Girls Doing Stuff: Agency and motivation in girls’ hobby shows
I like to think I have a fairly varied palette when it comes to my anime tastes: a genre charcuterie board with some fantasy here, some meaningful coming-of-age stories there, and a peppering of rom-coms seasoned just right. There’s one category, though, that I always find myself savoring and looking forward to each season. If there’s a cast of funny teen girls trying out a new hobby, be it animation, camping, playing guitar, or building a treehouse, I’m there. But why does this genre have such a gravitational pull? I could answer, simply and truthfully, that we live in stressful times and these shows are often very relaxing. But upon deeper consideration, there’s something else about these girls’ hobby shows that makes my heart happy, and it’s happening more on the level of character construction and development.
The “girls doing stuff” genre can be polarizing. What reads as an intimate, authentic portrayal of teen girls’ inner worlds to some may seem voyeuristic to others; a character may come off as an over-the-top, manufactured cutesy-blob to one viewer but feel deeply relatable and real to another. And, of course, some people find these series’ characteristic low stakes, slow pace, and focus on small moments relaxing while other people find them simply boring.
I am not attempting to make any “objective” claims with this article. I cannot scientifically quantify the appeal of the girls’ hobby genre for everyone, I can only speak to how and why it appeals to me. And that appeal, I argue, lies in the narrative priorities of these types of show: they are stories about young women with specific passions and motivations, given the autonomy to pursue them. It sounds simple, and it is, but it’s also extremely rewarding and effective when it’s done well.
Read it at Anime Feminist!
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Hi! I just read an extremely popular Brio fic and it was wonderfully well written but I found I kept losing interest. I realized it’s bc while Rio felt somewhat authentic for the AU, Beth seemed like a completely different character. There wasn’t really much background information on her so the changes didn’t really make sense to me, even in an AU setting.
How do you approach AU settings to make sure the characters feel connected to the originals? Like in your pornstars AU I can still see Beth in there, even if it’s not something I would have ever expected of her! So I’m curious as to how you approach that.
Also why do you think this seems to happen more to Beth versus Rio? Are people just projecting themselves onto her you think? Idk I just feel like she has such a strong personality that I’m curious why I seem to feel that way in some fics.
Anyways, love your work 🩷🩷🩷
Hi! Thanks for your lovely words, although I'm sorry for your experience with that other fic. It can be such a bummer when we're overall enjoying a story - whether fic, or books, or shows - but for whatever reason it's just not quite landing. I know the feeling pretty well, haha.
For me, I find that capturing a character in all writing is basically about distilling two things:
What they want
What they need
These two factors in so many ways embody the main narrative arc of a story. In fact, many author talks I've been to suggest that plot in its entirety is a matter of asking three questions - what does a character want? What's standing in their way stopping them from getting what they want? And how will they overcome this obstacle? I don't entirely agree with this, and it's not a method of plotting that I personally subscribe to these days (although I have used it in the past and still sometimes find it helpful when I'm stuck), but I do think it can be useful to think about in terms of the role character motivation contributes to story overall.
More to the point though, I find dividing a character's wants and needs to be super useful, both in terms of analysis and writing, as to me, it's those wants and needs that really feed into everything when it comes to characterisation.
Beth's actually a great example of this as her want vs need are both complimentary and frequently in conflict with each other:
What Beth wants is to earn enough to save her house, provide for her children and get herself, her sister and her best friend to a point of financial security that doesn't leave them in a state of constant free fall.
What Beth needs is to feel real self worth, to connect with the woman inside of herself beyond wifehood, motherhood and even sisterhood, and to be seen and acknowledged as that woman by people she respects (i.e. Rio, but not just him). She needs to be seen as capable, and to feel autonomous and in control of her future.
Both of these wants and needs have greater implications when filling in the details of a character. In Beth's case, her adultification as a child in raising her sister feeds her lack of identity as an adult at the start of the series and her need to find herself (she's been raising children her whole life!), Dean's cheating compounds those feelings of self-worth, and him losing the family house is what becomes the catalyst for Beth to act. Her wants are created due to the situation Dean forces her into, her needs have been there for a lot longer than that.
When writing fic in general, but especially AUs, I try not to change the wants or needs of the characters. Like I said, I tend to view them as pretty crucial to the character overall, but I also think those wants and needs are what makes me feel connected to them as opposed to other characters or other shows. Those are the things I like! Why would I want to change them?
And anyway, I tend to find it super fun figuring out how those wants and needs might guide characters in a different setting. In both the porn star AU and the pirate AU, I really wanted to use the time period, the industry and the context of those story worlds to see how Beth might navigate her needs and wants, and to see how those factors might influence the shape of her story arc. It was pretty interesting to realise that I didn't think much changed, even in the pirate AU which is set so far in the past. I hope that means I understand her as a character, or at least, I guess, my interpretation of her, haha.
As for other writers - - yeah! I mean, in some ways I do think Rio's probably easier to write because his own wants and needs are more ambiguous on the show and he's therefore a little more malleable in fic. A lot about him can be true when we ultimately saw so little of him, whereas Beth, as you said, has such a strong personality and defined character that to change elements of her voice or her background, or to make certain decisions for her, can leave us with the age old feeling of: 'she wouldn't do / say that'.
I do think that, especially by the end of the series, there was a not insignificant portion of the fandom who didn't like her so ultimately wrote her differently (I personally had issues with the fact that so many people wrote Rio as punishing and Beth as both taking and deserving that punishment, which is why some high profile fics in the fandom aren't of particular interest to me), but I think there are other factors as well.
Yes, some projection, yes, some who mostly wrote her to be able to write about Rio, yes, some who were simply disinterested in her interiority, but I also think GG was a lot of people's first fandom, and a lot of people's first time writing fic, and that ultimately, Beth was a complicated character who only got more complicated over the four seasons of the show. She's not easy to write, and I do think the fandom was chockfull of talented writers, but a lot of talented writers who were still ultimately pretty new to writing.
I've been writing for a long time (man, I think I worked out that I posted my first fic when I was about 13 which was like, twenty years ago now, haha, and I had my first short story published in a journal at 19 too), and ultimately writing is a skill like anything else - you get better the longer you do it. :-)
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Lucky Guy being the first survivor slowly turns him into a bit of a worrywart when it comes to the new survivors
He's constantly watching over them, waiting in the lobby whenever a match is ongoing to wait for survivors who possibly need some help patching up or just some simple comfort
God forbid anyone gets hurt that they have to go to the infirmary, because rest assured that Lucky Guy is going to visit them everyday, scold them, and start neglecting his own free time. You'd think he was the Doctor of the manor and not Emily
Despite Lucky being on good terms with everyone, his mother hen personality is also the reason why he doesn't really. Have any friends.
He takes care of them, looks after them, etc etc, but hanging out with them? Speaking to them outside of informing about the rules of the manor or scolding them for being too reckless in a match? The last time Lucky's ever did that was with Tutorial
WAIT OHHH MY GOD...Lucky being drawn towards the survivors who hold positions of "authority" and the such because it means he gets a break from worrying over others and is cared for himself, though he doesnt realize that he's doing it
Its part of the reason as to why he's close to the veterans, with the Lawyer being the self-proclaimed "leader" of the group during the early days and the Doctor taking control of the infirmary. It took some time for him to warm up to the Thief and the Gardener, but time helped their relationship progress into a friendly one
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