Forum:FC:Café Fanfic XXV

Café Fanfic is a discussion topic centered around fan-fiction. Authors are encouraged to contribute to the café's monthly discussion, which are designed to stimulate ideas and encourage engagement between members of the SWF fan-fiction writing community in a criticism-free zone.

Participants in Café Fanfic are also welcome to submit ideas for the next month's topic of discussion.

Previous topics can be found in the archival list at the bottom of the page.

There are three basic premises for Café Fanfic
 * 1) Please restrict this to stuff from your fan-fiction (written or possibly just conceptualized).
 * 2) You can suggest and make observations, but no condemning other people's work
 * 3) "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer.


 * July's topic: (Courtesy of Karohalva) What considerations or conventions do you use when writing characters that are the opposite sex from you? If you don't write those characters, why not?

Brandon
When I’m creating a story involving a female character, I try really hard to make sure she has a story of her own. By that I mean, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of making the female character only a love interest for a male character, with no story or character development of her own. I didn’t used to be very good at that. My big failure was with the story Shadows of the Jedi: The Legend of Ussej Padric Bac, a fic I worked on a few years ago on and off. The novel was based on the story of The Star Wars RP’s first timeline, the Great Territorial War, and focused on my character Ussej Padric Bac. Ussej was the first character I ever RPd.

In the RP, there were three central characters to the story involving Ussej: there was Ussej himself, the Sith Lord Darth Ravinos (formerly Kit Rendar), and Ravinos’ sister Laili Rendar. Laili was a smuggler who ended up going to the Jedi for help, since she believed her brother could be redeemed. Ussej decided to help her and the two began working on trying to redeem Ravinos. They also fell in love and got married.

Before I go any further, I’ll say that the RP portrayed Laili rather well. She was a smuggler and a determined sister first, and a member of a love story second. She was not the glorified girlfriend, she was a character in her own right. However, I made a mistake when I transferred the story of the RP into a novel.

First of all, Ussej was a weak character in his own right. The original conception of him was that he was a false Chosen One, someone the Jedi Council believed would fulfill the prophecy but would end up not doing so (obviously, since that’s Darth Vader’s job). He didn’t have much going for him other than me saying he was a hero. There were also some instances were I just outright copied part of Darth Vader’s story, such as visions leading Ussej to the dark side. He became Darth Mantus, the apprentice of Darth Ravinos. In and of itself, that’s a cool idea; the supposed savior of Darth Ravinos instead becomes his apprentice. Those weaknesses weren’t as apparent in the RP, though, because you don’t need the same kind of narrative flow in a RP. At least back then, the RP was a bit more of a patchwork of events rather than a coherent storyline.

Once I transitioned it into a novel, though, the weaknesses were more obvious. Ussej was clearly not a compelling hero because there was no reason to care about him, let alone suggest that there was a legend about him that warranted a book. The beginning of the novel was the first RP I ever did with Ussej, but in the context of SWRP there were other factors that would make people care more about Ussej, his fall, and ultimate redemption. I was an admin, for starters, so the colored username automatically gave what I did extra weight.

Additionally, I was fairly new. The people who RPd Ravinos and Laili were part of the pre-SWRP storyline on the LucasArts RP forum, and they were very established on SWRP. If anyone gravitated to the story, it was because of them, not me. So in that sense, the ultimate goal of that storyline had at its center Kit Rendar as the key&mdash;not Ussej Padric Bac. In fact, I would call Ussej the third of three most important characters in that particular storyline. The redemption of Kit was the goal, and the emotional connection to that quest was Laili. A love story between Ussej and Laili did happen, and there were more interactions with Ussej and Laili than there were with either of them and Kit, but they each played particular roles. Kit was the fallen hero. Laili was the loved one seeking redemption for her brother. Ussej was basically the tool to try and make that happen.

I say all of that to make a particular point: without knowing all of the Kit Rendar backstory as the people on SWRP did, and without knowing anything about him or having seen his tragic fall as the people on SWRP did, then you really had no reason to care about the events of Shadows of the Jedi. I decided that for that novel, as it was mine, that Ussej would be the main character. There was nothing inherently wrong with that decision. He did not have anything compelling enough in his story, though, to make him an effective central hero character&mdash;nor did he do anything remotely deserving of the title "The Legend of Ussej Padric Bac." In fact, the central conflict of the story for Ussej ended up being with his friend and Jedi Grand Master Damien Nightblade, who Ussej, for no particular reason other than the fact that it was similar to Anakin Skywalker, decided to accuse of trying to steal Laili from him and hold him back as a Jedi.

Between all of that, you didn’t care that he was asked to save Darth Ravinos, who you knew nothing about other than what the novel said to you in the narrative. You didn’t care that Ussej fell in love with Laili, whose function in the story was relegated to damsel in distress/love interest due to Ussej being the focus and not Kit (and that was my fault, not the fault of the person who RPd Laili, because I got the focus wrong). You didn’t care if Ussej fell to the dark side. You didn’t care if he was redeemed. You didn’t care because I gave you no reason to care. In the context of the war, the novel started in medias res, but failed in doing so.

The biggest failure was what it did to Laili. Her main issue in the novel was that she had an unjustified sense of bravado while only functioning as the damsel in distress and the girlfriend. That made her annoying. The truth is, though, she was more than the girlfriend. For the novel, the issue is that I decided I wanted it all to center around Ussej, so the RPs and the RP storylines that were shown were only the ones that were relevant to Ussej. That means that the storylines that showed Laili as her own character werne’t there. In the RP, she was a smuggler. She went on smuggling missions. She took on mercenaries and bounty hunters. She took care of herself, whereas the book always showed her needing to be rescued. She was partly of the Han Solo archetype, which is where that roguish bravado came from. I didn’t realize at the time that I can’t expect a reader to know that just because I told them. They didn’t see the rest of the story, and that’s a failure on my part.

So my takeaway is to make sure that female characters have their owns stories and their own growth. There’s a story I’m developing now where the focus was originally going to be on one character, a Jedi Knight, and all the other characters&mdash;including a female character&mdash;would serve his story. I realized that it would be the Laili mistake all over again. The story that I’m developing has therefore grown, where there are multiple characters with multiple stories. They all merge in the end, and the Jedi Knight is still the main character, but the story has become more epic in scope now that I’ve rightly realized that I can’t just expect people to care about people who serve as glorified props for the hero. Not that I'm comparing quality here, but I'd make the comparison to Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, where the main characters don't always interact with each other and sometimes are off on their own, even if the overall story is the game.

Tl;dr - the convention I use is an obvious one, which is to make people actually care about characters you're writing and not have them just serve one person's story. - Brandon Rhea (talk)  00:12, July 8, 2013 (UTC)

Jedi Master 76
When writing female characters, I try to give them a motivation to last them the course of the series. I try to make these motivations start simple and become more complex as I write. For example, Ralina Venli, a smuggler and&mdash;much to her chagrin&mdash;Jedi courier, only steals from Sith space because she believes the Sith Empire was responsible for killing her fiance. Nohli Crescen, on the other hand, is a young Sith officer who earnestly desires to prove herself to her peers and to her parents. Basically, every character has to have a reason to exist within the universe, even if it's a small one or not necessarily plot-centric.

Once that's through, I like to play with archetypes. Some characters, like Dynatha Aris, essentially exist (in my earliest stories) to be the damsel-in-distress. Ralina, on the other hand, is a starship captain devoted to her crew but who happens to be on the wrong side of the law. Other characters are more complex or a combination of archetypes. For example, Verita Ladola is a Jedi Knight who is a healer when we first see her, but after being captured by the Sith, she spends a bit of time as a cold, almost seductive figure. By the time she's redeemed, she forsakes her earlier penchant for healing and becomes a warrior through-and-through. A big inspiration for me came in the form of Jung's ideas on the animus and anima, and I try to work some of those ideas into my work. Some of my female characters embody anima/feminine traits, like Dynatha and Nohli, while others (usually villains, honestly) embody animus/masculine traits, such as the Sith warrior Calay or Ralina. And of course, a few get to have fun with both when the need arises. -- JM76 03:36, July 8, 2013 (UTC)

Soluuuuuus
Herro.

Ah, it seems I am a girl in a sea of sausage (mostly. Luv ya, Trak! :D). So yeah. Writing guys.

From "Rakata," gender was a big issue. As it followed cattle, it had to follow some of the rules regarding cattle - namely that, in the kind of work they were doing, they were almost all female. However, I chose to follow one of the few males. He had his role, and the story followed the drama of him wishing for more. Now, there are some things that happen in the storiee (hint: not good things) that might give one the idea that I'm some kind of psychotic sadistic misandrist.

...Well, I am, but that's not the point.

If you read the little hidden tidbit that tells you what happened after the story. In the end, it was the females who mostly won their freedom, but that's just because there were more of them. The males kinda helped, too, I guess. whatever. um.

.........BAD EXAMPLE

SO! Um...Fate! Let's talk about that, instead. ^-^; In Fate, gender is no issue at all. It plays no role at all in the story. I could literally flip around everyone's gender and the story would still play out the same. So, in that case, I wrote everyone as archetypes first, their gender just informed their character design. From there I could hone their personality until I was satisfied.

To sum up: if you're just writing a character at all and gender doesn't matter, write them as characters first - people are people whatever their gender. It's not "OH CRUD THIS CHARACTER HAS BOOBS. HOW DOES SHE TALK!!?!?" Like a person, you dolt.

If you don't know what gender to make them, flip a coin. Maybe change it later if you think it works better - I've flipped around several genders in Fate and pondered doing it to others before settling on exactly what I wanted.

If you're writing a story where gender is important, like it's about gender or you need a certain to be a certain gender for story reasons, then still make them characters. A personality, maybe an arc, something. Their gender should not be their defining characteristic.

And if you're going to be mean to a gender, at least choose a guy. They're more fun to beat up, anyway. Choppy choppy! :D - Solus          Talk to the Hand  20:30, July 8, 2013 (UTC)

MPK
"What considerations or conventions do I use"? Honestly, not that many. It's a habit of mine to forget to put chicks in my story - which I view as equally erroneous as forgetting to include aliens in the science fiction setting. If I were to go down the list of my fanfics, women aren't well represented - by which I mean aren't represented much at all - fairing only slightly worse than aliens. There are none to speak of in Burning Bright. The Beast of Rutan has two, one of whom's sole purpose is to get murdered and cannibalized and the other of whom never actually appears in person. Your Weapon, Your Life has none to speak of. River has perhaps a few on the sidelines, but it's been ages since I've read it.

Through Glass is the only story I've actually written which I can directly relate to this topic. It was my first serious attempt at writing a story about the character of - and I deliberately wrote her as a she because I don't write women much, and I thought it would make me pay more attention to how I developed her character. This helped somewhat, but in the end it didn't make much of a difference what gender she was; unlike most KotOR fic writers, I didn't and still don't have any interest in detailing whom Revan sits with in a tree k i s s i n g, and I just wanted some more variety in my characters. If I expect the question's scope to include all the dozens of stories that I haven't written, then I can say a few more things.

In such a case, I do have a handful of conventions. First of all, I very effortlessly avoid the trap of including a chick for no reason other than to be the manly man-hero's sidekick and smooch him a lot. My ability to avoid this is greatly helped by my utter ineptitude at writing romance subplots and lack of interest in doing so. Second, something I've noticed a lot in fanfiction - and bad storytelling in general - is cases where writers consciously want to make sure that they have "strong, independent female protagonists" and therefore set about accomplishing this by having said female protagonists manifest their strong independence by being foul-mouthed, arrogant, spiteful shitheads who are deliberately difficult with absolutely everyone, including their own allies and companions. Kind of like what Solus wrote about above, in the end I don't really think much differently about characters based on their gender. I mean, it's not like I'm trying to use fiction to comment about gender politics - and if I was, there'd be easier ways to do that than a futuristic setting full of aliens. Besides, who wants to hear about gender issues when you can have people fighting with laser swords or flying around in spaceships? -MPK, Free Man  04:44, July 9, 2013 (UTC)

Trak
I don't have many considerations when writing characters of different genders. At most, their vocal nuances would be different, but really, I see no difference in writing a male character than writing a female character. I give my characters vocal tics to separate them, but those tics pertain to the character and not their gender. About the only thing that actually touches upon gender differences are descriptions. Even then, those differences are negligible. Really, determining a character's gender would just come down to a coin toss for me. I see no actual difference in writing them. Characters are more than their gender, and thus, it would only play a small part in their development, unless I decide to actually make gender an issue. Trak Nar Ramble on 04:55, July 9, 2013 (UTC)