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gelbes_gilatierI still have to write this. Following the wave of (justified) outrage over that Female Character Flowchart at overthinkingit (which I will not link to since that thing is a major fail and I don't link to fails), I got thinking on clichés and female characters and writing and categories again and... came to a few conclusions that might not make me popular but I've been feeling like the kid that points out to everyone that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes for quite some time, anyway so...what the hell *shrugs
Basically, I realized I'm starting to become immensly tired of all the categorizing of characters by gender, race, sexual orientation, blablabla because it feels very much that this precedence of category over personality in meta (which, by the way, is exactly what that Flowchart author did and which many people justifiedly criticized) makes it very hard to write a story that doesn't offend but is still well-written. I'm starting to get really tired of what meta authors (who usually are fiction authors themselves which is why I don't really get why they're doing it) demand of fiction authors so that they won't be overwhelmed by people screaming FAIL at them.
What irked me most about the Flowchart and what ironically irks me most about the demands meta authors who criticized the Flowchart as well is... if all that is not perfect... then what is (that is, not offending anyone, not bashing anyone, not belittleing anyone and so on and so forth)? I'd like to ask the Flowchart author if there are any examples for the Strong Female Character (which, by the way, is starting to become a trope of its own for me which can go right there in the chart as "stereotype fail", not as the opposite to the hundreds of "fails" the author thinks to have identified) since the only examples she gave were for all the "stereotyped female characters", that, apparently were not strong characters (and I might add, there were Marge Simpson and Buffy among them... DUDE NOT COOL!).
That leads me to the suspicion that... the perfect Strong Female Character by her definition is impossible to write. And quite frankly... it seems to be the same case with the Perfect Politically Correct Story (which, by the way, only adheres to the US-American definition of "politically correct"... while "race", for example is a fully acceptable term in English, Germans flinch when hearing it in any language they recognize and you should be really careful with the use of the word "Rasse" in connection with human beings here) that so many well-meaning meta authors seem to demand of fiction authors.
What really gets me is all the categorizing (not stereotyping which does get to me as well but is not the issue in this case). You take a character and then you run him or her through a series of "tests" (with the Bechdel Test being probably the only one that makes actual sense) or through your set of categories and yes, sometimes it feels like meta authors are actually looking for finding a "fault" or a "fail" and search so hard that they find one in every story examined. Like, for example, it may appear like all my Stargate characters are white because I never mention their race (oh God, seriously, I can't even type that word without flinching... okay, I'll just use ethnicity or something like that in further texts) but you know... that's your stereotype, not mine.
If in your head, Sergeant Meyers from the Protect and Survive stories is white, it's what you have decided for him. In my head, he's not but his skin color was never actually an issue (and I just bet that if you really wanted to, you could find a 100 ways why I depicted him "wrong" for an African-American) so I didn't see any reason to mention it. He is like he is, and that's certainly also due to his skin color (because I do acknowledge that your gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity etc. blablabla are a determining factor in who you are but in this case his personality has character biography inherent reasons, not my stereotypes of African-Americans... actually, I'm not even sure if I have stereotypes of African-American people) but mainly it's due to how I wanted him to be and what kind of character I needed.
That he's actually African-American came to me after I decided on how to shape his personality, and not in an "Oh, I need a token African-American... let's randomly take one of the characters I already created" way. Just in a realization some point down the line... like I realized why I couldn't imagine my German medic Stabsarzt/Oberstabsarzt Matthias Morsberg with a woman. He's just not interested in them, at least not in that way. Again: I may have realized this after I started thinking about my characters' sexual orientation... but I didn't randomly pick some character because I needed a gay character. It was rather that looking more closely at him told me what I probably already knew subconsciously when I created him: he happens to be gay, among other things.
Which brings me to another point of categorizing that I'm really starting to resent: the whole het vs. slash thing. I'm a het writer - or at least I'm categorized as one, by myself and others - but if I write a story that focuses on Maureen Reece and Thomas Moore but has a side story with Morsberg getting interested in a male Atlantis scientis... is that het? Slash? Het with a sidedish of slash? And what if it's reversed and the main focus is on Morsberg and his scientist and Maureen and Tom are the background pairing? Is that slash? Het? I'm really confused (also, go away, plot bunny, I really don't need more of you).
I admit, I don't read slash, mainly because that category means to me in most of the cases (and those who do not fit into those cases on my flist hopefully know that they're not meant here) "Overwhelming presence of men in a story, overwhelming amount of OOCness, and everyone's gay" (see, another good reason to stop categorizing!). The first two aggravate me but the last one puzzles me. How... is that supposed to be non-exclusive? I know that a main grievance about het writers is that they don't acknowledge homosexuality in their stories and that a lot of people write (or claim to write) slash to give gay people a bigger presence in media and fiction and that's all fair and well... but I just... hrm.
Okay, example:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mackenziesmomma took one of the prompts in the current AU challenge on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
major_explosion and we had a little plotting conversation about it and at some point she became a little... hesitant, shall we call it. I tried to coax it out of her and after a while she said that while the main plot is a het plot, she has a male/male couple as supporting characters and that she didn't know how I'd react since she knows I don't do slash (am I correct in that assumption, mac?). The thing is: all I did was shrug my shoulders and say "That's fine. The couple makes sense, it sounds in character for both, go for it." I didn't say that because it's background... I said that because it makes sense, in a lot of ways. Basically... I said yes because it's two characters that don't squick me out when I think of them together (McShep for example does because no, I don't see it. Sheppard/Ronon... yeah, that does make sense, in a way. Still wouldn't read it but at least it doesn't make me shudder) and because they're together and happen to be male, not because they're guys and therefore have to be paired with each other.
Another example:clwilson2006 claimed another prompt on major_explosion and confessed to be nervous about it because well, it's a het prompt and well, we all know that clwilson2006 is a slash writer ;) But the thing is: there's nothing to be nervous about. Just because the characters you usually pair with each other happen to be of the same sex, it doesn't mean you can't write characters that are attracted to each other and happen to be of opposite sex. But since het and slash are usually made to be opposites (and sexual orientation is made into another one of those categories seeming to precede over actual personality in the judging of a character), I guess it's only natural that one would think writing one differs from writing the other.
But they're not because, most of all, the characters are people with personalities that attract each other, not an assortment of categories you can tick off on a chart and judge them by. By dissecting a character's personality into categories and then judge their behavior by it, we don't do them - and us as authors - a favor (and it always seems to me that this also transcends into the way we judge real people... first we do all the categorizing and then we get interested in who they actually are and that's not a good way to encounter people). To me, it really hampers the creative process because since I started reading meta, I started to dissect my characters and have the drastic urge not to offend anyone so I spend an awful lot of time with trying to find each and every possible fail I could commit (I already found at least one case of fridging and I have a feeling that most of my stories don't pass the Bechdel Test, either)... time that I could use just to write, instead of trying not to piss off anyone.
I'm not saying we should all write as we please and that we should let racist and sexist and whatever else -ist stories be uncommented or tolerate them... but what I'm saying is that I'm tired by judging stories after standardized tests or flowcharts are whatever. We should judge stories for themselves. Yes, maybe killing off Laura for the Defining Moments was fridging her and letting Evan agonize over it is giving him Manpain by various standards and tests and blah... but I refuse those stories be called a fail because they are not. The only reason I killed Laura instead of Evan was that the stories adhered to Stargate canon (which I try to do with all my Stargate stories, as long as they're not explicitely AU) and yes, in Stargate canon Evan did not die.
I also refuse to see fault in making Laura's death one of the main reasons for Lorne deciding to let Rodney go back to Atlantis to change the timeline. Honestly, he gets a chance to change everything, including getting back the wife he loved and that he could never stop loving (or at least giving his younger self a chance not to make the same mistake he thinks he made)... who of you could refuse? And who of you could honestly say of themselves they only did it for the greater good, not also for themselves?
See, that's what I mean. Maybe by tests and standards somewhere in the Defining Moments there's internalized misogyny or sexism or whatever... but since when is life always adhering to rules and standards (in the Defining Moments, Lorne struggles with the fact, that to him, Laura wasn't the one supposed to die... just sayin')? Since when do humans behave like the standards and the rules tell them to, most of all in highly emotional situations? That's what we should judge stories by... not by a prefabricated set of standards a certain group deems to be the correct one (since, as I can only repeat, a lot of those standards don't make any sense to people from other countries or other cultural backgrounds... but that doesn't automatically mean that those people don't see fault in racism or sexism or any other -ism).
Did I make sense to anyone not me out there?
PS.: And yeah, maybe one day I'll read slash (and no, my issues with slash don't extend to real life homophobia... in real life, a person's sexual orientation doesn't interest me... seriously, it doesn't and if someone tells me "I'm gay!" I just shrug my shoulders and say "Okay. So?")... well, read more slash because when I happen to stumble over a story that's categorized as slash but isn't slash or an author that can actually write a slash story for the story's sake and not the usual "Guh two hot guys let's double the hot by having them make out with each other regardless if they make sense as a couple or not guh" sake that originally turned me away from slash very early in my career as a fanfic reader/writer, I do give the story a chance. But as it is... most of the pairings I don't see (I don't read every het story that's out there, either because basically, the same squicks I have about slash also apply to het) and/or I'm not interested in so the slash community will have to do without me for the time being ;)
Basically, I realized I'm starting to become immensly tired of all the categorizing of characters by gender, race, sexual orientation, blablabla because it feels very much that this precedence of category over personality in meta (which, by the way, is exactly what that Flowchart author did and which many people justifiedly criticized) makes it very hard to write a story that doesn't offend but is still well-written. I'm starting to get really tired of what meta authors (who usually are fiction authors themselves which is why I don't really get why they're doing it) demand of fiction authors so that they won't be overwhelmed by people screaming FAIL at them.
What irked me most about the Flowchart and what ironically irks me most about the demands meta authors who criticized the Flowchart as well is... if all that is not perfect... then what is (that is, not offending anyone, not bashing anyone, not belittleing anyone and so on and so forth)? I'd like to ask the Flowchart author if there are any examples for the Strong Female Character (which, by the way, is starting to become a trope of its own for me which can go right there in the chart as "stereotype fail", not as the opposite to the hundreds of "fails" the author thinks to have identified) since the only examples she gave were for all the "stereotyped female characters", that, apparently were not strong characters (and I might add, there were Marge Simpson and Buffy among them... DUDE NOT COOL!).
That leads me to the suspicion that... the perfect Strong Female Character by her definition is impossible to write. And quite frankly... it seems to be the same case with the Perfect Politically Correct Story (which, by the way, only adheres to the US-American definition of "politically correct"... while "race", for example is a fully acceptable term in English, Germans flinch when hearing it in any language they recognize and you should be really careful with the use of the word "Rasse" in connection with human beings here) that so many well-meaning meta authors seem to demand of fiction authors.
What really gets me is all the categorizing (not stereotyping which does get to me as well but is not the issue in this case). You take a character and then you run him or her through a series of "tests" (with the Bechdel Test being probably the only one that makes actual sense) or through your set of categories and yes, sometimes it feels like meta authors are actually looking for finding a "fault" or a "fail" and search so hard that they find one in every story examined. Like, for example, it may appear like all my Stargate characters are white because I never mention their race (oh God, seriously, I can't even type that word without flinching... okay, I'll just use ethnicity or something like that in further texts) but you know... that's your stereotype, not mine.
If in your head, Sergeant Meyers from the Protect and Survive stories is white, it's what you have decided for him. In my head, he's not but his skin color was never actually an issue (and I just bet that if you really wanted to, you could find a 100 ways why I depicted him "wrong" for an African-American) so I didn't see any reason to mention it. He is like he is, and that's certainly also due to his skin color (because I do acknowledge that your gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity etc. blablabla are a determining factor in who you are but in this case his personality has character biography inherent reasons, not my stereotypes of African-Americans... actually, I'm not even sure if I have stereotypes of African-American people) but mainly it's due to how I wanted him to be and what kind of character I needed.
That he's actually African-American came to me after I decided on how to shape his personality, and not in an "Oh, I need a token African-American... let's randomly take one of the characters I already created" way. Just in a realization some point down the line... like I realized why I couldn't imagine my German medic Stabsarzt/Oberstabsarzt Matthias Morsberg with a woman. He's just not interested in them, at least not in that way. Again: I may have realized this after I started thinking about my characters' sexual orientation... but I didn't randomly pick some character because I needed a gay character. It was rather that looking more closely at him told me what I probably already knew subconsciously when I created him: he happens to be gay, among other things.
Which brings me to another point of categorizing that I'm really starting to resent: the whole het vs. slash thing. I'm a het writer - or at least I'm categorized as one, by myself and others - but if I write a story that focuses on Maureen Reece and Thomas Moore but has a side story with Morsberg getting interested in a male Atlantis scientis... is that het? Slash? Het with a sidedish of slash? And what if it's reversed and the main focus is on Morsberg and his scientist and Maureen and Tom are the background pairing? Is that slash? Het? I'm really confused (also, go away, plot bunny, I really don't need more of you).
I admit, I don't read slash, mainly because that category means to me in most of the cases (and those who do not fit into those cases on my flist hopefully know that they're not meant here) "Overwhelming presence of men in a story, overwhelming amount of OOCness, and everyone's gay" (see, another good reason to stop categorizing!). The first two aggravate me but the last one puzzles me. How... is that supposed to be non-exclusive? I know that a main grievance about het writers is that they don't acknowledge homosexuality in their stories and that a lot of people write (or claim to write) slash to give gay people a bigger presence in media and fiction and that's all fair and well... but I just... hrm.
Okay, example:
mackenziesmomma took one of the prompts in the current AU challenge on major_explosion and we had a little plotting conversation about it and at some point she became a little... hesitant, shall we call it. I tried to coax it out of her and after a while she said that while the main plot is a het plot, she has a male/male couple as supporting characters and that she didn't know how I'd react since she knows I don't do slash (am I correct in that assumption, mac?). The thing is: all I did was shrug my shoulders and say "That's fine. The couple makes sense, it sounds in character for both, go for it." I didn't say that because it's background... I said that because it makes sense, in a lot of ways. Basically... I said yes because it's two characters that don't squick me out when I think of them together (McShep for example does because no, I don't see it. Sheppard/Ronon... yeah, that does make sense, in a way. Still wouldn't read it but at least it doesn't make me shudder) and because they're together and happen to be male, not because they're guys and therefore have to be paired with each other. Another example:
clwilson2006 claimed another prompt on major_explosion and confessed to be nervous about it because well, it's a het prompt and well, we all know that clwilson2006 is a slash writer ;) But the thing is: there's nothing to be nervous about. Just because the characters you usually pair with each other happen to be of the same sex, it doesn't mean you can't write characters that are attracted to each other and happen to be of opposite sex. But since het and slash are usually made to be opposites (and sexual orientation is made into another one of those categories seeming to precede over actual personality in the judging of a character), I guess it's only natural that one would think writing one differs from writing the other.But they're not because, most of all, the characters are people with personalities that attract each other, not an assortment of categories you can tick off on a chart and judge them by. By dissecting a character's personality into categories and then judge their behavior by it, we don't do them - and us as authors - a favor (and it always seems to me that this also transcends into the way we judge real people... first we do all the categorizing and then we get interested in who they actually are and that's not a good way to encounter people). To me, it really hampers the creative process because since I started reading meta, I started to dissect my characters and have the drastic urge not to offend anyone so I spend an awful lot of time with trying to find each and every possible fail I could commit (I already found at least one case of fridging and I have a feeling that most of my stories don't pass the Bechdel Test, either)... time that I could use just to write, instead of trying not to piss off anyone.
I'm not saying we should all write as we please and that we should let racist and sexist and whatever else -ist stories be uncommented or tolerate them... but what I'm saying is that I'm tired by judging stories after standardized tests or flowcharts are whatever. We should judge stories for themselves. Yes, maybe killing off Laura for the Defining Moments was fridging her and letting Evan agonize over it is giving him Manpain by various standards and tests and blah... but I refuse those stories be called a fail because they are not. The only reason I killed Laura instead of Evan was that the stories adhered to Stargate canon (which I try to do with all my Stargate stories, as long as they're not explicitely AU) and yes, in Stargate canon Evan did not die.
I also refuse to see fault in making Laura's death one of the main reasons for Lorne deciding to let Rodney go back to Atlantis to change the timeline. Honestly, he gets a chance to change everything, including getting back the wife he loved and that he could never stop loving (or at least giving his younger self a chance not to make the same mistake he thinks he made)... who of you could refuse? And who of you could honestly say of themselves they only did it for the greater good, not also for themselves?
See, that's what I mean. Maybe by tests and standards somewhere in the Defining Moments there's internalized misogyny or sexism or whatever... but since when is life always adhering to rules and standards (in the Defining Moments, Lorne struggles with the fact, that to him, Laura wasn't the one supposed to die... just sayin')? Since when do humans behave like the standards and the rules tell them to, most of all in highly emotional situations? That's what we should judge stories by... not by a prefabricated set of standards a certain group deems to be the correct one (since, as I can only repeat, a lot of those standards don't make any sense to people from other countries or other cultural backgrounds... but that doesn't automatically mean that those people don't see fault in racism or sexism or any other -ism).
Did I make sense to anyone not me out there?
PS.: And yeah, maybe one day I'll read slash (and no, my issues with slash don't extend to real life homophobia... in real life, a person's sexual orientation doesn't interest me... seriously, it doesn't and if someone tells me "I'm gay!" I just shrug my shoulders and say "Okay. So?")... well, read more slash because when I happen to stumble over a story that's categorized as slash but isn't slash or an author that can actually write a slash story for the story's sake and not the usual "Guh two hot guys let's double the hot by having them make out with each other regardless if they make sense as a couple or not guh" sake that originally turned me away from slash very early in my career as a fanfic reader/writer, I do give the story a chance. But as it is... most of the pairings I don't see (I don't read every het story that's out there, either because basically, the same squicks I have about slash also apply to het) and/or I'm not interested in so the slash community will have to do without me for the time being ;)
