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thirty days of fanfic, day six
Sep. 6th, 2011 12:51 pm( previous days )
6 – When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?
Both, definitely. I was amazed that I spent most of 2010 writing men, because I'm rather comfortable writing women (though not Nyota, which might be why that happened). I love writing Parvati and Pansy, and I've always liked being in Hermione's head, or Ginny's.
I don't really find a huge difference, but then, I don't really dig the whole gender essentialism thing that gets played out so often in the culture at large, where if you write a man who's emotional he codes feminine. I don't think Leonard McCoy comes across as especially girly, and yet he is very specifically the emotional center of Star Trek. I don't think John Watson does, either, and yet he's always the heart while Sherlock is the head. (Maybe you need a specifically non-emotional character, like Spock or Sherlock, to make it okay for another male character to be more emotional in response?)
A while back someone was asking another one of those "why are all the men in slash really women" questions which always kind of piss me off. They were talking in this instance about Arthur/Merlin fic and Merlin being more "girly" and someone in the comments rightly pointed out that we live in a gender binary culture, and that all personality traits are coded as male or female, with nothing in between, so if you have a relationship between two people, one of them will always be more emotional than the other. That doesn't make them girly. (The thread also said a lot of interesting things about Arthur being a warrior where Merlin is a healer, and that this shouldn't mean that Merlin is girly--or that writers have to make him more "macho" in his off hours to "make up" for it.)
The whole question just makes me deeply uncomfortable, this idea that we have to make sure that the men are the men and the women are grateful, or something. I hated it when people talked about Remus/Sirius being "really lesbians"--like, talk about how specific stories or specific fannish tropes look OOC to you, but saying that writing men in certain ways is writing them like women and then implying that this is insulting to the characters and happens because they are women writing the men--how can a group of people who call themselves feminists actually say any of this with a straight face? Just call it a bad story and have done with it.
Write the damn character. That's all you really have to do.
6 – When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?
Both, definitely. I was amazed that I spent most of 2010 writing men, because I'm rather comfortable writing women (though not Nyota, which might be why that happened). I love writing Parvati and Pansy, and I've always liked being in Hermione's head, or Ginny's.
I don't really find a huge difference, but then, I don't really dig the whole gender essentialism thing that gets played out so often in the culture at large, where if you write a man who's emotional he codes feminine. I don't think Leonard McCoy comes across as especially girly, and yet he is very specifically the emotional center of Star Trek. I don't think John Watson does, either, and yet he's always the heart while Sherlock is the head. (Maybe you need a specifically non-emotional character, like Spock or Sherlock, to make it okay for another male character to be more emotional in response?)
A while back someone was asking another one of those "why are all the men in slash really women" questions which always kind of piss me off. They were talking in this instance about Arthur/Merlin fic and Merlin being more "girly" and someone in the comments rightly pointed out that we live in a gender binary culture, and that all personality traits are coded as male or female, with nothing in between, so if you have a relationship between two people, one of them will always be more emotional than the other. That doesn't make them girly. (The thread also said a lot of interesting things about Arthur being a warrior where Merlin is a healer, and that this shouldn't mean that Merlin is girly--or that writers have to make him more "macho" in his off hours to "make up" for it.)
The whole question just makes me deeply uncomfortable, this idea that we have to make sure that the men are the men and the women are grateful, or something. I hated it when people talked about Remus/Sirius being "really lesbians"--like, talk about how specific stories or specific fannish tropes look OOC to you, but saying that writing men in certain ways is writing them like women and then implying that this is insulting to the characters and happens because they are women writing the men--how can a group of people who call themselves feminists actually say any of this with a straight face? Just call it a bad story and have done with it.
Write the damn character. That's all you really have to do.
