I did a little thought experiment on myself while reading Andre Norton's Uncharted Stars, where I mentally rewrote the two secondary characters (Ryzk and Zilwrich) as female. There was no plot requirement for those people to be male, so why not? That one change improved the book immeasurably.

I think I'm going to start applying that technique to other Norton books (and what the hell, probably to any classic sci-fi and fantasy I read or reread). It really does drive home how the absence of women is as much a problem as bad depictions of women, you know? *sigh*

Changing Zilwrich's gender required no rewrites whatsoever: injured alien archaeologist is not a gendered plot role. I think if Ryzk had been written as female from the start, their introduction scene would need to be slightly altered because a drunk woman alone in a seedy bar is a different vibe from a drunk man alone in a seedy bar... but hey, maybe that would make the scene in question a bit less morally iffy! (If you wanted to be more drastic in the rewriting, it could result in two secondary characters -- Ryzk and a companion -- that could heighten some later tension in terms of divisions of opinion among the spaceship crew, but that's a more ambitious proposition.) Other than that, literally nothing that needed to be changed to make Ryzk a completely reasonable depiction of a woman, because there was nothing particularly gendered about that depiction in the first place aside from pronouns and that bar scene.

I now kind of want to reread the book and swap some background characters as well. Let's have female shady gem dealers! Female space pirates! Female squid-crustacean aliens who communicate via gesture-to-sound interfaces! Female hardscrabble ice planet merchants who've been dreaming of recreating a legendary trade their parent made! Etcetera.

I have, over the years, become more and more committed to the idea that unless there's a pressing plot or character reason for a character to be male, they should be female by default. (Cis and trans both welcome!)

I have been thinking this past year or so that nonbinary is also a good option. I need to start making random characters nonbinary as well -- this is a little trickier, particularly when working in somebody else's sandbox that has gender assumptions pre-installed, but challenge is good for the soul, yeah?

...

Anyway, bed now. :)

It's NFE reveal day! So I can now say that I wrote two stories: my original assignment and a pinch hit. I will talk about each in a separate post.

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Twelve Views of Port Paravel (3406 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Boats and Ships, Merchants and Trading, Calormen, Age of Winter (Narnia), Slavery, Angst and Tragedy, Unhappy Ending

Summary: Khoshet was in Tash's nest as the ship drew near the coast, and so he was the first to see not the shore but a strange black cloud above it.

Or, the fall of Port Paravel, as seen by the crew of a Calormene merchant ship and the trading staff in the port.

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This was my pinch hit, written for songsmith. Basically, I saw songsmith's prompts come through as a pinch hit request and leapt upon them because the one about a Calormene perspective on Jadis's conquest of Narnia and the start of the Winter hit me like a ton of bricks and I had to write it. I wasn't even quite sure how I'd deal with that subject, but it was seriously like a compulsion. I couldn't not. Even if I hadn't gotten the pinch hit, I would have written it as a treat once the prompt had been brought to my attention.

I'm not exactly sure when I hit on the idea of a merchant ship witnessing the fall of Port Paravel. I think it was a gradual process -- like, I wanted to do a multiple POV story, but initially there was going to be a POV from the ship, and then one from the merchant company's headquarters back in Calormen, and maybe one from someone in the court at Tashbaan reacting to the sudden dearth of [fill in northern commodity], and so on. But once I started writing about the ship, it was all about that ship and the warehouse staff from the port, and it very quickly became more focused in time as well, with the edge of panic brought on by knowing Jadis would arrive very soon... and then, in the final scene, she arrives a good twelve hours before anyone's predictions. (I had to. Drama demanded it.)

As with my assignment story, I completely gave up on the idea of anonymity. I mean, I suppose other people could use my Calormene pantheon. It is free for anyone to run with! But I figured that would probably give me away, along with the whole... mmm... culture clash themes? And also, of course, I have made a minor fandom name for myself as a person who does Calormene worldbuilding. *wry* But like I said, I couldn't not write the story.

This is a time where the judicious application of deadline adrenaline worked beautifully, though I did have to go back and make a few minor typo corrections and such after the archive went live, which is the unfortunate side effect of writing that way. I find that it can be very useful in turning off the self-critical part of my brain and forcing me to write from my id, which is good for vividness! It is less good for SPAG details. *wry*

I know it may seem a bit unrealistic to have so many women on board a ship when Calormen feels like a very patriarchal country, but I justify it by means of religion. Basically, you need a few women on board to act as stand-ins for the goddess Zardeenah so that Sokda, the god of the sea and storms (and horses, though that's less relevant here) will look favorably upon your ship. To go to sea with no women on board is to invite disaster. And while a lot of young women will sail as Handmaids for a year or two to build some savings, see the world, and maybe meet a spouse they didn't grow up seeing every day in the same small coastal village, many others will make sailing their career. There are a fair number of married couples on Calormene ships, and while it's a bit unusual for a woman to be a captain without a husband to act as co-captain, it's certainly not unheard of.

Also, I will put women in my fiction if I want to and you can't stop me, no matter what you think of my justifications. :p

Found via rthstewart

So, first of all, I am not entirely sure what is meant by "fandoms" in this context. Ones I write fic for? Ones I read fic for? Ones I read fic for without ever consuming the canon? Ones where I consume the canon and have no further interest? Interpretation is hard.

But anyway, I will give it a shot!

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If fandoms were lovers...

The one who seduced you and screwed you over and broke your heart in a million pieces and laughed about it. ...I don't think I actually have a fandom this applies to. I mean, yeah, there are things I've started reading or watching and then fallen out of love with, but I can't think of anything that's broken my heart by turning to shit. Unless you're talking about out-of-canon stuff, such as revelations about authors' real-life behavior? In which case I do find it somewhat awkward to reread Marion Zimmer Bradley's books at this point, or Orson Scott Card's work, even if I still find the books themselves valuable.

If we're just talking straight-up stories that I love passionately and which broke my heart, I think the champion is still The Lions of Al-Rassan. But I'm sure that story wasn't laughing at me.

The old flame you don't see very often any more but whom you still really enjoy getting together with for a few drinks and maybe a pleasant nostalgic romp in the sheets. Harry Potter.

The mysterious dark gothy one whom you used to sit up with talking until 3a.m. at weird coffeehouses and with whom you were quite smitten until you realized they really were fucking crazy. I mean, the Black Jewels series is legit fucking crazy, but that's why I like it in the first place, so... *hands* This goes for Angel Sanctuary as well.

The one you spent a whole weekend in bed with and who drank up all your liquor, and whom you'd still really like to get together with again although you're relieved they don't actually live in town. ...Saiyuki, maybe? For which I wrote four stories once upon a time to exorcise some meta that got stuck in my head, and which I do mean to go back and read more of someday. Or maybe Gormenghast. I wrote one Gormenghast fic ages ago, and have always vaguely regretted not doing more to play around with that canon's absolutely batshit worldbuilding.

The Steady. The Chronicles of Narnia, which I have been having productive discussions and arguments with since I was eight years old. *wry*

The alluring stranger whom you've flirted with at parties but have never got really serious with. Possibly Leverage. I keep meaning to try watching that series, but never actually getting around to it.

The one you hang out with and have vague fantasies about maybe having a thing with but ultimately you're just good friends because the friendship is there but the chemistry isn't. Most of the MCU, to be honest. (Except Daredevil, because reasons. *shifty eyes*)

The one your friends keep introducing you to and who seems really cool except it's never really gone anywhere. I dunno, really. You could probably fill in any audiovisual media thing here and be relatively accurate. Oh! Wait, no, I know: Fullmetal Alchemist. Which is a wonderful manga series and I keep just not clicking with it, which annoys me because I want to love it and can't quite get there and so am stuck with admiration instead.

The one who's slept with all your friends, and you keep looking at them and thinking, "How did they land all these utterly fabulous people?" See the audiovisual media part of the previous answer. But I guess more specifically Game of Thrones. Which from the first season has sounded kind of unpleasant to me, what with the sexposition and so on, but hey. De gustibus non est disputandum. *wry*

The one who gave you the best damned summer of your life and who you measure all other potential partners against. Homestuck! ;)

The one you recently met at a party and would like to get to know better and who you think you might have a crush on. Annoyingly, the canons I've been into most recently have been book series that are all Yuletide-eligible, so. Not lots of opportunity there. (To name names: Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series, Martha Wells's Raksura series and Murderbot series, and N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy and Dreamblood duology.)

The old flame that you wouldn't totally object to hooking up with again for a one night romp if only they cleaned themselves up a bit. Naruto. (Except we never exactly broke up. It's just a long-distance relationship and I am ignoring vast swathes of canon Because Reasons and also there is no sequel or weird anime movies, okay. Got it? Good.)

Your hot new flame. Alas, I don't have one. It is very frustrating. :(

The one who stole your people's hearts. I am interpreting this as a fandom that has swept many of my internet acquaintances off their feet, rather than something I wrote that everyone inexplicably likes best. At the moment this seems to be Good Omens, but I'm okay with that. I'm not in love myself, but it's nice to sort of vicariously experience other people's infatuation, and I am well-enough in like that I don't particularly mind not being deeply involved in this tangent.

And a bonus courtesy of syrena_of_the_lake: The one you’re embarrassed to admit you like, because your friends will all say you're too good for them. Oh, don't even get me started. The list of fandoms for which I read amazingly terrible fic is longer than both my legs put together -- and this is quite deliberate, since there are some power-kink tropes I find excruciating if I know the canon well enough to see how OOC they are, but find hot like burning if they're applied to characters with whom I'm only vaguely familiar via internet osmosis. *wry*

Also I found the Gor novels weirdly sexy when I was in high school. This is probably because the first one I read is the one where the main character gets caught and turned into a slave himself, and I do have both a power-kink and a torture-kink, so. :p

minutia_r tagged me in the 10 characters meme: List ten of your favorite characters in ten different fandoms and then tag ten people

In no particular order:

1. Chronicles of Narnia - Still Edmund, I think, though he has never been ahead by a very large margin and it's grown smaller over the years. I am awfully fond of almost all the characters. (Jadis is my second-favorite in general, and probably my most favorite for writing.)

2. Homestuck - This is tricky! Uh. Can I say Rose, Jade, Dave, Terezi, Karkat, Aradia, Roxy, Jane, Kanaya, Meenah, and Damara all together? It is really hard to make distinctions any more finely graded than that, and anyway which one of that set I like best shifts from day to day.

3. Harry Potter - Probably Harry, giant unobservant doofus that he is. Secondarily Hermione and Ginny. I love Ron lots in canon, but find him fannishly uninteresting.

4. Naruto - Team 7. (By which I mean Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke.) You can't make me subdivide further. *resolve face*

5. Star Trek: AOS - Spock, Kirk, and Uhura.

6. Angel Sanctuary - Kira Sakuya. (Yes, this includes all incarnations.) Secondarily Setsuna and Sara.

7. Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Morwen, obviously! :DDD

8. Darkangel Trilogy - Aeriel, I think. It is her story, and I so desperately want her to be happy.

9. Daredevil (MCU) - Matt. Secondarily Karen and Elektra. (I may find a reckless disregard for one's personal safety, a possibly unhealthy level of determination, and a willingness to deal violence more attractive than I really ought to. Also, someone should write me that threesome...)

10. Dark Is Rising sequence - Blodwen Rowlands! *evil grin* For reasons that are spoilers. But after her, Will, Jane, and Bran in no particular order.

In conclusion, I am kind of terrible at having favorite characters. This is not surprising -- I am terrible at having a favorite anything in any category. I like too many things and I don't want to rank them. *hands*

Secondary conclusion: I do tend to like main characters, insofar as any given canon even has a main character rather than an ensemble. They aren't always in my top tier, but if I don't like them at all, I tend to stop reading.

I am, as always, terrible at tagging so please consider yourself tagged if you want to play! :)

Note: I am repurposing my stock Yuletide letter here, which is why some of the sections may seem slightly off-topic for a single fandom exchange.

Hi, and thank you in advance for writing a story for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write context-free porn, I'll be thrilled just to get a response to one of my prompts. *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

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( General Information )

Okay. On to specific prompts.

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( Aravis Meets Rabadash )

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( Lucy/Sea Girl Femslash )

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( The Telmarine Court )

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( Rilian's Everyday Life While Enchanted )

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( Pure Worldbuilding )

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And that is that.

For wistfulmemory, for the Fic DVD Commentary Meme (which is still open, fyi!)

The Way of the Apartment Manager: Ayakawa Yukiko retired from being a ninja, and she's come to terms with that. Then the Third Hokage summons her for an assignment that will change her life. AU story, set six years pre-manga. (72,000 words)

Chapter 11: Chapter the Eleventh, in which Yukiko plots a grand renovation project, we meet Naga's mother, Asuma makes an uncredited cameo, and the third test starts with an uneven matchup. (4,100 words)

This chapter begins the third test of the chuunin exam, and contains Yukiko's tournament match with Uchiha Akaro. A genjutsu specialist fighting an Uchiha is a terrible mismatch, which of course is why I had to go there. I probably would have gone there even if I hadn't previously used a painful chuunin exam loss against a random Uchiha as part of Yukiko's backstory reasons for retirement -- it's one of many things that convinced her she couldn't actually do anything useful as a ninja -- but since I already had that set up, obviously I needed to replay a version of that fight and let her realize she's grown strong enough (confident enough? smart enough? whatever!) to win.

(If you think it's a spoiler that Yukiko wins, you have not been paying enough attention to shonen narrative tropes. *wry*)

( The Way of the Apartment Manager - Chapter 11, with commentary )

And that is pretty much that. :)

For othercat, for the Fic DVD Commentary Meme.

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The Law of Conservation of Mangrit: It starts out ironically, of course, but by the time Dave's wearing a corset and a swanky evening dress and Terezi's in a three-piece suit, Jade wants nothing more than to get them both into bed as soon as possible. (15,300 words)

Note: This is the fic that for a very long time was known only as "untitled Jade/Dave/Terezi crossdressing porn." And by a very long time, I mean I started writing it back in August 2012. (Yes, really.) That means it's based on canon that has since been drastically altered.

I think the best way to handle that issue is to say that "The Law of Conservation of Mangrit" is a retroactive AU based on the Game Over timeline, with the assumption that the actual Game Over events didn't spin so irretrievably out of control and the players were therefore able to win without Terezi using John to retcon anything. So Davesprite and John lived through all three years of the Yellow Yard and the meteor road trip was miserable for everyone involved. As for why Terezi is blind again, I assume she burned her sight out heroically saving somebody from something -- because of narrative echoes and significant choices and stuff -- and this time even if anyone offered to heal her, she said no.

Thank you to MadameHardy and missvgc for beta reading!

Some further background information! I started writing this fic because of the following kinkmeme prompt: I'd like to see a character of your choosing present as a different gender than they identify as, because they and their partner(s) think it's hot. I'm not really looking for trans!fic here (though that's awesome!), and I don't want them being shamed over either their gender identity or their play. So, for example:

Maybe sometimes Roxy likes to put on a suit and fedora and peg Dirk until he begs her to let him come.

Maybe John thinks it's really hot for Karkat to wear falsies and lacy underthings while he fucks his nook and calls him his loving wife.

Maybe Nepeta likes to switch between presenting as male or female between sexual encounters, and Terezi loves never knowing what she's going to get in the sack.

Would love to see focus on details like how the character dresses/gets ready to present a different gender (possibly with partner helping them?) as well as how that plays out in sexy times (i.e. gendered behavior re: topping, if that'd be a thing for your characters, or how non-hermaphroditic characters make up for having only male or female genitals, etc.).

By the time I finished, nearly three years had passed and I felt I'd veered too far from the prompt to post this as a response, but that was the inspiration.

( The Law of Conservation of Mangrit, with commentary )

I hope that was of some interest. :)

Snagged from various places:

Pick any story I've written, or, in the case of my longer, chaptered works, any chapter from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

(The phrasing is unclear as to whether we're discussing whole stories or just story sections, but hey, pick what you want! You can find all my fic via this link. The majority of those stories are also available here on AO3.)

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Cardcaptor Uhura, for rosaxx50

The Law of Conservation of Mangrit, for othercat

The Courting Dance, chapter 7, for bluejayfic

The Way of the Apartment Manager, chapter 11, for wistfulmemory

The Guardian in Spite of Herself, chapter 16, for jjhunter

I'm copypasting this from Tumblr, because I want to have it on a more permanent and searchable site:

In reference to ellen_fremedon's Sedoretu Fic Fest (which is currently open for signups on AO3, and you should totally leave and claim some prompts!), madamehardy asked: If you don't want to offer Homestuck (offer Homestuck offer Homestuck) the Pevensies could easily be a different moiety from Jill and Eustace, or from Aravis and whatsisface.

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I think if I were doing a Narnian sedoretu, the obvious method would be to have Cor, Aravis, and Corin searching for a fourth person to complete their square. This is already an unconventional marriage since Cor and Corin are, of course, both male (and obviously share a moiety, being twins), but I am all in favor of complicating these things when I can. And I think it would be an interesting political statement for the twins to say, implicitly, "The heir WILL be ethnically half-Calormene and you're not getting any other options from Corin BECAUSE REASONS."

If the Pevensies were doing sedoretu marriages, the standard thing would be for one of the boys and one of the girls to be the (pick a moiety) half of a marriage, and for the other boy and girl to do the same thing in a second square. The question is which boy and girl you'd pair up. Divvying it Peter-and-Susan and Edmund-and-Lucy by age makes a lot of sense, but that would result in a wildly different plot to HHB, so perhaps Peter and Lucy are currently staying unmarried because reasons, leaving Susan and Edmund to play the diplomatic marriage alliance game. Which presumably means HHB must involve one of Rabadash's siblings or half-siblings as a potential fourth member of the proposed sedoretu, and ooooh, the things I could do with that as a base premise… *cackles evilly*

I think possibly the most evil and intriguing thing to do to Jill and Eustace would be to slot them into a square with Rilian and the Lady of the Green Kirtle. (I think probably with the kids sharing a moiety because True Companions and the Lady and prince sharing a moiety because of the mockery of courtly love thing they have going on while he's brainwashed. Also because I am totally in favor of people being intensely attracted to the Lady and desperately wishing they weren't, because if we're going to the creepybadwrong place, let's go full throttle, yeah?) And we either go for a bad ending where they do get caught and brainwashed in Underland, or perhaps we just age them up a few years and have several days of awkward oh-no-they're-hot camping and skeevy touching where you can’t quite verbalize why the touches are skeevy on the way to Harfang or something.

Super cracky badwrong edition: Aslan and Jadis form a sedoretu with Frank and Helen. No, I have no idea how that would work. It's probably some kind of metaphorical power play on the non-mortal members' part, maybe an alternative to the Tree of Protection. (No point conquering Narnia if you're already married to its king and queen, right? WRONG. And if Jadis can't rule Narnia on her own, she will damn well make sure Narnia rules the rest of the world. Bloodily.) Frank and Helen would really like a divorce, please... except how do you go about divorcing god and the devil?

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I was reading through some of my old journal entries and I came across the following comment of mine, which I am going to quote here in slightly truncated and edited form:

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Yeah, that weird cultural sex-is-worse-than-violence skew is one of my main reasons for considering ratings pointless. The other is that those ratings are aimed at an audiovisual medium, and are therefore maladapted for a textual medium. Like, if I show you a clip of a person shooting someone else point blank in the head, that's pretty gory and upsetting and should presumably get a relatively high rating. But I can write something like this:

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"So be a good girl, and drop the gun." Joe smirked again, like he had every option closed off and she had no choice except to play along.

Leah shot him, point blank, and threw up her arms to ward off the backspatter of blood and other things. Then she hurled herself into the cover of the overturned minivan and hoped Fatima would have time to run before Joe's goons inevitably killed her.

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and move blithely along giving you no further details, and while that's not a nice scene, it's not so graphic that I feel a need to slap a huge warning on the fic as a whole if that's the worst thing that happens. Ditto sex: showing our heroines from the previous snippet getting hot and heavy onscreen is a lot different from saying:

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Leah and Fatima fell onto the sheets, fingers slipping on buttons and zippers in their haste to pull off each other's clothes and press skin to skin in desperate confirmation that they were still alive.

"Oh god," Leah panted into Fatima's shoulder, between sloppy, open-mouthed kisses against the crook of her neck, "I thought I'd lost you, I thought--"

"I know," Fatima said. "I know. But you didn't," and her hand finally slipped under the waistband of Leah's jeans and pressed up against the damp cotton of Leah's panties.

Leah sobbed with relief and did her best to reciprocate the favor.

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and then cutting the scene and jumping to next morning. You know? Like, that little snippet is not something parents would necessarily want preteen kids reading, but it's hardly what I'd call graphic, not to mention that it's really easy to skim past text in a way one can't replicate with audiovisual media.

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I suddenly have an intense need to read the rest of the story that connects those two excerpts. Alas, it does not currently exist and probably won't ever exist unless I write it. Perhaps in 2017...