Anghraine

Speaking of femslash Spirk genderbending name considerations:

I was really torn between how Spock is such a masculine-coded name by Vulcan norms that it feels weird to do nothing at all with it. But also, it’s so extremely iconic as THE name for THE character that an equally feminine-coded name like T'Pel or whatever would be super jarring (and distancing from the original character, I think—the potential in-world rationales for a character’s name are one consideration when I think about this stuff, but only one).

Also, Spock’s name predates the development of Vulcan as a language, and iirc, it’s also slightly odd as a Vulcan name these days (if I understand correctly, inconsistent orthographical representations and erratically silent letters are not at all usual). This does not even slightly bother me in terms of canon, but I thought a transliteration that looks more like “modern Vulcan” might preserve the basic sounds of the name while shifting pronunciation and appearance just enough to seem less specifically masculine.

Still, I was really tempted to try and make T’[whatever] work somehow with this. I feel like Sarek is the kind of person who might well insist upon a daughter having the prestige of the t'sai in her name, even if Amanda thought otherwise. But I couldn’t figure it out aesthetically, so instead I settled on S'paak. (I’m not 100% decided, but it’s the smoothest result thus far of my attempts to compromise between norms of Vulcan names and their components as more fully developed later, and the ultra-recognizable consonants of the original name.)

I’m also deciding how other crew members even address her, because “Miss S'paak” feels like a really weird and inappropriate way to refer to someone of her position and responsibilities, and yet this could at least be partly said of the canonical “Mr” as well. Maybe it’s just this era of Starfleet being relatively slack about this kind of thing, at least below the commanding officer’s rank? IDK, it’s not my impression, at least with regard to women.

Hmm, I checked, and Uhura is occasionally addressed as “Miss Uhura” but far more often as “Lieutenant Uhura” or just “Uhura.” Mira Romaine in “The Lights of Zetar” (which I watched not long ago) seemed to also be addressed by name as “Lieutenant Romaine” rather than “Miss Romaine.” OTOH Scotty is “Mr. Scott” quite often rather than addressed by rank, same for Sulu, etc, so maybe it’s more of a relic of the ultra-gendered dynamics and evolving world building of TOS… I’m still undecided tbh!

Rambling about family relationships based on my research for my PhD exams (16th- to 18th-century British literature):

One of the things that came up in my reading for my exams was, inevitably, ~the rise of the companionate marriage~. The usual framing is often over-simplistic and very heterocentric; people sometimes talk as if there was no concept of marriage involving romantic ties (sometimes even exclusive romantic ties!) until the 17th/18th century or something.

That said, IMO there’s something to it, at least in England. As someone who had mostly done research in the 18th and earlier 19th centuries, 16th-century takes on marriage often sound like they come from Earth 2. Over time, there’s more and more emphasis on the ties of marriage, companionship, and parenthood in cultural discourse, with other family relationships increasingly subordinated to those, even while ideas from earlier periods about the importance of those other family relationships persisted in some ways.

Like, there was a lot of talk about how brothers were supposed to care for the interests of their siblings, especially their unmarried sisters, but there’s also a lot of talk about how that was increasingly not happening, and how the ties between brothers and sisters were becoming less important and less reliable as a "net" for unmarried women.

Men increasingly resented their sisters for taking resources that would otherwise go to their wives and children, or simply denied them meaningful resources altogether in favor of focusing on their own wives/children. It was a really well-established dynamic by the time that Wollstonecraft wrote about it in Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Austen in Sense and Sensibility.

One of the things that S&S highlights is that John and Fanny Dashwood’s son does not need the resources that are denied to John’s sisters. He already has a comfortable separate inheritance. John prioritizes Fanny and Harry over his sisters both because of his character and because doing so had become very culturally normalized by then.

By the 20th century (at least in the UK and US), people prioritizing their spouses and children over their siblings or other connections was and is often going to seem "well, of course they would." But the degree to which that is the case is really influenced by cultural norms and expectations. Going back to Austen (surprise), she has an intriguing passage about it that speaks to the shifts in how the sibling tie was seen and experienced:

An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! it is so.—Fraternal love, sometimes almost every thing, is at others worse than nothing.

I don’t even have siblings (sort of surrogate siblings, but not people I was actually brought up with), but I do find the evolution and melancholy over this really interesting. And I do think that a lot of the, hmm, enthusiasm over the rise of the “companionate marriage” tends to ignore the cost of it.

Tagged: #i am pretty sure this is why austen keeps returning to darcy's sense of responsibility and deep affection for his sister #and why elizabeth thinks his way of talking about georgiana should have told her about his character #i've seen people be like 'just bc you care about your own family members doesn't mean you're a good person wtf' about that #but it was a big deal at the time! #wickham brings it up as something that people in general praise darcy for too #obviously this was of really immediate concern for austen herself #but plenty of people write about it over the years #and it's just ... idk #complicated

[ETA 5/28/2024: this is actually extremely relevant to my dissertation and something I was literally just writing about today!]

I'm taking a brief break from my dissertation to ... uh, amuse myself by figuring out my readers' ranking of my genderbending fics on AO3.

Rules I'm applying: 1) I'm only including fic verses that are collectively at least 2000 words long because, well, I do have to go back to the diss, 2) verses comprised of multiple fics are ranked according to either the popularity of the series as a whole or the most popular individual fic (depending on which is higher; not combining them because there's a lot of overlap), 3) I'm considering both bookmarks and kudos in my judgment—we'll see if it makes a difference, and 4) I'm ignoring everything with less than 30 kudos and 5 bookmarks.

1. First Impressions | 215 bookmarks | 876 kudos | genderbent characters: Elizabeth Bennet (-> Henry Bennet) and Fitzwilliam Darcy (-> Catherine Darcy)

This is a genderswapped retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in its original period (not really a true "what if"). All stats are specifically for the original (completed) 36k fic. It individually beats out every possible stat for every other fic in the series as well as the series as a whole. (Note: The overall series is 44k words long.)

2. Lucy Skywalker series | 163 bookmarks | 406 kudos (The Jedi and the Sith Lord) | genderbent characters: Luke Skywalker (-> Lucy Skywalker)

This is a genderbent AU that mostly, but not completely, sticks to the rails of canon until the end of the ESB timeline, at which point it swerves into the "real" AU. The Jedi and the Sith Lord is the sequel to The Imperial Menace/the ESB plot, and the third fic in the main series, focusing on the consequences of Vader capturing Lucy. It's technically completed at 70k, but only in the sense that it explores what happens to/with Lucy and Vader until the nature of her captivity fundamentally changes, and everything after that will be a separate fic but hasn't been written yet. Although none of the individual fics have as many bookmarks as the series as a whole, my #2, #3, and #4 most bookmarked genderbent fics are all for the Lucyverse. (Note: the overall series is 129k words long.)

3. Love, Pride & Delicacy | 25 bookmarks | 163 kudos | genderbent characters: Fitzwilliam Darcy (-> Catherine Darcy, for convenience)

This is an actual Elizabeth/f!Darcy "what if" femslash AU rather than a retelling, though a slow one—it's still early in the overall story at 25k. It's also placed in the original P&P setting. There is no wider series.

4. The Lady of Gondor | 25 bookmarks | 119 kudos (we also are daughters of the great) | genderbent characters: Faramir (-> Fíriel)

This is a deeply self-indulgent Aragorn/f!Faramir/Éowyn AU, though it's not only a WIP but split into different vaguely related fics (some of which are also WIPs!) about some aspect of the verse in relation to Fíriel. I think the norms of Gondor and Middle-earth make the gender change particularly significant (in some ways more than any other verse), so actual plot and relationship changes tend to be the focus. The kudos are for the specific linked fic, which is a WIP at nearly 5k and the most Éowyn-centric of them. (Note: the overall series is about 9.5k words long.)

5. The Edge of Darkness | 17 bookmarks | 106 kudos | genderbent characters: Tarrlok (-> Taraka)

This is a genderbent f!Tarrlok AU, though told entirely from Noatak/Amon's perspective, and to some extent more about the impact on him than on Taraka herself (though she's extremely important to the fic). Even more than that, the linked fic is focused on the effect of the change on their family dynamics as children, until teenage Noatak leaves her behind per canon. The fic can look like a retelling à la First Impressions, since the basic plot points don't change, but the larger series is on course to swerve into full "what if" territory as well. However, like First Impressions, these stats are all for the completed opening fic (18k) and not the longer WIP series (32k), which is temporarily paused at the point where 37-year-old Taraka openly identifies Amon as Noatak. CW: child abuse.

6. Blood and Fire | 16 bookmarks | 67 kudos | genderbent characters: Tarrlok (-> Taraka) and Noatak (-> Nataka)

This is a dark(er) AU of The Edge of Darkness in which Noatak/Amon is also genderbent, and the bloodbending siblings never separated. Taraka fled home with Nataka back in the day, they only grew closer (...too close), and although Taraka still ended up on the Republic City council, her true loyalty is to Amon. She promptly turns Korra over when Amon shows up, which is where the fic begins; it's told entirely through Korra's attempts to navigate her circumstances as a prisoner of the Equalists. CW: incest, complicated F/F/F dubcon??? emotional bonding kink with occasional violence yet little overt romance and no sex. I am what I am. The stats are for the completed (though deliberately ambiguous) main fic, which is 10k, and not the side fics or the series as a whole (13k).

7. The Queer Rogue One AU | 12 bookmarks | 57 kudos (the words we've both fallen under) | genderbent characters: Cassian Andor (-> Cassia Andor)

This is, on one level, a relatively straightforward genderbent!Cassian AU that is more or less complete at 13k. The underlying concepts are: a) what if my male fave was a hot lesbian and my ship was f/f and b) what if we headcanon every single member of the main team as queer in some capacity :D and c) the SW universe is so blatantly patriarchal in the films that it's a particularly interesting setting for exploring the effects of the gender change on someone like Cassia, a female revolutionary and spy :D :D. It's a little challenging to properly evaluate where it sits wrt stats because I revised the scattered, vaguely connected scraps of the universe into a single fic through both sentence-level revisions and significant additions, but that revision is only on Tumblr (where the link currently goes to, sorry) and my GoogleDrive, not AO3. It's not even a series in my heart! But it is on AO3. Evaluate as you will, but when I finally get around to converting the AO3 version to the correct format this may or may not change. For now this is where it goes by AO3 stats.

8. Daughters of Númenor series | 5 bookmarks | 33 kudos (the voices of the sea) | genderbent characters: all Númenórean throwbacks in LOTR, but specifically Aragorn (-> Aranor), Faramir (-> Míriel), Denethor (-> Andreth), and Imrahil (-> Imraphel)

As might be guessed, this is an AU where every Númenórean throwback mentioned in LOTR is genderbent (in the backstory, this also includes Ivriniel and Finduilas of Dol Amroth, who become Túrin, Prince of Dol Amroth, and Gwindor of Dol Amroth). It's Aranor/Míriel and definitely focused on them despite the broader change (where Arwen is a non-factor for the OT3 in The Lady of Gondor because she went to Valinor with Celebrían, she actually is present in Middle-earth in this series, though unfortunately very straight). While Fíriel in The Lady of Gondor was never expected to be a warrior and gets on reasonably well with Denethor, this AU is more about the broader effects—so even though we rarely see f!Denethor/Andreth, it's significant that she was a trailblazer as a female warrior, loremaster, and ultimately the first female ruler of Gondor, inadvertently laying a foundation that Aranor could build on later (which would have horrified Andreth herself!). The specific fic with the most kudos in the series, linked above, is a nearly 2k fic about the effect of Faramir's canonical visions on Míriel. (Note: the overall series is currently 3k words long.)

I'm cleaning up old tags because I'm finally running up against the max even for an upgraded account. And there was a period around 2012 when I'd started using tags on livejournal/Dreamwidth in a Tumblresque running-commentary-under-my-breath way even though 1) they don't work as well on LJ/DW in that way, because they're automatically alphabetized and 2) I wasn't likely to reuse those specific tags, so it's ultimately kind of a waste.

At the same time, I (obviously) prefer to preserve old posts and such as a kind of record of what I was doing and thinking and saying at the time (really putting the "journal" in livejournal!), so I haven't wanted to delete these Tumblr-style tags. They were part of what I was doing back then!

This is especially glaring for an admittedly very wanky series of posts I put together. For context, the liberal-leaning Star Wars blog fangirlblog had recently posted defenses of slave Leia and Padmé Amidala from an allegedly feminist perspective that were making the rounds at the time. I found both takes ... objectionable. It was difficult enough to put together a coherent response that I ended up simply recording myself reading it and responding in real time, and then transcribed that recording into text, ultimately spread across nine different posts. It's very 2012 in a lot of ways—including my much more overt hostility towards the prequels and the OP's extremely binary concept of gender—but also, I do still think the defenses of slave Leia (and even of Padmé in some ways) are short-sighted at best and deeply rooted in fucked-up concepts of gender at worst. In any case, I decided to preserve my tags before deleting them as organizational tags by making a new post (this one!) with the old tags listed.

Part 1: Intro (touches on gender, representation, diversity, marginalization of women in the OT and PT, and over-reliance on "Watsonian" or in-world explanations for choices made by overwhelmingly male creators in constructing narratives). Tagged: #ahoy false catch-22 #feminism marches on #i try to be fair but i hate the prequels #strong female characters

Part 2: Slave Leia and constructed narratives. Tagged: #fanservice for great justice #reading comprehension failure #rotj makes me cry inside #stories don't come from shangri-la #strong female characters

( Read more... )

Belatedly, re: my genderbending post:

brynnmclean said:

Solidarity, friend!

I replied:

Thank you!!! Gender feelings are so complicated and the intersection w/ genderbending is complicated and then people are like … That.

knighthooded said:

I felt this in my soul, thanks for putting it into words

I replied:

You’re welcome! Glad it’s not just me, honestly.

mairesmith said:

Matches my experience of gender perfectly

I replied:

*fistbump*

cosmonauthill said:

Late to the game on this but yes!! The idea that gender euphoria is something that everyone who isn’t trans experiences is so weird to me because I think most people live in a “well this is where the train stopped for me” sort of mindset? I know I certainly do.

I got some genderbending discourse on my dash, and it remains so weird to me.

This particular take was about how genderbending is inherently gender essentialist and I’m just ???????????

I mean, I can’t speak for everyone who writes genderbent fic, but I have written a lot of it. And for me, it only works when I don’t see the genderbent character as having an essential gender at all; otherwise it couldn’t be changed without making them a fundamentally different person (though no more so than many fandom changes). I once contemplated m!Leia and my brain just about broke.

In fairness, I’m pretty much projecting my own experience onto a lot of my faves and I accept that. I have never felt that I had an essential gender or even really understood gender, just that I have been assigned female and treated as female. I’ve certainly resented it at varying points in my life, but not enough to do anything about it. I just live my female-adjacent-ish life and it’s not quite right, but not quite wrong, so … whatever.

I honestly think that people often characterize gender in terms of what gender you feel like and not how much you feel it, but for me, it’s this mix of “what is gender anyway?” and “eh.” And yeah, there’s probably some repression going on there, but in any case, I deal with it through imagining apparently cis male fictional characters with the experience I have (no essential gender + some not-quite-comfortable social influence), and then converting it to something even closer to mine.

So it’s really weird when people are like … actually, taking ostensibly cis male characters and giving them your wtf experience of gender is gender essentialist and you’re not allowed to process your experiences that way.

I know people will keep doing what they’re doing, of course. But so will I.

Tagged: #hmm #my gb fics are different but have common themes that ... feel very obvious but weren't even obvious to me for awhile #me: why is all my genderbent fic so issueficcy #also me: hmm not sure but i don't think i care

Quora sent me a response about Aragorn’s claim to the throne that heavily downplayed the Stewards while completely overlooking some very salient elements of the original claim (like, Arvedui claiming to be the rightful king of Gondor under a misrepresentation of Númenórean law while his father was alive)

And then the first annoying response came from

Orson Scott Card

Tagged: #i mean. i already despised him but apparently he's on lotr threads on quora now #he wrote my favorite writing book as a young closeted lds writer so i'm very ADJKFKJADFK;ADFJKAGHHHH about him generally #WILL I NEVER BE FREE

Over at Tumblr, the main women's wrongs poll finished. After 4,464 votes (easily my most voted upon poll ever), the top four results were:

1) Clytemnestra from the Oresteia (19.5%)
2) Carmilla from (Le Fanu's) Carmilla (16.4%)
3) Catra from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (15.3%)
4) Cersei Lannister from ASOIAF (10.7%)

C is the letter of choice for beloved morally dubious female characters, apparently!

Okay, this one is also weirdly, well, challenging!

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

It feels like I do that all the time, lol, but (even though I'm not posting in the community's comments—lingering shyness, I guess) I guess it can be handy to have in one place. Okay. I think I'll do this one as a bulleted list for convenience. Stuff about me:

• My name is Elizabeth (most people know me as Anghraine and a few know my family nickname, but any of these are fine).
• I'm in my 30s. (Still. Somehow.)
• I'm a PhD student in English literature, hopefully in my final semester. I complain about my dissertation pretty regularly.
• Like many people in fandom, I'm very opinionated, frequently about things that seem trivial to other people.
• I'm US American and politically a progressive Democrat.
• My home is the Pacific Northwest and love it dearly.
• I don't like most of my appearance, but I do have dark hair and grey eyes, which give me a bit of joy as a Tolkien fan.
• I'm a grey-ace lesbian & she/her or they/their pronouns are both fine. My sense of gender is both very clear (no intrinsic gender) and very muddy (AFAB and in the habit of alignment with women for various reasons, but it's complicated), so I tend to veer between "eh, whatever" and "????????" as far as gender goes.
• I have three parents—my mother, my (adoptive) father, my (biological) father, and since I have ties to all of them (though much stronger to the first two), it's not always clear which father I'm talking about. My adoptive father is Mexican-American and my bio father is Greek/Irish-American, both of which come up sometimes for family reasons.
• I don't talk about it a whole lot, but I was raised Mormon (by my mother and adoptive father), while my bio father is Catholic, and this has definitely impacted my particular experience of US Christianity. I'm personally agnostic.
• I'm bipolar and autistic, and relatedly, tend to veer between not doing much and super-intense posting.
• I've been active in fandom since about 2003, when I delurked at the Faramir/Éowyn Emyn Arnen forums (I also stealth shipped Faramir/Aragorn, but didn't admit it then :P). My main OTP is Elizabeth/Darcy (book versions). I also love the Star Wars OT (with the prequels and, some days, TFA+TLJ along for the ride) and Rogue One a lot (I've had various SW ships over the years, but nothing really compares to the greatness of Jyn/Cassian; my other SW faves are Luke, Anakin, and Leia). I only intermittently still talk about Legend of Korra, but it's never left my heart (Korra, Noatak/Amon, Tarrlok, and Kuvira <33333).
• It's not the only thing I do, but I especially love genderbending my favorite male characters to women.
• Dreamwidth is not the place I post most often, but it is my favorite place to post (icons, f-lock, normalizing long-form conversations...).

With regard to this, I added:

tbh I’ve moved from incredulous joy to pure schadenfreude