This was interesting to read! Yeah pronouns.... I wrote my comic Two Moons with an androgynous character, but after struggling so much with pronouns I changed her to female. Y'know, just to make things easier. There's a difference between "she" and "female." My character is a she, but there is still a question of her gender. She is just a pronoun because, well, it's English. I suppose this kind of thing must be harder in French or Italian and easier in Japanese or Nepalese. But as a language teacher, I find this fascinating more than frustrating. That's just me, though.
But woah wait, you're talking about swapping pronouns?? I'd never thought of that before. Not once in my life has this ever come to mind. And like you said before.. you can't just swap he for she, you have to wonder... Is she aloof and wearing all black to appear more masculine? In which case, what happens if she's male to begin with... Thinking of my own characters, one is this brawny mechanic, hair all over his chest, having nothing to do with anything but machines. Change him into a girl, and I immediately want to shed 50 pounds off of him. His soft spots that he kept hidden as a man are now so obvious.. how can I hide them now? Or wait, would she even want to hide them now that it's culturally acceptable for her to do things like cry in public. What a crazy brain exercise!!
I'll give you my two cents on developing characters, since I consider myself completely heterosexual, I can give you my own standpoint. When I was a kid, I read a lot of my dad's fantasy books. There might have been a lot of steriotyping and sexuality, but it was all lost on me. I just skipped over what I couldn't understand. Basically what I got out of it was that old guys in cloaks with long beards were usually the smartest, and therefore coolest. And anyone with a big sword or a tattoo was also pretty cool. My mom is a huge femenist and tried to find me books for my age that I'd like that had female main characters. So I never really thought girls had to be weak or boys had to be strong, it just depended on the story. When I started making my own stories, I pretty much had two types. The main character was a young girl based off of one of my friends, generally melancholy in nature, or else the main character was an old wizard dude with a long beard who could kick ass. Sometimes both characters showed up in the same story in equal proportions. The villians on the other hand were all Evil Kings or Evil Queens. I imagined Evil Queens looked a lot like Barbie. I really hated Barbie, and she suffered many deaths by My Little Ponies, on an almost daily basis. Evil Kings were fat, rich, greedy steriotypes. So the villians were the steriotypes.
One day I showed my aunt the best of my stories. These were all the ones without female characters, because the ones with melancholy kids my age always ended up unfinished or being weak in plot, or ended in suicide or something that I wouldn't want to show off to my aunt. My aunt looked at my stories and then said, "Are all your main characters always male?" That was the first time that I'd ever thought twice about it. I thought about it quite a lot. I realized that it wasn't true, but I also realized what she was trying to say underneath, "You know that girls can be the strong ones too, don't you??" I find myself asking that a lot now... How is my balance of male and female characters? Is it realistic? Why did I chose these? Am I falling into steriotypes? Am I doing this on purpose?
It's definitely true that "she" and "he" are just pronouns! Inasmuch as they can be very important to how we relate to others, they are just terms. In my stories, Twapa is a "she" even though Twapa is what I would describe as genderqueer (or maybe a gender anarchist, haha). It's kinda tricky with the Ambaian culture I made up for TU, because they don't HAVE gender categories, even though I might have an idea of what kind of physical characteristics certain characters might have, they don't really differentiate. It's still hard for me not to think of them as "female" or "male" or "neutrois" or what have you for the characters I have authorial headcanon about, such as Phasia. It gets weirder because even though the view of bodies is simply that "each person is slightly different from each other person and that is just fine" some characters will still experience body dysphoria and may alter their bodies to better suit their needs. This is seen as normal and healthy, however.
Fiction is a great way to explore ideas about our own world by thinking about worlds in which the rules are completely different!
I've always written conniving, evil-science-y type villains who meddle in politics but I've never been very good with figuring out how the heroes would beat them with cleverness and science so I usually let bad guys get undone by their own machinations or something. XD This is kind of a weak point in my writing, I hope I can do better with TU, heh.
I think good writing SHOULD be self-aware. If you're writing a trope or stereotype, make sure it's on purpose, heh! It's always great to ask ourselves questions about why how and what we're writing. There's no need to OVER analyze it, but it's good to be aware of it and if you think there could be a problem you'll be able to try and fix it early on. : )
Yeah pronouns.... I wrote my comic Two Moons with an androgynous character, but after struggling so much with pronouns I changed her to female. Y'know, just to make things easier. There's a difference between "she" and "female." My character is a she, but there is still a question of her gender. She is just a pronoun because, well, it's English. I suppose this kind of thing must be harder in French or Italian and easier in Japanese or Nepalese. But as a language teacher, I find this fascinating more than frustrating. That's just me, though.
But woah wait, you're talking about swapping pronouns?? I'd never thought of that before. Not once in my life has this ever come to mind. And like you said before.. you can't just swap he for she, you have to wonder... Is she aloof and wearing all black to appear more masculine? In which case, what happens if she's male to begin with... Thinking of my own characters, one is this brawny mechanic, hair all over his chest, having nothing to do with anything but machines. Change him into a girl, and I immediately want to shed 50 pounds off of him. His soft spots that he kept hidden as a man are now so obvious.. how can I hide them now? Or wait, would she even want to hide them now that it's culturally acceptable for her to do things like cry in public. What a crazy brain exercise!!
I'll give you my two cents on developing characters, since I consider myself completely heterosexual, I can give you my own standpoint. When I was a kid, I read a lot of my dad's fantasy books. There might have been a lot of steriotyping and sexuality, but it was all lost on me. I just skipped over what I couldn't understand. Basically what I got out of it was that old guys in cloaks with long beards were usually the smartest, and therefore coolest. And anyone with a big sword or a tattoo was also pretty cool. My mom is a huge femenist and tried to find me books for my age that I'd like that had female main characters. So I never really thought girls had to be weak or boys had to be strong, it just depended on the story. When I started making my own stories, I pretty much had two types. The main character was a young girl based off of one of my friends, generally melancholy in nature, or else the main character was an old wizard dude with a long beard who could kick ass. Sometimes both characters showed up in the same story in equal proportions. The villians on the other hand were all Evil Kings or Evil Queens. I imagined Evil Queens looked a lot like Barbie. I really hated Barbie, and she suffered many deaths by My Little Ponies, on an almost daily basis. Evil Kings were fat, rich, greedy steriotypes. So the villians were the steriotypes.
One day I showed my aunt the best of my stories. These were all the ones without female characters, because the ones with melancholy kids my age always ended up unfinished or being weak in plot, or ended in suicide or something that I wouldn't want to show off to my aunt. My aunt looked at my stories and then said, "Are all your main characters always male?" That was the first time that I'd ever thought twice about it. I thought about it quite a lot. I realized that it wasn't true, but I also realized what she was trying to say underneath, "You know that girls can be the strong ones too, don't you??" I find myself asking that a lot now... How is my balance of male and female characters? Is it realistic? Why did I chose these? Am I falling into steriotypes? Am I doing this on purpose?
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Fiction is a great way to explore ideas about our own world by thinking about worlds in which the rules are completely different!
I've always written conniving, evil-science-y type villains who meddle in politics but I've never been very good with figuring out how the heroes would beat them with cleverness and science so I usually let bad guys get undone by their own machinations or something. XD This is kind of a weak point in my writing, I hope I can do better with TU, heh.
I think good writing SHOULD be self-aware. If you're writing a trope or stereotype, make sure it's on purpose, heh! It's always great to ask ourselves questions about why how and what we're writing. There's no need to OVER analyze it, but it's good to be aware of it and if you think there could be a problem you'll be able to try and fix it early on. : )
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