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edenfallingI am back to picking away at the damn space battle in "Intervention." Hegev has brought up the mineral mcguffin issue when Jayavanti made the perfectly logical objections about, you know, there being a plague and no reason to tell the pirates it's in the process of being cured and probably not cross-species transmissible anyway. Hegev is now trying to convince Jayavanti to help her in a crazy last stand thing.
I am not sure how convincing my reasoning is here. The idea is supposed to be that Jayavanti and Hegev are fairly close friends (and also the two youngest people on board the Amber Lotus) and Hegev wants a friend's support, but I think I need to put something into Jayavanti's backstory that makes her any use whatsoever at strategic thinking or even piloting or something. Because really, what rational reason would an engineer have to ask a nurse to help her plan a space battle?
On a different note, I realized that Jahiem has vanished from the story since the third scene, so I will need to give him a Big Damn Heroes moment later on for character balance. Also maybe I can work him in via com conversation during the 'figuring out the plague' scenes. Otherwise it becomes a case of the vanishing black man, and that's kind of oogy as well as just being bad character management.
...
Tangentially, it is kind of amusing to me that while I was not specifically setting out to make my Red Cross crew diverse in any way other than making two characters black and remembering to have a few aliens, I ended up without a single white man or woman on board. (Well, Nico is white-ish -- he's the son of a Brit and an Arab, mostly raised in England -- but even so.) This is entirely a byproduct of the crew I used as their base.
See, I started this story by trying to insert the five-person crew of a starship in one of my original secondary worlds into the Star Trek universe. And because the crew of that ship came from five different planets, all of which had been settled for thousands or tens of thousands of years (via handwavy interstellar Bermuda Triangle-style gates) and didn't quite correspond to Earth ethnic groups anymore, they did not really code (to me) as white. And that carried over when I translated them into Star Trek.
What I did, see, was mirror two characters singly and then take the other three and split their surface characteristics into two people. So, for example, Captain Gellery du Vasquez becomes Captain Inez Castaño and Jio Shatterjee becomes Jayavanti Chatterjee. Meanwhile, Zeq Aqailu becomes Katherine Rush (reserved 2nd-in-command) and Elakwa Baerdi (tall caustic telepath); Jordi Ous al'Albi becomes Nicholas Siddig (bi-racial Muslim intellectual) and Jahiem Rush (gregarious doctor); and Cambaraya Cho becomes Lu Zhi-ren (Asian flirt) and Hegev nich Tal (short argumentative engineer).
They're not at all the same people anymore, though they started as mirrors. Their personalities have drifted, their backgrounds are different, their jobs are different -- hell, in two cases (Elakwa and Hegev) their species are different. Even with the non-split mirrors, Jio Shatterjee is a street rat gang war survivor math prodigy, whereas Jayavanti Chatterjee is an idealistic nurse from a loving middle-class family. Pretty different, overall.
...
You may notice that my original crew was majority female (Gellery, Jio, Zeq) and so is my Star Trek crew (Jayavanti, Inez, Hegev, Kath, Elakwa). That was completely intentional. I still sometimes find myself filling story roles with male characters just because of cultural habit/expectation (for example, in the opening scene of "Ashes," which I posted a couple days ago, I initially had Riam running off to find his brother), but I have gotten better about noticing myself falling into that trap. And if there is no need for that story role to be filled by a man, I will generally go back and switch the man to a woman.
We are half the human race, after all. And the more women who are in a story, the more space each one has to be seen as herself, not as the representation of a writer's vision of some monolithic 'true nature of women' idiocy.
By analogy, the same goes for minority characters -- the more there are, the more they are perceived as people rather than symbols. So I am quite happy with my non-white crew. And I need to find some places to make it clear that while the Cordites (my xenophobic Luddite religious colony) were majority-white, they were not only white. I mean, the particular type of religious weirdness people are most attracted to is undoubtedly culturally influenced, and race and ethnicity are part of that, but not all of it. So I have to fight my natural tendency not to visually describe anything, in order to slip in some mention of diversity.
(As with the crew, the feminism thing is not an issue. So far the only Cordite aside from Adam who has both a name and a speaking role is Fra Treefell, a female member of the colony council of elders who seems to take control when the previous chairperson comes down with the plague. Again, this is a mirror from my original world, where the main character influencing Adam's mirror before he runs away from home is a female church elder.)
...
But the main point is that space battles are a pain to write, and that I think I may need to slip Jayavanti a touch of Jio's backstory -- just enough to explain why Hegev thinks she'd be good in a fight.
*returns to fighting the story*
I am not sure how convincing my reasoning is here. The idea is supposed to be that Jayavanti and Hegev are fairly close friends (and also the two youngest people on board the Amber Lotus) and Hegev wants a friend's support, but I think I need to put something into Jayavanti's backstory that makes her any use whatsoever at strategic thinking or even piloting or something. Because really, what rational reason would an engineer have to ask a nurse to help her plan a space battle?
On a different note, I realized that Jahiem has vanished from the story since the third scene, so I will need to give him a Big Damn Heroes moment later on for character balance. Also maybe I can work him in via com conversation during the 'figuring out the plague' scenes. Otherwise it becomes a case of the vanishing black man, and that's kind of oogy as well as just being bad character management.
...
Tangentially, it is kind of amusing to me that while I was not specifically setting out to make my Red Cross crew diverse in any way other than making two characters black and remembering to have a few aliens, I ended up without a single white man or woman on board. (Well, Nico is white-ish -- he's the son of a Brit and an Arab, mostly raised in England -- but even so.) This is entirely a byproduct of the crew I used as their base.
See, I started this story by trying to insert the five-person crew of a starship in one of my original secondary worlds into the Star Trek universe. And because the crew of that ship came from five different planets, all of which had been settled for thousands or tens of thousands of years (via handwavy interstellar Bermuda Triangle-style gates) and didn't quite correspond to Earth ethnic groups anymore, they did not really code (to me) as white. And that carried over when I translated them into Star Trek.
What I did, see, was mirror two characters singly and then take the other three and split their surface characteristics into two people. So, for example, Captain Gellery du Vasquez becomes Captain Inez Castaño and Jio Shatterjee becomes Jayavanti Chatterjee. Meanwhile, Zeq Aqailu becomes Katherine Rush (reserved 2nd-in-command) and Elakwa Baerdi (tall caustic telepath); Jordi Ous al'Albi becomes Nicholas Siddig (bi-racial Muslim intellectual) and Jahiem Rush (gregarious doctor); and Cambaraya Cho becomes Lu Zhi-ren (Asian flirt) and Hegev nich Tal (short argumentative engineer).
They're not at all the same people anymore, though they started as mirrors. Their personalities have drifted, their backgrounds are different, their jobs are different -- hell, in two cases (Elakwa and Hegev) their species are different. Even with the non-split mirrors, Jio Shatterjee is a street rat gang war survivor math prodigy, whereas Jayavanti Chatterjee is an idealistic nurse from a loving middle-class family. Pretty different, overall.
...
You may notice that my original crew was majority female (Gellery, Jio, Zeq) and so is my Star Trek crew (Jayavanti, Inez, Hegev, Kath, Elakwa). That was completely intentional. I still sometimes find myself filling story roles with male characters just because of cultural habit/expectation (for example, in the opening scene of "Ashes," which I posted a couple days ago, I initially had Riam running off to find his brother), but I have gotten better about noticing myself falling into that trap. And if there is no need for that story role to be filled by a man, I will generally go back and switch the man to a woman.
We are half the human race, after all. And the more women who are in a story, the more space each one has to be seen as herself, not as the representation of a writer's vision of some monolithic 'true nature of women' idiocy.
By analogy, the same goes for minority characters -- the more there are, the more they are perceived as people rather than symbols. So I am quite happy with my non-white crew. And I need to find some places to make it clear that while the Cordites (my xenophobic Luddite religious colony) were majority-white, they were not only white. I mean, the particular type of religious weirdness people are most attracted to is undoubtedly culturally influenced, and race and ethnicity are part of that, but not all of it. So I have to fight my natural tendency not to visually describe anything, in order to slip in some mention of diversity.
(As with the crew, the feminism thing is not an issue. So far the only Cordite aside from Adam who has both a name and a speaking role is Fra Treefell, a female member of the colony council of elders who seems to take control when the previous chairperson comes down with the plague. Again, this is a mirror from my original world, where the main character influencing Adam's mirror before he runs away from home is a female church elder.)
...
But the main point is that space battles are a pain to write, and that I think I may need to slip Jayavanti a touch of Jio's backstory -- just enough to explain why Hegev thinks she'd be good in a fight.
*returns to fighting the story*
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-03 12:43 am (UTC)I tried to do the same thing about the number of important women for my mermaids in space plot, but I have to admit my default mode tends to be "so he's like that" and then I pause, look back, and aw hell three quarters of the characters are male. Okay, genderbending time. It's frustrating to have bought into "this character is an astrogater, this other character is a space pirate, this other, other character is a girl."
I've got a lot of characters who are varying shades of brown from a dozen mixed background as well but since it's so far into the future as well, I get scared that either people will totally miss the color indicators and assume whiteness, or that they'll be all "those characters are only decoratively black/hindi/arab, they're written like ethnically white people in exotic skin!" It's kind of daunting.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-03 04:35 am (UTC)For example, in "Intervention" most of the characters are not just doctors, but rather low-paid doctors for the Red Cross who spend up to a year at a time out on deep space missions. That right there says a lot about them. And I had a pre-determined plot that involved a pirate fleet with a lone ship doing a desperate last stand thing (as per
On the other hand, as I get to know the characters, they shape the plot as much as it shapes them. I knew I had to make Jayavanti interact with Adam, for example, but the nature and tone of that interaction were very much up in the air until Jayavanti told me how it was going to be. And the various relationships and antagonisms among the crew of the Amber Lotus happened pretty organically -- I just set a few rules and let them improvise from there.
I think including women and non-white people gets easier as you do it. I mean, I had my kick in the head revelation about how I was shutting girls out of story roles when I was twelve or thirteen, and have been trying to do better ever since; including women has become a much more natural habit over time. I know I am much shakier on including minority characters, but even there, I figure it is better to try than not to. So I keep trying. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-05 06:56 pm (UTC)The solution, in my opinion, would be to cross-train each and every crew member, maybe on multiple subjects. So a nurse could also have a few other jobs on the side, things that aren't part of the normal skill set, but do cover things like damage control or piloting. Or maybe, in the case of someone who's done a tour of duty on the Klingon border, basic starship evasion and Electronic warfare.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-06 04:01 am (UTC)This stint is Jayavanti's first real time in space, so she has no actual crisis experience. Hegev, though, might well have been doing something potentially dangerous before she decided to work on Red Cross ships for a while. *ponders options*