wherein Liz rambles about writing and gender and stuff like that

[edenfalling]

There are a couple posts on metafandom about gender roles and writing, in which people lament the impossibility of writing female characters, or lament the persistence of stereotypes and wonder why there aren't more useful gender role-models or such-like.

I have a weird feeling reading those posts, because I had that issue back when I was, oh, fifteen or so? I had an idea for a fantasy quest story with a girl as the questing heroine, and then I thought to myself, "No, wait, I can't do that; Tamora Pierce already did that." And about five seconds after that, I wanted to smack myself, because seriously, how many thousands of stories are there about boys going on heroic quests, and I thought I couldn't write a girl on a heroic quest because I'd read one other version of that story?

Oy. But that moment was in-your-face enough that I became aware of the issue. And while I continue to be aware of it as a reader, it's very much in the background for me as a writer.

This is because I write a lot of women. My original stories tend to have a roughly 50-50 gender ratio or to actively focus on women. My fanfiction also tends to focus on female characters.

I don't do this for political reasons. It's just that we're 50% percent of the human race and we're the half I'm more familiar with (for obvious reasons), so I represent the world as I experience it. And because I write so many women, I don't have the issue of one or two female characters representing our entire gender. That means I write women as people and don't worry about trying to make anyone perfect -- not that I'd worry about that anyway, because it is a complete waste of time (you can never please everyone), but still. The more female characters you have, the more normative we become. This is not rocket science.

So I really don't think ignoring female characters is the way to go. When canon gives you horrible stereotypes, dig in and find a real person who includes but transcends the bad writing and/or bad acting she's trapped in. When people bitch at you, ignore them; they're idiots.

I like reading male-centric stories, too, whether gen or slash. But I am always uncomfortable to some degree with slash stories that sideline important canon female characters and their relationships to the male characters in question. Just because Guy 1 and Guy 2 have a super amazing love story doesn't mean that Gal A is evil for having once slept with Guy 1, or that Gal B's deep friendship and working partnership with Guy 2 suddenly don't matter.

Or, okay, let me be a little more specific. Take Highlander, for example. If you want to write Duncan/Methos, that's wonderful. (Seriously, it is. Give me links.) But it is canon that Duncan loved Tessa, that he arranged his life around hers, and that he was distraught at her death. It is canon that Methos loved Alexa, that he dropped everything to be with her, and that he risked his cover with the Watchers trying to find the Methuselah Stone to save her. And Duncan loves Amanda; that's canon too. They may or may not be in love, but she definitely matters.

So write Methos and Duncan falling in love and having sex. That's great. You can even make this somehow deeper than any love they've felt before. But don't say that they suddenly realize they've never truly loved anyone until now. Because that is a lie, and that is why people say slash is misogynistic.

As for female story roles, I dunno, is that really such an issue? Then again, I don't write with archetypes in mind. I start with a situation and some characters, and then the characters pretty much drive the plot (within a loose overarching plan). So what a character does is determined by who she is, not by some 'story role' she has to fulfill. And I find passive characters boring, so I tend not to write them. This is not to say that I write amazing ass-kicking women all the time, but I do try to write people making choices and to have those choices matter, even if they seem small and personal.

For example, the plot of "The Way of the Apartment Manager" is basically 'Yukiko examines her life, realizes she's in a self-defeating rut, and goes out and does something about it.' This is not great action-adventure (hence the secondary plot, wherein the first part of 'goes out and does something about it' is defined as 'retakes the chuunin exam') but it's a story about a female character taking charge of her life and shaping it the way she wants.

Someday I may get around to writing a fantasy quest story in which the main character is an archetypal hero who just happens to be female. (I actually do have an outline for one of those, but it's also a post-apocalyptic tragedy with skeevy incestual subtext, so I don't think it's the best example.) But until then, I'm just going to keep writing women doing whatever they damn well want to.

I think that's all that really matters in the end.

*scurries off to bed*

Comments

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

WORD.

And I think you really nail it when you talk about the importance of multiple female characters, because when one single character doesn't have to bear the burden of being THE GIRL it opens up so much more room for realistic representations and allows the author to just treat them like characters.

[edenfalling]

Yeah. I went through a phase where I said to myself, hey, I'm writing an awful lot of female characters -- what if I get pegged as someone who can't write men? And so I deliberately wrote some male-POV fics, just to make sure I could write men and boys, and then I said, okay, it's not a technical issue, so screw it, there is NOTHING WRONG with writing women. If those are the stories that come to me, those are the stories I'll write.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Good for you.

I used to ALWAYS write from the female pov, to the point where I wondered if I could write male at all, and then I discovered that Zuko (and later Kakashi) where characters whose heads I could get into as easily as walking through a door, and got worried about become one of those fangirls who focused on the male.

Now, I'm pretty much at a half and half place with my pov characters and as someone pointed out (and I was incredibly flattered) even when it's not girl pov, it's usually girl-centric, which I think is very true, and only partially due to the fact that I write a lot of het.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

*was linked here by redbrunja*

What turned me off so strongly to a lot of slash (aside from my first several years of encounters being almost solely the girl hating "fanbrat" variety...not the case anymore, thankfully) was realizing that very often if there was a canon het pairing and 10 unpaired guys, the slash would focus on any one of the unpaired guys and the paired guy. Similarly, if the fan slash pairing has a time period where the girl wouldn't be a factor, the slash would still focus on the period where she would be a factor, and I've never heard an explanation or a defense of a slash ship where there's a girl there in the canon that didn't come across as part of it was that the guy couldn't want only her, he had to also want the guy of choice. I'm not saying they hate the girls in question (though some do, not all, though) but there seems to be this idea that the favorite male must be "taken care of" romantically/sexually, and a paired male always seems to be the most attractive option, no matter how many options are available that won't end up coming across badly for the girl. (And if people think "he loves her, but he'd still do my favorite for kicks/because he couldn't help himself/as a favor" isn't insulting to the girl in question, I have to wonder what's going on there. )

Regarding females in stories, the post that seems to have kicked this off (I saw it before it was linked to metafandom) was that each female character from canon must be the perfect representative of every female ever, and more, must be written that way in fic. (1) For canon, that's the extreme doublestandard that's a large part of why slash has bad name. And yes, it is sexist. Especially when coupled with the idea that any male character can be written in any way. (2) For fanon/fanfic, that would be an OOC portrayal for almost every female character out there, and would be turning her into a bizarre Mary Sue. Canon characters have flaws. In theory, their fans realize that. (Though people seem to have more trouble admitting that male characters have flaws, while being eager to find flaws in a female character, but that's another topic.) Therefore, the idea that they must be must be portrayed as perfect in fanfic makes no sense.

[edenfalling]

I think one reason canon het pairings are broken up to make slash pairings is that canon het pairings tend to involve the main characters. :-)

As for the rest, well... there's an argument in favor of slash that I've seen now and then about how it's hard for women to identify with the female in a het romance, because those characters tend to be idealized and so there's a disconnect between her fabulousness and your dumpy reality, but when both characters are male there isn't the whole 'trying to identify physically and failing' thing so you can jump straight to emotional identification and also skip over various ugly gender-related power issues.

This has always read oddly to me, because A) I don't try to identify physically with any character; for me, it's all about internal reactions, B) slash does NOT get rid of ugly gender-related power issues, it just codes them one layer down from the surface, and C) it's not as if the male characters in romances aren't just as idealized as the women.

...

I seem to have wandered off on a tangent; sorry. You're right that the idea that female characters must be portrayed as paragons would require most canon characters to become wildly OOC in fanfiction. I'm inclined to suspect that what the original poster was reacting to wasn't any specific incident, but a lot of times that people called one story or another objectionable because it made a female character do something stereotyped or stupid. Even if each individual protest is valid, they can probably start to seem annoying en masse, especially once you filter out the particulars of each case. And that rant had the feel of something that had built over time.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The whole identification argument has always mystified me. Possibly because I rarely identify with characters in the first place, but also because it seems to remove objectivity.

See, I think that most male characters-paired or otherwise-are idealized much more than female characters, both in canon and in fandom. With certain exceptions*cough*Smallville version of Lana Lang*cough*. Most fiction focuses on them and puts them forth as more important/interesting, usually to the point where I have to go "Yeah? So?"

I think a lot of the original post is that, when writing fanfiction about slash, where the slash of slash pairing is the main focus, unless it's f/f,the women are secondary by necessity. Even if you're making sure to acknowledge them and give them things to do, the nature of the work means they have to be secondary. And most just don't seem to want to admit that yes, it is a part of fandom that deliberately places one gender as being second to the other. And so there has to be a justification to get around looking at why.

[teh-amazing-one.livejournal.com]

*also linked by redbrunja*


WORD. No, SENTENCE. No, actually, ENTIRE FUCKING ESSAY.

(Yes, I am that corny).

I am sooooooo memories-oizing this.

[edenfalling]

Thanks -- enthusiasm is always gratifying. :-)