#-a series that examines and criticizes common tropes in fiction-

[tea-cat-arts]

Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will

[linkspooky]

Hi....if you don't mind me asking, what are your top 10 favorite (fiction) books? And why? Sorry if you've answered this question before...

Hello, I don’t mind answering. Here’s my top ten books. Please don’t expect me to have good taste. A friendly reminder that I am a clown, and I have a clown’s taste in literature. 

#10 A Game of Thrones

Not the whole series, but the first book specifically is one of what I consider the best fantasy books of all time. I know this is an incredibly mainstream thing to say, but sometimes things that are popular, are popular for a reason. The Cersei sections of Feast of Crows are my favorite in the whole series, but as for the book in its entirety I believe the original book is almost a perfect example of a first book in a series which sets up greater characters and plot threads while at the same time writing a perfect three act tragedy in Ned Stark’s arc throughout the entire book. 

Genre fiction is my bread and butter, and I appreciate authors who are able to elevate Genre Fiction into serious art just by taking common characters and tropes of the genre seriously, and using those as tools to build upon the themes. Everyone knows the plotting and the world and politics and backstories are so impressively detailed that George RR Martin’s writing ability, and thoughtfulness towards his own work always shows in its dirty and gritty details. But ebyond that I’m reminded of a quote by Ursula K Le Guinn about genre fiction.

“For example: A writer sets out to write science fiction, but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. THis is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is knwon to sell weel, but as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study - what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of it’s own; it’s own appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers - that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all of this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel...” 

What I love about Game of Thrones is that it is a fairy tale story, that knows it is a fairy tale and instead of looking down on fairy tales, it critically examines them while at the same time adding humanity to all of its characters. The grittier elements of the story come not from George RR Martin thinking fantasy stories are stupid, but because he wants to write a legitimate challenge in his story for characters to ovecome, and a world where things are harder than they seem in stories, and yet it’s still worth the struggle to live life outside a story. You know. You know those themes? It’s one of those. 

#9 The Idiot by Dotsoevsky

It’s hard to pick a favorite out of Dostoevsky’s five great novels, but i inthk his most tragic entry is the one that’s also the most tightly written and clear in its themes. 

Prince Myshkin is one of Dostoevsky’s purest heartest characters, a character Dostoevsky wrote he wanted to create with an “entirely postivie... with an absolutely beautiful nature”, and yet despite being so loving and unselfish towards others he’s a rare example of a character who’s good points are matched evenly with his flaws. A fundamentally good person who is as complex as some of Dotsoevsky’s bad boys, like Raskolnivkov. Myshkin is so selfless a person he’s almost an ideal, but the point of the novel itself is that ideals cannot exist in reality. 

According to Joseph Frank, the character of prince Myshkin approaches “ the extremest incarnation of the Christian ideal of love that humanity can reach in its present form, but he is torn apart by the conflict between the contradictory imperatives of his apocalyptic aspirations and his earthly limitations.” 

Prince Myshkin is someone who similiarly can only see the world in ideals, which is what makes his romance with Nastaasya Filippovna so troubled, because she is a troubled person who exists in an area of grey that Myshkin cannot see. Myshkin can truly and unselfishly love her, and yet he cannot comprehend er at the same time which makes their romance one where desipte all good intentions neither of them are ever on the same page. 

Anyway, the best love stories are ones where thy don’t end up together. It’s the story of how they met, they didn’t fall in love, and didn’t end up happy together, and yet the goodness Myshkin saw in Nastasya who is Dostoevsky’s most complicated, and most flawed woman, was there all the same. 

#8 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Here’s the cliche answer for which work by a Bronte sister is your favorite. However, my hot take is one everyone in the world will disagree with  me over. Wuthering Heights is still a love story, even if it’s a story that is primarily about Katherine and Heathcliff’s selfish, destructive love. The Bronte Sisters weren’t out to debunk Regency Era romantic stories like the kind Jane Austen wrote. They aren’t anti-romantics. Wuthering Heights is still very much a story full of romanticism, it’s just like George RR Martin, looking at that genre with a more serious lens. 

In my essay I will go on to prove that Wuthering Heights is a romantic story.... It’s about big emotions and the consequneces about big emotions. Much is made about how destructive Katherine and Heathcliff’s love for one another is, and how selfish, but when reading it you have to pay attention to the circumstances surrounding it. Heathcliff is the victim of abuse and discrimmination, because he is poor, disadvantaged, and dark skinned. His childhood love is also with the only person who sort of treats him like a human being, and in that same light Katherine falls in love with the only person who knows her as she is in a complicated light rather than seeing her as a woman of manners and fine breeding. It’s only after everything goes wrong that the love itself becomes destructive towards both members. 

Wuthering Heights isn’t really saying that the brooding Byronic prtagonist is a bad person, but rather illustrating the cirucmstances that would create such a person. One interpretation I like about the story is that Heathcliff and Katherine are just as selfish in their actions towards each other, it’s just Heathcliff’s are more destructive because that’s the power he has as the head of the household. 

It’s a tragedy of two people coming together, and then coming apart by love, but to argue that love doesn’t exist is to like, say that the two leads of Romeo and Juliet weren’t in love, they were just horny teenagers. The story becomes leser if you ignore the romanticism of the story. If like, the descriptions of roaring green fields, and the weather reflecting the emotions of the characters, and the fainting spells and bouts of hiysteria are not enough to indicate it as a romantic work of fiction. Also, at the end of the story, the damage to two generations of the family that is done by abusive love, is slowly becoming undone by the union of two children who heavily parallel Katherine and Heathcliff  and represent what they could have been under different ircumstances. It’s just such a good story at depicting the extremes that people are capable of while its characters are still human. You could compare Heathcliff to Frankenstein’s monster, except he’s not a monster at all, he’s just a dude, ableit a heavily abused one who goes on to repeat his abuse in a heavily realstic way. 

#7 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I put this on the list just to be pretentious. There’s a lo of similar books of this genre I’ve read and enjoyed, but this is for me pretty much the only book that’s ever depicted  a mental breakdown accruately. The whole first half of the book really is just about a normal person unfamiliar and uncomfortable with her brief stay in New York City, and when she gets home and falls apart that is when the book becomes brilliant. 

A lot of mental illness in fiction is like, heavy hallucination, crazy behavior. Sylvia Plath writes a character just slowly falling apart, not being able to keep up with her normal life in the way she did before. One of the most striking passages to me was when she mentions that all she seemed to do all day was do nothing, and yet she couldn’t sleep either, and she went day, after day, after day without sleeping. When the main character attempts to slit her wrists too, it’s not a big dramatic deal, but something the character mentions almost offhandedly, and she does it because she is so tired of not sleeping. 

It’s just a small and quiet portrayal of suffering that’s just as striking and poetic, because it draws humanity out of the mundanity of this character’s breakdown. She just stops being able to do what she could always do before, and she doesn’t know why, or what’s the cause of this slow decline, and she feels trapped in her head and observing as it’s happening to her. It’s a book I’ve reread several times, at the minimalist language it uses, that is equally effetive as striking and overdramatic prose. It just gets the suffering of the character across, in small ways, it’s so soaked with a quiet misery. 

#6 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 

This is my favorite love story, ever. I actually think war and peace is stronger in its themes, and has more liabkly characters in its cast, but Anna Karenina is the story of one woman’s misery and her desire for escape from her life. There is so much humanity to Anna in this story, that’s not given to other woman in the time period. While theplot of War and Peace is about the comparison of the smalll lives of the Russians in contrast to the Big Stakes of the war happening around them, Anna Karenina is written about one women’s  misery and her trying to find happiness in love and it is treated with all the same importance and grand consequences. 

The opening quote of the book has stayed with me forever. 

All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Tolstoy writes about one small person living their life like it’s the most important thing in the world. That there are no great people like Napoleon, just people living their little lives. Anna’s desire for happiness is so strong she leaves her husband, and has an affair with him. Something a man would be allowed to do at the time, and is even easily forgiven for in the start of the book, but Anna is reviled for within her own society. 

It’s important to marriage Anna has a husband that for the time period she should have been satsifed with, he worked and paid for the house, he was a responsible man who didn’t cheat on her, he just didn’t love her. Yet not only is Anna not allowed to leave in the eyes of society, she should also be thankful for it. Anna then is swept away by a man who promises her the kind of love she’s searching for, and even if he does not love her, he is at least exciting. It sounds like every other romance story ever written which is why you really have to just read it, to understand the humanity that is on display in Anna’s character. 

#5 DRACULA 

Did somebody say female characters? One of my favorite things to watch on tumblr was to see Dracula become super popular as soon as someone came up with the idea of emailing people the story, letter by letter. Dracula isa story where the most interesting haracters are the human characters struggling against the monster, and that’s brought out by the epistolatory novel storytelling format. Jonathan’s diary, Mina and Lucy’s letters all go to such great lengths to flesh them out.

Mina and Lucy especially are too well developed female characters. The slow decline of Lucy’s health, and the great efforts everyone around her goes to save her, only to have her die at the end is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever read in fictions. It’s more horrifying than most modern day horror, and this sequence of events happens when Dracula is mostly offscreen and only appears in what to Lucy are just drreams.

Stephen King once said, and I’m paraphrasing, that what makes horror fiction scary is when the audience is invested in the fate of the characters. Dracula is so lasting and impactful because the main cast is as developed as the monster themselves, even though they are ntohing more than pathetic and scrawny human beings. It’s the rare monster story where you actually want to see the good guys slaughter the monster. 

#4 Frankenstein

Frankenstein, or as I call it, can you tell this was written by a woman? 

Frankenstein is just about so many things. It references stories like Paradise Lost in its themes about the potential of good and evil of humanity. r. It’s about the human adventuring spirit and the desire to do something great, and also when that same desire to be something greater than human can make people forget their basic humanity. It’s about misogyny. It’s about masculine entitlement. 

It’s about childbirth It’s about motherhood. It’s about the cycle of abuse. Frankenstein and his  Monster are such perfect foils for one another, to the point where the Monster is almost a living Jungian shadow who like Peter Pan’s shadow has escaped from him and is running around on his own. The more that Frankenstein denies the monster and dehumanizes him, the more monstrous he becomes.

One of my favaorite passages in all of fiction and one I think about when writing characters to this day, is when the monster points out that he has done bad things and deserves to be punished, but what about the family who beat him and chased him away for looking ugly when he spent months on end gathering firewood and he only wanted to introduce himself. What of the man who shot him, when he tried to save his son driving for a river. Why aren’t they deserving of punishment? If he is guilty, then why are all the people who pushed him into this and were violent towards him without cause innocent? 

#3 Zaregoto Vol. 2: The Kubishime Romanticist. 

This is where I get rocks thrown at me for putting a light novel on here and above all of these classics. The story behind Zaregoto volume two is fascinating . While the first was months of work went into it’s creation, Nisioisin felt something was missing when he had finished it. For the sequel, he sat down, and wrote it in two days. 

Zaregoto is one of my favorite novels of all time, but it does require reading the first to show how it contrasts the second. Basically, what I always say is that if you read the first volume you don’t really understand why everyone is so offput by the main character, or why everyone is constantly hinting that he’s a terrible person. However, by the second novel you understand exactly the kind of person IIchan is. 

While the first volume of the series is a tribute to mystery stories that for the most part, centers around solving the mystery, the second the mystery solving is almost incidental to establishing just what kind of person the first person narrator is. It’s a very vivid image that Nisioiisin paints in detail, and it’s not exactly a flattering portrait.

II-chan is a terrible person. This is the novel about how II-chan is a terrible person. However, Iic-han is one of my favorite characters ever, and this novel is one of my favorite novels just because the prose is so, almost trippy, psychadelic? It’s very stremam of thought narration. It’s poetic. And that’s all in servic to show what the kind of person II-chan is. He’s an unreliable narrator, because he’s such a good storyteller he’s twisting details to make himself look like the victim of the story, and yet if you pay attention and read behind the lines he’s just not a victim nor a particularly good or innocent person. Unreliable narrators are some of the best tropes in fiction to show how not only can stories not be trusted, but people cannot be trusted as well, because they both have a tendency to tell lies.

# 2 +#1 No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, and This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald 

These two are essentially tied for my favorite, because they are very similiar despite being written by authors from two different cultures. They are both semi-autobiographical novel length works that are essentially coming of age stories where the main character refuses to come of age or grow up in any specific way. They are love stories, where the main character doesn’t fall in love. They fact that they are semi-autobiographical novels which follow these characters from childhood to adulthood and paint not so flattering pictures of the main characters is part of what makes them raw and effective. 

I won’t speak about Osamu Dazai but if you know anything about F. SCott FItzgerald, well let’s just say there are a lot of scandals about his treatment of his wife, his writing. There’s a lot of honesty though in his works that makes me not want to completely dismiss his talent as an author. This Side of Paradise and Osamu Dazai are just so honest in their portrayal of the main characters warts and all, that they are still readable despite having what are selfish and unsyampthetic main characters. 

Osamu Dazai once wrote he tried to write novels for miserable people, and yep, that’s pretty much it. No Longer Human at times reads like a suicide note left by the author himself, and that’s even explciitly the framing of the novel, a journal that was left behind after everybody stopped hearing from the main character. They portray the struggles of the characters by giving them such rich internal worlds. 

This Side of Paradise is different in that it at least has a slightly more optimistic ending. Both stories feature characters who are born into relative wealth in privilege, trying to go to school, trying to fall in love, trying to find work and live in the world and failing at all of those things. At the end of hist journey though, Armory ends with this quote. 

“I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

Armory at least from all of his struggles, gains an understanding of himself by the end of the story. Which is why I think, stories like this need to be told. EAs Dazai said, some stories need to be written for miserable people, because misery is just as much of the human experience as happiness is. There’s still something to be gained from these stories, because loss and failure is something you can learn from. Which is why F. Scott Fitzgerald writes some of the most beautiful prose for the time period, because those people were born, dreamed to be someone important, wanted to be loved, just like everyone else and their stories are just as beautiful despite ending in loss and failure. 

[banyanboca]

"What The Queen's Gambit Got Right (And Wrong) About Addiction"

The Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit, tells the fictional story of a young woman overcoming her addiction to drugs. Although fiction, its realistic depiction of addiction has sparked discussion about its accuracy. This article examines both the accurate and inaccurate representation of addiction depicted within The Queen’s Gambit. The show accurately speaks to addiction being a chronic disease fueled by underlying trauma. The main character, Beth Harmon, experiences many forms of adversity throughout the show, which contributes to her struggles with addiction. Although she is able to recover, it is a lifelong journey that is not condensed into a typical two-episode story arc — a common trope with addiction narratives. The show also paints an insightful picture of the effects of addiction on relationships— both with other people and the self. When Beth is heavily under the influence of drugs, she is distant and critical of herself and of those around her. It’s a stark portrayal of how easily addiction can take over someone’s life and ruin relationships. On the other hand, the show does contain inaccuracies. One egregious example of inaccuracy is the portrayal of the length of methadone treatment. The Queen’s Gambit unsuccessfully sets up methadone treatment as a fitting resolution to the main characters’ addiction. In reality, a typical methadone treatment plan could last over a span of months— not minutes — making it an unreliable ending for an addiction arc in any show. The show is an interesting look into the world of addiction but it’s important to remember that some of the depictions aren’t accurate. The best way to experience a true depiction of addiction is to look to the experiences of those who struggle with it. Fortunately, options like drug rehabilitation and addiction treatment centers offer different paths to recovery. Here are the main takeaways from this article: • The Queen’s Gambit accurately portrays addiction as a lifelong journey and the effects it has on relationships. • Inaccuracies include making methadone treatment a “quick fix” to a person’s addiction. • Drug rehabilitation and addiction treatment centers are some of the available resources people can seek out for recovery.

[nanowrimo]

How to Make Interesting Worldbuilding Choices

We can’t assume that everyone knows the world we’re talking about, right? Luckily, author and previous Camp NaNoWriMo counselor Cass Morris has a few suggestions to help us more deeply explore our worldbuilding:

One of the most powerful things we can do as writers is create a world. What we write holds a mirror up to reality, where we can examine and criticize our own world or try to build a better one. We get to play god with our characters, and in doing so, we exercise a great deal of power in what we choose to reflect, to magnify, to laud, and to condemn.

So how can we make interesting choices, rather than relying on stale tropes, biased perspectives, or common assumptions about “the way things are” or “the way things were”?

Here are five basic concepts I suggest you explore to develop a richly detailed and unique world:

1. Family

What is a family structure? Is marriage tied to finances, or is it a purely emotional bond? Do you live with your spouse? Do you raise kids together? Is sexual fidelity expected? How many people can be in a marriage? Does “legitimacy” mean anything to family bonds? To inheritance? Is adoption common? 

2.Gender & Sexuality

What sexualities are socially permissible? How does your world conceive of gender? Does it accept third genders, nonbinary people, gender fluidity? If your world has rigid gender roles, or if one gender has more power and privilege than the other, make sure that’s a choice you examine, not just something you presume.

3. Race

What do race relations and ideas of ethnicity look like in your world? A historical or invented world may conceive identity very differently than we do today. If you have aliens or fantasy races, like elves, dwarves, or goblins, examine them carefully to avoid perpetuating racist stereotypes or erasing real-world issues with a handwave. I recommend Writing the Other as an excellent resource to help you think through these ideas respectfully).

4. The Afterlife and Religion

What do your characters believe happens to them when they die? This can affect so much else in a society: how eager or reluctant they are for war, how they preserve assets for future generations, how they conceive of sin and virtue. So what’s your basis? Gods or no gods? Ancestor worship? Natural spirits? And how exclusionary is it? Can your various cults play nice together, or are they trying to wipe each other out?

5. Government 

Who has power, how do they get it, and how do they hold onto it? There are so many options beyond “ye olde feudalism” and our modern conception of representative republics. Figure out what your structure is, how it came to be that way, and what other beliefs and structures, like religion or the military, it might be tied to.

These basic concepts will touch many other elements of your characters’ lives, from architecture to economy to warfare. They can also help generate wonderful, inventive plot hooks; in making deliberate choices about your world, you may find new challenges and opportunities for your characters.

While worldbuilding is typically associated with fantasy and science fiction, it’s important to real-world genres as well. The world in your book, whether invented or a version of our own, should be as diverse and complex as the world your readers live in. In historical fiction, the challenge is often in distinguishing what “everyone knows” about a period from the lived reality of people during that time. In a modern romance or thriller or anything else, details as small as what someone thinks of as a “normal” lunch can communicate elements of that character’s personal history and the world they operate in.

Make interesting choices. Your readers will be grateful.

Cass Morris works as a writer and educator in central Virginia. Her debut series, The Aven Cycle, is Roman-flavored historical fantasy released by DAW Books. She is also one-third of the team behind the Hugo Award Finalist podcast Worldbuilding for Masochists. She holds a Master of Letters from Mary Baldwin University and a BA in English and History from the College of William and Mary. She reads voraciously, wears corsets voluntarily, and will beat you at MarioKart. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Patreon. Make sure to check out The Aven Cycle and Worldbuilding for Masochists. 

[lorenfangor]

I heard that #40 was super homophobic :/ so I skipped it. But now your fic is making me want to give it a try. How problematic is it? Are the characters worth it?

Okay.

Okay.

Let’s talk about #40.

The plot of The Other (a Marco POV) is that Marco sees an Andalite on a video tape sent in to some Unsolved Mysteries-esque TV show, and he assumes it’s Ax and hauls ass to save him from being captured. Ax, being Ax, has videotaped the show, and they pull it up and Tobias uses his hawk eyes to figure out that it’s not Ax, it’s another Andalite - one without a tailblade. Ax is appalled at the presence of this vecol (an Andalite word for a disabled person) and we find out that he and others of his species have deep ingrained prejudices against at least some kinds of disabled people.

Despite this, Marco and Ax go looking for the Andalite in question because he’s been spotted by national TV, and they meet a second one, named Gafinilan-Estrif-Valad. The vecol is Mertil-Iscar-Elmand, a former fighter pilot with a reputation and Gafinilan’s coded-gay life partner. The two of them have been on Earth since book 1; they crashed their fighters on the planet and have been trapped there thanks to the GalaxyTree going down. Gafinilan has adopted a human cover, a physics professor, and they’ve been living in secret ever since.

Thanks to that tape, Mertil has been captured by Visser Three, and he’s not morph-capable so he can’t escape. Gafinilan wants to trade the leader of the “Andalite Bandits” to the Yeerks to get his boyfriend back; he can’t fight to free Mertil because he’s terminally ill with a genetic disorder that will eventually kill him, and (it’s implied that) the Yeerks aren’t interested in disabled hosts, even disabled Andalite ones. Despite Ax’s ableism, the Animorphs agree to work with Gafinilan and free Mertil, and they’re successful. Marco ends the book talking about how there are all kinds of prejudices you’ll have to face and boxes that people will put you in, and you can’t necessarily escape them even if they’re reductive and inaccurate, but you can still live your life with pride.

So now that I’ve explained the plot, I’m gonna come out the gate saying that I love this book. I love it wholeheartedly, I love Marco’s narration, I love Ax having to deal with Andalite society’s ableism, I love these characters, and as a disabled lesbian I don’t find these disabled gays to be inherently Bad Rep.

that’s of course just my opinion and it doesn’t overshadow other issues that people might have? but at the same time, I don’t like the seemingly-common narrative that this book is all bad all the time, and I want to offer up a different read.To that end, I’m going to go point by point through some of the criticisms and common complaints that I’ve seen across the fandom over the years.

“Mertil and Gafinilan were put on a bus after one appearance because they were gay!”

this is one I’m going to have to disagree with hardcore. I talked about this yesterday, but in Animorphs there are a lot of characters or ideas that only get introduced once or twice and then get written off or dropped - in order off the top of my head, #11 (the Amazon trip), #16 (Fenestre and his cannibalism), #17 (the oatmeal), #18 (the hint of Yeerks doing genetic experiments in the hospital basement), #24/#39/#42 (the Helmacrons’ ability to detect morphing tech), #25 (the Venber), #28 (experiments with limiting brain function through drugs), #34 (the Hork-Bajir homeworld being retaken, the Ixcila procedure), #36 (the Nartec), #41 (Jake’s Bad Future Dream), and #44 (the Aboriginal people Cassie meets in Australia) all feature things that either seem to exist just for the sake of having a particular trope explored Animorphs-style or to feature an idea for One Single Book.

This is a series that’s episodic and has a very limited overall story arc because of how children’s literature in the 90s was structured - these books are closer to The Saddle Club, Sweet Valley High, Animal Ark, or The Baby-Sitters’ Club than they are to Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events. Mertil and Gafinilan don’t get to be in more than one book because they’re not established in the main cast or the supporting cast, I don’t think that it’s solely got anything to do with their being gay.

“Gafinilan has AIDS, this is a book about AIDS, and that’s homophobic!”

Okay, this is… hard. First, yes, Gafinilan does have a terminal illness. Yes, Gafinilan is gay. No, Soola’s Disease is not AIDS.

I have two responses to this, and I’ll attack them in order of their occurrence in my thought. First, there’s coded AIDS diseases all over genre fiction, especially genre fiction from that era, because the AIDS epidemic made a massive impact on public life and fundamentally changed both how the public perceived illness and queerness and how queer people themselves experienced it. I was too young to live through it, but my dad’s college roommate was out, and my dad himself has a lot of friends who he just ceases to talk about if the conversation gets past 1986 or so - this was devastating and it got examined in art for more reasons than “gay people all have AIDS”, and I dislike the implication that the only reason it could ever appear was as a tired stereotype or a message that Being Queer Means Death. Gafinilan is kind, fond of flowers, and fond of children - he’s multifaceted, and he’s got a terminal illness. Those kinds of people really exist, and they aren’t Bad Rep.

Second off, Soola’s Disease? Really isn’t AIDS. It’s a congenital genetic illness that develops over time, cannot be transmitted, and does not carry a serious stigma the way AIDS did. Gafinilan also has access to a cure - he could become a nothlit and no longer be afflicted by it, even if it’s considered somewhat dishonorable to go nothlit to escape that way. That’s not AIDS, and in fact at no point in my read and rereads did I assume that his having a terminal illness was supposed to be a commentary on homosexuality until I found out that other people were assuming it.

“Mertil losing his tail means he’s lost his masculinity, and that’s bad because he’s gay! That’s homophobic!”

so this is another one I’ve gotta hardcore disagree with, because while Mertil is one of two Very Obviously Queer Characters, he’s not the only character who loses something fundamental about himself, or even loses access to sexual and/or romantic capability in ways he was familiar with.

Tobias and Arbron both get ripped out of their ordinary normal lives by going nothlit in bad situations, and while they both wind up finding fulfillment and freedom despite that, it’s still traumatic, even more for Arbron I’d say than for Tobias. And on a psychological level, none of the main cast is left unmarked or free of trauma or free of deep change thanks to the bad things that have happened to them - they’re no less fundamentally altered than Mertil, even if it’s mental rather than physical. And yes, tail loss is equated with castration or emasculation, but that doesn’t automatically mean Mertil suffering it is tied to his homosexuality and therefore the takeaway we’re intended to have is “Being gay is tragic and makes you less of a man”. This is a series where bad shit happens to everyone, and enduring losses that take away things central to one’s self-conception or identity or body is just part of the story.

Also, frankly? Plenty of IRL disabled people have to grapple with a loss of sexual function, and again, they’re not Bad Rep just because they’re messy.

“Andalite society is confusingly written in this book, and the disability aspects are clearly just a coverup for the gay stuff!”

Andalite society is canonically sexist, a bit exceptionalist and prejudiced in their own favor, and pretty contradictory and often challenged internally on its own norms. In essence, it’s a pretty ordinary society, and they’re really realistic as sci-fi races go. It makes sense from that perspective that Andalites would tolerate scarring or a lost stalk eye or a lost skull eye, but not tolerate serious injuries that significantly impact your perceived quality of life. Ableism is like that - it’s not one-size-fits-all. I look at Ax’s reactions and I see a lot of my own family and friends’ behaviors - this vibes with my understanding of prejudice, you know?

“Mertil and Gafinilan have a tragic ending, which means the story is saying that being gay dooms you to tragedy!”

Mertil and Gafinilan have the best possible ending that they could ask for? They are victims of the war, they are suffering because of the war, they get the same cocktail of trauma and damage that every other soldier gets. But unlike Jake and Tobias and Marco, unlike Elfangor, unlike Aximili? Their ending comes in peace, in their own home. Gafinilan isn’t dying alone, he’s got the love of his life with him. Mertil isn’t going to be as isolated anymore, he’s got Marco for a friend. Animorphs is a tragedy, it’s not a happy story, it’s not something that guarantees a beautiful sunshine-and-roses ending for everyone, and I love tragedy, and so I will fight for this story. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it deserved better. But it’s not less meaningful just because it’s sad. Nobody is entitled to anything in this book, and it’s just as true for these two as it is for anyone else.

“It’s not cool that the only canonically gay characters in this series don’t get to be happy and trauma-free and unblemished Good Rep!”

This is one I can kind of understand, and I’ll give some ground to it, because it is sucky. The only thing I’ll say is that I stand by my argument that nothing that happens to Mertil and Gafinilan is unusual compared to what happens to the rest of the cast, and that their ending is way happier than Rachel and Tobias’s, or Jake and Cassie’s. But it’s a legitimate point of frustration, and the one argument I’ll say I agree has validity.

(Though, I also want to point out that I think there are plenty of equally queercoded characters in the story who aren’t Mertil and Gafinilan - Tobias, Rachel, Cassie, and Marco all get at least one or two moments that signal to me that they’re potentially LGBT+, not to mention Mr. Tidwell and Illim in #29 and their long-term domestic partnership. There’s no reason to assume that the only queer people here are those two aliens when Marco’s descriptions of Jake exist.)

“Marco uses slurs and reduces Gafinilan’s whole identity to his illness!”

Technically, yes, this is true, except putting it that way strips the whole passage of its context. Marco is discussing the boxes society puts you into, the ones you don’t have a choice about facing or escaping. He’s talking about negative stereotypes and reductive generalizations, he’s referring to them as bad things that you get inflicted upon you by an outside world or by friends who don’t know the whole story or the real you. The slurs he uses are real slurs that get thrown at people still, and they’re not okay, and the point is that they’re not okay but assholes are going to call you by them anyway. He ends by saying “you just have to learn to live with it”, and since this is coming from a fifteen-year-old Latino kid who we know is picked on by bullies for all sorts of reasons and who faces racism and homophobia? He knows what he’s talking about. He’s bitter about what’s been said and done, he’s not stating it like it’s a good thing.

Yes, absolutely, this speech is a product of its time, but it’s a product of its time that speaks of defiance and says “We aren’t what we’re said to be,” and in the year this was published? That’s a good message.

tl;dr The Other is good, actually, and Mertil and Gafinilan are incredible characters who deserve all the love they could possibly get.

[thankskenpenders]

Let’s talk a little more about what I meant by “straight writers being straight writers”

Now obviously, I don’t think that ALL straight writers are bad at writing romance. Anyone who genuinely believes this is what I meant is just looking for reasons to get mad and confirm their biases against ~mean Tumblr SJWs~

But in general, many straight people fail to critically examine their views on gender, relationships, sex, etc. They might be a little more progressive than their parents, but they’ll often still believe much of what they were raised to believe. This means that many straight people who write fiction (straight men who write genre fiction in particular) bring a lot of this cultural baggage into their writing, and end up parroting harmful or just plain boring romance tropes that have been around forever and ever. It’s usually not even intentional--it’s just what they know

Some of the common ones include, but are certainly not limited to:

Stories where the central couple’s relationship and why they like each other is barely fleshed out because “he was a boy, she was a girl, can I make it any more obvious”

“These two bicker constantly, it must be sexual tension!” (see: literally every romantic subplot in Stranger Things)

Manic pixie dream girls

Girls being treated as little more than romantic prizes to be won by the male heroes

Married couples with an obnoxious slob husband we’re supposed to sympathize with and a nagging wife (see: like 90% of all sitcoms)

In general, couples where the woman is way too good for the man

Harry Potter-style endings where the surviving characters are all arbitrarily paired off into straight marriages with kids, regardless of how much or how little the paired off characters even interacted in the series

Similarly: important female characters getting paired off with a guy and being reduced to little more than his housewife

Also, married couples where the husband has tons of friends but the wife has no life outside of being a mom (see: “Does Marge have friends?”)

Stories about how men and women “can’t really be friends” and can only be lovers

Cheating! SO MUCH cheating

“Born Sexy Yesterday” stories, especially in sci-fi, where the male lead falls for a naive and childlike yet also hypercompetent and sexualized woman

In general, men being expected to go after younger women, but usually not the other way around

Men struggling to show their girlfriends genuine emotion and say “I love you” even if they’ve been dating for a long, long time

Keep in mind all of these things pop up in fiction I LIKE. Some of my all time favorties, even! But these things are all so common because many straight people don’t think critically about their views on relationships, and take these for granted as “how couples work.” These stories then reinforce those ideas instead of challenging them and help perpetuate the cycle

[sbooksbowm]

The ‘Does this make sense?’ check: Chapter 2, Part 1, writer function

Turns out that this chapter was way too long for one post, so I broke it into three parts, one for each section. Hooray! Also, because this was originally written for an audience with 1) little knowledge of fandom and 2) little knowledge of Harry Potter, I edited out the explanatory asides about fandom-specific terms, assuming that if you are reading this here, you are more familiar with either/both. 

Introduction: the multiple jobs of a fic writer

This chapter focuses on the function of the fic writer: what does the fic writer do to distinguish herself from the author of the source text (so she is not simply replicating the source text but transforming it), articulating a new interpretation of the work (so making difference that is interesting to read), while maintaining the integrity of the universe in which she writes (so not deviating so much so that her characters/premise are unrecognizable to the reader)? It’s a tricky balance to strike! 

Part 1 looks at how writers balance the source text and fannish discourse in crafting their fic. 

Part 2 looks at how writers signal the ‘writerliness’ (or, open to interpretation-ness) of their fics to their readers by using Author Notes. 

Part 3 looks at what fannish contexts are necessary to read fic, particularly knowledge of fandom tropes to make works legible. 

This section looks at the writer as function of the text, or, to quote Kristina Busse, how fic is ‘the collection of the choices made’ by the fic writer in selecting which parts of the source text she will foreground [1].

This writer function also demonstrates how fic makes source texts ‘writerly’, or ‘constructed with every reading process’, as opposed to readerly texts, which are ‘closed and only need to be interpreted by readers’, to use Roland Barthes’s concepts [2]. The source text’s ‘writerliness’ allows fic writers to simultaneously assert themselves apart from the source text author in order to establish their vision while they necessarily rely on accepted understandings and interpretations of the source text within the fan community in order for their work to be legible. In each of the works I examine—Annerb’s ‘The Changeling’ (Parts 1-3), gedsparrowhawk’s ‘Hogwarts, to welcome you home’ (Parts 1&2), and waspabi’s ‘Hermione Granger’s Hogwarts Crammer for Delinquents on the Run’ (Parts 2&3)—the writer selects different elements of the source text and fandom conventions to make their work legible while holding themselves apart from the source text author. 

Part 1: the fic writer as function of text 

Busse writes that ‘the fan fiction writer is constantly engaged in creating her own individualized version of canon: she foregrounds certain facts and scenes and overlooks others; she makes some aspects of the story more central to her reading than they may be in the source text’ [3]. In practice, the writer balances transformation with obfuscation, drawing on a fannish framework while articulating her own interpretation, lest an interpretative community reject a characterization that veers too wildly from the known, accepted, and loved.

Alternative Universe fics play on the resonances of the original work such that they are recognizable to reader by adopting the structure of the original stories, replicating those events, and then twisting them slightly, inheriting the author’s intended meaning so that it contributes to the aggregation of the fannish interpretation. Writerly intent is a multi-faceted force that draws from source text, interpretive functions, and fan frameworks to produce a recognizable yet distinct work.

‘The Changeling’ by Annerb exemplifies this balance: ‘The Changeling’ retells the Harry Potter series from the perspective of Ginny Weasley, who is sorted into Slytherin House rather than Gryffindor House. Annerb plays with the reader’s knowledge of the canonical events of Harry Potter and subverts the expectations around characteristics of Slytherin members, writing redemptive arcs for many of the characters who were otherwise villainized or ignored and creating a fully realized student body. She executes on a favored fan interpretation of redeeming Slytherin members who are invested in House unity but spurned by prejudice, and she complicates the characteristics of other houses, highlighting their fallacies. Annerb centralizes an oft-discussed fanon of Harry Potter: what is the Slytherin perspective and how are they a part of the school? Ginny becomes the point of view for observing and catalyzing this transformation.

Annerb plays on the known conceptions of Ginny, refracting her strength, resilience, and humor through new circumstances of isolation from her family in a different house and commitment to an anti-hero status. She shifts Ginny’s context and writes out the personal and emotional repercussions of that change. The draw at the start of the fic, as the reader cannot know how different the story will be when they first read it, is asking ‘what if Ginny were in Slytherin?’, foregrounding the reader’s expectations of both who Ginny is and what Slytherin is, then slowly unraveling and reimagining both.

Another example, ‘Hogwarts, to welcome you home’, by gedsparrowhawk, demonstrates the tension between avowal of authorship (e.g. ‘JK Rowling wrote this’) and disavowal of authorial rights (e.g. ‘JK Rowling’s version is wrong’).

‘Hogwarts, to welcome you home’ is a Post-Series Alternative Universe that disregards the epilogue in Deathly Hallows and makes Harry Potter a professor at Hogwarts. In this, gedsparrowhawk overlooks the epilogue (which was criticized by many fans for many reasons) and centralizes Harry’s skill in teaching and his relationship with his godson, drawing on a popular fanon that rejects the notion that Harry would become an Auror. It also addresses a major criticism of the epilogue, which fails to acknowledge Harry’s post-war trauma; gedsparrowhawk rectifies that with an explanation of what Harry did immediately after the war, a confrontation with the portrait of Albus Dumbledore, and McGonagall’s own observations of Harry’s changed behavior. As such, ‘Hogwarts, to welcome you home’ offers one interpretation that does ‘not necessarily align with expected intended readings yet are shared by a sizeable number of readers’ [4]. 

In this case, the expected intended readings were written by JK Rowling in her epilogue, which pictures a peach-pie middle aged Harry in a stable relationship with his wife, Ginny, father of three children, seeing off his sons to Hogwarts with his best friends, Hermione and Ron, who are also in a happy marriage with two children. The idyllic conclusion to the series frustrated many readers, who wanted a deeper look at how the aftermath of the war affected Harry. A scroll through the comments section of ‘Hogwarts, to welcome you home’ suggests as much, with many readers commenting some iteration of ‘this is the epilogue now’. gedsparrowhawk successfully manages the tension of disavowing Rowling’s authorial rights in rewriting the epilogue and reinterpreting apparent themes in the source text.

Both Annerb and gedsparrowhawk use different perspectives (a common trope), and both make changes that resonate with popular fanons (Slytherin redemption and Professor!Harry). In these cases, the changes place both writers in opposition to the source text author, rather than in conflict with particular fannish factions; by situating their works with popular tropes, they signal their awareness of the fannish discourse and the reliability of their interpretations. 

Citations 

Busse, Framing fan fiction, p.107. 

Busse, p.25.

Busse, p.108.

Busse, p.109.

[ericdeggans]

The Last DEGGY Awards of 2020: Special Honors for TV Highlights During the Strangest Year in Recent Memory

Here’s what I will say about TV in the year 2020: there may not have been a lot of truly great shows, but there were a whole lot of very good ones.

Which is what made it so hard to pick a top 10 list of best shows, and likely why every roster of best ofs this year was so individualistic. I’m not a huge consumer of comedy or coming-of-age stories and not a fan of soapy drama, so those kinds of shows weren’t high on my list.

Check out the best of 2020 list I cooked up with fellow NPR critics Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris and Glen Weldon to see how few shows we picked in common.

As a final look back, here’s a special edition of my DEGGY awards, pegged to the great swath of content we waded into as virus lockdowns forced us to spend months in front of our screens.

Best Reimagining of a Franchise: The Mandalorian (Disney+) – From its start, this series has achieved everything I’d hoped, bringing fresh storytelling to underutilized corners of the Star Wars universe and pointing the way toward a new future for a hallowed film franchise. But how will they top that second season ending?

Best Fight Scenes on TV: Gangs of London (AMC+) – If you don’t have the new streaming service AMC+, you probably haven’t seen this series, which is an explicitly violent look at a crime family rocked by the murder of its patriarch. But the fight scenes, especially those featuring star Sope Dirisu, are the most kinetic and unexpectedly thrilling that I’ve on any TV show.

Best argument against Trumpism: Little America (Apple TV+) – This criminally underseen series features eight vignettes about immigrants, ranging from a  poignant story about a young boy attempting to win the National Spelling Bee to help bring his parents back from India to a Nigerian graduate student who plug himself into cowboy culture to find his place in America. 

Best Blow Against White Centering: Lovecraft Country (HBO) – As a Black person of a certain age who has always loved science fiction and monster movies, it was a real treat to experience every episode of this series, which placed a Black family at the center of a supernatural fight in ways typically reserved for white characters. Yeah, it was at times way too dense and overstuffed with commentary on race, class, sexual orientation, Afrofuturism, horror tropes and more. But that only lent the sense that they held nothing back, making sure every idea got used, in case HBO didn’t let them do it again.

Best Cleaning up of Damaging TV Tropes: Cancellation of Cops and Live PD – The great reckoning over civil rights kicked off by George Floyd’s killing helped wake up people to the corrosive effects of these so-called reality shows, which follow police officers around and cobble together episodes featuring their exploits. Too often they feature the poor and people of color, with no way to correct the record if those who are arrested on camera are eventually found innocent or charges are dropped. Here’s a story I wrote back in 2005 (!!) about how producers convinced a cop in Tampa to dress like a clown while conducting prostitution stings.   

Best Network TV Examination of Race and Society: This Is Us (NBC) – I didn’t watch much network TV this year, but the way This Is Us has continued to mine compelling drama from Randall Pearson’s search for identity as a Black man raised by white parents trying find his way in the world, remains powerful and enthralling. Earlier this year, at the end of the previous season, Sterling K. Brown’s Randall and a therapist played by Pamela Adlon had Emmy-worthy exchanges searching for the source of his anxiety issues. 

Honorable mentions: I May Destroy You (HBO), Small Axe (Amazon Prime video), The Last Dance (ESPN), Driving While Black (PBS), The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix), Better Call Saul (AMC), Harley Quinn (DC Universe/HBO Max), Unorthodox (Netflix), Woke (Hulu), David Byrne’s American Utopia (HBO), Crip Camp (Netflix), The Salisbury Poisonings (AMC+), The Boys (Amazon).

[aelaer]

Hey aelaer, I have a question and since you seem to have been writing fanfic forever, I think you're a good person to ask this. I have a crossover idea with Doctor Strange and another universe, but to my dismay someone has already written something similar (not the same universe). I did have my story plotted out already, but there's some key concepts that can't be avoided I don't know if I should give up. I don't want to be accused of plagiarism even if the story is completely different.

Hi, thanks for thinking of me for your question! I have a tendency to ramble (and I ended up writing an essay for this) so let me answer you immediately: yes, you should still write it.

Now the rest of the answer delves into the why, in entirely too much detail as I am wont to do.

According to plagiarism.org, Merriam Webster defines the following items as plagiarism:

to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own

to use (another’s production) without crediting the source

to commit literary theft

to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

For instance, if I were to state that the above was my own words, I would be plagiarizing both Merriam Webster and plagiarism.org (which is just irony at its finest).

Figuring out how to avoid plagiarizing words is easy: don’t copy-paste words that aren’t yours and declare them as yours. Slight rewording of the content doesn’t keep it from being plagiarism, either. The issue of ideas, however, is a good deal more difficult to quantify, especially in the creative space.

The Office of Research Integrity starts off by giving us a base point of idea plagiarism with the sciences in the following statement:

“In the sciences, as in most other scholarly endeavors, ethical writing demands that any ideas, data, and conclusions borrowed from others and used as the foundation of one’s own contributions to the literature, be properly acknowledged. The specific manner in which we make such acknowledgement may vary depending on the context and even on the discipline, but it often takes the form of either a footnote or a reference citation.”

This makes sense. In many educational systems kids are taught to properly site sources for information, which extends to ideas within the scientific community. If you are building your thesis on cancer research upon the discoveries of other researchers, they need to be referenced and cited properly (and it builds credibility for your own studies).

But how does this apply to creative writing, or indeed any creative medium? Obviously you don’t see footnotes for every source of inspiration in popular fiction across creative media, and it’s not like magical schools are banned from fiction because JK Rowling wrote a series about such a place. How do the rules of plagiarism of ideas that have a clear guideline in formal writing adapt to the creative arts?

To answer this question I am first going to turn to the modern legal system. Every country has its own set of laws regarding the protection of original works and ideas, but for the sake of ease the following is based on US laws and definitions. If you’re interested in your own country’s specific laws (and how they differ from what is stated here) I recommend a quick Google search.

Copyright is a concept that puts some (but not all) acts of plagiarism into a legal liability. It came into form as the printing press (and printed works) became more popular, but has grown significantly over the past 150 years as new technology and new ways to distribute media have come into play. As Wikipedia succinctly summarizes, “In law, copyright is the exclusive right, given to the creator of a work, to reproduce the work, usually for a limited time. Copyright protects the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fairuse doctrine in the United States.” This is how parody and criticism are protected, for instance.

It’s important to note that copyright protects the specifics, but not the actual idea. For instance, Marvel (and thus, Disney) have the copyright to the story of Stephen Strange, the arrogant surgeon that had a terrible car crash and went to Kamar-Taj and learned the ways of the Mystic Arts. However, if someone were to write about Trevor Baker, the arrogant baseball player that lost his arm in a car accident and went to a secret society in Japan to learn magic to become a sorcerer, there is no copyright protection. The idea is the same (and perhaps plagiarized), but there is enough difference to make it its own work.

You may note that, under that copyright definition and the current state of US law, all fanfiction are copyright infringements. Alongside that, all fanfiction can be considered a plagiarism of ideas in the eyes of some original creators. However, you’ll find that most authors, studios, and creative organizations are tolerant and sometimes encouraging of fanfiction and other fan-derived works so long as it’s not done for profit and clearly stated to be a fan-derived work (one time commissionsseem to be a grey area that most seem okay with, but something like art prints of copyrighted or trademarked characters is not something I’ve found definite rules for, and I imagine that it is also on a case by case basis; publishing written fanfiction works widely for profit is a big no for most creators). For more on this subject and how fan-derived works have fared legally, take a look at this wiki article, which mostly looks at cases within the United States but is still an interesting read. For more details about specific cases you can go to the sources linked.

You’ll note that, since copyright law does not protect ideas, that it doesn’t really fall into the scenario prompted in the original ask. The reason I bring up copyright is that it is important to recognize the differences between copyright and plagiarism.

I think Sara F Hawkins (an actual attorney, unlike me) states it best in her article about it. She has a whole list of the differences between copyright and plagiarism, but I think for the sake of this topic, this point is especially relevant to us: “Plagiarism is a violation of moral, ethical, or organization norms not laws.”

So let’s look at this case from those three viewpoints (for the sake of ease, I am using this definition to show the difference between ethics and morals. I don’t know if it’s right, but it’s useful).

Moral: The plagiarism of ideas and where it stands on a moral ground really varies from person to person. For instance, one may accuse me of plagiarizing @amethyst-noir​‘s ideas with the embellished or different spins on the prompts and asks received in her inbox. However, my moral stance would be that this falls into inspiration rather than plagiarism because there is enough of my own work within these prompts. This is a stronger argument as I also have her full support (as well as the support of a couple of the anons), but even if I didn’t, I think that if you put enough of your own spin onto the base of an idea, you craft it enough to make it your own. Many, many stories follow the same general plot lines and tropes; that does not mean they are all plagiarizing each other. Furthermore, the original ask makes it sound like you, anon, did not know this story existed after crafting the outline, making the argument null. How can you plagiarize something you did not know existed? You can’t, not from a moral standpoint.

Ethical: Unfortunately this one is a bit harder and the one you seem most concerned about. There is no one culture amongst the fan fiction community, and even every fandom has its own set of different communities with their own sets of norms, leaving this not entirely possible to predict. Instead I would rather critically examine the key plot points that are the same as this writer and figure out if they are relatively common tropes or entirely too specific to each other. For instance, if there’s a kidnapping, that’s in half the fiction out there. It’s way too broad a trope to be considered an idea one can really plagiarize. However, if both your story and theirs feature a kidnapping of the same character in the same spot with the same method after a very similar series of events, then there may be more people that see the similarities between them.If you want to take precaution against overzealous fans of the other work, upon publication of your own story, you can outright mention that you found a work similar to yours well after beginning your story and that any similarities are unintentional, with a link and a positive plug to the story in particular. You could even reach out to the author themselves before publishing, but I don’t think this is necessary, especially since you are crossing over a wholly different world (which already distinguishes itself as a different piece of work in regards to the base idea in most cases).

Organization: The authority on transformative works is usually considered to be AO3. AO3 would not pull a work for very similar ideas; if that were the case, the hurt/comfort, chatroom, and E-rating categories would be much, much smaller than they are now. So no worries on that end.

I cannot predict the behavior of your reviewers, anon, and without specifics I cannot say how similar your work is to this work already published, but I hope that everything I outlined above gives you an idea of where to go from here.

I am going to end this essay of an answer with something I found in my research on this subject. I came across this fantastic article by a Jonathan Bailey about the plagiarism of ideas and how they apply in US patent law (unlike copyright law, you can patent ideas), and what it would mean for the creative space if they were applied similarly. I recommend reading the whole article, but this passage especially stood out to me:

The best thing that we can do is realize that, in the eyes of the law, the value of a creative work is in its execution, not the idea behind it. As such, we have to take it upon ourselves not only to be original, but to carry out our visions the best possible way.

I think that should be a mantra everyone working with both original and derivative works should take to heart. Supposedly every story has already been told, so we may as well just tell the stories with our own spin, in our own words, and our own specific ideas that make them distinctly ours. That is how we make them unique and memorable.

[nmcconnellportfolio]

Saving Marion Crane: Women in Horror and Fanfiction as a Revolutionary Act of Reclamation for Women Writers

A Research Paper on women in the horror genre and the creation of the literary zine The Story of a Beautiful Dead Woman

Everyone knows the story of Marion Crane; a young woman who skips town after stealing a large sum of money, so she can help her lover divorce his wife, only to find a motel and met her end through gaining the attention of one of the most famous horror villains in cinematic history: Norman Bates. Marion Crane, whose famous moment of dying in the acclaimed psychological horror film Psycho (1960) was the embryo to one of the constant tropes that make up the horror genre; the death of a beautiful, sexual woman. Marion Crane, who was designed to merely act as the false protagonist, written to die so the real story of Psycho – the story of Norman Bates and his beloved mother - could be told. With the creation of Bates Motel in 2013, the genre of horror has evolved and grown between the fifty-three years that separates the texts. In between this stretch of time, we have seen the horror genre (especially the genre of slasher horror) – be characterised with horrific acts of violence (both physical and sexual) against female characters. And interestingly, during the fifty-three years, the internet was born and the wide-accessibility to reproduce and recreate and retell texts from mainstream culture, to recreate these texts as fanfiction, was born. Fanfiction, in particular, which is predominantly created by women to fulfil desires that are not given acknowledgement or satisfaction by mainstream popular culture. Fanfiction which allows readers to become creators and engage critically with horror texts, as so to remediate them into narratives that fulfil the audience’s desires better.

Women (and Female Sexuality) in Horror.

Looking at the wide range of the literary and academic sources regarding the representations of women in the horror genre, the majority of academic sources have noted the underlining theme of misogyny and gendered violence within horror – Psycho (1960) only being one example amongst many. What’s notable is that like fanfiction, the slasher horror genre has been ignored and considered lesser deserving of academic attention – on the basis that it was exploitative, that the domain of the horror genre belonged to low-brow culture (Trencansky, 1990, pp. 64). This is especially relevant since the literary zine I focused on is a retelling (transformative text/fanfiction piece) about one famous film, Psycho (1960), which in particular is considered to be the cinematic piece that birthed a specific branch of horror cinema, known as the slasher film; where the violent deaths of female characters are a common aspect of the genre. In a survey that examined over 57 slasher films, Gloria Cowan and Margaret O’Brien noted that female sexuality often leads to death in slasher films – that women portrayed as sexually active were more likely become victims of the killer than chaste women or men in general (Cowan and O’Brien, 1990, pp. 194). Andrew Welsh followed up with another survey in 2010, noting that while sexuality in general was a factor of death in slasher films, female characters depicted as sexual were more likely to die and were depicted with longer death scenes as punishment for that sexuality (Welsh, 2010, pp. 770). With the passage of twenty years, it’s illustrated that the brutal deaths of women in horror is still a common aspect to horror cinema.

Another aspect that interlinks with the punishment of female sexuality is the punishment and Othering of non-traditional masculinity. Referring back to Men, Women and Chainsaws, Clover had proposed that male audiences are forced to identify with the surviving female victim, named the ‘Final Girl’, as she kills the villain – even through while the thought of female protagonists being supported is progressive,  it should be noted that the Final Girl is often presented as chaste and often presents herself as more masculine in comparison to the female victims (Clover, 2015, pp. 40) This is especially important to understand in the dynamic of whom she has to survive and ultimately kill. In a study focusing on the presentation of masculinity in horror cinema, Rieser noted that famous villains – such as the famous Norman Bates from Psycho (1960)– may be presented as monstrous because they do not fulfil their roles as men; that they may be virginial (Michael Meyers from Halloween and other examples) or non-gender conforming (i.e. Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs) or convinced that they are a woman – as in Norman Bates and his persona, Mother (Rieser, 2001, pp. 374). So even with the theory of women successfully fighting back against their killers, the subtext of negativity about the feminine – that only masculine means of power can be considered powerful, that feminine men are monsters – still exists in horror.

Fanfiction and Women.

Fanfiction, when the research is not properly done, is characterised as either shallow and badly-written sexual fantasies written by teenage girls or acts of copyright violations that disrespect the texts creators and devalues the text itself. However, I would make the argument that if art is a conversation between the consumer and the creator, fanfiction is the response to when culture does not fulfil the desires of an audience. The principle of fanfiction, as discussed by culture theorist Henry Jenkins, is that ‘once television characters enter into a broader circulation, intrude into our living rooms, pervade the fabric of our society, they belong to their audience and not simply to the artists who originated them’ (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 333). And one particularly interesting aspect to fanfiction is how the majority of fanfiction participants are female audiences that become women-writers, one study proposing that fanfiction could be the ‘result of the need of the female audience for fictional narratives that expand the boundary of the official source products’ (Peeples, Yen and Weigle, 2018, pp. 258). This is especially important when you consider that there are female audiences who watch and consume horror films and may even be paradoxically felt to be spoken to by the text (Trencansky, 1990, pp. 64).

Fanfiction, an activity that is about the circulation and active critique of original texts amongst communities of fans (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 331, is all about being able to indulge in desires and fantasies that mainstream society cannot fulfil, all under anonymous identities that separate the writer’s real life from their writing (Peeples, Yen and Weigle, 2018, pp. 259). But at its heart, fanfiction is seen as a form of participatory culture, a culture that has flourished with the birth of the internet which allows for creators that may be gatekept out of traditional spaces (i.e. the exclusion of female and minority creators in Hollywood or traditional publishing) to write texts that defy the narratives upheld in popular culture – even (and perhaps, particularly) about the narratives of gender and sexuality in horror. Fanfiction, as Henry Jenkins famously said in a New York Times interview, is a ‘a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk’ (Harmon, 1997).

Case Study: A Fanfiction.

To look at how fanfiction can act as an act of remediating and reclaiming male-focused horror stories for female creators and female audiences, it’s important to now focus on the praxis of fanfiction by examining three fanfiction pieces posted on Archive of Our Own – a website and server space created by the Transformative Works. By examining the two transformative texts in their relation to their original texts, we can see how fanfiction is a method of participating in the creation and recreation of culture. The first text, “so close (just the two of us)” (Espeones, 2018), the fanfiction rewrites the Halloween series with Michael Meyers (the masked villain of Halloween) being depicted as the victim of stalking to Laurie Strode, the final girl of Halloween now depicted as a killer and stalker. By inverting the violence once put upon Laurie, by rewriting the original story into a story of female-perpetrated violence against a male victim, the story could be calling to Clover’s idea that ‘gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane’ when it comes to the presentation and dynamics of gender in storytelling (Clover, 2015, pp. 46). This switching of moral roles between antagonist and protagonist within, falls under one of the ten categories of how fans rewrite original texts, known as moral realignment, where such fanfictions deliberately ‘blur the original narrative's more rigid boundaries between good and evil’ (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 221).

The second text, “A Deal’s a Deal – Freddy Kreuger x Reader” (summerdayghost, 2018), is a fanfiction where the reader is encouraged to insert themselves as an insert into the story, where they gain the romantic interest of Freddy Kreuger, who helps the reader gain revenge on the people who bully them. This sort of fanfiction, self-insert fanfiction, is the most controversial within fandom – falling under the category of personalization – which is about fulfilling the desires of both writers/readers to embed themselves directly into the story rather than identify with another character (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 227). However, this fanfiction could theoretically be considered a form of escapism and also a rebuttal against Rieser’s theory of feminine men as monsters. Personalization fanfiction texts asks readers to rehearse unconscious ideas about romance and courtship, askes the readers to give themselves permission to feel desire and fantasise in a safe space through identification of a fictional stand-in (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007, pp. 160). More particular, instead of the text identifying feminine desires as deserving of punishment and having female characters act in passive ways and also identifying Freddie Kreuger as a monster, the fanfiction places the reader in the position of loving the monster and aiding him in the crime – and having the monster love you back, without hurting you. These two fanfiction pieces merely being two amongst many ways of rewriting horror texts to ‘better speak to the audience's cultural interests and more fully address their desires.’ (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 333).

Conclusion/Discussion.

While the representations of women and female sexuality in the horror genre, we see that the horror genre – and cinema and television, in general, has a long way to go. If the horror genre does not punish women for sexuality or force them to abandon femininity to survive – the same way that Lady McBeth of Shakespeare was forced to cast away for womanhood for power, it makes monsters out of men that do possess femininity. Which is why the rise of fanfiction is so important – to claim these texts as our own, women-writers have the freedom to reclaim outdated narratives to tell new stories. Even in mainstream cinema, the 2010s have being subject to a renaissance of horror cinematic pieces such as The VVitch (2015), the Babadook (2014) or Hereditary (2018); The VVitch about a Puritan woman caught in the paranoia of a witchhunt and whom becomes a witch herself, The Babadook being a fable where the monster acts as an allegory for grief and the terrors of motherhood and Hereditary being the story of mental illness and familial trauma through the perspective of a family falling apart. All capitalised by the creation of Bates Motel, a television adaptation of Psycho (1960) where the text is transformed to have Marion Crane – the woman whose death gave birth to slasher horror – survive and leave the hotel unharmed. All these texts show the direction of horror bending towards feminist storytelling, towards perspectives once erased in cinema and actively celebrated in fanfiction communities.

References

Clover, C. (2015). Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (pp. 21-64). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cowan, G., & O'Brien, M. (1990). Gender and survival vs. death in slasher films: A content analysis. Sex Roles, 23(3-4), 187-196. doi: 10.1007/bf00289865

Espeones. (2018). A Deal's a Deal - Freddy Krueger x Reader. Retrieved from https://archiveofourown.org/works/15385824

Harmon, A. (1997). In TV's Dull Summer Days, Plots Take Wing on the Net. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/18/business/in-tv-s-dull-summer-days-plots-take-wing-on-the-net.html

Jenkins, H. (2012). Textual Poachers: Televison Fans and Participatory Culture (Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition) (pp. 215-229, 330-340). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge.

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2007). A New Literacies Sampler (pp. 137-165). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Peeples, D., Yen, J., & Weigle, P. (2018). Geeks, Fandoms, and Social Engagement. Child And Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics Of North America, 27(2), 247-267. doi: 10.1016/j.chc.2017.11.008

Rieser, K. (2001). Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film. Men And Masculinities, 3(4), 370-392. doi: 10.1177/1097184x01003004002

summerdayghost. (2018). so close (just the two of us). Retrieved from https://archiveofourown.org/works/16605782

Trencansky, S. (2001). Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror. Journal Of Popular Film And Television, 29(2), 63-73. doi: 10.1080/01956050109601010

Welsh, A. (2010). On the Perils of Living Dangerously in the Slasher Horror Film: Gender Differences in the Association Between Sexual Activity and Survival. Sex Roles, 62(11-12), 762-773. doi: 10.1007/s11199-010-9762-x

[itslmdee]

What is Meta

Meta is a term you’ve probably come across in jargon such as “metadata”. You’ll hear it quite often in relation to media and fandom. Meta refers to the self-referential nature of something.

For example, a metafiction might be the “play within a play” featured in Hamlet. It might be about a character who knows they are in fictional universe. It might a story about a storyteller, or a movie about filmmaking. It might invoke the conventions of narrative such as in the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett in which “one-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten”, because, as the characters themselves understand, that is how stories work.

Meta is often used as a blanket term within fandom to denote critical analysis and discussions about media artefacts. This is not the same as a review such as “The cinematography is good but the plot is poor”. Instead you will find readings such as “Sherlock’s Coat: The Importance of Costumes” focussing on the BBC’s Sherlock or “Comparing BBC’s Sherlock to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes: Misogyny and Subtextal Homoeroticism” or “Reading Ron Weasley as Bisexual” or “Magic: Representations of Wicca and Neo-Paganism in Popular Media”.

These types of readings are common in academia, where, for example, feminist readings or Marxist readings of a text are used to critically examine a book, film, or television series. Fandom however has picked up on the tools used professionally and uses them to start their own discussions about subjects of interest.

Meta in this sense can also denote metafiction as discussed above, such as a map of Hogwarts (Harry Potter), or works intended to assist fans to create other fanworks such as a character list giving key facts as a ready reference, or a primer on writing about emergency medical treatments to give realism to fanfiction.

In fannish terms then “meta” can refer to a variety of non-fiction texts as well as texts incorporating the self-referential nature of storytelling. For many, it’s an interesting and important part of fandom. Fandom is about more than just reading a book or watching a film or show or listening to a particular band. It’s about a sense of community with other fans, but it is also about engaging with the work which can include discussing it, analysing it, and creating transformative works inspired by the original work.

Meta is about taking a deeper look at a work, comparing and contrasting, reading it from different angles. It recognises that media is important, that it informs us and our world, and as such, deserves to be studied as well as enjoyed. (references/further reading under the cut)

Resources/Further Reading

The Wikipedia Metafiction page has more examples of the types of metafiction while the TV Tropes Million To One Chance page gives examples of that trope, including that of the Pratchett usage mentioned here. None of the fandom specific meta titles given here are real but were created to give a feel for the types of meta created. It is considered poor etiquette to link to specific fannish endeavours outside of fandom without prior permission. However searching for “meta” and your favourite fandom will probably bring up some results if you’re interested in reading some examples, though as with all work, professional or fan-created, quality varies considerably. originally published at my wordpress

[youniversify]

WEEK 6...?

"To meet this one in all the lifetimes I will be given. In every life, in every chance, in every small opportunity that I will have—let the earth and heavens move so I can see you, meet you, and if it's not too much to ask Fate, I hope I get to love you." - writingcap

In the recent turn of events, this entry is currently optional. To be honest, I was slightly disappointed because I already loaded some possible topics in the entries. Result? This incoherent and self-indulgent rants about the topics I couldn't let go of. Some unfinished. Mostly drabbles because I spitball a lot and my attention span for it barely holds enough—I switch frequently. 

So I made this prompt of two people finding each other over and over again in even in different universes and in different lifetimes because they're soulmates out of whim because my head was swimming with thoughts of this so I manifested into writing it. Although I doubt I'll continue it given that it's farfetched to become a music video (maybe at the greatest, only a school project film), my friends still hyped it. They're wonderful. 

MV IDEA (Ben&Ben's "Araw-Araw")

"Hey."

"Hm?"

"Don't laugh."

"Wala ka pa ngang sinasabi."

"Iiih kasi, my tanong is serious!"

"Ge pagbibigyan kita."

"Naniniwala ka ba sa soulmates?"

Umaga na sa ating duyan 'Wag nang mawawala

"...Like yung multiverse theory eme?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Oo naman."

"Really?"

"Oo ngaaaa. Ang sakin lang, hindi lahat tayo may ganun. May pwedeng dalawa lang sila, may ibang tatlo. Yung iba romantic, iba platonic."

"Ay. Seryoso siya."

"Gago eh malamang seryoso tanong mo 'di ba?"

"'To naman, 'di mabiro. Pero sa tingin mo magkikita sila sa lahat ng universe na 'yun?"

Umaga na sa ating duyan Magmamahal, oh, mahiwaga

-- [CUT TO:]

Their eyes widened. But it followed a retracted confused pair of eyebrows, touch of an unfamiliar thread being prepared. They forget they're not the only ones in the room when someone else interrupts.

"Magkakilala kayo?"

— Parang?                                 — Yes?

The studio lights flicker with anticipation, but neither of them say anything.

[intro instrumental]

Action! The two pretend to bump into each other, the collision of shoulders (albeit choreographed) emitting an unraveling of the thread. Growing familiarity.

They look into each other's eyes, and in them are emotions of...

-- [CUT TO:]

...hatred, envy. Self, why did you agree on letting this damn childhood friend acquaintance stay in their own house again?

Matang magkakilala

"Hanggang ngayon nambabangga ka parin?"

Pota, family friends nga pala magulang namin.

--

Two strangers meet for the first time. "Magkakilala kayo?" And they lose the words they're finding to say.

--

https://youtu.be/5uQLDRlp0xI

I'm actually quite glad I put off watching this when it first released during the week of our Preliminary Examinations, because now I get to marvel at the ingenuity. Extraordinary talent pulsing through the screen. Silent films aren't my cup of tea so going into it, I was doubtful. After watching, I shouldn't have doubted the expression of the 19-year-old dancer and choreographer Sean Lew who wrote, directed, and produced this. I realized I shouldn't be so wary of art that I don't understand fully or those of non-linear stories, seeing other fans' reactions of (albeit it's in our human nature to) breaking down and comprehending the meaning of the scenes. Ika nga, "art—you don't have to understand everything. Mas mahalaga yung nararamdaman mo." And I felt pain, anxiety, turmoil, misery, longing, fear, hope, tranquility, peace, and love. I've been a fan of him since 2018 when I discovered them competing in World of Dance and his partnership with Kaycee Rice—which coincidentally enough, is also the time he started creating this dance film. The juxtaposition of words in each Scene: Peace & War, Harmony & Noise, Give & Take, Hopes & Doubts, Fear & Acceptance; and the choice of music deliberately fit to the abovementioned concepts: Billie Eilish's ocean eyes, Panic! at the Disco's High Hopes, Dermot Kennedy's Glory, etc. And for an experimental film, it has a clear resolution! All of the main character's pursuits of piecing together the puzzle throughout his (what seems to be a coming-of-age) journey actually gives the audience the full picture. He's able to reunite with the one he loves, and though frightened by the possibility of that love leaving again by pushing her away, they eventually get to each other's heads and settle. 

I've been reading audience feedback about how they think it's badass for a character to smoke. Squinting, I read more and learned that herbal cigarettes are what actors use during shooting. Then relieved, I searched deeper. Unfortunately I found out that even though herbal cigs are marketed as safer, they produce tar which is an active agent for causing cancer in regular cigarettes. So, ekis parin sakin if one day I produce any screenwork to have my actors use them. No smokers as characters I guess. I still have to think in special cases though, like if it's more of a plot device than a character stylistic choice. 

So I tried to watch Big Bang Theory with a friend and I just found myself conflicted. Sure, I could make a video analysis essay about misogyny played for laughs and other numerous problematic comedic tropes used throughout the series, but what caught my eye in particular is the character Sheldon Cooper Ph.D., Sc.D. Played by the brilliant Jim Parsons, he's presented as the autistic-coded (that is, not explicitly confirmed by the showrunners nor canonically diagnosed) nerd scientist whose ego is too inflated to make room for tact. Which leads me to my main point: why are stereotypically intelligent fictional characters have low emotional quotient (EQ)? You'd suppose some writers have done research and stumbled upon the IQs and EQs of people. No. Instead, they completely disregard that a person with high regard for the technical sciences wouldn't be kind in the same breath. Realistically, they would value the social sciences because these are what built civilization in the first place and have successfully created and bridged human connection. They would take to heart the value of Psychology as well! 

I discovered this podcast from the online fandom of Gaya sa Pelikula. Remember when I said they're critical thinkers? Well, one of the podcast's hosts sent this article on Parasocial Interaction to one of the lead actors himself. He then replied, grateful, with keeping himself in check as to how he views Karl.     

He did admit in a question from Direk Takes exclusive paid episode that he sometimes doesn't "banlaw" his character Karl Almasen. Banlaw in film context is the act of washing out one's own character by personality traits, attitudes, behavior, and perspective. Common reasons are because (1) playing morally tainted characters can personally affect your mental health, and (2) blurring the lines between that and other types of dangerous characters (abusers, rapists, murderers) could start to take a toll on you and make you fall into the trap of, "Huh. Maybe my character has justifiable points for genocide." In line with this, he says he doesn't banlaw because Karl is inherently this innocent, wide-eyed freshman who sees the good in everyone without malice—says he could use some of that in his real life.     

And that's so valid! He will make you kinder. But because of the fan-suggested article, he took a step back and reevaluated if there should still be a line drawn between him and Karl. In the podcast, we find the answer: Yes. Although Parasocial Interaction is defined as the audience forming a psychological close relationship with those of media personalities, it can still be redefined in the context of the media personality forming a psychological close relationship with his own formed character that may be lead to the constant interaction with his fans, myself included. "Gaya sa Payaso," the aforementioned podcast, tackles this conflict head on as the two main hosts break down situations and discern acceptability. It's an intelligent listen. I am reminded to still create distance between myself and the celebrity, no matter how close we could get. 

https://open.spotify.com/show/7mg92j83PtjmbNnQNWVr8x?si=GMEbSF9TQryQANV3xf6Xqw

Full circle moment: after watching an amazing 3-hour interview about the trials and tribulation of sports (specifically cheer), at 1 am I told Paolo that I wrote about him in my Understanding the Self entries. He responded.

A sight to see: mama and papa sitting outside at a table, eating with my sister. I hand over a slice of chocolate cake from Red Ribbon. She takes it with a full smile, and after I've stood there gaping, she shares a laugh with papa. Though the speakers blare in the garage, the noise is drowned out. 

Mundane. 

Yet unfamiliar. 

Do you ever see your parents' mortality hang over their head? Today, I did.

“Makikiisa tayo sa rebolusyong atin. Uuwi’t uuwian.” - Atria Pacaña

[trinuviel]

Azor Ahai, The Prince that was Promised and the Red Sword of Heroes (part 4)

In my last post, I examined the legend of Lightbringer - the burning sword that Azor Ahai wielded against the dark. I also touched upon the how the legend relates to Daenerys and her dragons. This post will continue this subject but  I’ll also raise the issue of the reliability of prophecies as well as cast some doubt upon the issue on whether Azor Ahai reborn really is the promised hero. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) 

THREE SWORDS, THREE DRAGONS

If the hatching of the three dragons represents the three swords forged by Azor Ahai, then what would represent their tempering? This is where we enter into the realm of speculation based on the show rather than the books. I would argue that the dragons will be tempered in battle. It is a common saying that soldiers tempered in battle as an expression testing their mettle. Dany’s dragons will be tested in battle and two of them will fall – and it will Viserion and Rhaegal, their growth and strength inhibited by their incarceration in the pit of the pyramid in Meereen. Just as the the growth of the Targaryen was slowed after they were confined to the Dragonpit in King’s Landing.

In the show, Viserion was felled by the Night King’s icy spear and it sunk into the icy waters of a lake. This could definitely be considered as a tempering by water, like the first sword that AA forged. However, we don’t know if this is a plot that is exclusive to the show or whether Dany will lose a dragon to the ice zombies in the books as well. There is another possibility for a tempering by water in the books. Victarion Greyjoy is on his way to Meereen with horn Dragonbinder, a Valyrian artifact that supposedly has the ability to control dragons. The Greyjoys are associated with water (the sea) and Victarion suborning one of Dany’s dragons can certainly be considered a failed tempering by water.

The second sword that AA forged was tempered in the blood of a lion and still it failed. If a second dragon is killed in battle (as an analogy to the tempering of the second sword), then it is very likely that it will involve a Lannister since the sigil of House Lannister is a lion. The show has already teased this when Jaime Lannister charged Drogon in s07ep4. 

I have written elsewhere that the imagery of this scene has several points of similarity with artistic depictions of St. George the Dragonslayer throughout the history of Western art since the Middle Ages. If Jaime is to kill a dragon, it will probably be Rhaegal since the dragon in the paintings of St. George the Dragon Slayer almost always is green (like Rhaegal).

That leaves Drogon, the largest and strongest of the dragons. Is Drogon really the Red Sword of Heroes? Is this monster really the weapon that will deliver the world from an icy apocalypse?

Make no mistake. The dragons are monsters! Even Daenerys realizes this in one of her rare moments of self-reflection:

Mother of dragons, Daenerys thought. Mother of monsters. What have I unleashed upon the world? A queen I am, but my throne is made of burned bones, and it rests on quicksand. Without dragons, how could she hope to hold Meereen, much less win back Westeros? I am the blood of the dragon, she thought. If they are monsters, so am I. (ADwD, Daenerys II)

WHAT HAVE I UNLEASED UPON THE WORLD? This is such an interesting sentence, especially in the context of Daenerys as Azor Ahai come again. The dragons are dangerous, they are destructive on a massive scale and they may do more harm than good.

IS PROPHECY DESTINY?

In my previous post, I made an argument for Daenerys Targaryen as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Azor Ahai reborn. I feel fairly confident in identifying Dany as AA come again. Azor Ahai reborn is the Champion of R’hllor and Daenerys is connected to fire in an intimate and elemental way. Does this mean that Dany is the one who will save Westeros? In a traditional piece of fantasy fiction, she most certainly would be. When it comes to GRRM, I am less certain because he engages critically with the tropes that dominate fantasy as a genre:

The battle between Good and Evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between Good and Evil is fought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés.

It is certainly a genuine, legitimate topic as the core of fantasy, but I think the battle between Good and Evil is waged within the individual human hearts. We all have good in us and we all have evil in us, and we may do a wonderful good act on Tuesday and a horrible, selfish, bad act on Wednesday, and to me, that’s the great human drama of fiction. I believe in gray characters, as I’ve said before. We all have good and evil in us and there are very few pure paragons and there are very few orcs. A villain is a hero of the other side, as someone said once, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and that’s the interesting thing. In the case of war, that kind of situation, so I think some of that is definitely what I’m aiming at. – GRRM (x)

On the surface, Daenerys Targaryen is a character that conforms to many of the genre’s expectations when it comes to a hero and saviour. She’s royalty fallen on hard times. She has undergone a lot of hardship but she is ultimately rewarded with magical creatures and she quite likely is the subject of a prophecy about the salvation of the world.

However, GRRM quietly subverts the trope of the prophesied saviour. Daenerys wants to be good, she wants to be a saviour. She has empathy for the suffering of the downtrodden people she comes across in Essos. She wants to save them and she leads a war of conquest against the Masters of Slaver’s Bay in the name of freedom. However, Daenerys is a saviour who fails again and again, not because she faces overwhelming odds but because she ignorant and lacks patience. Her solution for the Lhazareen women she “saves” from rape by the Dothraki is to make them marry their rapists. The slaves she liberates in Meereen are forced to sell themselves back into slavery because she has no alternative to the slave economy she destroyed.

In the world that GRRM has created, Daenerys Targaryen being the reincarnation of Azor Ahai doesn’t necessarily mean that she will save the world. She’s not going to be a hero and saviour simply because a prophecy says so. If she’s going to save the world, then it will be because she chooses to do so! “The battle between Good and Evil is fought largely within the individual human heart.”

In the show Dany has come to a cross roads. She has to choose between her desire to be a saviour and her desire for the Iron Throne. She can be a saviour or a conqueror. She cannot be both – and she hasn’t made this choice yet. Her dragons are weapons and they can be used for either good or evil – against the ice zombies or against living breathing people.

She can choose to be either a saviour or the Queen of Ashes. 

My point is this: prophecy is not necessarily destiny! The hero has to choose to do the right thing – and that choice has to be difficult. It cannot be a foregone conclusion that the “hero” will make the right choice because it can be very difficult to abandon selfish desires.

There’s also another reason as to why we should be wary of the role Daenerys may play as Azor Ahai reborn. Prophecies are tricky. In fact, several warnings are issued regarding prophecies in the text itself:

“Prophecy is like a half-trained mule. It looks as though it might be useful, but the moment you trust in it, it kicks you in the head.” - Tyrion Lannister to Jorah Mormont (ADwD, Tyrion IX)

Gorghan of Old Ghis once wrote that a prophecy is like a treacherous woman. She takes your member in her mouth, and you moan with the pleasure of it and think how sweet, how fine, how good this is… and then her teeth snap shut and your moans turn to screams. That is the nature of prophecy, said Gorghan. Prophecy will bite your prick off every time.“ - Maester Marwyn to Samwell Tarly (AFoC, Samwell V)

These utterances are not just warnings to the characters within the story. They are also warnings to the reader. I find this notion of prophecy as a warning very interesting. The unreliability of prophecy goes beyond identifying who is the promised hero. It questions the very nature of prophecy itself – and I think that we should be very suspicious and wary of the prophecies that the priests of R’hllor espouses. This is a subject that I’ll examine in the next installment of this series.

[joannalannister]

The Dead Ladies Club

“Ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.”

The Dead Ladies Club is a term I invented** circa 2012 to describe the pantheon of undeveloped female characters in ASOIAF from the generation or so before the story began. 

It is a term that carries with it inherent criticisms of ASOIAF, which this post will address, in an essay in nine parts. The first, second, and third parts of this essay define the term in detail. Subsequent sections examine how these women were written and why this aspect of ASOIAF merits criticism, exploring the pervasiveness of the dead mothers trope in fiction, the excessive use of sexual violence in writing these women, and the differences in GRRM’s portrayals of male sacrifice versus female sacrifice in the narrative. 

To conclude, I assert that the manner in which these women were written undermines GRRM’s thesis, and ASOIAF -- a series I consider to be one of the greatest works of modern fantasy -- is poorer because of it. 

*~*~*~*~

PART I: WHAT IS THE DEAD LADIES CLUB?

Below is a list of women I personally include in the Dead Ladies Club. This list is flexible, but this is generally who people are talking about when they’re talking about the DLC:

Lyanna Stark

Elia Martell

Ashara Dayne

Rhaella Targaryen

Joanna Lannister

Cassana Estermont

Tysha

Lyarra Stark

the Unnamed Princess of Dorne (mother to Doran, Elia, and Oberyn)

Brienne’s Unnamed Mother

Minisa Whent-Tully

Bethany Ryswell-Bolton

EDIT - The Miller’s Wife - GRRM never named her, but she was raped by Roose Bolton and she gave birth to Ramsay

I might be forgetting someone

Most of the DLC are mothers, dead before the series began. I deliberately use the word “pantheon” when describing the DLC because, like the gods of ancient mythology, these women typically loom large over the lives of our current POVs, and it is their deification that is largely the problem. The women of the Dead Ladies Club tend to be either heavily romanticized or heavily villainized by the text, either up on a pedestal or down on their knees, to paraphrase Margaret Attwood. The DLC are written by GRRM as little more than male fantasies and tired tropes, defined almost exclusively by their beauty and desirability (or lack thereof). They have no voices of their own. Too often they are nameless. They are frequently the victims of sexual violence. They are presented with few or no choices in their stories, something I consider to be a particularly egregious oversight when GRRM says it is our choices which define us. 

The space in the narrative given over to their humanity and their interiority (their inner lives, their thoughts and feelings, their existence as individuals) is minimal or nonexistent, which is quite a shame in a series that is meant to celebrate our common humanity. How can I have faith in the thesis of ASOIAF, that people’s “lives have meaning, not their deaths,” when GRRM created a coterie of women whose main if not sole purpose was to die? 

I restrict the Dead Ladies Club to women one or two generations back because the Lady in question must have some immediate connection to a POV character or a second-tier character. These women tend to be of immediate importance to a POV character (mothers, grandmothers, etc), or at most they’re one character removed from a POV character in the main story (AGOT - ADWD+). 

Example #1: Dany (POV) --> Rhaella Targaryen

Example #2: Davos (POV) --> Stannis --> Cassana Estermont

*~*~*~*~

PART II: "NOW SAY HER NAME.”

Lyanna Stark, “beautiful, willful, and dead before her time.” We know little about Lyanna other than how much men desired her. A Helen of Troy type figure, an entire continent of men fought and died because “Rhaegar loved his Lady Lyanna”. He loved her enough to lock her in a tower, where she gave birth and died. But who was she? How did she feel about any of these events? What did she want? What were her hopes, her dreams? On these, GRRM remains silent. 

Elia Martell, “kind and clever, with a gentle heart and a sweet wit.” Presented in the narrative as a dead mother, a dead sister, a deficient wife who could bare no more children, she is defined solely by her relationships with various men, with no story of her own outside of her rape and murder. 

Ashara Dayne, the maiden in the tower, the mother of a stillborn daughter, the beautiful suicide, we get no details of her personality, only that she was desired by Barristan the Bold and either (or perhaps both) Brandon or Ned Stark. 

Rhaella Targaryen, a Queen of the Seven Kingdoms for more than 20 years. We know that Aerys abused and raped her to conceive Daenerys. We know that she suffered many miscarriages. But what do we know about her? What did she think of Aerys’s desire to make the Dornish deserts bloom? What did she spend 20 years doing when she wasn’t being abused? How did she feel when Aerys moved the court to Casterly Rock for almost a year? We don’t have answers to any of these questions. Yandel wrote a whole history book for ASOIAF giving us lots and lots of information on the personalities and quirks and fears and desires of men like Aerys and Tywin and Rhaegar, so I know who these men are in a way that I don’t know the women in canon. I don’t think it’s reasonable that GRRM left Rhaella’s humanity virtually blank when he had all of TWOIAF to elaborate on pre-series characters, and he could have easily made a little sidebar on Queen Rhaella. We have a lot of dairies and letters and stuff about the thoughts and feelings of real medieval queens, so why didn’t Yandel (and GRRM) give us a little more about the last Targaryen queen in the Seven Kingdoms? Why didn’t we even get a picture of Rhaella in TWOIAF? 

Joanna Lannister, desired by both a King and a King’s Hand and made to suffer for it, she died giving birth to Tyrion. We know there was “love between” Tywin and Joanna, but details about her are few and far between. With many of these women, the scant lines in the text about them often leave the reader asking, “well, what does that mean exactly?” What does it mean exactly that Lyanna was willful? What does it mean exactly that Rhaella was mindful of her duty? Joanna is no exception, with GRRM’s teasing yet frustratingly vague remark that Joanna “ruled” Tywin at home. Joanna is merely the roughest sketch in the text, seen through a glass darkly. 

Cassana Estermont. Honestly I tried to recall a quote about Cassana and I realized that there wasn’t one. She is the drowned lover, the dead wife, the dead mother, and we know nothing else. 

Tysha, a teenage girl who was saved from rapers, only to be gang-raped on Tywin Lannister’s orders. Her whereabouts become something of a talisman for Tyrion in ADWD, as if finding her will free him from his dead father’s long, black shadow, but aside from the sexual violence she suffered, we know nothing else about this lowborn girl except that she loved a boy deemed by Westerosi society to be unloveable. 

For Lyarra, Minisa, Bethany, and the rest, we know little more than their names, their pregnancies, and their deaths, and for some we don’t even have names. 

I often include Lynesse Hightower and Alannys Greyjoy as honorary members, even though they’re obviously not dead. 

I said above that the DLC are either up on a pedestal or down on their knees. Lynesse Hightower is both, introduced to us by Jorah as a love story out of the songs, and villainized as the woman who left Jorah to be a concubine in Lys. In Jorah’s words, he hates Lynesse, almost as much as he loves her. Lynesse’s story is defined by a lot of tired tropes; she is the “Stunningly Beautiful” “Uptown Girl” / “Rich Bitch” “Distracted by the Luxury” until she realizes Jorah is “Unable to support a wife”. (All of these are explained on tv tropes if you would like to read more.) Lynesse is basically an embodiment of the gold digger trope without any depth, without any subversion, without really delving into Lynesse as a person. Even though she’s still alive, even though lots of people still alive know her and would be able to tell us about her as a person, they don’t. 

Alannys Greyjoy I personally include in the Dead Ladies Club because her character boils down to a “Mother’s Madness” with little else to her, even tho, again, she’s not dead. 

When I include Lynesse and Alannys, every region in GRRM’s Seven Kingdoms has at least one of the DLC. That was something that stood out to me when I was first reading - how widespread GRRM’s dead mothers and cast off women are. It’s not just one mother, it’s not just one House, it’s everywhere in GRRM’s writing.

And when I say “everywhere in GRRM’s writing,” I mean everywhere. Mothers killed off-screen (typically in childbirth) before the story begins is a trope GRRM uses throughout his career, in Fevre Dream and Dreamsongs and Armageddon Rag and in his tv scripts. It’s unimaginative and lazy, to say the least. 

*~*~*~*~

PART III: WHO ARE THEY NOT? 

Long dead, historical women like Visenya Targaryen are not included in the Dead Ladies Club. Why, you ask? 

If you go up to the average American on the street, they’ll probably be able to tell you something about their mother, or their grandmother, or their aunt, or some other woman in their lives who is important to them, and you can get an idea about who these women were/are as people. But the average American probably won’t be able to tell you a whole lot about Martha Washington, who lived centuries ago. (If you’re not American, substitute “Martha Washington” with the name of the mother of an important political figure who lived 300 years ago. I’m American, so this is the example I’m using. Also, I can already hear the history nerds piping up - sit down, you’re distinctly above average.)  

In this same fashion, the average Westerosi should (misogyny aside) usually be able to tell you something about the important women in their lives. In real life history, kings and lords and other noblemen shared or preserved information about their wives or mothers or sisters or w/e, in spite of the extremely misogynistic medieval societies they lived in. 

So this isn’t “OMG a woman died, be outraged!!1!” kind of thing. This isn’t that. 

I generally limit the DLC to women who have died relatively recently in Westerosi history and who are denied their humanity in a way that their male contemporaries are not. 

*~*~*~*~

PART IV: WHY DOES IT MATTER?

The Dead Ladies Club are the women of the previous one or two generations that we should know more about, but we don’t. We know little more about them than that they had children and they died. I don’t know these women, except through transformative fandom. I know a lot about the pre-series male characters in the text, but canon gives me almost nothing about these women. 

To copy from another post of mine on this issue, it’s like the Dead Ladies exist in GRRM’s narrative solely to be abused, raped, give birth, and die, later to have their immutable likenesses cast in stone and put up on pedestals to be idealized. The women of the Dead Ladies Club aren’t afforded the same characterization and growth as pre-series male characters. 

Think about Jaime, who, while not a pre-series character, is a great example of how GRRM can use characterization to play with his readers. We start off seeing Jaime as an asshole who pushes kids out of windows, and don’t get me wrong, he’s still an asshole who pushes kids out of windows, but he’s also so much more than that. Our perception as readers shifts and we understand that Jaime is so complex and multi-layered and grey. 

With dead pre-series male characters, GRRM still manages to do interesting things with their stories, and to convey their desires, and to play with reader perceptions. Rhaegar is a prime example. Readers go from Robert’s version of the story that Rhaegar was a sadistic supervillain, to the idea that whatever happened between Rhaegar and Lyanna wasn’t as simple as Robert believed, and some fans even progress further to this idea that Rhaegar was highly motivated by prophecy. 

But we don’t get that kind of character development with the Dead Ladies. For example, Elia exists in the narrative to be raped and to die, and to motivate Doran’s desires for justice and revenge, a symbol of the Dornish cause, a reminder by the narrative that it is the innocents who suffer most in the game of thrones. But we don’t know who she is as a person. We don’t know what she wanted in life, how she felt, what she dreamed of. 

We don’t get characterization of the DLC, we don’t get shifts in perception, we barely get anything at all when it comes to these women. GRRM does not write pre-series female characters the same way he writes pre-series male characters. These women are not given space in the narrative the same way their male contemporaries are. 

Consider the Unnamed Princess of Dorne, mother to Doran, Elia, and Oberyn. She was the only female ruler of a kingdom while the Robert’s Rebellion generation was coming up, and she is also the only leader of a Great House during that time period that we don’t have a name for. 

The North? Ruled by Rickard Stark. The Riverlands? Ruled by Hoster Tully. The Iron Islands? Ruled by Quellon Greyjoy. The Vale? Ruled by Jon Arryn. The Westerlands? Ruled by Tywin Lannister. The Stormlands? Steffon, and then Robert Baratheon. The Reach? Mace Tyrell. But Dorne? Just some woman with no name, oops, who the hell cares, who even cares, why bother with a name, who needs one, it’s not like names matter in ASOIAF, amirite? //sarcasm//

We didn’t even get her name in TWOIAF, even though the Unnamed Princess was mentioned there. And this lack of a name is so very limiting - it is so hard to discuss a ruler’s policy and evaluate her decisions when the ruler doesn’t even have a name. 

To speak more on the namelessness of women... Tysha didn’t get a name until ACOK. Although they were named in the appendices in book 1, neither Joanna nor Rhaella were named within the story until ASOS. Ned Stark’s mother wasn’t named until the family tree in the appendix of TWOIAF. And when will the Unnamed Princess of Dorne get a name? When? 

As I think about this, I cannot help but think of this quote: “She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.” Too often these women exist to further the male characters, in a way that doesn’t apply to men like Rhaegar or Aerys. 

I don’t think that GRRM is leaving out or delaying these names on purpose. I don’t think GRRM is doing any of this deliberately. The Dead Ladies Club, imo, is the result of indifference, not malevolence. 

But these kinds of oversights like the Princess of Dorne not having a name are, in my opinion, indicative of a much larger trend -- GRRM refuses these dead women space in the narrative while affording significant space to the dead/pre-series male characters. This issue, imo, is relevant to feminist spatial theory, or the ways in which women inhabit or occupy space (or are prevented from doing so). Some feminist scholars argue that even conceptual “places” or “spaces” (like a narrative or a story) have an influence on people’s political power, culture, and social experience. Such a discussion is probably beyond the scope of this post, but basically it’s argued that women/girls are socialized to take up less space than men in their surroundings. So when GRRM refuses narrative space to pre-series women in a way that he does not do to pre-series men, I feel like he is playing into misogynistic tropes and tendencies rather than subverting them.  

*~*~*~*~

PART V: THE DEATH OF THE MOTHER

Given that many of the DLC (although not all) were mothers, and that many died in childbirth, I want to examine this phenomenon in more detail, and discuss what it means for the Dead Ladies Club. 

Popular culture has a tendency to prioritize fatherhood by marginalizing motherhood. (Look at Disney’s long history of dead or absent mothers, storytelling which is merely a continuation a much older fairytale tradition of the “symbolic annihilation” of the mother figure.) Audiences are socialized to view mothers as “expendable,” while fathers are “irreplaceable”:

This is achieved by not only removing the mother from the narrative and undermining her motherwork, but also by obsessively showing her death, again and again. […] The death of the mother is instead invoked repeatedly as a romantic necessity […] there appears to be a reflex in mainstream popular visual culture to kill off the mother. [x]

For me, the existence of the Dead Ladies Club is perpetuating the tendency to devalue motherhood, and unlike so much else about ASOIAF, it’s not original, it’s not subversive, and it’s not great writing.  

Consider Lyarra Stark. In GRRM’s own words, when asked who Ned Stark’s mother was and how she died, he tells us laconically, “Lady Stark. She died.” We know nothing of Lyarra Stark, other than that she married her cousin Rickard, gave birth to four children, and died during or after Benjen’s birth. It’s another example of GRRM’s casual indifference toward and disregard for these women, and it’s very disappointing coming from an author who is otherwise so amazing. If GRRM can imagine a world as rich and varied as Westeros, why is it so often the case that when it comes to the female relatives of his characters, all GRRM can imagine is that they suffer and die? 

Now, you might be saying, “dying in childbirth is just something that happens to women, so what’s the big deal?” Sure, women died in childbirth in the Middle Ages at an alarming rate. Let’s assume that Westerosi medicine closely approximates medieval medicine - even if we make that assumption, the rate at which these women are dying in childbirth in Westeros is inordinately high compared to the real Middle Ages, statistically speaking. But here’s the kicker: Westerosi medicine is not medieval. Westerosi medicine is better than medieval medicine. To paraphrase my friend @alamutjones, Westeros has better than medieval medicine, but worse than medieval outcomes when it comes to women. GRRM is putting his finger down on the scales here. And it’s lazy. 

Childbirth, by definition, is a very gendered death. And it’s how GRRM defines these women - they gave birth, and they died, and nothing else about them matters to him. (“Lady Stark. She died.”) Sure, there’s some bits of minutia we can gather about these women if we squint. Lyanna was said to be willful, and she had some sort of relationship with Rhaegar Targaryen that the jury is still out on, but her consent was dubious at best. Joanna was happily married, and she was desired by Aerys Targaryen, and she may or may not have been raped. Rhaella was definitely raped to conceive Daenerys, who she died giving birth to. 

Why are these women treated in such a gendered manner? Why did so many mothers die in childbirth in ASOIAF? Fathers don’t tend to die gendered deaths in Westeros, so why isn’t the cause of death more varied for women? 

And why are so many women in ASOIAF defined by their absence, as black holes, as negative space in the narrative? 

The same cannot be said of so many fathers in ASOIAF. Consider Cersei, Jaime, and Tyrion, but whose father is a godlike-figure in their lives, both before and after his death. Even dead, Tywin still rules his children’s lives. 

It’s the relationship between child and father (Randyll Tarly, Selwyn Tarth, Rickard Stark, Hoster Tully, etc) that GRRM gives so much weight to relative to the mother’s relationship, with notable exceptions found in Catelyn Stark and Cersei Lannister. (Though with Cersei, I think it could be argued that GRRM isn’t subverting anything -- he’s playing into the dark side of motherhood, and the idea that mothers damage their children with their presence -- which is basically the flip side of the dead mother trope -- but this post is already a ridiculous length and I’m not gonna get into this here.) 

*~*~*~*~

PART VI: THE DLC AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Despite his claims to historical verisimilitude, GRRM made Westeros more misogynistic than the real Middle Ages. Considering that the details of their sexual violence is the primary information we have about the DLC, why is so much sexual violence necessary?

I discuss this issue in depth in my tag for #rape culture in Westeros, but I think it deserves to be touched on here, at least briefly. 

Girls like Tysha are defined by the sexual violence they experienced. We know about Tysha’s gang rape in book 1, but we don’t even learn her name until book 2.  So many of the DLC are victims of sexual violence, with little or no attention given to how this violence affected them personally. More attention is given to how the sexual violence affected the men in their lives. With each new sexual harassment Joanna suffered because of Aerys, we know per TWOIAF that Tywin cracked a little more, but how did Joanna feel? We know that Rhaella had been abused to the point that it appeared that a beast had savaged her, and we know that Jaime felt extremely conflicted about this because of his Kingsguard oaths, but how did Rhaella feel, when her abuser was her brother-husband? We know more about the abuse these women suffered than we do about the women themselves. The narrative objectifies rather than humanizes the DLC. 

Why did GRRM’s messianic characters have to be conceived through rape? The mother figure being raped and sacrificed for the messiah/hero is an old and tired fantasy trope, and GRRM does it not once, but two (or possibly even three) times. Really, GRRM? Really? GRRM doesn’t need to rely on raped dead mothers as part of his store-bought tragic backstory. GRRM can do better than that, and he should do better. (Further discussion in my tag for #gender in ASOIAF.) 

*~*~*~*~

PART VII: MALE SACRIFICE, FEMALE SACRIFICE, AND CHOICE

Now, you might be asking, “It’s normal for male characters to sacrifice themselves, so why can’t women sacrifice themselves for the messiah? Isn’t female sacrifice subversive?” 

Male sacrifice and female sacrifice are often not the same in popular culture. To boil it down - men sacrifice, while women are sacrificed. 

Women dying in childbirth to give birth to the messiah isn’t the same thing as male characters making some grand last stand with guns blazing to give the Messianic Hero the chance to Do The Thing. The male characters who get to go out guns blazing choose that fate; it’s the end result of their characterization to do so. Think of Syrio Forel. He chooses to sacrifice himself to save one of our protagonists. 

But women like Lyanna and Rhaella and Joanna they didn’t get a choice, were afforded no grand moment of existential victory that was the culmination of their characters; they just died. They bled out, they got sick, they were murdered -- they-just-died. There was no grand choice to sacrifice themselves in favor of saving the world, there was no option to refuse the sacrifice, there wasn’t any choice at all. 

And that’s key. That’s what lies at the heart of all of GRRM’s stories: choice. As I said here,

“Choice […]. That’s the difference between good and evil, you said. Now it looks like I’m the one got to make a choice” (Fevre Dream). In GRRM’s own words, “That’s something that’s very much in my books: I believe in great characters. We’re all capable of doing great things, and of doing bad things. We have the angels and the demons inside of us, and our lives are a succession of choices.” It’s the the choices that hurt, the choices where good and evil hang in the balance – these are the choices in which “the human heart [is] in conflict with itself,” which GRRM considers to be “the only thing worth writing about”. 

Men like Aerys and Rhaegar and Tywin make choices in ASOIAF; women like Rhaella don’t have any choices at all in the narrative. 

Does GRRM not find the stories of the Dead Ladies Club worth writing about? Was there no moment in GRRM’s mind when Rhaella or Elia or Ashara felt conflicted in their hearts, no moment they felt their loyalties divided? How did Lynesse feel choosing concubinage? What of Tysha, who loved a Lannister boy, but was gang-raped at the hands of House Lannister? How did she feel? 

It would be very different if we were told about the choices that Lyanna and Rhaella and Elia made. (Fandom often speculates about whether, for example, Lyanna chose to go with Rhaegar, but the text remains silent on this issue as of ADWD. GRRM remains silent on these women’s choices.)  

It would be different if GRRM explored their hearts in conflict, but we’re not told anything about that. It would be subversive if these women actively chose to sacrifice themselves, but they didn’t. 

Dany is probably being set up as a woman who actively chooses to sacrifice herself to save the world, and I think that’s subversive, a valiant and commendable effort on GRRM’s part to tackle this dichotomy between male sacrifice and female sacrifice. But I don’t think it makes up for all of these dead women sacrificed in childbirth with no choice. 

*~*~*~*~

PART VIII: CONCLUSIONS

I hope this post serves as a working definition of the Dead Ladies Club, a term which, at least for me, carries a lot of criticism of the way GRRM handles these female characters. The term encompasses the voicelessness of these women, the excessive and highly gendered abuse they suffered, and their lack of characterization and agency. 

GRRM calls his characters his children. I feel like these dead women -- the mothers, the wives, the sisters -- I feel like these women were GRRM’s stillborn children, with nothing left of them but a name on a birth certificate, and a lot of lost potential, and a hole where the heart once was in someone else’s story. From my earliest days on tumblr, I wanted to give voice to these voiceless women. Too often they were forgotten, and I didn’t want them to be. 

Because if they were forgotten -- if all they were meant to do was die -- how could I believe in ASOIAF? 

How can I believe that “men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths” if GRRM created this group of women merely to be sacrificed? Sacrificed for prophecy, or for someone else’s pain, or simply for the tragedy of it all?

How can I believe in all the things ASOIAF stands for? I know that GRRM does a great job with Sansa and Arya and Dany and all the other female POVs, and I admire him for it. 

But when ASOIAF asks, “what is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?" What is one life worth, when measured against so much? And Davos answers, softly, “Everything” ... When ASOIAF says that ... when ASOIAF says that one life is worth everything, how can people tell me that these women don’t matter? 

How can I believe in ASOIAF as a celebration of humanity, when GRRM dehumanizes and objectifies these women? 

The treatment of these women undermines ASOIAF’s central thesis, and it didn’t need to be like this. GRRM is better than this. He can do better. 

I want to be wrong about all this. I want GRRM to tell us in TWOW all about Lyanna’s choices, and I want to learn the name of the Unnamed Princess, and I want to know that three women weren’t raped to fulfill GRRM’s prophecy. I want GRRM to breathe life into them, because I consider him to be the best fantasy writer alive. 

But I don’t know that he will do that. The best I can say is, I want to believe.

*~*~*~*~

“Ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.” 

But I sing of them. I do. Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story...

*~*~*~*~

PART IX: FOOTNOTES AND MISCELLANEOUS

**I am 90% certain that I am the person who invented the term “Dead Ladies Club”, but I am not 100% certain. It sounds like a name I would make up, but a lot of my friends who I would talk to about this on their blogs in 2011 and 2012 have long since deleted, so I can’t find the first time I used the term, and I can’t remember anymore. Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost, history became legend, legend became myth, y'all know the drill.

To give you a little more about the origins of this term, I created my sideblog @pre-gameofthrones because I wanted a place for the history of ASOIAF, but mostly I wanted a place where these women could be brought to life. During my early days in fandom, so many people around here were writing great fanfiction featuring these women, fleshing out these women’s thoughts and feelings, bringing them to life and giving them the humanity that GRRM denied them. I wasn’t very interested in transformative works before ASOIAF, but suddenly I needed a place to preserve all of these fanfics about these women. Perhaps it sounds silly, but I didn’t want these women to suffer a second “death” and to be forgotten a second time with people deleting their blogs and posts getting lost in tumblr’s terrible organization system. 

Over the years, so many other people have talked about and celebrated the Dead Ladies Club: @poorshadowspaintedqueens, @cosmonauthill, @lyannas, @rhaellas, @ayllriadayne, @poorquentyn, @goodqueenaly, @arielno, @gulbaharsultan, @racefortheironthrone and so many others, but these were the people I remembered off the top of my head, and I wanted to list them here because they all have such great things to say about this, so check them out, go through their archives, ask them stuff, because they’re wonderful!

[papermoonloveslucy]

YOUNG MATRONS’ LEAGUE TRYOUTS

October 2, 1948

"Young Matron’s League Tryouts” is episode #11 of the radio series MY FAVORITE HUSBAND broadcast on October 2, 1948.

Synopsis ~ Liz tries to butter up George in hopes that he'll let her try out for the play that the Young Matrons League will be performing.

Note: This episode was aired before the characters names were changed from Cugat to Cooper. It was also before Jell-O came aboard to sponsor the show and before the regular cast featured Bea Benadaret and Gale Gordon as the Atterburys. 

This was the first episode scripted by Jess Oppenheimer. The show moved from Fridays at 9:00-9:30 pm to Saturdays at 7:00-7:30 pm.

“My Favorite Husband” was based on the novels Mr. and Mrs. Cugat, the Record of a Happy Marriage (1940) and Outside Eden (1945) by Isabel Scott Rorick, which had previously been adapted into the film Are Husbands Necessary? (1942). “My Favorite Husband” was first broadcast as a one-time special on July 5, 1948. Lucille Ball and Lee Bowman played the characters of Liz and George Cugat, and a positive response to this broadcast convinced CBS to launch “My Favorite Husband” as a series. Bowman was not available Richard Denning was cast as George. On January 7, 1949, confusion with bandleader Xavier Cugat prompted a name change to Cooper. On this same episode Jell-O became its sponsor. A total of 124 episodes of the program aired from July 23, 1948 through March 31, 1951. After about ten episodes had been written, writers Fox and Davenport departed and three new writers took over – Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and head writer/producer Jess Oppenheimer. In March 1949 Gale Gordon took over the existing role of George’s boss, Rudolph Atterbury, and Bea Benaderet was added as his wife, Iris. CBS brought “My Favorite Husband” to television in 1953, starring Joan Caulfield and Barry Nelson as Liz and George Cooper. The television version ran two-and-a-half seasons, from September 1953 through December 1955, running concurrently with “I Love Lucy.” It was produced live at CBS Television City for most of its run, until switching to film for a truncated third season filmed (ironically) at Desilu and recasting Liz Cooper with Vanessa Brown.

MAIN CAST

Lucille Ball (Liz Cugat) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. “My Favorite Husband” eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon.

Richard Denning (George Cugat) was born Louis Albert Heindrich Denninger Jr., in Poughkeepsie, New York. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to Los Angeles. Plans called for him to take over his father’s garment manufacturing business, but he developed an interest in acting. Denning enlisted in the US Navy during World War II. He is best known for his  roles in various science fiction and horror films of the 1950s. Although he teamed with Lucille Ball on radio in “My Favorite Husband,” the two never acted together on screen. While “I Love Lucy” was on the air, he was seen on another CBS TV series, “Mr. & Mrs. North.” From 1968 to 1980 he played the Governor on “Hawaii 5-0″, his final role. He died in 1998 at age 84.

Ruth Perrott (Katie, the Maid) was also later seen on “I Love Lucy.” She first played Mrs. Pomerantz, a member of the surprise investigating committee for the Society Matrons League in “Pioneer Women” (ILL S1;E25), as one of the member of the Wednesday Afternoon Fine Arts League in “Lucy and Ethel Buy the Same Dress” (ILL S3;E3), and also played a nurse when “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” (ILL S2;E16). She died in 1996 at the age of 96.

Bob LeMond (Announcer) also served as the announcer for the pilot episode of “I Love Lucy”. When the long-lost pilot was finally discovered in 1990, a few moments of the opening narration were damaged and lost, so LeMond – fifty years later – recreated the narration for the CBS special and subsequent DVD release.

GUEST CAST

John Hiestand (Cory Cartwright) served as the announcer for the radio show “Let George Do It” from 1946 to 1950. In 1955 he did an episode of “Our Miss Brooks” opposite Gale Gordon.

Jean Vander Pyl (Ann) is best known as the voice of Wilma Flintstone for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon “The Flintstones.” Coincidentally, Wilma’s best friend was voiced by Bea Benadaret, who will later play Iris Atterbury, Liz’s best friend on “My Favorite Husband.” On radio she was heard on such programs as “The Halls of Ivy” (1950–52) and on “Father Knows Best” before it moved to TV.  She died in 1999 at age 79.

Elvia Allman (Miss Worthingill) was born on September 19, 1904 in Enochville, North Carolina. She started her performing career on radio in the 1920s, as both a storyteller and singer. Allman’s first episode of “I Love Lucy” is also one of the most memorable in TV history: “Job Switching” (ILL S2;E1) in September 1952.  She played the strident foreman of Kramer’s Candy Kitchen. Allman returned to the show as one of Minnie Finch’s neighbors in “Fan Magazine Interview” (ILL S3;E17) in 1954. Changing gears once again she played prim magazine reporter Nancy Graham in “The Homecoming” (ILL S5;E6) in 1955. She made two appearances on “The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour“ - first as Ida Thompson, Westfield’s PTA director in “The Celebrity Next Door” (LDCH S1;E2) and as Milton Berle’s secretary when “Milton Berle Hides Out at the Ricardos” (LDCH S3;E1) in 1959. On “The Lucy Show” she was seen in “Lucy Bags a Bargain” (TLS S4;E17) and in “Lucy The Babysitter” (TLS S5;E16).  Allman died on March 6, 1992, aged 87.

Hans Conried (Dr. Rhineholdt Schweinkampf, a Psychiatrist) first co-starred with Lucille Ball in The Big Street (1942). He then appeared on “I Love Lucy” as used furniture man Dan Jenkins in “Redecorating” (ILL S2;E8) and later that same season as Percy Livermore in “Lucy Hires an English Tutor” (ILL S2;E13) – both in 1952. The following year he began an association with Disney by voicing Captain Hook in Peter Pan. On “The Lucy Show” he played Professor Gitterman in “Lucy’s Barbershop Quartet” (TLS S1;E19) and in “Lucy Plays Cleopatra” (TLS S2;E1). He was probably best known as Uncle Tonoose on “Make Room for Daddy” starring Danny Thomas, which was filmed on the Desilu lot. He joined Thomas on a season 6 episode of “Here’s Lucy” in 1973. He died in 1982 at age 64.

Conried uses a broad German accent as the Psychiatrist, a common trope due to the popularity of Dr. Sigmund Freud.

THE EPISODE

ANNOUNCER: “Let’s look in on them now as Liz waits George to come down to breakfast…”

Liz tells Katie the Maid to cook the breakfast, but that she’ll serve it. She’s looking to butter up George for a favor.  

The phone rings and it is Ann asking Liz to lunch. She declines because it is the afternoon of the Young Matrons’ League play auditions. She tells Ann that the famous Hollywood director Anatol Brodney (a former resident of Sheridan Falls) will be in the audience opening night!  The audition notice is in the society column of today’s paper.

In “Pioneer Women” (ILL S1;E25) Lucy and Ethel are anxious to gain membership in a group called The Society Matron’s League if they can pass muster with its haughty examining committee, Mrs. Pettebone and Mrs. Pomerantz. This group is clearly modeled on The Young Matrons League on “My Favorite Husband,” a group that is mentioned in several episodes of the series. Although Lucy always declined to reveal her age, television was a visual medium so the word “young” had to be replaced!

GEORGE: “Are YOU cooking breakfast?” LIZ: “Well, you’re my favorite husband.” GEORGE: “What do you want from me, Liz?”

While waiting for his breakfast, Liz tells George to read the paper, which just happens to be open to the society column. 

GEORGE (reading aloud): “Overheard at tea: People wouldn’t be so incompatible if the men had more income and the girls were more pattable!” 

When George sees the audition notice, he calls the participants jackasses.  Liz was in the play last year, so she takes issue with his assessment. George puts his foot down and won’t let Liz audition. She already knows that this year the play will be John Loves Mary.  

John Loves Mary was a real life comedy written by Norman Krausner that opened on Broadway at the Booth Theatre on February 4, 1947 before moving a month later to the Music Box Theatre for the remainder of its run. It closed on February 7, 1949 after 423 performances. The play won an award for Best Costumes at the very first Tony Awards in 1948. The cast included Max Showalter, who would guest star in several episodes of “The Lucy Show”. The play also served as the Broadway debut of Cloris Leachman, who understudied Nina Foch. In February 1949, just a few months after this broadcast, the film version was released, although it was in production during January and February.  It was known for being the film debut of Patricia Neal, who took the role originated by Nina Foch on Broadway. The film starred Ronald Reagan, who, as President of the United States, would bestow Lucille Ball with her Kennedy Center Honor in 1986. It also featured Paul Harvey, who would play the New York Times art critic on “Lucy is a Sculptress” (ILL S2;E15). Irving Bacon (Mr. Willoughby and Will Potter) is also in the film. .

Liz tells George about the Hollywood director who is going to be in the audience and says she just might land a big Hollywood contract. 

Liz is not the last Lucy character to try out for an amateur theatrical production. In 1963 Lucy Carmichael auditioned for the role of Cleopatra for the Danfield Community Players. She landed the role! 

LIZ: “What has Betty Grable got that I haven’t got? Or Lana Turner?”

Betty Grable (1916-1973) made two films with Lucille Ball when they were both at RKO in the mid-1930s. She married actor Jackie Coogan in 1937 but divorced him in 1940. A pin-up girl, she was known for her shapely legs. In the late 1940s, 20th Century Fox insured her legs with Lloyd’s of London for a quarter of a million dollars. Although she never appeared on the half-hour "I Love Lucy,” the mention of her name alone often stirred Fred’s libido, much to Ethel’s chagrin. In “Ricky’s Screen Test” (ILL S4;E7) Grable is mentioned as one of Ricky’s possible Don Juan co-stars. Her final screen appearance was in a 1958 “Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” playing herself opposite her husband, Harry James.  

Lana Turner (1921-1995) was as famous for her tight-fitting sweaters as Grable was for her shapely legs. She had appeared as herself in DuBarry Was A Lady starring Lucille Ball in 1943. She was mentioned on three episodes of “I Love Lucy” but never appeared on the series. 

Once George has gone to work, Liz quickly phones back Ann and tells her that although George has forbidden it, she is going to the audition anyway. She claims that she isn’t looking for Hollywood fame, but wants to be able to prove to George that she can get it.  

Housewife Liz’s search for fame is a character trait the writers would bring to Lucy Ricardo on “I Love Lucy.” The main difference is that Lucy truly wants to be famous, whereas Liz just wants to prove she has what it takes to get it!

Bachelor Cory Cartwright (John Heistand) drops by to report on his latest girlfriend, listed in his little black book as Mary Johnson, RHRW. The RH means Red Head and the second R stands for Real. (The audience laughs, perhaps knowing that Lucille Ball is NOT a real redhead.)  The final letter is his kissing guide: W is for Wow!  Liz asks if she is listed in his little black book? She is: Liz Cugat RHRWIWG. (Apparently Liz is supposed to be a real redhead). The WIWG stands for “Wish I Were George”!   Liz demurs.  Awww!

Cory lets it slip that he and George are having lunch with Anatol Brodney, who Cory knows from his college days. Liz wants Cory to bring George and Anatol home for dinner so that she can really show off her talent. He promises to try. 

On “I Love Lucy,” the Ricardos and Mertzes also conspire to show off for a visiting Hollywood rep in “The Mustache” (ILL S1;E23). Lucy is a harem dancer, mainly due to the need to disguise the full beard she’s accidentally glued to her face. The Mertzes do an Arabian Nights act complete with snake charming, while Ricky croons ballads.  

This idea would also be part of “Ricky’s Movie Offer” (ILL S4;E5), in which Lucy and the neighbors are sure that Ricky is bringing home a Hollywood talent scout, so they get their acts read. Lucy as Marilyn Monroe, Fred and Ethel as apache dancers, Mrs. Trumbull as a castanet singer, and the grocery delivery boy playing the trumpet!  

At the auditions, Miss Worthingill of the Drama Department of Sixley College (Elvia Allman) is introduced to talk about her acting method. Liz gets up to audition for the role of a matron of 36, although she doesn’t think she can play someone quite so old. [Ball is actually 37 at time!]  The scene involves displaying an array of emotions from laughter to tears, plus chastising a dog who won’t get off the sofa. Miss Worthingill deems Liz a strong contender for the part.

George unexpectedly comes home for some papers and is told by Katie that Liz came home and locked herself in her room. Listening at the door, they hear Liz rehearsing - first crying, then laughing, then barking like a dog. They overhear Liz say the line “Take me in your arms!” and George decides to go in and confront her. Searching the room, he whistles for the dog and looks in the closet and under the bed, naturally finding neither dog, nor secret lover! 

LIZ: “What did you expect to find? The Toni twins?”

Liz is jokingly referring to a series of print ads for Toni Home Permanent that depicted two twins with identical hairstyles and asked which one had the Toni, and which one had the more expensive salon perm. The promotion was so popular that the slogan “Which Twin Has The Toni?” became a part of common parlance. In addition, the Toni name itself became the name for a generic home permanent. The Gillette Safety Razor Company acquired The Toni Company in 1948, the year of this broadcast.  

To hide that she was rehearsing for her final audition, Liz tells George she had a nightmare. Or a ‘day-mare’, since it is daytime.  

A worried George decides to talk to a psychiatrist (Hans Conried) for advice about Liz. Hearing George’s surname, the doctor asks: 

DOCTOR: “Xavier?” GEORGE: “George!  I can’t even hold a tune.”

This is a reference to the Cuban bandleader Xavier Cugat (1900-1990). Lucille Ball’s husband Desi Arnaz was once employed by Cugat and looked at him as a mentor. Although the characters that inspired “My Favorite Husband” were originally named Cugat, it became apparent that there was confusion about the uncommon surname - especially considering the Arnaz / Cugat connection. By the end of 1948 it was decided that the name Cugat would be changed to Cooper to avoid the confusion - and any rumored legal action by the bandleader himself. Coincidentally, when creating the television characters inspired by Liz and George, Lucy and Ricky, they first considered Lopez. However, there already was a Larry Lopez, who was (what else?) a bandleader!  So they became Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.  

George tells the Psychiatrist about Liz’s condition. The Doctor volunteers to come to the Cugat home for dinner to better diagnose Liz. IN order not to alarm her, George tells Liz that he is bringing home an old college chum named Art Jones. Liz naturally thinks it is Anatol Brodney that George is bringing home!  

In “The Inferiority Complex” (ILL S2;E18) Ricky is worried about Lucy’s mental health and also consults a psychiatrist. Like George, Ricky brings him home to observe Lucy. So she doesn’t discover their plan, he calls himself Chuck Stewart, an old friend of Ricky’s.  

Thinking that the psychiatrist is really the Hollywood director, Liz trots out the array of emotions and characters to impress him!  First, a sexy Mae West voice:.

LIZ (ala Mae West): “Hello, boys. I’m certainly glad you came up to see me. There’s a sofa over there, Mr. Jones. Why don’t you get out of that hard chair and slip into something more comfortable?” 

Mae West (1893-1980) was a stage and screen performer who capitalized on her sex appeal and was well-known for her scandalous sexual innuendo. In a 1977 episode of “Donny & Marie” (above) Lucille Ball did her Mae West impersonation yet again!  

Liz immediately switches character to that of a desperate, scorned woman, wildly attacking George for his indiscretions:

LIZ (wildly): “You beat me with a cane and pushed my poor broken body down the stairs!  I don’t care for myself, but you pushed the children after me!” GEORGE: “The children?  I did not!” LIZ (flatly): “Then where are they?”

Liz leaves the room in crocodile tears and the doctor advises daily treatments.  George opens the front door and it is Liz with a shawl on her head, talking like a bleating goat, begging for change. 

LIZ (bleating): “Will you buy a poor old lady’s violets?  I haven’t eaten for a week.”

George rings for Katie, but Liz enters as a Cockney maid. 

LIZ (Cockney): “Alright, alright! I’m comin’ guv’nor. Don’t get on about it!”

When George tells her to quit it, she drops to the floor to become a South seas Native girl! 

LIZ (deep voice): “Me Tondelayo!  Me love white man. You don’t love me?”

During a sketch in “Danny Thomas’ The Wonderful World of Burlesque” in 1966, Lucille Ball wears a leopard print dress and a black wig and struts in seductively saying “I am Tondelayo,” the same words and voice she uses here on “My Favorite Husband” in 1948, 18 years earlier. 

As Liz is prostrate on the floor, the doorbell rings. It is Cory Cartwright, who has with him (as promised) a guest for dinner - Anatol Brodney!  Liz faints. 

Later, Mrs. Worthingill calls and George answers the phone. She tells George that Liz got the part, but George says Liz has given up the theatre for good. Just after George hangs up, Liz, who has been listening on the extension phone, tells Mrs. Worthingill to disregard what George said - she’ll be at rehearsals first thing in the morning!  End of episode!

[femslashrevolution]

On the personal as normal; on the normal as political

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

A few months ago I had a conversation about pubic hair, with a lover of mine. Your bush is super hot, my lover said. I’m blushing, I said. Then she asked: was my decision not to shave a political one, or just a “this is fckn sexy” one? And at that last question—I wasn’t sure what it was, or why it was happening, but something reared up in me. Some looming, rebellious objection. It wasn’t my lover’s fault; she is a thoughtful and considerate communicator, and had done nothing wrong. And it was strange, to feel as I did; because it wasn’t as if I was new to the idea of female body hair being a site of political dissension. I’m thirty-five years old; I was hassled by my schoolfriends in middle school for not shaving my legs and hassled by my girlfriend in high school and my Womyn’s Center mates in college for shaving them. Patti Smith’s Easter, with its iconographic pit hair has pride of place on my record shelf. I have done my time in the trenches of feminist debate, and when I was younger I spent my fair share of time agonizing over which personal grooming strategy made me “the best feminist." 

 But the truth is that these days, twenty years on, my selective hair removal—I shave my legs and my pits, but not my bush—feels, to me, neither politically motivated nor even particularly intentional. Instead it feels normal. It’s one of the myriad little habits that makes feel at home in my body, in that deeply comfortable and worn-in sense of "at home” that comes from being able to walk around one’s apartment barefoot, in the dark, while thinking about the last scene in one’s novel rather than where one is placing one’s feet. It’s a level of at-home-ness; of ownership and normalcy, that means conscious thought is superfluous. And though I acknowledge the usefulness, in many contexts, of interrogating received wisdom and assumptions about what constitutes “womanly” or “hygienic” female behavior, I would argue that in this world—this world which, today more than ever, teaches women never to be at home in our bodies, never to be comfortable in our bodies, never to stop thinking about our bodies and feeling guilt and shame about our bodies—that there is value to carving out spaces of normalcy, as well: space for us to breathe into all our inconsistent and idiosyncratic ways. 

What does all this have to do with femslash? Glad you asked. 

I am no longer a fandom newbie, but neither am I a long-time veteran of the wars. I wandered wide-eyed into fandom in my late 20s, already a full-grown adult: a near-lesbian in a foundering long-term relationship with a man, I was also a crafter and feminist and compulsive reader of literary fiction; and I was looking, with mercenary intensity, for writing which explicitly portrayed the kind of sexual complexity with which I was struggling in my personal life, and which I was pointedly not finding in published fiction. I knew zilch about fandom traditions or fandom political histories; all those fandom battles which old-timers were already heartily sick of fighting. I just knew: god! Here were people writing about sex (between men) so viscerally compellingly that even I could understand the appeal: I, who have always felt vaguely repulsed by men’s society and men’s bodies—even, inconveniently, the bodies of men I loved.

And even though my lack of fandom context led to me doing and saying some things in those early days that were, in retrospect, kind of embarrassingly naïve and lacking in nuance, I’m glad that I was ignorant of the larger fandom dynamics around lady/lady sex writing (or hey, around lady/lady writing at all [or hey, around writing about women, full stop]). Because my ignorance meant that when I discovered an entire new-to-me, female-dominated community writing complicated, explicit sex scenes, full of longing and messy exploration and bodily fluids, I could blunder right into writing about women conflictedly fucking other women; conflictedly fighting with other women; conflictedly forgiving other women and reconnecting with other women and betraying other women and taking care of other women and bittersweetly remembering other women. Because why wouldn’t I write about that? That was, to my fandom-naïve eye, the normal thing to do in this subculture into which I’d wandered. 

 Unsurprisingly, this provoked some interesting reactions.

Due in part to my ignorance when I came on the scene, I’ve since had a lot of interactions and internal debates, and witnessed a lot of fandom dust-ups, about those three things: writing female characters; and writing female characters in relationship to other female characters; and writing female characters fucking other female characters. (I have also written a lot about this, as well.) Some of these interactions have involved talking about why folks write queer women characters. More of them have revolved around why folks don’t; or don’t like to; or don’t think it’s a fair thing to ask; or don’t like it when I do. Common objections I’ve heard to writing and reading women fucking women include: there are fewer female characters in source media (or they’re not as interesting), so finding them and developing investment in them requires more work; f/f writing doesn’t get as much attention, and it is disheartening to choose political correctness over reader response; writing female bodies while living in a female body in a culture that hates female bodies is more emotionally difficult/traumatic; female bodies are gross; the mainstream hypersexualization of lesbians means that is it anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex among women, especially kinky sex; mainstream objectification of female bodies means it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex involving women, especially kinky sex; the omnipresence of sexist tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write female characters as anything less than morally exemplary, which is boring; the omnipresence of homophobic tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write a story that deviates from the anti-trope script (e.g. “happy lesbians with well-balanced relationships”), which is boring; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and including female sexuality is too close to home to be enjoyable; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and expecting hobbyists to be warriors in the army of capital-r Representation is obnoxious; fandom space is dominated by young women, and expecting them to be warriors in the army of capital-R Representation is sexist when we don’t hold middle-aged male media creators to the same standard. 

I could write an essay about each of these, some of which are really complex points with some merit. But I think one thing that stands out, from a majority of my interactions on this issue through the years, is the perception that the act of writing relationships among women is inherently political, in a way that the act of writing about relationships among men is not. 

The $64,000 question: do I agree with this?

Are electrons particles, or waves?

I mean, let’s get this out of the way: if writing about women is political, then writing about men is political, too. Masculinity is constructed as the default flavor of humanity in our society, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bear critical examination, nor does it mean that the actions of men aren’t informed by their socialization, or that everyone’s perceptions of men aren’t informed by power structures. Nor does it mean that men are immune from the toxic effects of life in a heteronormative patriarchy. If we as writers experience a focus on men to be a relaxing break from the stifling responsibility of depicting oppression, that is (a) pretty understandable, since that’s the myth of the (white cis hetero) male experience that’s sold to us from birth, but also (b) probably in need of some interrogation, since it doesn’t actually reflect anyone’s lived reality. Not even the lived reality of dude-bros who roll their eyes at the words “heteronormative” and “patriarchy”; and ESPECIALLY not the lived reality of queer men, who are, let’s remember, real people with a real history and a real present of active oppression due to their orientation. 

As to the question of queer women: was I right or wrong, in my fandom-naïve days, to assume that writing sex and relationships among women is essentially the same as writing those things among men? 

Yes. That is, I think I was right, and also wrong.

In a 1995 essay, Paula Rust enumerates many of the widely divergent and in some cases mutually incompatible interpretations of the oft-quoted second-wave feminist slogan “The personal is political”:

The personal reflects the political status quo (with the implication that the personal should be examined to provide insight into the political); the personal serves the political status quo; one can make personal choices in response to or protest against the political status quo; one’s personal life influences one’s personal politics or determines the limits of one’s understanding of the political status quo; the personal is a personal political statement; personal choices can influence the political status quo; one’s personal choices reveal or reflect one’s personal politics; one should make personal choices that are consistent with one’s personal politics; personal life and personal politics are indistinguishable; personal life and personal politics are unrelated.

If we adapt Rust’s terminology slightly to accommodate the act of reading and writing fiction, so that “the personal” becomes something more like “individualized character depictions,” then I think this passage becomes a useful tool in breaking down how we think about reading and writing women versus how we think about reading and writing men. It seems to me that often, when we are reading and writing about men (especially cis white men who are canonically assumed to be straight even if they fuck in fanfic), our attitudes tend to hang out in the spectrum ranging from, on the more nuanced end, “choices about individualized character depictions can be made in response to or protest against the status quo” to, on the less nuanced end, “individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated.” Since straight white men are the default, depicting them doesn’t feel primarily political. It feels normal. Things that happen to straight white male characters seem not to carry the burdensome weight of responsibility and representation that plagues female characters, especially queer female characters or female characters of color. The unspoken logic here posits that the things that happen to men, just happen! The traits men have are just traits! Men can be evaluated as individuals, because there is nothing to distract from that individuality. No matter that whiteness/straightness/maleness is not actually nothing, only an invisible something; and never mind that the completeness of the divorce between individualized character depictions and greater political realities is to a large extent illusory. The fact remains that that’s often the in-the-moment experience of reading and writing about male characters: they can exist as individuals, because their maleness is the norm. 

By contrast, when we are reading and writing about women (especially queer women and women of color), our default assumptions tend to range from “individualized character depictions can influence the political status quo” to “individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable.” It is burdensome to write about queer women because we feel that every individualized queer woman character we write, in her body and her actions, must both bear the brunt of, and actively resist, all that baggage listed above. She must subvert (on a meta level) and/or stand against (on an in-story level) the tide of mainstream objectification, of lesbian hypersexualization, of sexist and homophobic tropes, of poor treatment and shoddy development at the hands of media creators, and on and on. Everything that happens to her or doesn’t happen to her, every physical trait and every mental tic, is massively overdetermined, because we feel that to write about queer women is to body forth our own personal politics into the world—and, more than that, to transform the landscape of queer female representation entire. 

OBVIOUSLY, as a writer and reader this is neither fun nor possible! No character can do this. 

Please let that sink in. No character can do this. No character is so well-written that she is going to transcend the Oppression Soup in which we all swim; and even if she did, she would not be enough transform the landscape of queer female representation into an egalitarian wonderland. We can stop hitching our wagons to that star because it’s not going to happen. Good news! We are not failures because we fall short of this demonstrably impossible metric! Similarly: my friends and I can install low-flow shower heads in every bathroom in every apartment we move into, from now until our deaths, but we are still not going to offset the effect of Nestlé extracting 36 million gallons of water per year from our national forests to bottle and sell at a profit. Or again: my personal choice to make my own clothes, though potentially politically meaningful to me as an individual, is never going to counteract the coercive power of a global fashion industry that earns $3 trillion a year peddling the lie that women who are larger than a size 10, or who don’t have expendable income to keep up with the latest trends, are not employable, fuckable, or worth taking seriously. This is not to say that making my own clothes can’t be politically meaningful for me personally. Nor is it to say that I am incapable of meaningful political action: I can help to take on these oppressive and exploitative industries via mass organizing: public actions, legal challenges, legislative lobbying, investigative exposés, mass boycotts. But there is absolutely nothing that I alone can do, with my body or my apartment or my novel, that will dismantle these power structures. 

For one thing, this is not how institutional oppression works. Yes, the ramifications of oppressive power structures can manifest in intimate details of one’s life, and it does well to be conscious of that. But the causality doesn’t work in reverse: identifying and purging artefacts of oppression from the intimate details of one’s life, while potentially personally meaningful or satisfying, won’t meaningfully reduce the overall strength of the originating oppressive power structures in society at large. I cannot take down the fashion industry by making my own clothes. I cannot save the world from Nestlé by installing low-flow shower heads. I cannot dismantle sexism and heteronormativity by writing a queer female character who carries perfectly on her shoulders the representation of every oppression she suffers, and perfectly represents my personal authorial politics—or, indeed, by writing a host of such characters, and sharing them with a few thousand people on the internet. This needs to stop being the expectation, or even the ideal. To hold the queer female character to such a standard is to make of her even more of an unattainable exception to human existence than she already is: for none of us can stand in for All Women, or All Queers, or All Queer Women; and none of us should be asked to do so. 

For another thing, this is not how fiction works. Fiction doesn’t convince through intellectual perfection. Fiction convinces through building empathy and voluntary identification in readers for characters who may or may not be wildly different from them, and may or may not be placed in radically different situations than they have ever found themselves in, but whom they the readers, on some basic human level, nonetheless recognize. Crafting an individual character who inspires that kind of gut-level recognition is difficult if the author is assembling them primarily as anti-oppression talisman rather than a flawed and complicit individual; or if the author is undermining the voluntary nature of the reader’s identification by making the character, Ayn Rand-style, a prostelytizing mouthpiece for the author’s own philosophy. I think this is part of what people mean, when they object that writing women, or queer women, or women of color, feels “too political”: the strictures of talisman-creation undermine the ability to foster empathy for a real-seeming individual. But this is not a problem with writing queer women! It’s a problem with the unrealistic expectations we’ve placed on ourselves around doing so. 

I mean, for my money, the way to craft characters who do inspire this gut-level sense of recognition is to draw on one’s own experiences—one’s own passions and one’s own struggles—while also refraining from providing neat and tidy solutions to which real people (and hence characters in the moment) do not have access. People are messy; we have to be able to let our characters be messy. To paraphrase John Waters, who surely knows whereof he speaks: we have to let our characters make US uncomfortable. We have to let them make us feel queasy and ambivalent sometimes, just as we sometimes make ourselves feel that way. We have to let ourselves discover things through the journey of writing and reading that we did not know when we started out. 

Does this mean there is no point in research, no point in educating ourselves about over-used tropes and the history and current reality of queer representation, no point in critiquing media that perpetuates these tropes? Of course it doesn’t mean that. The goal—my goal, anyway—is to write characters who ring true to life, who come off as real people, with real struggles. And in order to do that, a writer needs to be familiar with the toxic and un-lifelike nonsense that gets endlessly recycled in media. It’s helpful to know, for example, that the “lesbian dies, goes mad, or returns to the heterosexual fold at novel’s end” trope was originally imposed on lesbian pulp writers as a condition of publication if they wanted to avoid obscenity charges: here is an example that’s, VERY clearly, not an artefact of lesbian reality but an artificial and homophobic narrative imposed from without. I think it’s valid to make the point that maybe, in this year of our apocalypse 2017, we have reached a point where this narrative should be largely avoided. 

But you know: there are a lot of artificial and homophobic narratives. And there are even more narratives that, while not intrinsically artificial or homophobic, have so often been twisted that way as to be forever tainted by suspicion and pain. And that suspicion and pain twist back into real lived experience in ways that can be complicated and unpredictable. If our culture is a house, then so many of its walls are built of tainted narratives, and so many of its other walls are built up against those tainted walls, that it’s very difficult to dismantle the structure, or determine what’s sound and what’s not. As a real-life queer woman, I have never met an anti-oppression talisman, but I have met plenty of queer women who have made me uncomfortable—myself at the top of my own list. Though I squirm at the “lesbian goes crazy” novel ending, I have known many queer women, myself included, who struggle with mental illness (as well as many who don’t). Though I have noped out of media for egregious and self-serving use of the “lesbian was just waiting for the right man” trope, I myself am a near-lesbian who once fell in love with a man, and I know others who have done the same (as well as many who haven’t). Though I share the frustration over the assumption that bisexual characters are universally flighty and commitment-averse, I also know several flighty and promiscuous bisexuals (and many bisexuals who are neither, and many flighty and promiscuous straight folks). Though I cringe a little at depictions of alcoholism and drug abuse in queer female culture, I am myself a queer woman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. In a cringe-y catch-22, I am deeply uncomfortable with both the demonization of the working-class butch/femme subculture by the middle and upper classes of lesbian society AND ALSO with the degree of forcibly normative gender expectations I personally have encountered in butch/femme environments… so I decided to go ahead and write a whole novel about that, despite the fact that I might avoid someone else’s treatment of the same subject matter. 

The pattern here is hopefully obvious: even drawing from the pool of my own personal lived stories, many verge on or overlap with narratives that are often toxic in their execution. So what are we to do? Does all this add up to a wash, a free pass for the continuation of any tired and harmful trope imaginable? No. It adds up to a call for a nuanced and subjective calculus around analyzing works of art: an acknowledgement that some versions of Narrative X or Character Y will spark that sense of recognition or that shock of injury for audience members, and others won’t, and others will for some audience members but not for others, and all of that is valid to talk about. And it also adds up to a call for writers of queer female characters—especially those of us who are queer and/or female ourselves—to allow ourselves the freedom to write individualized queer women who, though they may not body forth our personal politics, make us familiarly uncomfortable. Characters with whom we are intimate. 

Characters with whom we feel at home. 

Taking a larger view, I think that we need to close the gap between our reading and writing of men, especially straight white men (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated”) and our reading and writing of women, especially queer women and women of color (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable”). Both sides need to shift. Neither extreme is true, and we are doing a disservice to all our characters, and our works, if we disregard the nuance that lives between them. But more intensely, and more specifically, I would argue that where queer female characters are concerned we need to work toward an attitude that—however partially and strategically—begins to uncouple “individual character representation” from “personal authorial politics,” and does so with the express goal of allowing these characters normality. Weird, inconsistent, flawed, complicated, mundane normality. We need to let go of the intimidating and paralyzing attitude that queerness and femaleness raise the political stakes in such a way that mundane fuckups, either on the part of the author or the character, are no longer allowed. 

To extend the analogies from earlier: if we have the water pressure to support it, we should install low-flow showerheads, not because we can thereby compensate for the evils of Nestlé, but to save on our water bills. And if we have the time and inclination we might make our own clothes, not because it will magically deliver us from the perils of the beauty industry, because it it a mode of self-expression that is also personally empowering. And if we can, we should write and read complex, flawed queer female characters, and support others who write and read them, because to do so enables us—real-life queer women, and people who know real-life queer women, and even people who might be intimidated or repulsed by real-life queer women—to feel that real-life queer women, in all their flawed and problematic glory, are more human; more at home; more recognized. Closer to the range of the normal. 

None of these things is going to save the world, and we don’t need them to. They are important and life-sustaining anyway. 

(The author can be found online as havingbeenbreathedout on Tumblr and breathedout on AO3. She can be found offline on the wide open beaches and labyrinthine interstates of sunny southern California, where she lives the social-justice nonprofit life and also enjoys Bloomsbury history, kissing girls, poolside cocktails, early-morning yoga, and crying about fiction with her live-in editor/BFF/queerplatonic life partner fizzygins.)