Comments | ysabetwordsmith: Reading about Miles Morales

ysabetwordsmith

Reading about Miles Morales

May 15, 2014 00:41

My partner Doug found this wonderful interview with the creator of the Miles Morales Spiderman. It talks about why he made a mixed-race Spiderman and what superheroes mean to the audience. Some thoughts ...

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fantasy, reading, gender studies, writing, life lessons, community, networking, ethnic studies

Comments 6

thnidu May 15 2014, 06:34:52 UTC

This sounds solid. I haven't read the article, just your post. I don't write fiction, or hardly ever, and I didn't feel much connection *as creator* with the lessons for writers. One thing did ring with me, but in contradiction - in the particular context of what I do write: songs and lyrics ( ... )

Yes... ysabetwordsmith May 15 2014, 07:32:54 UTC

>> Halfway into it I thought "Hey, wait! Why 'he'?" All I needed to do was change the pronouns, and my hapless Filkmeister became a hapless Filkmeisterin. <<

I think things like this are important. I also know some songs that have no gender markers, but sound very different if sung by male or female performers; and many more where the markers are just in the pronouns or a few pet names that can easily be swapped, again shifting the effect.

ankewehner May 15 2014, 08:09:24 UTC

Yeah, I noticed the same when writing not-connected-to-anything flashfics.

I remember another writer saying they decided in one work to default to female and only make a character male if there was a reason (with a really low bar for "reason", such as "it makes this scene easier to write because the two people in it will use different pronouns"), and among the feedback was asking if it was set in a matriarchal dystopy, because all the men were gone. What does that say about the usual male-default fare we're offered...

0_o ysabetwordsmith May 15 2014, 18:05:22 UTC

>> among the feedback was asking if it was set in a matriarchal dystopy, because all the men were gone. <<

Creepy.

But then I freaked out the entire population in the Carl Brandon party at Wiscon once: Someone asked what stories we'd written with no white characters. Everyone named one or two stories right off the top of their heads, or in a few cases, several stories. I named one, paused, named another, paused, and kept going like that. And then they were all staring at me. I had to stop and explain that I did not file my stories by character race and had to mentally sort through them all. Apparently that's not what everyone else was doing. Then it came out that their stories with no white people were all "about" race in some way, whereas most of mine were like that because I'd set them in places where there simply weren't any light-skinned people around. I was kind of bothered that nobody else seemed to be doing that. Everyone else was looking at me like I'd grown another head ( ... )

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