Meta: Rich White Cisguys: You Bought 'Em, You Break 'Em
I'm really enjoying happydork's recent posts on some factors explaining why writers don't go ahead and write what we say we want to read. Ummm, I used to know how to say "I know and approve the better course but follow the worse" in Latin, but I don't anymore. (Cut for length)
One point I commented on in one of those posts is that, quite apart from any political aspects, we don't write what we think is the best that COULD be written, we write what we CAN write. I mean, "envying this fan's art and that fan's scope" could be my motto. I don't hate Epic, I just don't DO Epic. Which doesn't mean I don't do some pretty good Teensy.
A point I didn't comment on and am taking up here is that there are certain imperatives that apply to fiction that don't apply to sociology. Meta discussions can get very slippery--sometimes a sentence starts out talking about RL and shifts to talking about fiction, or vice versa.
Fiction often relies on two tools--Stupidity and Whump--that militate against wider representation of female characters and characters of color. I'm not sure whether media properties that gather a fandom are more or less likely than popular media in general to have Idiot Plots, but certainly they are far from unknown in our canons. In my two main fandoms, Blakes7 and Firefly, quite a lot of plots in both canon and fanfic are motivated by, e.g., Blake or Mal doing something stupid. This is often used as a weapon by fans who think that someone else should be running the mission, but seldom cited as a reason not to let white guys be in charge of stuff.
Now, canonically, Zoe is an extremely sensible person (Dayna, not so much) so a fic based on Dayna or Zoe doing something of comparable stupidity is likely to receive comments about whether the writer thinks women of color are stupid. Or, worse, comradeship being claimed by commenters who think the writer wants a membership card for their Let's Not Let Women [optional: Of Color] Run Stuff Treehouse.
Also, whom fandom loveth it chasteneth, and I think it's only fair to the RL counterparts of non-privileged characters to have it be the privileged characters who get thrown in dungeons or out of helicopters, bitten by sharks, tortured by chortling angora-cat-stroking sociopaths, etc.
One point I commented on in one of those posts is that, quite apart from any political aspects, we don't write what we think is the best that COULD be written, we write what we CAN write. I mean, "envying this fan's art and that fan's scope" could be my motto. I don't hate Epic, I just don't DO Epic. Which doesn't mean I don't do some pretty good Teensy.
A point I didn't comment on and am taking up here is that there are certain imperatives that apply to fiction that don't apply to sociology. Meta discussions can get very slippery--sometimes a sentence starts out talking about RL and shifts to talking about fiction, or vice versa.
Fiction often relies on two tools--Stupidity and Whump--that militate against wider representation of female characters and characters of color. I'm not sure whether media properties that gather a fandom are more or less likely than popular media in general to have Idiot Plots, but certainly they are far from unknown in our canons. In my two main fandoms, Blakes7 and Firefly, quite a lot of plots in both canon and fanfic are motivated by, e.g., Blake or Mal doing something stupid. This is often used as a weapon by fans who think that someone else should be running the mission, but seldom cited as a reason not to let white guys be in charge of stuff.
Now, canonically, Zoe is an extremely sensible person (Dayna, not so much) so a fic based on Dayna or Zoe doing something of comparable stupidity is likely to receive comments about whether the writer thinks women of color are stupid. Or, worse, comradeship being claimed by commenters who think the writer wants a membership card for their Let's Not Let Women [optional: Of Color] Run Stuff Treehouse.
Also, whom fandom loveth it chasteneth, and I think it's only fair to the RL counterparts of non-privileged characters to have it be the privileged characters who get thrown in dungeons or out of helicopters, bitten by sharks, tortured by chortling angora-cat-stroking sociopaths, etc.