eorgiou to be killed off, and, after she was killed off, I spent a year telling myself it was just a TV show and that I was an adult with an adult perspective who wasn’t going to let myself be that sad about that. But the truth is, I was sad about it. No, not as sad as I would be about [insert terrible real-world event here]; yes, it is just a TV show; and yes, it’s worth reminding myself of that. But I was--and am--sad about it.

As a character, Captain G/eorgiou was groundbreaking, and she was unusual. She was the first Asian woman captain on Star Trek, and it still breaks my heart to think about the Asian fans of Star Trek who had to see the first Asian woman captain killed off in a particularly horrible way. (Couldn’t the show have done something else? Anything else?) She was a rare portrayal of a long-term trauma survivor, someone who had come through terrible things and then built a full and happy life for herself. She was a woman of color in a position of power who was written and portrayed as a nuanced human being--professional but sarcastic, competent but fallible, tough but kind.

As someone who had spent the past few years before Discovery making my way through one crisis after another, I think the biggest reason Captain G/eorgiou ended up being so important to me was that she was an example of someone who faced terrible things, both before and on the show, and did not let them compromise her identity. She still chose to be principled and thoughtful and kind. She chose who she wanted to be.

Captain G/eorgiou meant a lot to a lot of people, and I can balance “At the end of the day, it is just a TV show, and there are thankfully other inspiring stories out there as well for us” with “Captain G/eorgiou was important to me and to other people and yes, I am sad that her character was killed off.”

There are some reasons I am happy and excited about the new S/ection 31 Michelle Y/eoh show! I think Michelle Y/eoh is a phenomenal actor, and I’m hugely excited to see her get cast in all the things. I do love spy stuff. And I’m very excited about having another Star Trek show led by a woman of color.

Also--while as a white person I am not going to have a very good sense of this, nor am I the person whose opinion is relevant--I’ve seen some commentary over the past year about how Mirror Georgiou breaks certain stereotypes for Asian women in media by being a tough/roguish/evil character. So, in that way, I’m happy that a show about Mirror Georgiou specifically may do something positive in terms of representation.

So, on one level, I am sad about the “so close and yet so far” aspect of Michelle Y/eoh headlining a Star Trek show, yet not playing the original character who was so groundbreaking and so inspiring to so many people. On another level, I can see the definite positive aspects of this show (Michelle Y/eoh, Star Trek, representation!) And finally, at the end of the day, I can remind myself that it is just a TV show, and that there will be opportunities for other creators and other franchises to tell stories about badass and complex and heroic Asian woman sci-fi characters, and trauma-survivor sci-fi characters, and female leader sci-fi characters, and I will be first in line to support those stories.

So, that’s where I’m at right now. Philippa G/eorgiou means so much to me, so I’m definitely emotional at the moment, and filled with a lot of contradictory thoughts and feelings, but hey, it’s okay to have contradictory emotions in reaction to News and Stuff Happening sometimes. And it’s okay to have feelings about Stuff Happening, as long as one doesn’t act on those feelings in a way that is harmful/annoying/etc to others, which sort of leads me to the second part of this post.

Some of y’all might remember how back in November I created the beginning materials of a fan campaign to have Captain G/eorgiou involved in the potential Michelle Y/eoh show, and then pretty quickly rolled that back up for various reasons. And yes, I am all too aware of how flaky that probably made me look.

The reasons I started the project are probably pretty obvious--in addition to believing Captain G/eorgiou means a lot to a lot of people, I hoped a project in support of a character like her would have the side benefit of encouraging people writing original fiction about characters and stories like hers. The main reasons I rolled it back up were that I was very conflicted about the potential negatives (like aggressiveness/pushiness) of fan campaigns, that there wasn’t too much enthusiasm after I posted about it, and that, on the flip side, I was worried about involving other people in a project that would potentially result in them having to deal with discourse and drama.

And, frankly, I respect Michelle Y/eoh so much as an actor that I was a little hesitant about doing anything (no matter how small the chance of said fan campaign affecting anything) to push for Trek to ask her to be part of their one specific franchise, when hopefully she is at a point in her career where she can be part of anything she wants.

But now she IS headlining a Star Trek show, and I’m, well, certainly not planning to try to work on a fan campaign again. But I am wondering again about doing some kind of fan event. Several of y’all who were enthusiastic (or enthusiastic with qualifications) about the Captain G/eorgiou project idea suggested doing an event that was more of an appreciation project than a fan campaign. Which I think is a brilliant idea...doing some kind of appreciation project for Captain G/eorgiou could be fun and interesting and make it feel like we’d done something to show our enthusiasm for the character, and demonstrate that the original G/eorgiou appearing on/having plenty of relevance to the S/ection 31 Michelle Y/eoh show would have an audience, while dodging some of the problems of a “fan campaign.” And also, of course, just be fun! :)

I think my biggest mistake from my ultimately-flaky attempt at a project this fall was going off and starting my own thing on my own and only then asking if anyone was interested, rather than asking what people thought in the first place, and listening.

So...what do you guys think? I’m leaning towards perhaps not even doing anything, honestly, and keeping it as a lowkey character-appreciation event if we do. But Captain G/eorgiou has come to mean a lot to me over the last year, and, more importantly, so has this fandom. If people are interested in some kind of event in celebration of her, I would be more than happy to help organize.

And then maybe enjoy the Mirror Georgiou show, with the knowledge that there are positive aspects to it in and of itself, and that hey, at least they didn’t make a show about this version of the character for lack of positive response to the original one. :)

Thoughts?

One of my OCs is a deaf white cat (Whiteflower), and I've been told I'm writing her wrong. In my setting, the cats have a simple but effective sign language. It lacks things like complex adjectives and words with more common synonyms (for example, there's no way to say furious but 'very angry' is possible) and there’s not always specific words for rare situations, such as an eclipse. The sign language was developed only in the clans, and even though everyone knows the basics (==>)

(because that’s mostly just the same body language they all use already), not everyone is fluent. One of Whiteflower’s quirks is that she’s unwilling to go on any type of diplomacy meeting because she worries she’ll be misinterpreted or unable to explain what she means as well as she wants to. In addition, she prefers to stay closer to camp rather than the far reaches of the territory when hunting, again due to a general fear of being misinterpreted or encountering a cat she’s not able to communicate well with. I was told this was a very ableist way of approaching this, and now I’m unsure if I’ve accidentally handled this very poorly. Sorry for the length, and thank you for any input!

Hello, Ruddles! Before I give you my thoughts, I’m going to have a little rant, because this person who commented on your character reminded me of it.

Preface: I’m not saying that you should disregard any and all criticism or feedback on your work! That would be very wrong. But the fact is, not everyone is qualified to give the criticism or feedback they’ll offer you. You as the writer should be critical of your critics, because not everyone with an opinion is someone who ought to be taken very seriously. It was very sensible of you to seek out other voices after getting feedback like this, because sometimes people are going to just say whatever or make bizarre claims, and especially since this feedback was vague. 

That brings me to: something that’s really important–for writers, and for reviewers–to think of whenever giving or receiving feedback is the concept of constructive criticism. If a reviewer says, “This is work is bad,” but offers no thoughts on how to make it less so/resolve the problem, they are failing to give constructive criticism and therefore failing to actually make any difference in the world. 

The writer is no better off for being told, “This work is bad,” because, if the writer had known how to make the work better in the first place, that’s probably what they would have done. You can usually assume that ignorance/not recognising problems/not knowing how not to write the problem is at the heart of a lot of issues in writing (especially in amateur/fan writing!), and therefore the actually helpful thing to do as a reviewer or critic is to identify the problem (”this text does X and Y”), explain the problem (”X and Y both have a history of being real ick things”), and then propose solutions (”if you don’t write X, this work will be better” or “if you write Y this way instead of that way, you’re not falling into the stereotype”). If you do only the first and/or second step on the process, you’re sort of being a bit… useless, in my opinion. 

So, this person who gave you this information is not a really useful engine at all! I just wanted to get that out of the way, because there’s something so exasperating to me personally about people who think they’re doing something by making a statement and then walking away. It’s very Tuxedo Mask “my work here is done,” and it grinds my gears. (End my little rant). 

All that said, I think I can pinpoint what it is that got this person’s back up and what needs to be reworked in your story. It is an ableist narrative set-up, because this character is restricted unfairly by the fact she’s deaf: where she goes and when she talks is limited in a way it isn’t for hearing characters, which is particularly surprising given a setting where all characters can basically sign. As a native deaf signer, she is going to be highly fluent and surely can work around characters who are less competent. Language teachers do that constantly. Additionally, she doesn’t have to be involved in negotiations or diplomacy, because plenty of cats (deaf and otherwise) might not want to do that, but that doesn’t mean she’d have to be a homebody and live in fear that someone from another clan might misunderstand her. 

In reality, deaf people want to be heard. It’s a big deal to be listened to, because hearing people almost never do that! Therefore, there’s a strong possibility that writing a character who is scared to communicate in sign to other signers is going to get a very poor reception by deaf people. You might have constructed this setting, but we all write into a broader context, and in that broader context, deaf people almost never get a voice. A deaf character who is timid and shy is perhaps not the most tasteful characterisation available to you. With that in mind, I don’t think this character idea you’re working on is finished yet.

I’ve had a conversation with my little sister, who uses Auslan, and we recommend that you: 

1. drop the idea of no synonyms/complex adjectives, because it’s not a realistic way of translating from sign. In Auslan, for example, “furious” is a much larger version of the sign “angry.” Sign language is expressive and has a lot of its own nuances! It’s better to focus on how your character expresses her personality and pick the words/impressions/syntax that fit her, rather than trying from the start to impose a limited vocabulary on how she expresses herself. You are, after all, telling a story, all of which you get to invent: it’s more important to accurately develop her as a character in the minds of the reader than it is to explore the exact details and mechanisms of your sign conlang. 

2. you can still have a character who is deaf and not necessarily socially comfortable! However, how you approach this needs some thought. If she’s not comfortable meeting with strangers, it’s because she’s anxious the same way a hearing character would be, not because she’s deaf and worried she can’t communicate “well enough.” Hearing people aren’t really qualified to be writing about deaf experiences like that: you can absolutely write a deaf character, but it’s better not to attempt what it is to be deaf, if you know what I mean. So, I think this character should definitely still voyage out of the clan and to gatherings, but perhaps she insists on only travelling with a good, reliable friend or isn’t the first to jump into spoken conversations (preferring to converse only when everyone is signing). Both of those things are very familiar experiences for many deaf people. 

3. if your sign language is simple and effective, there’s no reason for this premise of “not being able to sign well enough.” If, as you say, everyone knows the basics, there’s no excuse for a deaf character not to be able to participate in everyday and inter-clan events and conversations with everyone else. It just doesn’t make sense and does come across as looking for any reason to exclude a deaf character from the action. I don’t think this is intentional, but you can’t have your cake (have a sign language-enabled clan system) and eat it too (have a deaf character who doesn’t participate): if the setting is accommodating to disability, disabled characters can–and should–play a meaningful role in it.

4. how many other significant deaf characters are there in this world you’re creating? If the only one is Whiteflower in this form, that itself is a problem, because without other deaf characters who are outgoing and charismatic etc. as comparison, you can wind up portraying Whiteflower’s behaviour and demeanour as conflated with deafness itself. “Mainstream” characters (straight, able-bodied, white, etc.) are rarely put under this same pressure of representation and can have their identities viewed as separate from everything else about them, but if you don’t want to write only mainstream characters (which I can strongly recommend! It’s very good), you do have to think about how you’re portraying them and where it fits in the broader context of media and the real world. 

I don’t think you should give up on this character! But I do think these are things that need to be thought through, so that when you write her, you can write her as a complex and realistic deaf character. I hope this is helpful to you. 

i'm not sure how to say this but how are we supposed to know what is the definitive version of a character? i dont mean it just with dick or batfam but in general how can we know which version of a character is the true version of that character? what indicates that? i really want to know bc with comics a lot of different writers write for the same characters and at times they're v inconsistent with the character they're writing that it makes you think they didn't read what came before their run

This is a really interesting question and hard to answer universally. There are always going to be different interpretations and with comics characters they’re also not in a ‘closed’ canon (the current continuity anyway, Post-Crisis is now closed). 

Here’s a little bit of my thoughts on this: 

Who was this character established as? 

This is the first thing you should look at, because this goes back to the character as established by their creator/reinventor (depending on if they’re new to the canon or being reintroduced to a new continuity or back from the dead, etc etc). 

Characters change but if you’re reading a character that has absolutely no similarities to who they were when they were created, it’s time to ask some questions about why, because while people change over time, complete personality transplants are hard to handwave, especially when you can spend 20 irl years moving comics time along only 3 years. 

Example: Consider who Damian was when Morrison introduced him, who Jason was in the beginning of Post-Crisis, etc. 

Does this characterization make sense, based on what we know of this character before? Does it directly contradict previous characterization with no explanation?

Characters change, and a well-written story can take a character like Damian as written by Morrison and develop him to the point where he’s Damian as written by Tomasi. If it’s well-done, you can see the changes happen to the character and why. It makes sense based on the development and experiences the writer has Damian experience. He didn’t go straight to a more sympathetic and softened Damian without giving us the experience. 

Compare with Jason’s portrayal as the ‘angry, bad robin’ with the victim-blaming implications that he caused his own death. All you have to do is go back to his Robin run and Death in the Family and you’re left with an obvious disconnect between what DC is trying to sell and what’s actually been presented. DC did have Jason spiraling at the end of his Robin run, but it was far more nuanced and accidentally sympathetic than they expected, and also totally explained within context. We can also see from context that this was Jason with a death wish and in a really bad place, this was not a bad, angry kid, it was a kid who desperately needed help. 

The victim-blaming of Jason started well before the retcons made him an angry, bad boy stereotype. Reading Jason’s run and then post-death mentions of him after his run shows a very obvious contradiction. Some writers portrayed it properly, “Jason was the best” and the like, and taken all together you just don’t buy into the victim blaming if you don’t just take it at face value. 

Retcons and Agenda

Retcons happen and they can effect characters and their personalities, but they don’t happen in a vacuum. While you can try to make a definitive chronology out of only retcons and canon onwards (i.e. starting a dick grayson read with robin year one and nightwing year one) generally comic readers don’t experience comics this way. Retcons happen to already established characters so readers will know right away if they’re going to accept it or not. 

It’s also fairly obvious when a change has happened because DC needs to get something done. Jason is the definitive example of this. We have interview upon interview of a writer and editor admitting they deliberately tried to get him killed off numerous times and attempted to make him increasingly dislikeable to do it (funnily enough it didn’t really work as intended, we know the phone poll was tampered with and if it hadn’t been Jason would’ve lived, and letters to the editors proved that Robin Jason was still popular with little kids who were sad he died. New fans continue to be on Jason’s side of the balcony debate as well–the story and the nuance was dark for the time but hilariously it fit in with the later darker and grittier comics Post-Jason’s death). 

For characterization in comics, context is key. Who were they, who are they, does it make sense how the writer got them here, how abruptly did this happen, does this retcon work, why is DC pushing this. 

On Experience and Scarcity

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

First and foremost: the subject of this essay has been banging around my mind for a long time, but trying to put it into words turned out to be difficult. It wasn’t until I read Holyfant’s’s excellent essay, towards a “darker” femslash, that I found my starting point. Even so, I often struggle to find the right terms and language to describe my own personal experience, so I’m going to ask for a little leeway here.

Holyfant’s essay mentions three main reasons why people hesitate to write femslash. If I can (roughly) paraphrase: the first reason is the fact that compared to M/M fic, F/F is a niche fandom with relatively little feedback opportunities; the second is a  lack of interesting female characters and F/F relationships in canon; and the third is the feeling of responsibility that comes with writing less-than-perfect women. Holyfant focuses on the third point, which is an issue all of its own (and one that’s also echoed in havingbeenbreathedout’s “On the personal as normal; on the normal as political”.) But personally, I’ve always felt like I’ve been more influenced by the second reason. The consequences of what we write, the fear of the way we write a character having widespread consequences – that’s something I am, in a way, already a little used to. I’ve written a lot of what I’d call dubious shit; I’m used to dealing with the fear of consequences of writing things that could be generalised. Whether it’s women who are less than perfect or relationships seriously veering into the abusive, I’m always of the opinion that my audience is smart enough to see nuance and not to generalise. My own main problem isn’t really the political repercussions of writing femslash, if you can put it that way.

My problem is the canon material.

I’m speaking from my own experience here– I have no way of knowing how widespread this particular problem is. On the other hand, I’ve seen enough people write musings and reactions about similar issues to suspect I’m not just the only person struggling with this.

Anyway. Let’s start with my backlog of fic. AO3 tells me that right now, I have twice the amount of M/M fics compared to F/F fics. Looking at it by wordcount, it gets even worse. The longer ones, the intense ones, are always inevitably male/male ships.

This used to annoy me a lot. I couldn’t understand why I kept going for the male pairings. Had I really internalised this kind of misogyny so badly, that I couldn’t see the potential of female characters? Was I a Bad Feminist for ignoring the stories about women and focusing on men? I was a little disturbed at this clear trend in my own writing, yet I couldn’t really find a way to fix it – because I couldn’t find any femslash pairing that really inspired me enough to write about in great depth. But why? Why did female pairings fail to intrigue me? Was this really just internalised sexism?

Well, maybe. But there were other factors at play here too, ones that took me a while two discover. Two things helped me find them.

The first was genderswapping. The second was Person of Interest.

Genderswapping – shorthand in this context for taking a canon cis male character and creating a cis female version of him, also known as spectrumslide – is something that I find really interesting. I know there are a lot of people who are opposed, who see it as a way to drive out actual canon women in favour of male characters, never mind the gender change. But for me, there is no better tool to challenge the way you think about gender and personality and relationships, and how they’re all subconsciously intertwined.

When I read genderswapped stories, I often got annoyed at how far the female versions were from their male counterparts. Traits that I enjoyed were changed, or warped, or erased altogether. These stories didn’t appeal to me at all. On the other hand, some other writers created characters that did appeal to me, massively. Because they weren’t like others I’d read about before, because they possessed the same traits that attracted me to their male counterparts. Genderswapping offered me female characters unlike any I’d seen before in mainstream fiction. Rough around the edges. Unemotional. Violent. Aggressively sexual. Bitterly sarcastic. Nasty women, if you will. Women that seem to be the opposite of everything that’s traditionally associated with femininity.

(It’s probably important to note at this point that my type of character tends to be a villain, or at the very least somewhat of an anti-hero. Relatedly, the relationships I get inspired by are invariably damaging, unhealthy, possessive, power-unbalanced or twisted – relationships that almost seem non-existent between fictional women. But I’ll come back to that later.)

It got me thinking. In my head I started playing around with character stereotypes. A hard-drinking emotionally blunt promiscuous violent man as James Bond, for example. What do you get when you take those characteristics and put them in a cis woman? The hardboiled noir detective, the knight in shining armour… Can those exist in female versions? While keeping the essence of their character, their personality intact?

I started to challenge my own views on gender, feminity, and masculinity. What do I associate with “woman” as an abstract concept? When I create OC’s as side characters, why do I choose to give them one gender and not another one? Why do I automatically give a character this or that trait just because of their gender?

There were a whole lot of ugly subconscious connections I laid bare like this, and I found it was pretty confrontational. It’s not fun, discovering how biased you really are.

So, the logical next step was to try my own hand at genderswapping. Pure hypothesis-testing, that: if it really were just the characters’ personality and interpersonal dynamics that attract me, that should work just as well if I swapped out one gender for another one, right? And I suppose it did. But it took some work.

Like Holyfant mentions in her excellent essay: it’s very easy to fall into stereotyping when writing women. You’d think that taking a male character’s personality as a starting point might be a solution to that, but it isn’t quite that easy. For example: what is unnerving and aggressive sexuality in a man can become, in a woman, that boring old cliché of the femme fatale – if you don’t pay attention, that is. This isn’t made easier by the fact that there aren’t many examples of fictional women like the ones I want to write. To create something on your own, without a blueprint to fall back on… It’s tricky.

Then there’s the fact that you can’t just transpose characteristics from men to women. Mind you, I’m not saying that women are fundamentally different than men or any shite like that. But the way society looks at women and men -  here there are radical differences. On the whole, society’s reaction to certain traits is vastly different depending on if it’s a man or a woman doing it, which also means that the character themselves is going to look differently at that. A physically strong, violent woman is considered an anomaly, a freak; a physically strong, violent man is an action hero. Or, the other way around: a gentle, caring man is considered weak, while a gentle, caring woman is an example of traditional womanhood. So if you write a woman who’s violent, you’re going to have to take into account that society as a whole tends to condemn that. And if a whole society condemns a character’s personality, that’s going to have an effect on the way a character sees herself, too. it really is a bit more complicated than just swapping around the pronouns and calling it a day.

It takes work, it takes practice. That much had become painfully obvious to me. If I reread my first attempts at genderswapping now, I cringe a little. Not that they’re bad, per se. It’s just that they’re not exactly original. There’s a giggling lipstick-wearing short-skirted seductress, there’s lean-but-not-muscular assassins for hire… It isn’t what I’d call groundbreaking – and even at the time, it wasn’t quite what I wanted either. I just didn’t know how to make what I wanted, at first. It took a pretty long while before I finally had my first genderswapped character that actually felt like a real, original, complex flesh-and-blood woman.

So. What I learned by genderswapping is 1) it’s bloody difficult to write a female version as nuanced and complex and original as the male original, 2) clichés are always lurking, ready to pounce, but 3) in the end it really is someone’s personality and relationship that makes me interested.

Those points can just as easily be applied to non-genderswapped female characters: for me, at least, women are harder to write interestingly than men, at first. It’s less practiced. But – the positive thing I’d learned – I really do have a type regardless of gender. Meaning that if I wanted to write more (non-genderswapped) femslash, I merely had to look for two or more fictional women with the same traits as the male characters I enjoyed, and then squish ‘em together.

Problem was… They didn’t really seem to exist?

Most relationships between fictional women, if they’re explicit, are shown to be soft! And gentle! And good and pure! Tara and Willow in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for example – oh, there was a lot of fucked-upness going on there but the essence of their relationship was tenderness and open, honest love and mutual support. Which is great! But not what I want to write about. Even a pairing like Black Sails’ Max and Anne – both morally ambiguous, three-dimensional, and in Anne Bonny’s case stereotype-defying – are portrayed as essentially a gentle, healing, deeply caring relationship. Those unhealthy relationships I like to write about, the mutually destructive ones… They didn’t seem to show up in fiction.

Then I started watching Person of Interest.

Person of Interest has Root, a major villain-later-turned-hero. As far as female characters go, she’s sort of midway. She’s still flirty and seductive, and later openly emotional and caring – far more traditionally female than any of the male characters in the series. But she’s a hacker, she’s aggressive, she’s independent, and her plotlines give her agency. She’s original. She’s got an edge beyond the stereotype.

Person of Interest also has Shaw. And this is where things get very, very interesting.

Shaw is blunt. She’s unemotional. She’s aggressive, likes guns, likes violence. She avoids romantic relationships – not because of some painful deep trauma that gets healed in the end by the ‘right person’, just because that’s who she is. She’s sexual, but in a rather forthright, dominant, taking-what-she-wants-without-complications way you tend to only see in men. And right from the start, her interactions with Root are decidedly sexual. Their very first interaction is laced with BDSM-implications, and when they start interacting more – once Root has come over to the good side –, every exchange between them is full of barbs and barely-concealed aggression and power play. When Shaw at a later point describes a potential relationship between her and Root as a four alarm fire at an oil refinery, she isn’t lying. And when they finally end up having sex (it’s a dream, sort of, but shush) it looks more like a wrestling match than like “making love”, each one tearing at the other one and refusing to back down, not afraid to use punches or kicks in between the kisses. Miles away from the smiling-laughing-cuddling-vanilla sex Tara and Willow have.

It still doesn’t quite work for me, on the whole. Root, although Amy Acker does her damn best to give her life, still fits the traditional model too much for me to connect. She feels more like an idealised version of a woman than a real one. Especially in the later seasons her reactions are far more emotional, sentimental, than I’d really expect or want from her – again, traditionally feminine (in contrast to Shaw, who remains her gruff self). And of course Root and Shaw (spoiler alert) don’t really end up together. It’s very much implied that they would end up together, but then – in fine queer fictional woman tradition –  Root goes and dies before they can get there. It’s a shame, because flirting is one thing, but an actual relationship between those two would’ve been something I’d kill to see.

Still. Here was an example of the dynamic I like, but between two women. It does exist, it is possible. And seeing that gave me a starting point, a sort of blueprint to use for my own writing.

So. Where does that leave me, and my 2:1 ratio of M/M versus F/F fics?

The way I see it, there’s a dual responsibility. Part of the lack of interesting, flawed, complex,  ugly female characters in fiction has to do with the lack of material in canon – not just that there are very few female characters to start with, but also that this trend means fanfic writers have so few examples we can base our own work on. We still have to carve out our own model, here.

But another part is my own responsibility. Writing flawed women, unsympathetic women, women with ugly personalities or traits – that takes more work and effort. It doesn’t come quite naturally to me yet, which means it’s harder to write, which means I tend to avoid it in favour of easier things – which in turn, means there’s fewer ‘dark’ femslash in the word, and thus lesser examples to work from.

It’s a vicious self-perpetuating circle. But it’s starting to get its dents. In the form of Root and Shaw, of Gillian Anderson’s fingerlickingly complex Stella Gibson, in everything Sally Wainwright has written. And in our own work, of course. Story by story, we chip away at the block and create images and thoughts about the full complexity in relationships between women.

About the author

Pasiphile is a fanfiction author who mainly writes for Sherlock, but their work also includes Discworld, Attack on Titan, Luther and a heap of other fandoms. They have also co-edited two anthologies of original erotica under the name of Alex Freeman. You can find them on tumblr and AO3.