(no subject)
So, eclective found, via metafandom, this particularly debatable article on how to characterize Sam and Dean from Supernatural. (Hey, transnomad. Remember how you felt like Hollywood thought you were stupid? Well....) I read. I gagged a bit. I seethed at the implications. And after thinking about it a bit longer and reading through a few of the comments, I hit on why (beyond the obvious) it torqued me off so much.
In my eversohumble opinion, and based on my admittedly having only seen three discs/12 episodes... Supernatural is not that great a show. This is fine; whatever. Torchwood is not that great a show. My fandom alma mater, Final Fantasy VIII, was not that great a game. In fandom, we can't be held responsible for what brings us to the table. All we control is what we bring to the table, and there's been some pretty great stuff written for SPN, TW, FF8, all of these.
But here's the catch: you can take mediocre raw material and make something great with it, but it takes creativity, effort, and skill. If you don't invest these things in it, you're taking a mediocre raw material and making utter shit.
And when you're being given advice like "Stereotypes exist for a reason," what you're being told is "Shut off your brain." No--really. Evolutionary reason for stereotypes? To decrease cognitive strain. It's easier to say "All members of this class display these attributes," and when you're dealing with something like "all destroying angel mushrooms are poisonous," this is fine. When you're sticking it onto something like "all boys are crude" or "all girls are ditzy" or "all Texans are cowboys" "all black people are violent," it's just stupid. Ignorant. Whatever.
This sort of an analysis, regardless of whether or not (as the original poster asserts) "this workshop was specifically for Supernatural, whose main characters are, essentially, the male American stereotype" (emphasis mine), is the characterization version of formula fiction. At best, it'll produce these sort of prepackaged, artificially-flavored junk-food characters without much to distinguish them from any other two guys stuck in a car and told to fight crime.
Worse, it writes out the importance of, say, the differences between Sam and Dean (which is what's going to make SPN fiction really sizzle). The effects of Sam's being away from the hunting life for so long, Sam's greater introversion as opposed to Dean's greater extroversion, so on, so forth. There are nods in that direction, that some things are out of character even if they're "guy things" to say: "While Jared would, and has, said, "I'm sweatin' like a whore in church," this is not something Sam Winchester would say." But aside from that, the overwhelming message is that Boys Will Be Boys. Which means crude.
It's a good idea to keep in mind that, in many many cases, males don't act like females. A scene written between two "normal" females would have to be significantly rewritten to read realistically as occurring between two "normal" males. But going down a laundry-list of characteristics associated with maleness is not The Basis for a character's behavior nearly so much as, say, personality, history, current situation, and other neat little tricks like that. And you can also convey masculinity with more subtlety, like a character's choice of words, the things he notices, the cadence of his words, the things he will and won't discuss, his interests, his body language, his emotional reactions... I've passed around fiction to a group of people with a pretty even gender-split, and not only did they find the main character convincing as a male, they thought (as it was an anonymous exercise) that it had been written by a bio-male as well.
The only thing I touched on that made the linked list? He cursed a few times.
Though not nearly so much as the main female character did.
In my eversohumble opinion, and based on my admittedly having only seen three discs/12 episodes... Supernatural is not that great a show. This is fine; whatever. Torchwood is not that great a show. My fandom alma mater, Final Fantasy VIII, was not that great a game. In fandom, we can't be held responsible for what brings us to the table. All we control is what we bring to the table, and there's been some pretty great stuff written for SPN, TW, FF8, all of these.
But here's the catch: you can take mediocre raw material and make something great with it, but it takes creativity, effort, and skill. If you don't invest these things in it, you're taking a mediocre raw material and making utter shit.
And when you're being given advice like "Stereotypes exist for a reason," what you're being told is "Shut off your brain." No--really. Evolutionary reason for stereotypes? To decrease cognitive strain. It's easier to say "All members of this class display these attributes," and when you're dealing with something like "all destroying angel mushrooms are poisonous," this is fine. When you're sticking it onto something like "all boys are crude" or "all girls are ditzy" or "all Texans are cowboys" "all black people are violent," it's just stupid. Ignorant. Whatever.
This sort of an analysis, regardless of whether or not (as the original poster asserts) "this workshop was specifically for Supernatural, whose main characters are, essentially, the male American stereotype" (emphasis mine), is the characterization version of formula fiction. At best, it'll produce these sort of prepackaged, artificially-flavored junk-food characters without much to distinguish them from any other two guys stuck in a car and told to fight crime.
Worse, it writes out the importance of, say, the differences between Sam and Dean (which is what's going to make SPN fiction really sizzle). The effects of Sam's being away from the hunting life for so long, Sam's greater introversion as opposed to Dean's greater extroversion, so on, so forth. There are nods in that direction, that some things are out of character even if they're "guy things" to say: "While Jared would, and has, said, "I'm sweatin' like a whore in church," this is not something Sam Winchester would say." But aside from that, the overwhelming message is that Boys Will Be Boys. Which means crude.
It's a good idea to keep in mind that, in many many cases, males don't act like females. A scene written between two "normal" females would have to be significantly rewritten to read realistically as occurring between two "normal" males. But going down a laundry-list of characteristics associated with maleness is not The Basis for a character's behavior nearly so much as, say, personality, history, current situation, and other neat little tricks like that. And you can also convey masculinity with more subtlety, like a character's choice of words, the things he notices, the cadence of his words, the things he will and won't discuss, his interests, his body language, his emotional reactions... I've passed around fiction to a group of people with a pretty even gender-split, and not only did they find the main character convincing as a male, they thought (as it was an anonymous exercise) that it had been written by a bio-male as well.
The only thing I touched on that made the linked list? He cursed a few times.
Though not nearly so much as the main female character did.