#working around jkr's shitty writing is v difficult

[amorremanet]

what's your novel about??

Oh my gosh, nonny, thank you so much for asking!!

Okay, so the absolute shortest version — the, “summarize this thing and make it sound as shitty as possible” meme version — is, “Superpowered LGBTIQ neurodivergent and/or mentally ill mutant weirdos with emotional problems (and their self-appointed sidekick, who isn’t a mutant but is very enthusiastic about the work) investigate some seemingly unrelated incidents and accidentally uncover a neo-fascist supervillain club that’s trying to take over the U.S. on as many levels as possible — currently, by pulling strings to sabotage the lead-up to the still-upcoming 2016 election — and the neo-fascist supervillains are, unfortunately, very good at this.

“Also, our heroes start out as a ragtag group of misfits with superpowers [or, in Pete’s case, enthusiasm, wit, dedication af, adaptability, and a rather sizable collection of lime-green hot-pants], and progressively become both an actual team and a set of accidental rising stars in the superhero world. Is it a bit of a tired plot? Yeah, especially given how often superhero teams have to do some kind of song and dance like this — but: 1. it’s done so often because it resonates with people and, when done well, it can work; and 2. tired or not, it’s something that viewers/readers deserve to actually see happening, rather than just being told, ‘oh yeah, now they’re a team, okay? okay cool.’”

At least, that’s the plot of the first book, since…… I can’t make anything simple or less-difficult for myself, series are often more fun in general, and I just have a lot of characters here who I love, so the whole, “These incidents are starting to string themselves together in really suspicious ways, oh shit fuck goddammit, the election is being sabotaged” plot is just the start of things.* The bigger series plot would be more about trying to deal with further attempts by the neo-fascist supervillain club to wreak all kinds of neo-fascist supervillain Hell all over everything.

Then, the way I’m looking at this, structurally? Is that I have an ensemble cast, in the end. There are different tiers of importance among the different characters, because that’s unavoidable — I mean, I rail against JKR’s habit of treating her characters as plot devices first and people second, but even if you all treat your characters as people, you have to prioritize some of them over the others at different points, or else you end up worse off than George RR Martin, drowning in impossible goals and strangled by the giant pile of fictional people you made up to tell stories about — but I still view the cast as fundamentally an ensemble.

However, for the sake of reining in my horrible attention span and trying to avoid GRRM’s example, each installment has a focal character, whose own personal story of the moment gets to exist alongside the bigger plotty plot-stuff of each book (…I am a serious business writer, oh yes I am). As an approach, this has its drawbacks — balancing things without making it all too coincidentally intertwined is a big one — but I also love it because, to me, it reflects the way that life has several different levels to it that aren’t always intimately woven together, but still affect each other and need to find some kind of balance if you’re going to get anywhere

Anywho, the focal character for book one is Sebastian, because on one hand, he was here first. Like, he was originally for a game that my Sunday night RP group was playing this past summer, which was still the same-ish idea of mutant superheroes, except that it was more closely modeled on the way that Aya Brea’s powers work in the Parasite Eve games

Meaning, “the system is very openly based on Parasite Eve, it says so in the player’s handbook and everything,” rather than a motley hodgepodge assortment of superhero comics and movies/TV, speculative fiction in general, LGBTIQ theories and histories and cultures, “okay, I’d kind of like to be more active in superhero-related fandoms, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that the stories I want to tell right now are not easily mapped onto characters who already exist, I won’t feel fulfilled in trying to change them so I can shoehorn Sam and Steve and Nat and Bucky or Dick, Jason Stephanie, Tim, Cass, Duke, and Harper into them, so I’ve got to just say, ‘fuck it’ and do my own thing”

and, “what if I did [something that is a big and very, very deliberate middle finger to either Marvel or DC, possibly both, for some reason or another]” — e.g., “what if I made a pair of characters who are a pretty blatant satire of/commentary on/response to/whatever Marvel’s perpetual, annoying as fuck Cherik-baiting, except that they’re actually married — and they will be literally married as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court rules on Obergefell v. Hodges in-universe — and also they are old lady lesbians, nah nah nah nah nah nah *flips off Stan Lee et al. with both middle fingers while doing a, ‘come at me, bro’ dance and generally being a Stunning Bastion Of Authorial Maturity Lmao Not Really*”

So, yeah. I had to rescope some things after my RP group dropped that game, but in the name of, “developing my character and giving Jake, my DM and high school friend, material with which to torment my character, and also, Double-Cross’s system actually makes character development and characterization pretty important elements to playing the game,” I’d already written way too much stuff to just let it go, and Sebastian had endeared himself to me in a big way, and I just went, “Fuck it, I’ll write my own thing with him in it, it’ll be fun.”

I don’t remember when he decided to look like Hayden Christensen, only that I tried to stop that mental image from solidifying, and trying to stop it only made it worse, so I just gave up and went, “Fine, whatever, look like Hayden Christensen, see what I care.” But then, more importantly than, “Sebastian gets to go first because in fairness, he was here first”? Well.

On a thematic level, I feel like this little mutant disaster’s biggest personal story of the moment (trying desperately to get his shit together after making it to 30 without his clinical depression getting noticed as depression, much less treated; trying to stay sober and find something to do with his life that feels even vaguely fulfilling, which for him would mean, “helping people, doing some kind of good in the world, trying to make someone else happy because he is fairly certain that he never will be, period”; trying to actually deal with the past and move forward, not forgetting it or forsaking it entirely, but also not being frozen and chained to the past, learning from it and building something new)…

…has the most common ground and overlap with the current round of big plotty plot-type stuff, since it’s all about things like, “whoo, the formation of a new team! whoo, the new team getting it together and learning how to work as a team and trying to figure out their team identity and values! oh no, emergence of previously unseen threats that have not actually come from out of nowhere, even though it kind of looks like they have, and are more complicated than previously estimated! oh no, we can’t just delete them from existence because they’re insidious and entrenched in more places than we entirely realize at first, so how do we even fight this! ohhh no, progressive realization that we’re fighting a symptom rather than the actual facts problem, but we can’t just NOT-treat the symptom or shit is even more fucked than it will be if we treat the symptom by not the actual problem, and in some ways we don’t even entirely know what the bigger-picture problem is yet! oh man, what do we do!”

—so, like. These two threads work together better than they would with different parts of the larger, longer story.

(And then there’s Pete, who is an admitted authorial pet of mine, just like GRRM blatantly favors Tyrion and JKR visibly projects onto Harry and Hermione, and who I feel lends himself better to a format more like, “Dunk and Egg”-esque novellas, or a collection of, “chronicles of side-kicking” short stories about his little side-adventures and myriad hijinks that aren’t always immediately relevant to the main story but that are really fun. But I also feel like that might just be an excuse to write more weird adventures for him that aren’t necessarily tied together in the right order, like novels generally need to be unless you have some kind of reason not to do that.

idk, man, I just really love my stale cinnamon roll Dramatic bb theatre kid with a heart of gold who will tell you that you’re wrong and he so does not have a heart of gold while he is digging around Seb’s kitchen and making dinner for himself and his Princess because an unfortunate side-effect of one of Seb’s superpowers — the toxin filtering part of his mutant healing factor — is that his body doesn’t only filter out poisons, gases, narcotics, caffeine, and alcohol… it also filters the antidepressants that he gets given a prescription for about ten hours before abruptly being thrust headlong into his newly-awoken mutant superpowers.

Which is a huge mess all over — though, yes, there is a huge part of this that is a pretty deliberate, “fuck you” to literally every piece of media that goes, “and then the hero found out they had superpowers or magic or the fuck whatever and lol suddenly no more mental illness or disabilities or any kind of neurodivergence or anything neener neener” — and anyway, Pete’s hypothetically just found Seb half-spaced out and listening to, “Careless Whisper” on repeat, and Pete is going to tell you that he doesn’t have any kind of heart of gold because he’s a heartless wretch shut your mouth……

…while he’s making them dinner and going, “okay, come on, Princess. Sit up, let’s try and get you through this. No, don’t argue with me. You did the same — or similar, anyway — for me in that entire ten-day stretch when you knew I wasn’t eating disorder okay but couldn’t get me to talk about it and we’ve been over this: if that’s what friends do for each other, then it cuts both ways, so come on. Dinner. Do you want me to put on Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, Female Trouble, Ten Things I Hate About You, or some other thing until you feel like talking.”)

But anyway, as I was saying.

I look at the attempt to find thematic crossover between the plot parts of a book in the series and the story parts of a book as being kind of like how, in the first three seasons of Community, whatever class the Study Group had together was a of synergistic reflection of certain season-long themes and developments for them as characters and in their relationships.

Like, in season one, they were learning how to talk to each other and the basics of building relationships with and understanding each other, so they took Spanish, a language class.

In season two, they took Anthropology — in-universe described as, “the study of humanity” and which is presented as being so open-ended that shitty memetic youtube vids are as valid an object of study as humanity’s development and use of tools, and the different processes by which humans work together to do greater shit than we can do solo — and in that year’s shenanigans, the Study Group cemented their trust as friends, but also went through Hell together in several cases, and in the last two episodes (the cowboy/Star Warts paintball two-parter), they had to face the question of whether or not removing one of them for his shitty behavior (Pierce) would be better or worse for the overall health of the group.

And in season three, they took Biology, defined in-universe as, “the study of life” (which isn’t wrong irl, but the specific phrasing is important to me, here), and they spend a lot of time exploring and developing their lives, both together and individually, both at Greendale Community College and more importantly outside its walls. There’s also the season-long theme of evolution, because the Study Group have evolved as people and continue to evolve — which reaches its biggest culminations in the finale, not just in Jeff’s Winger Speech, but also with five of the big seven (Annie and Britta are sort of adrift but Troy, Abed, Shirley, and Pierce all have moments, and Jeff has the BIGGEST, most obvious moment).

So, with the books, I’m trying to do something kind of similar. Not quite the same, because…… well, TV vs. novels, school setting vs. a variety of settings but none quite as structured as a school (even one that’s as, well, Greendalian as you get on Community), a million other reasons besides — but having some kind of thematic synergy between the plot part of each of the books and the focal characters’ personal stories in each book…… idk, it gives me a comforting sense of structure to play with?

And aside from that, I feel like it’s probably a better choice for the sake of the whole stories because having those points of connection means they can more easily work to enhance each other, rather than distracting from each other. Like, one of the biggest issues that I have with shoehorned-in romance plots in stories that don’t need a romance plot? Even overlooking how they are almost invariably white and m/f and heteronormative and can be all kinds of, “uggggh” in several other ways besides, it comes down to whether or not they work, thematically and tonally, with everything else.

[this is where i had a tangent trying to illustrate my point by talking about pointlessly shoehorned-in white, m/f romance plots in otherwise no romo stories, then cut it after i started to feel moderately ashamed of how many examples and trends about this that i just have in my back pocket]

The point being: you can use dissonance and conflicting juxtaposed parts of the story to different effects, but it’s often harder to pull off and you do need to have some idea of what you’re doing, otherwise you’re going to end up with a huge mess and no idea where to start sorting through it (I say this based on having done this exact thing several times before)

So, in the interests of not doing that, I like the idea of trying to find the big points of synergy and connection between any given book’s focal char’s story, and the plot points of that installment and how it fits into the larger story. And, for the sake of book 1, Sebastian’s big story of the moment is the one that lines up best with the plot stuff, thematically.

Also, apropos of nothing but, he spends like all of two minutes coming up with his nom de spandex, and ends up with Pete being Unimpressed at him because…… Really, Princess? Princess, really. Like. Princess. Really. Your family is obnoxiously insistent on your Frenchness, even though you were all born and raised in fucking Baltimore and your Dad’s family hasn’t been in France itself since your ancestor sold the old ancestral marquisate and came to save the Revolution with the Marquis de Lafayette… and now you turn into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man…… and you picked out the official, “it is on your actual facts government-issued vigilante hero license” name of…… Gévaudan.

Really, Princess. Fucking. REALLY. Ugggggggh, you’re more creative than that, why did you pick the stupidly obvious werewolf name ffs, your family isn’t even FROM Gévaudan or anywhere in its general damn vicinity, why did you have to pick THAT name, it’s BORING.

And now I don’t know how to wrap this up so I’m gonna abruptly stop talking (apart from the footnote below, which I wrote a couple hours ago, whoops)

Thank you so much for asking this and giving me a free excuse to talk about my novel, nonny

*: Given my chosen subject matter, I feel like it has to be? Partly, yeah, it’s authorial self-gratification because I love my weirdos and their adventures.

But another part of it is the idea that it’s not enough to punch fascists in the face. Like, yes, by all means, we need to do that, too — but fascism is insidious and easily enabled by so many aspects of our contemporary societies. So, we need to resist the urge to simplify the discussion. We can go, “Fascism is wrong, period” while also trying to understand the different ways that fascism draws people into supporting it, how it can spread so far and so thoroughly in nominally non-fascist societies, and its different manifestations and ways of working, so that we can better fight it.

Additionally, we’re products of the same societies that create people who do become fascists and we can easily become complicit in both fascism and oppression more generally, so we need to hold ourselves and each other accountable while trying to fight fascism, instead of putting it off for later, because…… historically, and based on several different precedents? Putting off addressing the internal issues among ourselves doesn’t work; it just creates fertile ground for more problems to breed and makes it even harder for people down the line.

And there aren’t any easy answers here. There are some part of them that are easy or at least easier than others — e.g., agreeing on the statement, “Fascism is wrong and we should oppose it” — but unfortunately, not everything in life and resistance can be as easy as, “This thing is wrong, we should oppose it.”

Even getting into the questions of HOW to best and most effectively fight back against fascism gets complicated, to say nothing of situations where there isn’t an obvious Right Side or Wrong Side, no matter how many people try to turn those discussions into Right vs. Wrong and get into a lot of binary-thinking moral absolutism that ultimately upholds a lot of the shit we’re nominally trying to fight, and does more harm than good to everyone involved.

(ftr, those discussions are not things like, “Fascism is wrong, Y/N,” but more like disagreements between people, none of whom are outright in the wrong, but all of whom have different sets of values, different kinds of grievances with each other [some fair, some not so fair], different points of view on any given topic, and so on, usually about things like, “is it more important for people to be free but with more potential for people to abuse that freedom in hurtful ways, or for people to be safe but in ways that give us new ways to hurt each other in the name of safety,” however the Hell these issues are manifesting in a specific context at any given moment)

And, well. It’s a precarious line to walk on, as someone who wants to be as ethical and responsible a writer as I can be and as true to my handful of basic guiding principles as possible. Principles that I have because…… uh, I want to be as ethical and responsible a writer as I can be? And I want to always work on failing better, as @saathi1013​ would put it?

so, if you’re going to do that, you kinda need to have something to stand for and try to be more aware of what’s going on in the world, more aware where the content you’re making fits into those discussions, and more aware of yourself and how you work so that you can try to find places of potential Unfortunate Implications or places where you’re not actually living up to the values that you want to put in your work — c.f., JKR’s handling of House Elves and Muggles in the HP series, or how she wants the books to be anti-abuse but gives Dumbledore a free pass on hardcore manipulating both Harry and Snape [to say nothing of how he doesn’t do shit to make Snape act like a teacher, not a bully, because of reasons], and gives Molly and Arthur a total free pass on all of their unadulterated abusive bullshit

—and part of all this is knowing what you stand for, knowing what you think and feel as much as you can, and being willing to actually interrogate your positions and adjust your views and stances as you come into new information, new experiences, etc. Call it a belief, call it a good idea, call it whatever you want, but for me? You have to have some kind of principles to stand for/by, if you really want to be ethical and/or responsible content creator, because if you don’t have your principles, then what’s guiding you in this, exactly? Principles are what separate people who at least try to be ethical and/or responsible content creators from fuckbishops like the Dadaists, the Marquis de Sade, and the creative team of Family Guy.

And one of my principles here is, essentially, “People are people, and this means, on one hand, that all people deserve basic human rights and civil liberties. But on the other hand, it means that many of our problems are, in the words of Pterry and Gneil in Good Omens, caused not by people being either Good or Evil, but by people being fundamentally people. We’re all a bunch of disasters to varying degrees, and most situations are not going to come down to Good vs. Evil, but to (as Richard Siken puts it) need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone has the potential to be doing wrong by/unto someone else, even if some of us are going to come out more wrong than others based on our actions and/or the context of the situation.”

Which all basically adds up to…… yes, “Fascism is wrong” is a simple and straightforward statement, but there are situations and debates that arise surrounding most simple, straightforward statements that are tangled up and complicated. In this case, for example, how fascism takes root and spreads, how to best fight it in which situations, how it takes advantage of structures and practices even within non-fascist communities and uses them to fester and draw people into supporting it + what the fuck to do about that especially since at a certain point all of us become complicit in it to some degree or another, by virtue of being people who are alive and take part in our civilizations, and what’s at stake for everyone in all these discussions + how best to approach the question(s) of priorities

(…see, what I mean when I say that yes, I have interest in contemporary sociopolitical goings-on for their own sake but also bring them back to the novel pretty easily and regularly? It’s kinda unavoidable when you’re living in the times we are now, writing about superheroes who have to fight very explicitly neo-fascist supervillains)

So, anyway, the TL;DR of my basic point here is that I do try to approach my writing with principles in mind, but I don’t believe in oversimplifying shit — based on what I’ve encountered so far, I believe that oversimplifying things in a lot of these discussions usually starts in an understandable sort of place, but only ends up creating more problems for everyone in the long run, because it too easily fosters binaristic thinking and moral absolutism, dehumanizing each other, creating arbitrary hierarchies that we always end up using to justify hurting each other, and so on — and I don’t want to be a preacher in my work. I’d be a lot happier if I inspired actual discussions.

……Unfortunately, I’ve been in fandom and literature generally for too long to think that this is going to happen without the risk of people playing the apologist cards, the [douchebag character] in Leather Pants card, and all of that good stuff, but…… well.

I’m just trying to tell myself that this is a risk I’m going to have to live with, and if I do everything that I can reasonably do to prevent that and it still happens anyway, then hey, I’m in good company with George Orwell (all the people who have read 1984 as a defense or endorsement of right-wing anything when Orwell was a Socialist, he just opposed fucking Stalinism), Dr. Seuss (the anti-reproductive rights brigade who co-opted Horton Hears A Who to make it a screed against abortion), Emily Brontë (everyone who thinks Heathcliff is romantic and awesome when no. NO. fuck ALL the way OFF, he is an abusive jackass who literally kills a puppy and torments a generation of kids into reenacting his and Cathy’s relationship, just to get back at her for dumping him, and whose author was a fucking abuse survivor, now can everyone please get off her tits and stop using her book to justify their own abusive garbage behaviors), and so many countless others

But that’s a whole other kettle of monkeys, and I should only be so lucky to maybe someday have enough people reading anything I write that there are actually popular misinterpretations of anything. Like, would it be ideal if the misinterpretations didn’t happen? Yeah, but that’s not how writing works and it’s not how reading works and it’s not how most contemporary socialization trains us to read and see things, and everyone who reads anything I write is going to come up with their own interpretation because I can’t tell them how to read it, so

*shrugs* The Author Is Not God, y’know? I can do the work to try and best actualize my vision of things, but there will be things in it that other people see that I didn’t intend or didn’t notice, and my version of the story can’t be the absolute truth because the readers’ input is just as vital to the life of a written work as the work itself. It’s an unavoidable risk of writing shit on shit, so we make do, the end, I guess?

#that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #pete x seb #mine: asks #mine: writing #nonny hi you're my favorite today if ur still around #reaction gifs// #depression cw// #writing meta #Anonymous