write like you need it to survive

18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?

Er. Seriously, we're doing the "where do your ideas come from?" question? Who wrote this meme?

Ahem. Anyway. I get bunnies from everywhere. The whole long Aral/Jole saga came from me tin-hatting Aral and Jole in canon and then sitting down and trying to work out how the hell that would work. The Generation Kill wolf-verse came, as far as I can reconstruct, from me trying to figure out how to take the GK guys and turn everything about them up to eleven--raise the already-high stakes, make their culture even weirder and more insular and intense and more serious about warrior spirits. I have a bunny that comes from listening to a particular song over and over and wanting to shove Brad and Nate inside it. I have a bunny that comes from me talking to Iulia and saying "I don't think anyone's written X. Oh, hey...." (The maximum case of that is Hawks and Hands, which was spawned, in all its enormity, from someone assuring me that they didn't mind how hockey kept cropping up in my Due South stories and my replying, "It's not going to be funny anymore when I write a whole AU where they're hockey players. Oh, hey....") I have a bunny that came from reading someone's unanswered request for recs of fic featuring a specific scenario, which, in retrospect, I probably misinterpreted enough that she wouldn't want to read the story I want to write.

Mostly my bunnies come from the fact that when I'm into a fandom, it's right there at the front of my brain, and everything I encounter bumps up against it. Sometimes it throws off sparks. Sometimes the sparks catch.


( All 30 questions under the cut. )

5 – If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?

I haven't. In fact I'm honestly not even sure what that would be like or how it would work. Can anybody who has had that happen tell me about it? Is it as common an experience as the phrasing of this question seems to imply?

I mean, I have a short attention span and am what you might call a fannish butterfly; I am no stranger to being halfway through a story and becoming quite fascinated by some other character who is not the character I'm writing about right now. Usually that just means I want to go write some other story about that character, though, not introduce said character into the story I'm presently writing.

A few times I have realized a character in a story I was writing was more important than I originally thought he was (for example, that Rodney McKay was the secret hero of a story that wasn't about Rodney McKay at all) and in that case I attempted to make sure that the story supplied a satisfying point of closure regarding that character, so that people who recognized his importance didn't feel he'd fallen into a plot hole and disappeared. But the story still wasn't about him.

( 30 questions under the cut. )

Sooooo I may have mentioned I am posting a story for stargate_summer this year. I've got my posting date-range--I'm going the last week of June. I'm not sure of the exact date because it includes the weekend of a certain bridal shower for which I will possibly be the only member of the bridal party in attendance apart from the actual, you know, bride. And groom. Probably. So there are some logistics to sort out there.

Anyway! The story is up to 58,000 words at this point in the beta process and I still have ... many more things to add and fix, and I have index cards and an outline and everything, so we all know what that means, right? Yes. Cat-waxing.

So! Here's Stargate SG-1, Season Four on the characterscount wiki, devoted to tracking Bechdel test passes/fails and in general the representation of women and people of color in TV shows and movies. There's not a lot there because you have to be a special kind of obsessive to do this much counting, but anyone can add more! If you're interested in this sort of thing, you can hook up with other people who are at characterscount.

Season 4, as it turned out, was even more dismal than every other season preceding it for representation of people of color--it included twelve episodes (more than half!) where Teal'c was the only person of color, and we got to the twelfth episode of the season before two people of color spoke to each other at all. So, uh. *facepalm* Oh, show. What.

And now, off to find something else to do that is not working on my bigbang but also not totally giving in and allowing Generation Kill to take over my brain as it has been trying valiantly to do for the last ten days or so. /o\

So around January 2002 I went to see The Fellowship of the Ring with thelionforreal, who was at that point possibly already a part of the Popslash=>Lotrips migration. I had already been resisting seeing the movie for a month or more because--I realize this will not make any sense to anyone, okay, but there it is--I had come across a Theban Band manip of Aragorn and Boromir, and I had made it my desktop wallpaper, and Boromir was smiling a particularly happy smile, and I knew that he was going to die in the movie, and I knew that he would not smile that smile or be that happy, and I did not want to see it.

But eventually I went to see the movie, and sure enough he died, and I started crying--I started sobbing, and I did not stop for half an hour. If you are familiar with the movie, you will realize that this took me through the rest of the movie, the credits, and the three-block walk home from the movie theater. I still feel kind of bad about subjecting Missi to that; I'm sure she was even more baffled by it than I was.

Ever since then, I feel a little uncertain of what I mean, or what anyone else understands me to mean, when I say a book or a movie or something made me cry. Last night I finished reading The Persian Boy, and Alexander's death (this is even less of a spoiler than Boromir's death, okay) made tears drip from my eyes, and instead of just saying to anyone "The Persian Boy made me cry!" I found myself wondering what it meant when I said that and whether I would be somehow deceiving someone because I was not, for instance, prostrated with grief for at least half an hour.

So! A poll. (On Dreamwidth only. But you can be a part of this very important scientific undertaking with an OpenID login!)

( A poll about crying over stuff. )

Sometime in the last five years, in reference to some discussion of the way fanfic and slash are devalued and ghettoized and marginalized and dismissed by everyone but us--and sometimes even by us--someone somewhere mentioned Joanna Russ's book, How to Suppress Women's Writing.

This weekend, I finally got around to reading it. I had already had the main points summarized by that fanperson who recced it, and then by the cover, which reads:

She didn't write it. But if it's clear she did the deed... She wrote it, but she shouldn't have. (It's political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. ("Jane Eyre. Poor dear, that's all she ever...") She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. (It's a thriller, a romance, a children's book. It's sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Bramwell Bronte. Her own "masculine side".) She wrote it, but she's an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard's help...) She wrote it BUT...

So it was a quick but still difficult, dizzying read. The book was, I believe, originally written in 1979, making it the disheartening experience of the generation before mine. I was intensely conscious as I read it of my gratitude for the existence of Lois McMaster Bujold, who wrote the books I wanted to read and received critical acclaim for it, and never allowed me to imagine that I could not go right ahead and do the same (and Dorothy Sayers and Georgette Heyer and the rest, for inspiring her). Still, I came away with a sizable list of women's writing to go out and find and read, post haste.

And also, of course, I was reading it with an eye to fic, and slash, and our rightful place as a massive literary movement. I was just as conscious of being thankful that I had come into fandom at a time when I never had to do anything for the first time, when fans who came before me had already invented our genres and vocabulary and fannish infrastructure, so I didn't have to wander around in the outer darkness wondering about this funny feeling I got whenever Jack and Daniel or Jim and Blair looked at each other like that. I could dive right in and write and label my story and send it out to the mailing list devoted to its pairing--I had all the tools, models to follow, and a ready-made audience.

But, of course, it was just fanfic.

So here's no less an authority than Jane Austen (as quoted by Russ, 101) addressing, in Northanger Abbey, the stigma that attached to her community of writers and their chosen form of expression: the novel.

Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than any other literary corporation in this world, no species of composition has been so much decried. ... There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and under-valuing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

Russ writes, "Jane Austen ... worked (as some critics tend to forget) in a genre that had been dominated by women for a century and one that was looked down upon as trash, a position that may have given her considerable artistic freedom." (100)

So I thought of the Five Things story, and flashfic and drabbles and those challenge stories where you have to include the word eggbeater and a quotation of the prompter's choosing, and Written by the Victors and the Shoebox Project and every other wildly experimental way we've done this thing we do.

Later, discussing the forms in which the Europe's earliest literate women wrote, Russ mentions that "women always write in the vernacular. Not strictly true, and yet it explains a lot. It certainly explains letters and diaries. ... It explains why so many wrote ghost stories in the nineteenth century and still write them." (128-129)

And, it occurred to me, that's what we're doing. We're writing in the vernacular. If there is a ubiquitous, disposable, disreputable form of writing today, it's internet porn. And here we are, making it (to say nothing of the equally-ubiquitous television show, comic, movie, or children's book) our own.

And this is a real thing we are doing, and our work is real work, and our writing is real writing, and we are really here together doing this, and I am glad.


This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/527925.html.

Stats are available at the SG-1 Season 3 page on the Characters Count Wiki, or under the cut:
( Chart, under the cut! )

Takeaways for Season 3:

One statistic improved: Bechdel Test passes continued to increase, from 9/21 in S1 to 11/22 in S2 to 12/22 in S3. 

One statistic stayed the same: race-Bechdel Test passes, at 5/22.

Everything else got worse.  Everything.  Four episodes in which Sam is the only woman, EIGHT in which Teal'c is the only person of color, counts and percentages down across the board. 

(And, with the introduction of the Replicators as villains--and Asgard as allies in the fight against them--we begin the move away from the Goa'uld and Jaffa, who represent a considerable proportion of the women and people of color in some episodes, replacing them with mechanical spiders and race- and gender-neutral alien things.  For whatever that's worth.

Oh, show.  What the hell.)


Now, perhaps you are thinking, well, that sucks, what is there to be done about it?  Do what fans always do!  Join a comm!

At LiveJournal, there is the newly formed passingbechdel community, for all your Bechdel Test fixit-fic needs--it's open to all fandoms, and welcomes fic that brings characters of color together, as well as fic that highlights women.

At Dreamwidth, there is the also newly formed  characterscount  community, affiliated with the Characters Count Wiki, for discussion and coordination of counting projects like this one--if you've embarked on a crazy counting project, or if you would like to organize a group of people to cooperate on one, or if you just want to kibbitz, it's the place to go.

Inspired by beccaelizabeth's counting of characters in Torchwood, I decided to count characters in Stargate SG-1 while rewatching, to calculate percentages of female characters and characters of color. (SPOILER: the results were kinda depressing.)

Methodology: I counted the number of speaking characters per episode. Partly just as a matter of feasibility, I did not count: a) people who did not speak, b) people who spoke only in crowd scenes where it was difficult or impossible to determine who was speaking, and c) disembodied voices (which means that a couple of times I left Chevron Guy off the count for an episode he was in, which means in a few spots the stats should probably be worse). This also means that characters who appear at two different ages are counted as a single speaking character (characters who appear in two different universes/timelines/bodily forms are, however, counted twice).

Counting characters of color was, obviously, a judgment call. (I counted Sha're, Skaara/Klorel, all other Abydonians, Apophis, and Bra'tac, for instance, though I am not sure how all the relevant actors identify their own races.)

In addition to counting and calculating percentages, I tracked the Bechdel test (There are two women, who talk to each other, about something other than a man) and a race-Bechdel test (There are two characters of color, who talk to each other, about something other than a white person) for each episode. In a lot of cases this was also a judgment call, and scores range from 'Pass' to 'Pass?' to 'Fail' to 'FAIL'. Caps indicates that an episode included only one woman or one character of color who spoke.

I have my raw data sheet with comments on Bechdel and race-Bechdel pass/fails and lists of characters who spoke in the order they first spoke, if people want data to look at/quibble with/recalculate for their own purposes. I'm not posting it now because it's long and unwieldy, but I'm happy to share it if anyone wants it.

And with that: Results

( Table, which hopefully works. )

Conclusions: I am actively trying not to draw too many (or too sweeping) conclusions; in a lot of cases the numbers and passes/fails speak for themselves, I think.

One thing I did notice is that in the two episodes where Sam is the only woman to speak ("The First Commandment" and "Solitudes") the episode centers significantly on Sam. ETA: Just realized that's two of the three episodes in which Sam is the only woman to speak; she's also the only one in "Within the Serpent's Grasp" and has no special role there. In the eight seven episodes where Teal'c is the only character of color to speak, he generally plays a no more than usually central role; in fact episodes that center on Teal'c tend to focus also on his family and/or the Jaffa, so they tend to include other characters of color and pass the race-Bechdel test.

I also noticed that - while percentages of women and characters of color are mostly dismal across the board - episodes frequently manage to pass either the Bechdel or race-Bechdel test, at times alternating from one to the other over a string of episodes.

Also, I do not think I would have bet dirt, going in, that "The Broca Divide" would manage to be the best episode of the season in terms of the Bechdel and race-Bechdel tests. I guess it had to be good for something.

I briefly attempted to track the statistics on who died and who was shown in some degree of undress, but it became unwieldy and crazymaking, so I leave that to future inquiries by brave people who are not me, and move on to counting season two.

I was going to post about my thoughts on James DeWees possibly joining MCR back when the rumor first surfaced (initially, for me, in the form of a text from missmollyetc, which neither of us could back up with anything on the internet, and then a few weeks later I actually saw a post somewhere), but I got distracted by something shiny and figured I'd missed the narrow window of people actually giving a shit.

Only it seems, lately, like possibly people still give a shit? So I will post my thoughts, which are mine, behind a cut tag, and you can click if you give a shit, or scroll on by if you are so over this/have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, and then everyone is happy! Hooray!

( my theory that I have follows the lines I am about to relate. )

Reposting by request a comment I made nearly four (!!!) years ago in switchknife's journal:

At a guess, the reason the article saying slash=egalitarian relationships reads as such total bullshit to you is because it's not, whether it explicitly says so or not, talking about the type of slash you read and write.

I think slash originated (well, not *originated*, because it *originated* thousands of years ago, but in the sense of the continuous fandom culture that's getting academic attention) with things like Kirk/Spock and Starsky/Hutch and those guys from The Professionals - that is, partners and friends who work together in an essentially egalitarian way and then wind up shagging. Call it buddyslash. That's a tradition carried on by my present fandom (due South) and several others: Sentinel, Sports Night, popslash, etc.

Then there's the fight-fight-shag model: enemyslash.

And then there's also the teacher/student or master/servant or cop/prisoner or what have you dynamic, which you could probably call powerslash. I think the three deserve to be recognized at least as distinct subgenres within slash, if not wholly different animals. I think that if you vastly prefer one of these, you're likely to be a slasher for different reasons than people who vastly prefer a different one. And I think that for purposes of explaining it to people who don't slash at all, academics tend to be looking at buddyslash unless they say otherwise.

But that's just my unresearched anecdotal opinion, and I've only been awake for an hour, so your mileage will of course vary.

And I would just like to say that, four years on a) I do know Bodie and Doyle's names now, yes, and b) do you suppose bandom would fall into some fourth category of makingittoogoddamneasyslash? they'reaskingforitlookatthewaythey'redressedslash?

Anyway, this is apropos of nothing for 99.98% of you, but if you have something to say about it, feel free. :)

This has been sitting on a post-it on my desktop since it popped into my head. It may not be funny unless you were actually in high school when the song came out and/or are me, but the post-it is starting to bug me and I finally got around to uploading the song. So!

LJ karaoke, to the tune of Nada Surf - Popular

( I propose that we support a one-month limit on friending. )