marmota_b

Before you start yelling at me: no, of course I don't mean "but how do I even work in some POC characters" or "how do I even write POC characters".

No, what I mean is "how do I make clear this character is a POC without hitting the reader over the head with it or making it seem like I'm intentionally pointing out the POC characters against a white default (big can of worms)."

This particular pondering is borne out of a story on AO3 I was just reading where the author basically shouted "all these characters are POC, *** canon!" in the Author's Notes; and while I basically agree with their reasoning in that particular case and have zero problem with it beyond not sharing their opinions on which looks are the most handsome among their fancasts... :D
... I also felt like "okay, I also want to point out unambiguously that these and these characters I write are POC for the people who care as strongly about it and because I'd rather hate for my readers to default to white when I picture them this way; but I really don't want to go about it in such a forceful way."

It's a balance between "well, they look this way in my head, but will the reader know, or will they default to white?"and "I really don't want to describe the characters in a very explicit fashion if there's not a valid POV reason for me to be describing them like that since that way lie other cans of worms." (And since I tend to write mostly in character POV rather than as an omniscient narrator.) The third thing to weigh is - shouting that they are POC in an Author's Note like the aforementioned author did feels rather like the "Dumbledore is actually gay" sort of cop-out from my personal writerly point of view, in that I try to make the story stand on its own and make sense even without the Author's Notes (although I do often include more background info in there).

It's easier when you're writing in a Spare Oom environment and can just say where characters are from and people will form their own mental images. When you're writing in the Narnian world, that only works for all readers with Calormen, and even then I bet the mental images will differ (are they Arabic? Indian?). When you write in the Galaxy Far Far Away, it's... harder.
( Further elaboration of my mental processes )
It's also a pondering born out of my digging through my backup disk over the holidays and finding some old pictures of some characters I drew when I was a teenager and have largely forgotten about. Several years ago, I had copied them from my old desktop computer onto my backup disk, which was a very good thing indeed because shortly after father updated something on that computer and it crashed. (It may still be salvageable but he hasn't gotten around to full salvage yet.) The pictures were then sitting on my backup disk and I'd rather forgotten about them.
(At some point after scanning them I had decided it was a good idea to run them through a smoothing filter and only save them that way, so you can't really see how exactly I drew them. Our younger selves are often stupid that way.)

There's this lady whose whole story I've completely forgotten because I never wrote it down and it never progressed beyond some sort of backstory. I know her name because that's in the filenames, but that's it. Her name is Venus and I'm not sure I like it, but I think I'll keep it because people having names that don't go with them definitely is a thing so from that point of view I do like it (and it jumpstarted a sort of new backstory for her). She looks cool and needs to find her way into the Choruk'la Kajir universe at some point although I'm not entirely sure where to fit her. And she's almost certainly black (at least in the American sense; I think she's actually mixed race from the way she looks?).
I just designed a black character at some point in my life while trying out a new drawing technique, many years before that sort of thing became cool on Tumblr :D, and I didn't even think about it hard enough to remember anything about her backstory when I see her pictures years later, which hints to me strongly that the way she looked had nothing whatsoever to do with her backstory. The clothes she wears do (and the facial scars undoubtedly do); I'm fairly sure she was from the same space-opera-ish universe as the next character, which is why I think I can safely transplant her into the Choruk'la Kajir universe.





So there's this other lady. I do know who she is, she was from a story I wrote when I was about twelve or thirteen that was a rather clueless ripoff of Star Wars and some other things, and she got to be a big player in that universe though mostly in a behind the scenes capacity (but due to her shaping up entirely on her own as the sort of capable behind-the-scenes character who pulled off things before my floundering protagonists did, she's a character I'm still very fond of many years later). Her name is Arve; which turns out to be a male name in Scandinavia, fictional names can be funny that way. She is definitely Asian in her looks (I've now tried to pin it down and I think Nepali is probably closest to my mental image - but how exactly do you describe that when you're writing a character from a different planet in a fictional universe?). It's pretty funny because I found one picture of her I'd forgotten about right after I stumbled upon a Tumblr post on how (not) to draw Asian people (which I now can't find), and there she was, I got it down pretty well when I was a clueless teenager. :D (A bit more of an explanation why I did further below.)
Not that the pictures are anywhere near perfect, because my drawing skills as a teenager were not quite up to the task of drawing just from mental images (and they probably still aren't). But I think I captured all the respective features well enough that you get the idea, and if you combine the two images you could probably find a good "fancast" if you wanted to badly enough.
It's rather telling in this context that I had a pretty clear image of her in my head but somehow never even described her in the story. It's equally telling in this context that Arve never got a description in the story because that's exactly the kind of character she was - people overlooked her, and she made full use of that. She would be overlooked and underestimated, she would observe, draw her own conclusions, and then act decisively upon them.
Goodness gracious, I love Arve, but I'm not sure she could make the universe hop quite intact.





The third strike in this vein is another character, from a bit later, from what was already a conscious Star Wars fanfiction that never got too far but which will definitely find its way into the Choruk'la Kajir universe later, in some form. That character looks exactly like Sridevi. Not in the sense of "I fancast Sridevi in the role"; in the sense that I had this image of a dark-haired lady with huge dark eyes and a certain facial shape in my head (and attempts on paper), and then my sister showed me a video of Sridevi on YouTube years later, and then my mind went "whoa, that's Anadarya!" I can't look at pictures of Sridevi without going very emotional for entirely different reasons than her fans probably do.
The name started out as a bit of a placeholder because she's something of an Amidala expy (it is, of course, Anna + Darya, and a vague mirror of Amidala) - but it stuck so that's her name now. (And BTW in my Czech mind it's been up till now spelled with a J, not Y, until I wrote it down in this English text and realised you'd pronounce it differently.)
I won't show you the pictures of her because just like with Arve my drawing skills were not up to the task of capturing the mental image so mostly they would just show you various degrees of how much I could not draw Sridevi properly as a teenager. :D

And I think there lies my writing POC problem. If you asked me to draw the characters in my head, I would draw them a certain way because duh, that's what they look like - but how do I capture that in writing when I tend to intentionally just hint in my descriptions?

Of course I do succumb to the weakness of defaulting to white, too. But I think I can lay some credit at the door of Karl May, of all things, for actually having grown up with a more colourful world than there was around me in Real Life during my childhood. His books may suffer from the Mighty Whitey and Noble Savage complexes and whatever other accusations are being levelled against them at this point in history. But the indisputable fact is that a lot of his characters are not white, and the stories are never "whites vs The Other" - the protagonist groups are always mixed, which frankly can be quite progressive even for today, let alone the 19th century...

It's rather funny because when I look back at my old characters, I find out they were actually often more diverse than the characters I tend to write now... that when I was coming up with stories freely and still largely unencumbered with writerly concerns, that's what I came up with. The stories were a lot more silly, but the characters were more diverse. I had characters of colour, I had mixed race characters, and I don't think I even thought of it that way, they just looked a certain way, they just came from certain cultures, they just had parents from different cultures. And whenever I am reminded of all that, it feels so strange to compare it to all the discourse around POC characters I come across now, that I just... did that.

Also: We never had TV, so a lot of contemporary popular culture got to me only in variously convoluted ways, like articles about TV shows and films in magazines, or catching part of a film or an episode of a series here and there when visiting other people. I read rather a lot of travelogues when I was a teenager, books and a magazine (lots of isssues over the years), and there were all these people. Especially in the books, people living their lives, people the Czech authors did things with, and were on first name terms with, and were joking about Czech beer with, whatever. So my characters looked like people. In retrospect, I can't help but think that sort of travelogues is actually a lot better for casually exposing you to diversity than films and other forms of popular culture; but I also understand why people are pushing for diversity in popular culture because obviously most people don't grow up casually reading travelogues.


Anyway.

Right now, in the Choruk'la Kajir AU, I can get away easily with canonically POC characters with maybe brief descriptions (one would have to be particularly stupid to argue Aravis and Lasaraleen are not POCs, and Boba Fett has also been firmly cast for a while now).

And I got my headcanon racially ambiguous Peridan across very easily by way of describing him from the POV of a character meeting him for the first time. (Either he's the Peridan Chronicles Methos, in which case he's vaguely Near / Middle Eastern of uncertain ethnicity, or he's Telmarine, in which case he's mixed race Polynesian / Causasian, which I think is almost as good as canon for Telmarines anyway. I will probably have to do a whole post about my headcanon Telmarines one of these days.) In fact, since that's simply how I headcanon Peridan, funnily enough it kind of only hit me afterwards that what I did there was fairly explicitly describe a racially ambiguous character - so yes, therein lies most of my problem.
It happens organically when it happens organically, so what do I do when the story just meanders around it without my noticing? It's one of those "there's something that remained in your mind without making it to the page" things, but one that's more difficult to pick upon for, say, a beta reader (if I had anyone beta reading this thing), than things like plot holes are. How do I train myself to notice, and how do I divert the flow of the story to hit upon the necessary notes to get the point across, without derailing it? (Please ignore the mixed metaphors in the previous sentence.)

Current pondering: I now headcanon Corran Horn as basically looking like the German-Turkish actor Erdogan Atalay (just with eyes on the green side of hazel). There's this image of Corran, Corran is short, a former cop and a bit of a cocky pilot, and Atalay is short and plays a cocky Autobahn cop in a long-running TV series; it's one of those "can't unsee" things.

So, depending on how you look at it, my headcanon Corran is also a POC. The thing is, personally I probably actually don't really look at it that way? Make of that what you will. How do I make my readers see him more or less like I do without clumsily hitting them over the head with some stupid stereotypical descriptors, dangling a "look, a POC to feed your need for POC" before them? This is the Galaxy Far Far Away, it's just the way he looks, no big deal.

Before you start yelling at me: Don't worry, I think I've already found the correct POV character for pointing it out organically.

I'm wondering whether I should or shouldn't add the "Character(s) of Color" tag to the story currently in progress. They are there. Several of them are listed in the character tags anyway, so is that worth pointing out separately?

Just... I wanted to share this whole thought process, and maybe ask, how do you deal with it?

Also, oops, I wanted to finish the next chapter in the story but my thought processes and writing got once again derailed, by this. But I think it was worth addressing, if only because it's one of those things that should help me make the story better.

(Second oops, the post break got broken, but it's too late to think now, I'll fix it later.)

Picked up from heliopausa : you ask for a letter and then think of five fictional characters whose name begins with that letter, and write your comments and ideas on them.

When I asked her for a letter, I feared I would end up with one that Czech names don't usually begin with. Of course I was given G which is exactly one such letter. Over half of the following characters' names don't involve it in Czech.

But, surprisingly, once I got started, the rest flowed very quickly.

Gordon Urquhart (I hope I spelled it correctly...), from Local Hero – is frankly a mystery to me; but that’s actually part of what makes Local Hero fun. He’s a shrewd, smooth businessman in a community where everyone has to hold several jobs; as the story progresses, one begins to think simutaneously that he’s wasted there, that he’s exactly the man this community needs, and that he'd gleefully drive it to ground for money (but then, so would the rest of the community...). And he’s played by Dennis Lawson, so you believe it all. The interplay between him and Mac, Gordon trying to butter up Mac and drive a hard bargain and Mac swiftly not giving a damn (I’m at a loss at how to describe "not giving a damn" progressively?) – that’s an integral part of the core of the story in Local Hero, and a lot of fun to watch. So Gordon has to be smooth and therefore a bit faceless; but as I said, as played by Dennis Lawson, he is all that and still very memorable. (Which is best exemplified by the fact that he was the first fictional character with a name beginning with G I could think of that I could imagine myself writing about and wasn’t my own :D). Hm, I should watch more films with Dennis Lawson. He does seem to have an inate ability to make characters memorable.


Goldberry – from The Fellowship of the Ring. Doesn’t get much space in the books, but she does make a deep and lasting impression, feeding right into stories of water fairies, to put into English the way I think of it in Czech. Which, of course, doesn’t make much sense with the way fairies are usually perceived in English these days. That was, I believe, precisely Tolkien’s point in writing about such characters.

She’s actually not dangerous like Slavic water fairies are (at least not in this story), but she certainly radiates power, in a bit of foreshadowing for the way Galadriel is portrayed later in the book. Why did I think of Goldberry before Galadriel? Probably precisely because she’s a category of character I was already familiar with when first reading the books, so she rests somewhere more firmly in my subconscious. Even though her name doesn’t begin with G in Czech. (It’s Zlatěnka in Czech.)

The impression I have of her is hugely visual. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm so visual myself, or because that's really mostly what we get. But what I get from that about her as a character is that she has a knack for making an impression. That would go a long way towards explaining how she made an impression on Tom Bombadil, who, if anything, is characterised by being above (?) things. And her hospitality shows that she's not just that.

Gimli – and now that I’ve thought of Tolkien, there’s actually a wide choice of G characters to pick from. I chose to go with Gimli, because of Gimli and Legolas, who demonstrate one of my favourite literary moments... motifs... something; namely, the way two characters are stronger together, not just in the universe of the book (although that’s certainly also true), but even more so, for the reader.

Gimli, on his own, is mostly the token dwarf in the Fellowship (pretty much literally). He has his moments, but were it not for his friendship with Legolas – even though we actually never learn how exactly that happened! – his gradual character development would probably be passing and somewhat unmemorable. Even his devotion to Galadriel would probably be a lot less impactful, were it the only connection to the Elves he formed; but now that he springs to her defence in front of Éomer and Legolas springs to Gimli’s defence against the Riders in the same scene, the shift in Gimli’s attitude is firm and unshakable. His friendship with Legolas seals the deal, and also makes it absolutely clear that this is one of the good guys who are going to save the world and who are worthy of saving the world. (A lesson a lot of the “saving the world” genre could take a few pages from.)

Plus, Gimli’s description of the Glittering Caves is, in my personal opinion, one of the most beautiful things Tolkien’s ever written. It’s probably insulting to Dwarves to say that one passage completely humanises Dwarves, but my human readers will know what I mean.

Magrat Garlick from Discworld – surnames count, don’t they?

Whoo, Magrat. She’s like someone I know, except I don’t really know anyone quite like her. I love that Pratchett’s able to do that. I have my problems with him, but I love that he’s able to do that.

She’s insecure and has odd beliefs (I mean, even among the witches in the books) and half the time you roll your eyes at her ideas, and you still root for her, her success against the villains, her progress in the world and her awkward romance. I'm unable to dissect this the way I was able to dissect Gimli, but I think part of the trick is seeing into her head in her Crowning Moments of Awesome. It makes her both relatable and kind of aspirational. We don't usually get this with Granny Weatherwax in her Crowning Moments of Awesome, only in what leads up to them, which makes Granny both seem even more awesome but also more distant. Granny's the shining leader (with lots of faults), Magrat is the underdog you root for.

Also, a group (Eh... what exactly is the terminology here? “Voluntary association”, as provided by Wikipedia, sounds weird.) for free time activities in my hometown, founded largely by women (including two of my art teachers), was named after her ("Magráta"). I wasn’t familiar with Magrat yet when it happened. Now that I am, I wholeheartedly approve of that choice of name. It’s exactly the sort of pursuit she would approve of.

Glimfeather – my take on Glimfeather can be summed up thusly:

“You can't trust mammals to know a thing about Birds, tu-whoo. But you do know that female Owls are bigger than males, don’t you?”

A huge part of the reason I insist on keeping female Glimfeather is precisely because it doesn't matter whether Glimfeather as a character is male or female (aside from my hobby-horse fact above: it would presumably be even easier for a female Owl to carry a human child). Glimfeather is default; Lewis defaulted to male and the translator defaulted to female. There's a sad shortage of default female animal characters, even in books originally written in Czech (like, more tomcats than female cats in popular Czech children's books, even though cat is default female). Jill, for example, isn't as default as that. For one thing, she plays up her femininity when it suits her; the surrounding characters do treat her differently. Glimfeather, being a Bird and an Owl in particular, can be either and we mammals would be none the wiser (which is also my headcanon for why Lewis treats her as default male).

Glimfeather's obviously following the "wise owl" trope, which apparently isn't true in Real Life. But this is Narnia, so who cares. What I like is that she's shrewd and common-sense: her wisdom is practical, active (unlike the completely satirical Owl-Wol in Winnie-the-Pooh or the Owl in the Czech Little Mole cartoons, who's learned but rather out of touch as a result).

And I like that she's one of the Beasts who are very obviously Beasts.

So... if you want, and haven't done this yet (or maybe even if you have), you can ask me for a letter, too.

Also: happy new year!

Well, that sounds like a very pretentious title for what's going to follow.

I've written about this a few times already in various comments on other people's blogs and possibly also stories, but I've wanted to make a post out of it. There is all the talk about representation of women going on - female fanfiction writers trying to tackle it in their stories, myself included (goodness, Twinkletop happened kind of accidentally, but I've very quickly become very fond of her...), and inevitably you come to the point that there just aren't that many female background characters in Narnia. Lewis, for his time and age and life experience, does remarkably well on balance between protagonists, in my opinion, and I suspect that was because he really was doing a conscious effort - because almost every time a slightly less important character pops up, Lewis defaults to male.

The fun part of this I wanted to discuss is the fact that I've only become aware of this when I started reading the books in English. The reason why that's so is that Czech, unlike English, is a gendered language - everything has a gender, masculine, feminine or neuter, so some animals naturally default to female in Czech. And in some cases, the translator - I'm speaking of Renáta Ferstová here, because I've never read the second Czech translation - defaulted to female even where Lewis used a male pronoun in the original.

And sometimes, in Narnia, this means a female Glimfeather and a whole Parliament of female Owls, because "sova" - "owl" is default feminine. (Goodness, was I disappointed when I found out that both Glimfeather and Owl-Wol in Winnie-the-Pooh are male...)

It means that when the Jackdaw in The Magician's Nephew becomes the first joke, the Jackdaw is female.

It means that when the giant in Prince Caspian steps on a Fox in his distress and the Fox bites him, the Fox is female.

In fact, it means that you probably automatically assume some of the Mice are female, because "mouse" is a femininum.

It means that the Squirrels at the end of The Silver Chair default to female.

EDIT: The most striking example that didn't occur to me at first - in The Boy and His Boy, the cat that comforts Shasta and is actually Aslan is default female.

So, for your enjoyment and contemplation, I'm enclosing a non-exhaustive list of default-female species in Czech. Many of these, even where English only seems to have a complicated or Latin genus name (at least to be found online), would have a simple Czech name that a child moderately interested in the natural world (which many Czech children are, or at least were when I was a child...) and visiting zoos would come to recognise.
( The list )
So, as you can see, you get a fairly encompassing range of "female Beast" characteristics in this default list, even if it often does tend towards the smaller (most of the larger animals are default male). But you also get the hugeness that is a whale, you get beasts & birds of prey as well as the peaceful dove and sheep, you get swans and crows, you get both the "bad" and "good" snakes, you get the chatty and the quiet, the fast and the bouncy and the flying and crawling and swimming and earth-dwelling and nest-building and tree-climbing, you get day and night. Have fun with it if you're writing Narnian fanfiction. :-)

(Interestingly and as an aside, "child" in Czech is grammatically neuter but "children" is feminine, to the confusion of many a student.)

There's definitely shades of Pitcairn Islands history in Telmarine history. Not in a "that's what Lewis meant!" way, but definitely in a "that's most likely the story he would have heard" way. I like the mention of how inaccurate navigational techniques made the islands hard to find for subsequent explorers - that's very easily what could have happened to the island the Telmarines came from and returned to! And the story of the Bounty mutineers together with Tahitians founding the few families that live there, and the subsequent infighting among the settlers: that does sound familiar.

I should be doing something else, of course, but I got to thinking how much of Polynesian culture (assuming it's Polynesian, which I find most likely) might have filtered down to Telmarine culture, and that's the kind of rabbit hole that sort of thinking leads to.

The headcanon I'm working with now is that the independent-thinking Western Telmarines I've mentioned in The Peridan Chronicles are those who've retained most of their Polynesian roots (adapted to new circumstances and mostly unaware), and are most content with being where they are (which may not necessarily mean "settled down" in their case). Whereas the Central/Eastern Telmarines are those who are most like their forefathers of European descent, including the drive to conquer and subjugate.
Very simplistically told, because they're not all the same, of course. Now I'll have to find out more about Polynesian culture and what of it I could use, but I don't really have time for it now.

                                          

Also, Dreamwidth needs to introduce an "inquisitive" mood indicator. "Curious" is close but not quite.

Do you assign actor likenesses to characters?

For long, I had not been one to do that. Maybe this was in part because we’ve never had TV, so where others grew up with visual stories, I grew up imagining everything from the pages of a book. Then with DVDs, this changed. I still don’t do it with that systematicity of some people who have lists of characters and actors at the beginning of their stories (that sort of approach always feels somewhat false to me, although what do I know). But some likenesses have worked their way through.

Kněžna, who makes a cameo appearance here, actually goes way back to what I now believe to have been my very first piece of fanfiction, written during my teenage years at the request of “a short story, to be beautiful” by my sister for her birthday. It evolved into novel proportions and was finished years after that particular birthday. It was based on ideas and environment developed by Czech writer Jaroslav Foglar, but populated entirely by my own characters (and five characters of my sister’s creation). I still call it “my short story”, even though it’s actually not. Anyway, Kněžna has, for a long time, looked much like Libuše Šafránková, especially in her incarnation as Cinderella. This happened, in part, because a certain scene in the story was inspired by a drawing in a 1970s knitting and crocheting manual – I would flip through it, look at the pictures of young ladies in knitwear and try to imagine why they were in those strange poses they were (back then, the concepts of “fashion illustration creative licence” and “pattern illustrations are weird” were still beyond my grasp). Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella is from 1974, so apparently there’s some similarity. My mind works in mysterious ways like that.

The next character to have a likeness assigned was Edmund. My headcanon Edmund, as I mentioned in the note to the first chapter of The Peridan Chronicles, is dark-haired, because of the Czech illustrations. Then, later, I watched 4:50 from Paddington in the latest Miss Marple series and suddenly realised that Michael Landes’ character reminded me of Edmund for some reason; once I realised that, I could not go back. In this funny roundabout way, my headcanon child Edmund actually looks a lot like Skandar Keynes, although otherwise pretty much nothing else about my headcanon Narnia looks like those films. (Well, maybe except some of those parts that were filmed in the Czech Republic, because not too surprisingly, a lot of my headcanon Narnia looks like that which I’m familiar with.)

Then adult Lucy started looking much like Rosamund Pike. This happened because I played with the idea of Susan being similar to Grace Kelly (dark-haired, of course), the same sort of half gracefully aspirational, half tragic character. That one did not quite take root in the looks department, but along the way, I came across a photoshoot of Pike Grace Kelly-style, and went all “oooh, Lucy” – and that one stuck. There’s no arguing with my mind when it does that.

It’s for tracing these crazy roundabout mysteries of my creative process that I wanted a fanfiction-y journal. I’ve never gotten into the habit of writing a personal diary, but sometimes trying to keep track of this without it is rather maddening... I think it’s the concept of writing something private that anyone can at any time find and read without your permission anyway that doesn’t sit well with me – growing up with two sisters in a small house will do that to you. And all the stories of famous people’s diaries. Better to just make it public right from the start, I guess.