adiva_calandia | Blogging Against Racism, better late than never

It's easy to identify prejudices in another's work, though -- that's why we have editors, because it's too hard to find our own problems in our own work. Which is why, I think, the representation problems in Milliways go largely unnoticed. It's our work. Last night, Coalhouse Walker from Ragtime entered and summed it up: You travel beyond the reach of the sun, to whatever world lies beyond, and it's full of white people.

I'm as guilty of it as everyone else. I was thinking this morning as I walked back from getting coffee, composing this in my head, Why didn't I cast Epimetheus as Greek? Well, because I'm playing off Prometheus' PB, who's white, and whose music partner is white. So why is Prometheus white?

For that matter, why are all of the mythical, seperate-from-general reality characters in Milliways white? The only exceptions I can come up with off the top of my head are Coyote and, on occasion, Raven (

varadia talked about that a lot). Why are these pups that are half personal canon white? Why did I assume Tom would be white? Why are none of my pups in The Wasteland non-white?

I don't feel that I can use the excuse that I'm white, and that I therefore can't write a non-white perspective. I'm female and I write guys fine. I'm straight and I write lesbian okay. I'm young and I write middle-aged or immortal okay.

And to be fair to myself, I play two non-white characters: Carmela Rodriguez and Nirupam Singh. But I still come back to that question -- why are the characters I create white?

Not like I'm going to change my PB selection on Epimetheus and Tom and Russ and Journey all of a sudden, but it's worth keeping in mind when I write.

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I was afraid she was a Sue.

Sometimes I look at what's on my TV (and on my shelves, and in my DVD players) and I think maybe we should be writing Mary Sues. But that is a tl;dr for another time.

I would be very interested in reading this tl;dr!

*pauses. tries to sort brains. fails.*

My Mary Sue issues mostly boil down to two things.

I think "Mary Sue" is a useful term in a setting with mostly-female writers. See: 10 year old girl rewriting Harry Potter to be about Harry's long lost twin sister Raven Moonpearl. Or writing about Harry getting a girlfriend named Sparkle Princess. We know the dynamic.

Except that we also talk about Canon Sues, and Lana Lang is not the same issue as the above 10 year old. But that dynamic there's too, and we need to be able to talk about that also. Mostly I wish we had different terms for them, and I wish that, say, a male writer's inability to write women well didn't so often get fandom loathing the female characters instead of criticizing the writing.

And anyway, if there aren't any female Harry Potters in the library . . . well, why shouldn't Miss 10 Year Old write about Raven Moonpearl?

I hate the feeling that we're collectively talking ourselves out of . . . writing ourselves into the stories we shouldn't be written out of in the first place. Because it's ridiculous and offensively self-indulgent to write SPN fic about a female, Chinese hunter? but all the white boys with magic powers are just business as usual? why? Sure, badly done self-insert wish-fulfillment is boring to read, but the way the fear of Mary Sueing works, I feel like we treat wish-fulfillment itself as the bad guy. That, and writing characters who are like us (in gender -- white girls writing about white men doesn't get called Mary Sueing, natch).

And it's kind of like . . . well, part of the idea of Mary Sues is that they're taking screen time/importance that doesn't belong to them? I think? And when it's (rich, straight, attractive) white boy protagonists everywhere, it's like we're collectively saying the screen time belongs to them and we shouldn't be intruding on it.

I think about Mary Sue stuff mostly in terms of gender -- which is why this is a tangent -- but I think a lot of the issues are applicable to every flavor of identity politics.

And with all that said, I'm still profoundly uninterested in most fic with OCs. My mouth and my money, they are not in the same place.

*adds --*

I meant springboarding, not spingboarding . . .

And my frustration, lest this be unclear, is with myself and with some nebulous abstract Fandom, not with you or anyone else who is a specific person.

What Midge said!

*adds vote in favor*

Blogging Against Racism, better late than never

spingboard into tangentland

Re: spingboard into tangentland

tl;dr like the wind

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Re: spingboard into tangentland

Re: spingboard into tangentland