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anghraineWarning: this is very long, very rambly, and very inconclusive except for some strong opinions in the middle. But hey, no TV Tropes!
So, I will definitely be writing The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker for the au_bb. I might try Revenge of the Jedi as well, since I’d really like to get it done; I definitely won’t be doing the massive P&P genderswap, but that’s okay. It’s going to a good home and I’m still creator/editor/consultant, so it’ll be like … partial custody.
Anyway, Lucy. I’ve started plotting to try and figure out what I want to do with it, beyond GIRL!LUKE YAAAAAAAY!! And it’s immensely complicated, because just about every possible path is dependent on interpretations of canon, and in a lot of cases I’m not even sure how I interpret canon.
For instance, a big one: can women be starpilots? I don’t remember seeing one: not in the Empire, not in the Rebellion, not in the anywhere. Is it just coincidence? (Ha.) Are they just discouraged? Or is it outright forbidden? I don’t know. I never really thought about it before. You wouldn’t think the Rebellion could afford to be too picky about such things, but apparently they are. Would Lucy be allowed to attack the Death Star? Even if Biggs’ testimonial (…assuming he’d offer it!) spurred them to make an exception for her, what would that exceptionalism entail?
Okay, the other members of the squadron would still be blown up. Han would still come back to rescue her – if anything, I expect innocence and heroism in a teenage girl would bring out his protective impulses even more than with a teenage boy. Mkay, he blows Vader out of thewater sky, Lucy destroys the Death Star, hurrah. She’s instantly catapulted into insta-celebrity and her position in the fleet is obviously secure.
How would the other, all-male, pilots react to her presence (or her existence)? She wouldn’t room with them, of course, and at that point the leadership would probably be only too willing to make accommodations for her. Would there be people bawling about special treatment? Would there be hazing? Harassment? Or would they think of her more as a mascot? Would she get promoted as quickly as Luke did (or at all)? Or any combination of the above?
I. don't. know.
The biggest obstacle, though, isn’t the plot. I can decide on what interpretation I agree with, or which best suits the story, and build the plot around that. Eventually. Maybe. Anyway, the main conundrum is relationships.
By which I mean sex.
The thing is, sex is really important. I know, you’re all stunned. But, just sticking to fiction (hey, from my point of view, fictional sex is way more interesting) sexual tension has an enormous effect on how people behave, on what relationships they become involved in, in how they see those relationships, on how we see those relationships, on pretty much every dynamic in which sex is involved in any way.
Genderswap, by its nature, throws a massive spanner in the works of pretty much every sexual dynamic (and the nonsexual ones too, but that’s a different discussion). I don’t just mean explicitly sexual relationships, either. Switching fandoms for a moment, Elizabeth’s attraction to Wickham is obviously a strong component in her readiness to believe his story. Arguably, so is an attraction to Darcy.
So when I wrote First Impressions, a localized double genderswap (same basic storyline, girl!Darcy, boy!Elizabeth), I ran straight up against The Problem of Wickham. His story is stupid, his lies transparent, and his self-dramatizing obvious. But he’s pretty and he’s hating on Darcy, so Elizabeth swallows it. Fine. But now Elizabeth is Henry, and Wickham is looking for a nice gullible young girl to regale with his tale of endless tragedy.
It was easy enough to decide that the girl would be Lydia, and Henry would be near enough to participate in the conversation. However, the sexual tension would run very differently.
Wickham would be mildly attracted to Lydia, of course, and most likely not to Henry. Henry’s attraction to [Miss] Darcy is probably clearer – he’d be more accustomed to being a sexual subject in the first place, while she’s even more of a sexual object than Darcy was in canon. There’s no way Wickham wouldn’t have tried his luck with a female Darcy, so that’s floating around in the backstory, while his sex appeal would have comparatively little effect on Henry.
So, as I saw it, I had three options: first, to simply ignore all this and keep the plot on the rails by retaining canon!Elizabeth's attraction to Wickham (improbable as it would be for Henry); second, to rely on the assumption that Elizabeth's misjudgment has waaaaaay more to do with Darcy than Wickham, and keep the plot on the rails by relying on Henry's prejudice against Catherine, or third, to follow the plot where the characters took it, not even bothering to keep it on the rails.
The first was the simplest, and since the scene kept defeating me I was tempted to go with it, but that smacked of the 'arbitrary change in orientation for the purposes of plot,' which so far transcends 'pet peeve' that usually I can't do much more than sputter in rage. I hate this. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
I want to stop and clarify something right here. I've been thinking about this ever since my Ace Goggles post, and I do not hate the act of refusing to assume a character is straight because we don't know otherwise. In fact, that's why I intensely dislike the idea that you have to arbitrarily change characters' sexualities to write them as anything other than 100% straight. It's predicated upon the assumption that characters are straight by default, even if we have no reason to think so. That's why 'canonical sexuality' is such a can of worms -- people will complain about fans turning straight characters gay or bi or ace, because apparently anyone not explicitly identified as an aberration of nature or something equally revolting just has to be straight.
This is the sort of thing that makes me want to explain how my favourite characters from every single one of my fandoms can be seen as ace. Most of the time, there's as much evidence for that as for anything else (and sometimes more, when her name is Charlotte Lucas), but of course fandom sez straight-until-proven-guilty.
I know I'm not the only one who's seen these assumptions running rampant through fandom -- sometimes implied, sometimes stated outright, but always there. I'm definitely not the only one who's run into it in real life. The entire concept of straight as the default around which all variations revolve is ubiquitous, problematic, and damaging, and I see no reason to tolerate it in any context.
*deep breath*
The other justification I often see is that sexuality just isn't that big a deal. Omnia vincit amor, y'all -- orientation doesn't matter if you just love each other enough.
Bullshit.
I'm not talking specifically about bisexuals and demisexuals here, because that's not what incompatible orientation is about. It's about how it hits you, one day, that the person you love most in the world wants -- needs -- something you can never, never give them. It's just not there. Or vice-versa, though as an aromantic asexual, I've only been on one side of it. For me, almost the entire world is incompatible. You know how shippers talk about the Most Important Person? Sure, I have one, but I can never be one -- they'll always need ... something. Somethingmore else. Someone else.
In case there was any doubt about it, this sucks. So no, I don't particularly appreciate it when people go on about how it doesn't matter unless you make it matter, with enough love you can conquer anything, blah blah blah. Actually, it makes me want to smack people until they stop being privileged assholes. Thanks, now you know.
And knowing is half the battle.
Anyway, back to the problem of canonical sexuality. Accepting that it's not cool to assume (1) straight until proven otherwise, and (2) sexuality is unimportant in the face of true love, what is a well-meaning fan to do?
Whatever the hell you want, if canon doesn't suggest anything in particular. For instance, inbiichan's Miss Bingley Regrets, Caroline, Lady Middleton, and -- IIRC -- Elizabeth Elliot are gay, Georgiana and possibly Darcy are bi, and for all we know Jane might be too. In canon, we know nothing of the preferences of the former three, while the latter each demonstrate interest in one person of the opposite sex, which proves ... very little. They could be straight, bi, demi, romantic!ace, or basically anything except completely gay or completely ace. So this was cool, even if I thought it weird that she overlooked characters like Emma Woodhouse and Mary Crawford in favour of ... Lady Middleton?
But if canon does tell us, either by implication or direct statement, then arbitrarily changing characters' sexualities is no better than changing any character trait, and because of the historical baggage often worse. Romantic!sexual!Charlotte is faily. Straight!Dumbledore should not happen. I don't care if it's "just fiction." Fictional is part of cultural dialogue, and often a really important part.
Soooo. Back to Henry, alternative one (ignore his orientation!) didn't sit well at all. Elizabeth Bennet is probably the most blatantly straight Austen heroine (not that there's a lot of competition, admittedly, between Emma, Catherine, Fanny and Co), expressing clear attraction to at least three different men and none to any women whatsoever. Alternate three (ignore the plot!) might make a purer AU, but I wanted a localized AU. So I went for #2: Wickham, ever alert to his own advantage, tailors his story to suit his changed audience (inheritance woes --> TRAGIC ROMANCE), not-attracted!Henry is clear-sighted enough to find him kind of skeevy, but his desire to believe that Catherine Darcy is a bitch from hell overrides his better judgment.
Yes, it was really that involved for one scene. And really, the whole Problem of Sex is why I made it a double genderswap to begin with. Austen did boy!Elizabeth herself, in Henry Tilney, so while I enjoyed writing him, he didn't take a whole lot of thought and I certainly didn't embark upon two years of plotting for his sake. First Impressions was a vehicle for girl!Darcy. Oddly enough, it was much more difficult to keep it one if I only switched her -- the issues of sex and sexuality changed so much that it was no longer focused just on Catherine. And I very much wanted to cover the same ground, emphasizing the differences caused only by the genderswap. So I switched them both, and it worked.
That's not the only genderswap I've come up with, either. Setting aside casual moderns, I've played on-and-off-again with the idea of universe-wide genderswaps (straightforward ones for P&P and SW each, and then another SW one, set in a full-blown fantasy universe) -- but again, with everybody in a relationship switched, it's much less of an issue than when it's only one. In fact, genderswap-happy though I am, I've never even imagined a single-target one.
Probably because it's haaaaaaard.
</Lucy>
I'm not particularly invested in keeping this localized à la First Impressions, though I don't want it becoming completely unrecognisable, either. I can do a pure AU, taking a single point of departure ("Lucy is a girl") and following it -- that could really go anywhere and, as I said at first, depends a lot on how I see the in-story universe/characters. Last year, even though I loved writing FI, I often felt boxed in by the localization. This would allow me to get away from that -- but it would also destroy the structure provided by canon. And originally, I'm pretty sure I meant to imagine what SW would have looked like if they'd gone through with making Luke a girl. That story would have quite a few more out-of-story influences, be more generally meta, and even if it ended up veering away from canon, it'd at least have a basic structure to start with.
I ... don't really know. I'm not sure which would be better or more interesting or just more fun to write. But I'm pretty sure it'll have a huge influence on how I write the Han-Lucy-Leia dynamic.
(Hint: the latter would have much less in the way of femmeslash subtext.)
So, I will definitely be writing The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker for the au_bb. I might try Revenge of the Jedi as well, since I’d really like to get it done; I definitely won’t be doing the massive P&P genderswap, but that’s okay. It’s going to a good home and I’m still creator/editor/consultant, so it’ll be like … partial custody.
Anyway, Lucy. I’ve started plotting to try and figure out what I want to do with it, beyond GIRL!LUKE YAAAAAAAY!! And it’s immensely complicated, because just about every possible path is dependent on interpretations of canon, and in a lot of cases I’m not even sure how I interpret canon.
For instance, a big one: can women be starpilots? I don’t remember seeing one: not in the Empire, not in the Rebellion, not in the anywhere. Is it just coincidence? (Ha.) Are they just discouraged? Or is it outright forbidden? I don’t know. I never really thought about it before. You wouldn’t think the Rebellion could afford to be too picky about such things, but apparently they are. Would Lucy be allowed to attack the Death Star? Even if Biggs’ testimonial (…assuming he’d offer it!) spurred them to make an exception for her, what would that exceptionalism entail?
Okay, the other members of the squadron would still be blown up. Han would still come back to rescue her – if anything, I expect innocence and heroism in a teenage girl would bring out his protective impulses even more than with a teenage boy. Mkay, he blows Vader out of the
How would the other, all-male, pilots react to her presence (or her existence)? She wouldn’t room with them, of course, and at that point the leadership would probably be only too willing to make accommodations for her. Would there be people bawling about special treatment? Would there be hazing? Harassment? Or would they think of her more as a mascot? Would she get promoted as quickly as Luke did (or at all)? Or any combination of the above?
I. don't. know.
The biggest obstacle, though, isn’t the plot. I can decide on what interpretation I agree with, or which best suits the story, and build the plot around that. Eventually. Maybe. Anyway, the main conundrum is relationships.
By which I mean sex.
The thing is, sex is really important. I know, you’re all stunned. But, just sticking to fiction (hey, from my point of view, fictional sex is way more interesting) sexual tension has an enormous effect on how people behave, on what relationships they become involved in, in how they see those relationships, on how we see those relationships, on pretty much every dynamic in which sex is involved in any way.
Genderswap, by its nature, throws a massive spanner in the works of pretty much every sexual dynamic (and the nonsexual ones too, but that’s a different discussion). I don’t just mean explicitly sexual relationships, either. Switching fandoms for a moment, Elizabeth’s attraction to Wickham is obviously a strong component in her readiness to believe his story. Arguably, so is an attraction to Darcy.
So when I wrote First Impressions, a localized double genderswap (same basic storyline, girl!Darcy, boy!Elizabeth), I ran straight up against The Problem of Wickham. His story is stupid, his lies transparent, and his self-dramatizing obvious. But he’s pretty and he’s hating on Darcy, so Elizabeth swallows it. Fine. But now Elizabeth is Henry, and Wickham is looking for a nice gullible young girl to regale with his tale of endless tragedy.
It was easy enough to decide that the girl would be Lydia, and Henry would be near enough to participate in the conversation. However, the sexual tension would run very differently.
Wickham would be mildly attracted to Lydia, of course, and most likely not to Henry. Henry’s attraction to [Miss] Darcy is probably clearer – he’d be more accustomed to being a sexual subject in the first place, while she’s even more of a sexual object than Darcy was in canon. There’s no way Wickham wouldn’t have tried his luck with a female Darcy, so that’s floating around in the backstory, while his sex appeal would have comparatively little effect on Henry.
So, as I saw it, I had three options: first, to simply ignore all this and keep the plot on the rails by retaining canon!Elizabeth's attraction to Wickham (improbable as it would be for Henry); second, to rely on the assumption that Elizabeth's misjudgment has waaaaaay more to do with Darcy than Wickham, and keep the plot on the rails by relying on Henry's prejudice against Catherine, or third, to follow the plot where the characters took it, not even bothering to keep it on the rails.
The first was the simplest, and since the scene kept defeating me I was tempted to go with it, but that smacked of the 'arbitrary change in orientation for the purposes of plot,' which so far transcends 'pet peeve' that usually I can't do much more than sputter in rage. I hate this. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
I want to stop and clarify something right here. I've been thinking about this ever since my Ace Goggles post, and I do not hate the act of refusing to assume a character is straight because we don't know otherwise. In fact, that's why I intensely dislike the idea that you have to arbitrarily change characters' sexualities to write them as anything other than 100% straight. It's predicated upon the assumption that characters are straight by default, even if we have no reason to think so. That's why 'canonical sexuality' is such a can of worms -- people will complain about fans turning straight characters gay or bi or ace, because apparently anyone not explicitly identified as an aberration of nature or something equally revolting just has to be straight.
This is the sort of thing that makes me want to explain how my favourite characters from every single one of my fandoms can be seen as ace. Most of the time, there's as much evidence for that as for anything else (and sometimes more, when her name is Charlotte Lucas), but of course fandom sez straight-until-proven-guilty.
I know I'm not the only one who's seen these assumptions running rampant through fandom -- sometimes implied, sometimes stated outright, but always there. I'm definitely not the only one who's run into it in real life. The entire concept of straight as the default around which all variations revolve is ubiquitous, problematic, and damaging, and I see no reason to tolerate it in any context.
*deep breath*
The other justification I often see is that sexuality just isn't that big a deal. Omnia vincit amor, y'all -- orientation doesn't matter if you just love each other enough.
Bullshit.
I'm not talking specifically about bisexuals and demisexuals here, because that's not what incompatible orientation is about. It's about how it hits you, one day, that the person you love most in the world wants -- needs -- something you can never, never give them. It's just not there. Or vice-versa, though as an aromantic asexual, I've only been on one side of it. For me, almost the entire world is incompatible. You know how shippers talk about the Most Important Person? Sure, I have one, but I can never be one -- they'll always need ... something. Something
In case there was any doubt about it, this sucks. So no, I don't particularly appreciate it when people go on about how it doesn't matter unless you make it matter, with enough love you can conquer anything, blah blah blah. Actually, it makes me want to smack people until they stop being privileged assholes. Thanks, now you know.
And knowing is half the battle.
Anyway, back to the problem of canonical sexuality. Accepting that it's not cool to assume (1) straight until proven otherwise, and (2) sexuality is unimportant in the face of true love, what is a well-meaning fan to do?
Whatever the hell you want, if canon doesn't suggest anything in particular. For instance, in
biichan's Miss Bingley Regrets, Caroline, Lady Middleton, and -- IIRC -- Elizabeth Elliot are gay, Georgiana and possibly Darcy are bi, and for all we know Jane might be too. In canon, we know nothing of the preferences of the former three, while the latter each demonstrate interest in one person of the opposite sex, which proves ... very little. They could be straight, bi, demi, romantic!ace, or basically anything except completely gay or completely ace. So this was cool, even if I thought it weird that she overlooked characters like Emma Woodhouse and Mary Crawford in favour of ... Lady Middleton? But if canon does tell us, either by implication or direct statement, then arbitrarily changing characters' sexualities is no better than changing any character trait, and because of the historical baggage often worse. Romantic!sexual!Charlotte is faily. Straight!Dumbledore should not happen. I don't care if it's "just fiction." Fictional is part of cultural dialogue, and often a really important part.
Soooo. Back to Henry, alternative one (ignore his orientation!) didn't sit well at all. Elizabeth Bennet is probably the most blatantly straight Austen heroine (not that there's a lot of competition, admittedly, between Emma, Catherine, Fanny and Co), expressing clear attraction to at least three different men and none to any women whatsoever. Alternate three (ignore the plot!) might make a purer AU, but I wanted a localized AU. So I went for #2: Wickham, ever alert to his own advantage, tailors his story to suit his changed audience (inheritance woes --> TRAGIC ROMANCE), not-attracted!Henry is clear-sighted enough to find him kind of skeevy, but his desire to believe that Catherine Darcy is a bitch from hell overrides his better judgment.
Yes, it was really that involved for one scene. And really, the whole Problem of Sex is why I made it a double genderswap to begin with. Austen did boy!Elizabeth herself, in Henry Tilney, so while I enjoyed writing him, he didn't take a whole lot of thought and I certainly didn't embark upon two years of plotting for his sake. First Impressions was a vehicle for girl!Darcy. Oddly enough, it was much more difficult to keep it one if I only switched her -- the issues of sex and sexuality changed so much that it was no longer focused just on Catherine. And I very much wanted to cover the same ground, emphasizing the differences caused only by the genderswap. So I switched them both, and it worked.
That's not the only genderswap I've come up with, either. Setting aside casual moderns, I've played on-and-off-again with the idea of universe-wide genderswaps (straightforward ones for P&P and SW each, and then another SW one, set in a full-blown fantasy universe) -- but again, with everybody in a relationship switched, it's much less of an issue than when it's only one. In fact, genderswap-happy though I am, I've never even imagined a single-target one.
Probably because it's haaaaaaard.
</Lucy>
I'm not particularly invested in keeping this localized à la First Impressions, though I don't want it becoming completely unrecognisable, either. I can do a pure AU, taking a single point of departure ("Lucy is a girl") and following it -- that could really go anywhere and, as I said at first, depends a lot on how I see the in-story universe/characters. Last year, even though I loved writing FI, I often felt boxed in by the localization. This would allow me to get away from that -- but it would also destroy the structure provided by canon. And originally, I'm pretty sure I meant to imagine what SW would have looked like if they'd gone through with making Luke a girl. That story would have quite a few more out-of-story influences, be more generally meta, and even if it ended up veering away from canon, it'd at least have a basic structure to start with.
I ... don't really know. I'm not sure which would be better or more interesting or just more fun to write. But I'm pretty sure it'll have a huge influence on how I write the Han-Lucy-Leia dynamic.
(Hint: the latter would have much less in the way of femmeslash subtext.)
no subject
on 2011-02-17 08:41 pm (UTC)I was thinking the other day, why is so easy to think of an AU in which Elizabeth is a man and not so easy to think of one in which Darcy is a woman. Of course, it could be the Henry Tilney influence in those who have read NA, or internalized misogyny, because some of the things Darcy is liked for are not things our society likes in women, but also, I suspect it's much easier to imagine an unchanged Darcy falling for man!Elizabeth, than an unchanged Elizabeth falling for a woman!Darcy. She's very much focussed on the men, attraction wise.
no subject
on 2011-02-18 04:43 pm (UTC)I agree that's probably part of it -- Elizabeth is interested in men and Darcy is interested in Elizabeth. As I was telling you, whenever I tried to make girl!Darcy/Elizabeth work it just...didn't. I do tend to think misogyny (okay, and Darcy's reduction to a sex object) has more to do with it, though. Fangirling a clever, abrasive character when it's a man is one thing; when it's a woman, it's quite another. A charming, vain character, on the other hand ... meh, who cares.
no subject
on 2011-02-18 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-18 04:46 pm (UTC)I'm kind of curious why you wanted a mentor-lover at all, though. It works, it's just -- I'm not sure why it was so necessary to have one?
no subject
on 2011-02-18 07:59 pm (UTC)Oh, and I think probably another reason I ended up using Lady Middleton is that even though she is not made of raw femslash potential like Emma and Mary Crawford, my slash goggles had previously given me thoughts of Lady Middleton/Lucy Steele.
no subject
on 2011-02-21 01:59 am (UTC)It's a weird (largely unrelated!) thing, but now that I think of it, most of the Mary/Fanny vibes come from Fanny's side of things. I think my favourite is the part explaining why she keeps going to see Mary: she doesn't like her and she doesn't enjoy anything except the occasional giggle that she feels guilty about and she doesn't approve of her AT ALL, but there's just this inexorable fascination. Fanny has epic potential, though maybe not with Caroline.
I don't really get femmeslashy vibes from Lady Middleton and Lucy Steele, though I don't have much in the way of slash goggles. Lady Susan, on the other hand, I can see as mentor!lover to just about anyone.