There’s been some muttering online recently to the effect that the Bechdel Test isn’t important anymore, that the number of women represented in media doesn’t matter so long as the quality is good. The technical term for this idea is “horseshit.” Men are not the default configuration of humanity. We must stop acting as if they are. The larger the cast, the more imperative it is to include women. This is a point on which I have almost no compromise. The one exception is stories which feature a setting in which women would be rare, such as historical war dramas, but if you really know your history you’ll find that’s a much narrower slice of the narrative pie than is popularly believed.
Why am I such an absolutist on this point?
Because I wrote a book in which all but two of the speaking parts were women, and it didn’t hamper me at all. There was no compelling narrative reason to include more men. There were no story points that only made sense if they involved men. It was easy, almost thoughtlessly easy. And this is a book filled with sex and violence. I had a hard-bitten soldier, a cunning manipulator, a tough underdog, and so on. A speaking cast of about twenty two roles, with many different personalities, opinions, attitudes. Almost all of them women, and it didn’t hold the story back at all.
Which means that there is no compelling narrative reason to ever exclude women from your work.
Women are people, dammit, and that means they’re exactly as interesting as the writer makes them. They can fit any role in almost any story. There is no reason whatsoever to arbitrarily make women an afterthought, an also-there, an eternal minority. I mean it. And this is especially true of fantastic settings. The more unreality you put in your story, the fewer excuses you have. The larger your cast is, the more diverse it should be. (In all ways, of course, but I’m talking mainly about gender here.)
Your stance shouldn’t be finding justifications for including women in your work. It should be making sure you have enough of them! Unless you have a compelling need to exclude women, their absence is a flaw in your work. Yes, a flaw. It reduces your work’s quality. You can be brilliant in all the other ways, but if your cast is biased in favor of men, then it is not as good as it could be. I don’t mean this from a political standpoint, I mean that its asthetics will be hampered by your decision to exclude or downplay the presence of women in the world.
And also? If you do find that you have a “compelling reason” to exclude women from the story, then maybe you should take a long hard look at why you think that story needs to be told so badly, and why it needs to be told in such a way as to keep women out of it. Telling stories is about communicating. If you don’t talk to women, you’re avoiding direct communication with half the audience. What is so important that you can’t include everyone? This is a more political point, but then again aesthetics are more political than most people want to admit. (And yes, I do believe that the absence of men is not a flaw in the way that the absence of women is, at least not for fiction produced in the social and cultural context in which I currently operate.)
The larger the cast, the smaller the excuse. The more fantastic the setting, the more pathetic the justification.
The trans feminine experience is one of pain. There’s beauty and glory in there too, but it always starts with pain. Pain tells us something is wrong. It tells us that we need to make a change. It shows us how brave we are, and how far we’re willing to go. You are already very familiar with pain.
That pain is important, sacred almost, because without that pain we wouldn’t realize who we are. You may hate it, Goddess knows I have sometimes, but it’s much better to learn from it to suppress it. You must strive to understand it. Even to find beauty in it. Some day, you may cherish your scars.
But that same pain can poison us. It would be lovely to think that every trans woman who goes through the crucible would come out the other side as a courageous, generous human being, but it doesn’t work that way. You will meet trans women who are so wrapped up in their own agony that they have become toxic to everyone around them. Once you know what to look for, they’re easy to spot.
If you listen to nothing else I have to say, attend to this: stay the fuck away from them while you’re still figuring your own shit out. They’re contagious. If that venom gets inside you while you’re still molding yourself, it can really be hard to get it out. Your world will become a place of thorns and shadows, and you won’t know how to escape.
Understand that this is not a prohibition against expressing pain, or a call to become an army of Stepford wives. Express yourself, let people who care about you know when you’re hurting. Blow off steam when you have to. Don’t let it consume you. Don’t give in to the temptation of bitterness. Bitterness trades a moment of solace now for a lifetime of agony later.
The answer is love. Always keep your love close. If it’s your family, if it’s your friends, even if it’s just your dog, know who you love, and know that they love you. Show love and kindness to as many people as you can. Strive to be a positive force in the world. Sometimes, that means calling out bullshit and taking a stand, but far more often it means patience, and empathy, and the hard emotional work it takes to accept your flaws and work on improving them for the benefit of those you care about.
Be generous and forgiving, to yourself most of all. Love yourself. Love your family, chosen or born. Create and enjoy as much love as you can, and try to understand that love tinted with pain can be the most beautiful thing in the world.
We are born from pain, and love sets us free.
Note: this article was originally published on my tumblr.
Sanderson’s First Law (please don’t tell me there’s going to be a second) admonishes us that “An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.”
Which encapsulates quite neatly my problems with Sanderson’s work; an author shouldn’t be solving her conflict with magic! She should solve it with character choices, sacrifices, determination to win, anything other than a magic system.
When Luke blows up the Death Star, he does it by using the Force but we don’t need a twenty minute explanation on how the Force works, we just need to see that he’s making a choice to trust Ben, to trust in the Force, to have faith that the Light Side has his back. The plot resolution informs his character, not some arbitrary set of rules that define what the Force is and isn’t capable of.
Why does the One Ring need to be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom? Because that’s where it was forged. Why can it only be destroyed there? Fuck if I know, and I don’t really care. What matters is that Gandalf knows his shit, and he says that this is the only way to do it, and any more complicated reason is basically a middlebrow thought experiment.
Rules for magic are better thought as rules for the narrative. They don’t have to fit into some larger system, and perhaps shouldn’t since then the story ends up becoming bound by the rules rather than the other way around and that can get dull very fast. All narratives have their rules, either implicit or explicit.
In Catch 22, Capt. Yossarian wants a Section 8 so that he can be excused from flying further combat missions. Failing that, he will use every trick in the book to avoid going into combat. This is structurally no different from seeking a magic talisman to cure a disease or bargaining with the gods to earn a favor. The important thing is that there is a clear and consistent narrative constraint keeping the hero from achieving his goal. The nature of the constraint can vary from story to story, and some of those variations have structural implications, but a lot of it is just flavor.
Another example:
Alice can’t go home until daylight because her brother is a vampire.
Alice can’t go home until daylight because her brother is an abusive asshole and she needs to wait until he’s out at work.
These are both narrative constraints that Alice has to work around. They work in mainly the same way, but for different in-universe reasons. They both suggest the possibility of the narrative forcing Alice to do what she knows is dangerous to do for the sake of telling a good yarn. There is in fact no structural difference between them. All stories have rules, and just because a rule involves the supernatural is no reason to over design it. Establish your rules when they become relevant. Make them clear. Do not waver from or contradict them. Do not pretend that the nature of narrative rules changes just because you’re calling some of them magic. If you put too much effort into developing the rules of magic, you lose sight of the drama that the story is supposed to be about. You get the fantasy equivalent of technobabble: magibberish.
A lot of times, authors will get so enamored of their magic system they’ll spend ages and ages explaining and reexplaining it (*cough* Mistborn *cough*), and then contort the story into all sorts of knots as a means to justify going through ever more convoluted permutations of the system. Watching an author get too cute with their magic system is like watching a stage magician do card tricks with a deck she drew herself. “Look! I pulled the Ace of Roses out of my hat! Remember, the Ace of Roses from Chapter 2 that I explained at tedious length? Yeah! It was right here! In my hat!”
On top of that, the most complicated magic systems seem to only be used for fighting. Come on, guys, even the RPGs you’re obviously taking your cues from were more creative than that.
In contrast, Chuck Wendig’s Unclean Spirits, the gods and goddesses roam the earth, tormenting any mortals unlucky enough to cross their path. Most of what we see the gods use their power for is to make some mortal’s life miserable, but it’s at least implied that they can do a lot of other things, too. They all have the ability to manipulate reality according to their basic portfolio. Death gods do death, time gods do time, etc. That’s about as detailed as the “system” gets, and it works wonderfully. (Also, Chuck’s version of Aphrodite is screamingly hot, which makes everything a whole lot more fun.)
In The Black Company, Glenn Cook has large parts of his supporting cast made up of horrifyingly powerful sorcerers, and yet never really needs to explain how they do the magic that they do. They seem all the more wondrous and terrifying because of that omission, yes, but more importantly the focus stays on the characters and the plot, and thus the book is actually interesting.
Hell, let’s go all the way to The Lord of the Rings and notice that Tolkien basically never explains his magic. In fact, Tolkien explicitly did not want magic to feel mechanical. He did not want it to be a gun that anybody could pick up and use to whack people. Yet that’s exactly what a lot of magic in modern fantasy has become.
We have people recommending books to each other based almost solely on the strength of their magic systems and it makes me really question what the hell this genre is for these days. Are we just giving up on telling stories about people now? Are we settling for narrative form RPG supplements?
Ditch your fucking magic system. Your book will be better for it.
NOTE: This post originally appeared on the blog I maintained under my now defunct pen name.
I play Borderlands.
So do a lot of other women. The game is notable, in fact, for its large and vocal community of female fans. No matter what the dudebros down at Gamestop tell you, women play all sorts of games, even very violent shooters like Gears of War and Call of Duty. The fandom of Borderlands, however, is much more visibly gender mixed than many other mainstream games.
There are two main components to Borderlands’ success with female characters: variety and flaws.
Behold! The best wetsuit ever. Oh, and Maya.
Borderlands 2, like Borderlands 1, only has a single female character who is playable out of the box, despite having four playable characters included with the game. (There is a 3rd female character named Gaige who can be bought as a DLC.) Taken by itself, this could be a troubling sign of tokenism, and in truth I do grumble about it endlessly to my friends. And sadly, despite being a playable character, Maya is perhaps the least developed of the women I’ll profile here. She is competent, friendly with the other Vault Hunters, and isn’t any more or less psychopathic than anyone else in the game. (Oh, by the way, everyone in Borderlands is an unrepentant murderer. I can’t think of a single character who hasn’t at least asked someone else to kill someone for them.) She’s not actually that interesting. Her back story is pretty simple: she was raised by a religious order to be their tool of domination over the population of her home planet, but rebelled and then came to Pandora, the planet where the games take place, in order to learn more about what it means to be a Siren, one of the six women in the universe who have super powers.
And that’s it. If that’s all Borderlands had to offer, I’d be very disappointed. Luckily, my disappointment with Maya is contained by the otherwise excellent cast of women in both games. It turns out, and this is really shocking so hold on, it turns out that if you have lots and lots of women in your story, it doesn’t matter so much when one of them is boring. Imagine that!
Lilith, who is tragically not gay. My OTPs are all ruined.
Lilith is a psychopath. (Just like everyone else on Pandora.) While playing her in the first game, the player is treated to a vicarious experience of gleeful power. Lilith has fucking super powers and she knows just how awesome that is. Mocking laughter and taunts burst forth from her when she’s in a firefight against the poor, unfortunate, and dreadfully outclassed bandits who are foolish enough to fight her. She is strong, deadly, competent, and unwaveringly dedicated to being as awesome as she can possibly be. She’s also kind of pathetic, and this is why I love her.
In the second game we see new sides of her through private audio recordings. Among the things we learn is that she is a nervous wreck when it comes to talking to men she likes, is kinda-sorta addicted to a substance which makes her powers stronger, and is a bit too ready to be flattered by a homicidal cult that started burning people alive in her name. And none of this is used to undercut how much of a badass she is. She’s a take-no-prisoners power fantasy for women–something that is in chronically short supply–and also a rounded person with fears and failings and weaknesses. Both, at once.
Let’s take a brief diversion: power fantasies? What’s up with that? Power fantasies are an important part of our culture, and there is no point in denying that. Just look at, oh, I don’t know, any random movie about how One Man Stands In Their Way that’s been released this week. Clearly there is something there that we as a culture value. Should we? I dunno, that’s beyond the scope of this article. I would suggest two points however.
First, historically disenfranchised groups such as women or ethnic minorities (or, gasp, women who are part of an ethnic minority!) are very frequently starved of images of people like them being powerful and important. Straight white guys get constantly flattered with images of people just like them saving the world and generally embodying all that is good and just, but other groups don’t get that same treatment. This has a real impact on our self-assessment and judgement of our worth and capabilities, and with good reason. It’s a pretty strong signal that you don’t matter to the culture at large when simply wanting a book or a movie or a video game that stars someone who looks like you is somehow a specialty interest, when the same story staring a white dude is “more mainstream.”
Second, denying women or other groups power fantasies of their own denies them full participation in our culture. Everything from Die Hard to Superman is about straight white men being The Most Important People Ever, and our culture celebrates and reflects that endlessly. But if you just once try to make a black woman the center of a power fantasy, people lose their fucking minds. And what that says is that people who aren’t straight white guys should not be allowed to participate in our culture to the same extent, since they must necessarily do so by vicariously living through someone else’s fantasy, rather than a fantasy that stars someone they really identify with.
I can’t stress how important this is enough. Over and over we see Strong Female Characters who are perfect, hyper-competent badasses, but who lack any kind of human depth. Women whose competence is essentially just another feature to make them more desirable to the (always, always, male) protagonist. When Megan Fox’s character in the Transformers movies is shown to be a mechanic, that’s not because she’s a well-rounded character with motivations and interests of her own; it’s so that Shia LaBeouf’s character can have a girlfriend who is so awesome she knows how to fix his car. (And also so she can pose like this.) It’s even worse when, despite being played up as some kind of strong, independent woman ™ she ends up captured or otherwise imperiled and needs to be saved by the slovenly slacker she will inexplicably fall in love with just before the credits roll. The modern Strong Female Character is just a warmed over version of that Victorian trap of worshiping an ideal of womanhood that doesn’t exist.
A real woman is never cross, never flustered, always primped, always presentable, always protects her virtue goes the lie. This transmutes to, a real woman is always strong, always competent, always beautiful, always available, but never a slut; you know, Girl Power!
It’s Victorian bullshit in a sports bra: pretending to flatter women by raising the standards of femininity so high that they can’t be reached. And when you fail that standard–and you will–that failure will be used to police you, to restrict you, to dismiss you, to silence you, to punish you, to ignore you. Real Women ™ are whatever patriarchy needs them to be right this moment, but don’t forget to be ready to radically change everything about yourself to conform to the new, completely contradictory standard that is going to be rolled out tomorrow. Right now, patriarchy is on the defensive, and so it needs men to flatter themselves that they aren’t sexist so that they can continue to ignore the problem. Thus, Strong Female Characters.
So how do you create a power fantasy for women without falling into that same trap? You make the power sit comfortably alongside vulnerabilities and relatable flaws. Lilith is vain, and that vanity that is born of her insecurities, a problem a lot of us (ahem) can identify with. Lilith is a powerful person in her world, but she’s a person first and foremost. She has wants and needs and fears and failings. In having flaws, she is granted dignity. We see her as a worthwhile person beyond and in spite of her flaws; they are never used to undercut her value to her friends or her strength in the world. They’re just parts of who she is, a big glorious mixed-up fuckup who also kicks ass and takes names as necessary.
There is dignity in failure. There is dignity in being recognized as having worth and value even in your moments of weakness. Male characters are granted this allowance pretty much all the time. Bruce Wayne is a neurotic mess. Tony Stark is a substance abuser. John McClaine is a terrible husband and father (No seriously, what the fuck, John?). But can you think of any female characters who have that level of flaw or weakness in their characterization, and yet are still treated as being worthy of being a hero? Or hell, let’s make it easier, who even get to be protagonists? It’s a lot harder, and if you add the further caveat that they should have the same level of exposure as the three male characters I mentioned, it becomes basically impossible.
Now, I don’t know, but I suspect that some well-meaning creative types out there fall for this trap again and again because they’re scared that if they make the main female character in their work flawed in one of these ways, that this will be taken as a condemnation of all women everywhere. We can’t have the main woman in the story be self-conscious and insecure, because then people will say we think women are obsessed with what others think of them! Oh noes!
That’s where the second half of the solution comes in: you want to include not just strongly written female characters, but MORE female characters. A lot more. If there is a particular narrative reason that you can’t have a lot of women in your story, then that is okay as long as the reason isn’t just a bullshit excuse. If you’re writing a war drama set in the trenches of WW1, then yeah, maybe you won’t have many women in the cast. If the story is set in a modern hospital, however, you’ll need a much better excuse to get away with throwing a sausage party.
Having a lot of women in your story allows you to have diverse female characters, each with their own issues and strengths and weaknesses. And now, through the magic of admitting that half the fucking species are women, you have freed yourself from the shackles of needing to treat your female characters as if each one of them was meant to represent what you think the strengths and failings are of all women everywhere. I know, it’s fucking amazing, right? Get this, by displaying a wide variety of women doing a lot of different things, you can even have women enjoying activities that are traditionally coded feminine without worrying that people will presume that means you think all women should inhabit one specific social role!
And it’s one that Borderlands gets so, so very right. You see, as much as it is disappointing that only 25% of the initially-available player characters are women, the supporting cast of NPCs is much, much better about being balanced between men and women. And since the point of these games is that Pandora is a dangerous place whose population spans the gambit from the very eccentric to the recreationally homicidal, more or less all the women in the cast get to be as delightfully damaged and bizarre as the men. None of the women is saddled with being the burden of representing all women, so they get to be personalized and inscribed with their own hangups, motivations, wants, and fears. They get to be individuals. They get to be human.
Moxxi is unimaginably cruel and sadistic, and she only gets better from there.
When we meet Moxxi she is presiding over a murderous pit fighting ring which she flatly admits she maintains to be able to indulge in her fondness for cruelty and brutality. She is an irrepressible sex pot whose cleavage is so famous on Pandora that it her wanted poster is a sketch of her chest. She is also the mother of two of the other major NPCs. A femme fatale who is gleefully murderous…and is a mother. When was the last time you saw a mother depicted in any part of pop culture that didn’t depict moms as extensions of their children or husbands? When you become a mother you are a sexless appendage to the greater glory of your husband’s sperm, or so pop culture goes. Mothers are the worriers, the nags, the wet blankets. They never get to be the ones screaming “HIT HIM AGAIN! THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME!” But in Borderlands, they do.
Here’s the best part: being fat is not a joke about Ellie, it’s just something that’s part of who she is.
Ellie is a mechanic who lives in the middle of fucking nowhere, beset on all sides by bloodthirsty maniacs, and that’s just the way she likes it. Interestingly, one of the reasons she moved out into the badlands is because she was tired of her mother (Moxxi) telling her to slim down. Yes, folks, this game has a fat chick who gets fed up with body policing and does something about it. The jokes about her aren’t really that she’s fat; they’re more that she’s crass, impulsive, violent, and kind of a redneck. (Much like her brother Scooter, in fact.) There actually aren’t a whole lot of jokes centered around Ellie, in fact. She’s sort of the only sane woman on Pandora, and her pathos mainly comes from the loneliness she experiences as a result of having fled the stifling expectations of her mother. She’s still a hoot to hang out with, though.
Helena Pierce lost an arm and much of her face in a romantic gesture gone awry. A woman with disabilities? In MY video game?!
If Ellie is the only sane woman in Borderlands 2, then Helena Pierce is fulfills that role in Borderlands 1. (Yes, I know I’m posting these way out of the order they appear in.) I’m fond of her, but she doesn’t really have any glaring flaws or weaknesses that are immediately apparent. Of all the women on Pandora, she comes the closest to falling into the Strong Female Character trap, but avoids it on the basis of two excellent choices in characterization. First, she has a disability (and she’s not the only character in the game to have one, as well). The way her disability is treated is very matter of fact, and allows the player to contextualize her no-nonsense attitude towards protecting the people under her care. Helena is a badass because she took her knocks and earned her scars and she knows that somebody has to be the one to make sure shit gets done.
Second, her badassery is mainly limited to being an extremely competent administrator (it’s cooler than it sounds); this enmeshes her in a social fabric, and gives her a plausible reason not to be out there shooting up the bandits in person. She knows where her strengths lay, and has no objections to letting those more capable at violence handle the firefights. That kind of self-knowledge is real power, people. But more importantly, her responsibilities to the people of New Haven pretty much rule her out as a love interest; even if this game had romance subplots, she probably wouldn’t have the time or desire to get into a relationship.
You’ve noticed that Strong Female Characters almost never have anything tying them down that would make them turn down a male hero’s advances, right? Helena is a widow who, I suspect, is still in mourning. She’s implied to be a workaholic, and we learn in the second game that her husband died horribly when a local carnivore attacked them after he unknowingly gave her a ring that put out mating pheromones. Helena’s conspicuous displays of strength and competence are, I believe, the result of her burying her grief. She never really comes to terms with his loss, and so while she’s the one character in the game who appears, at least on the surface, to be an uncomplicated hyper-competent badass, she’s about as far from a romantic reward for a male character as you could imagine. The flaw that makes her human is one that strikes directly at the heart of what I hate in so many depictions of women in pop culture, that we are essentially accessories to a man’s story, and that is why I love her.
Oh, also? I think her scars are kinda hot, but that’s just me.
Dr. Patricia Tannis is everyone’s favorite amoral lunatic.
I love, love, love Dr. Tannis. She’s the brilliant scientist with a PhD in exposition that any sci-fi setting needs, and she is also completely out to lunch. A series of horrifying and tragic log recordings in the first game chronicle her spiral down into (exaggerated, cartoony, and utterly unrealistic) mental illness. But even as she enjoys the company of her best friend, a chair, she’s never made to be incompetent. What I love about Dr. Tannis so much is that we never laugh at her for being crazy as if it was somehow a failing of hers, or something that undercut her value as a person. The horror of what has happened to her is very much present in every interaction, and that horror is enhanced by how we are coached to empathize with her. In many depictions of mental illness, the illness is used as a way to distance and dehumanize the character, but Tannis is brought in closer, and made more human the longer you speak to her. She’s a tragicomic foil to the entire setting of Pandora, and that doesn’t work unless you care about her as a person. The things she says are funny, sure, but the game never lets you forget that she’s this way because of the things that were done to her, and never makes her the butt of the joke. Patricia Tannis helps us laugh in the face of horror, while we empathize with the pain she is fighting through just to be lucid.
I’ll be a bit personal here: I have had, and continue to have, mental health issues. Not at this (exaggerated, cartoony, and utterly unrealistic) level, no, but I have had nervous breakdowns and I have been suicidal and I have sometimes found myself riding the bus to a destination I don’t remember quietly muttering “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over and over again. There are careers I really wanted to have that I am permanently locked out of because of my health. So Patricia speaks to me, in a way. She’s a way of laughing at my own darkest moments, and how they must have looked like on the outside. And the fact that she’s still doing what she loves, even through the illness, that makes my throat go tight when I think about it. Maybe that’s not enough of a basis to build a feminist critique off of. I don’t care. Dr. Tannis makes the fucking game, as far as I’m concerned.
And these are just the women who I have something I want to say about. This post is getting pretty long, and I haven’t even encountered the full cast of both games, so an exhaustive listing won’t be covered here. I never did finish Borderlands 1 (it got too grindy for me) and I have yet to complete Borderlands 2 (although that should be happening soon). Looking at the NPC list on the wiki indicates that there are plenty more women in the casts of both games that I have yet to encounter. Why can’t every ensemble cast be this gender balanced? Why does it have to be so unusual? It shouldn’t be that hard, right? The two golden ingredients–flawed women, and lots of them–have combined in this series to create a wonderful, rich cast with plenty of colorful women who are given the same respect as the men, in most important regards. (I would have liked to see some female bandits out in the wasteland, similar to how Mass Effect has female mercs and goons all over the place.) They get to be flawed–sometimes egregiously so–and they get to have fears and failures and problems. But they also get to be competent, and powerful, and strong, and important in their world. Both, at the same time. Borderlands isn’t a series that is flawless. I’ve got some problems with how they handle short people. Tiny Tina…uh, Tiny Tina needs her own blog post. But even with those flaws, it manages something that is all too rare these days: it treats women with respect, by allowing them to exist in large numbers and also be just as fucked up and weird as the men around them.
When the people try to dehumanize you by holding you to a standard of perfection, there is dignity in being pathetic. On Pandora, everyone is pathetic in one way or another.
[Note: Friends inform me that events in the later part of Borderlands 2 may make it necessary for me to write a follow on post to this one, so be on the lookout for that, maybe, if I get around to it.]
NOTE: This post originally appeared on the blog I maintained under my now defunct pen name.
She’s cute, and quirky, and enthusiastically malicious. When you meet her, she’s quick to let you know that she’s sexually available in a mild, nonthreatening kind of way. It’s a dark and terrible lie. She has no visible means of support, but does not appear to live in poverty. (Her victims fund her well.) This gives her plenty of time to enjoy visiting funky local shops, eating street cart food, and torturing cats with hacksaws.
Bump into her on the train, as if by chance. No chance about it. Her perspective on the world is so unique and free spirited. She’ll show you the joy of giving up on society’s stodgy rules and marching to the beat of your own drum, and also of arson.
Her room is filled with salvaged antiques and hand-drawn posters. A mobile hangs above the bed; bones and feathers and squirrel pelts. She says she’s into taxidermy. The walls are a familiar reddish brown, a color you recognize but can’t quite place. The paint is strange, and kind of crumbly.
One night when you’re sleeping over at her place, you hear loud thumping and wailing from beneath the floor. Just the downstairs neighbors having noisy sex she says. She disappears to ask them to be quiet. For some reason she takes a hammer with her. Later, you can’t recall ever seeing the entrance to a basement apartment in her building.
One night you start to wonder if she’s right for you. You thought you saw her across the street from your apartment, standing in the shadows under a tree, but when you went out to look, you found nothing. Now you’re wondering what that sudden bolt of fear was about. And why’d you bring a knife?
Picnics in the park, running around with your arms spread out making airplane noises. This hamburger tastes interesting, is it pork?
She says you spend too much time at work. You joke that she should take it up with your boss. The next day she’s in there screaming at him. The day after that, the building you work in burns down. Now you can spend all your time with her! Isn’t that great? Yeah, just…just great.
It’s not working out. The chemistry is gone. You’re afraid to sleep without locking the door. She takes the news well. Where’d your dog go?
Your new job has an anthrax scare, the letter billowing with white powder. They find your fingerprints on the envelope. The door to your holding cell opens, and in she walks. You tell her to leave, she says something kooky and sweet. You scream for the guard, but they don’t hear you. She won’t explain how she got in. She won’t explain how she got your fingerprints on the envelope, or your saliva on the stamp. She explains, with great disappointment, how you just weren’t good enough, and now she’s got to stand up for herself. She’s shows you a small wad of cash, says it’s all that remains of your accounts, but don’t worry; some public defenders are actually pretty good. Somehow, at trial, the prosecution produces video of you packing the envelope. She sits alone in the audience and stares at you with a quiet smile on her face. You try to ask your lawyer to call her to the stand, but when you point at her, he can’t see who you mean. Her smile grows wider.
No actual anthrax involved; you only get 8 months. When you get to the halfway house, there’s a laptop waiting on your bed. It boots up when you enter the room, and there she is, welcoming you back. She’s the Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl. She’ll ruin your life, and then send you cutesy videos where she uses your dog’s severed head as a puppet.
So Disney has decided that they’re going to nuke most of the previously established Star Wars canon. I think this is as good a reason as any to finally bury the destructive concept of canon in fictional works. Note that this does not mean that I am against stories in continuity with each other, that’s not my position at all. I love continuity, and the story options that it enables. But even as I enjoy continuity, I don’t see why we should be judging stories as more or less significant than another on any basis but their merits. And that’s all canon does, it arbitrarily privileges some continuities over others. Why should we recognize that kind of a distinction? Why should we give a soulless corporate entity that kind of power over our culture? Because that’s what we’re really talking about here.
Canon is, at its root, only a way to designate this story as more important than that story, more significant, more “true.” The term canon, as applied to fictional works, initially came about as a manner to draw a distinction between the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and fan works that used the same characters. It was initially more or less a joke, a way of reifying and exaggerating the importance of Doyle’s work when compared to his imitators.
But since that initial, half-in-jest start to the concept, it has gained an almost unholy amount of power. People started believing in this, as if it somehow mattered. Arguments about canon have become one of the great plagues of fandom, a billowing swarm of cognitive locusts that threatens to swoop in and strip any conversation of fun at any time. Canon means that if someone writes a story in your favorite setting that you don’t like, and they have the mojo to get it declared canon by the mystic copyright fairies in the sky, that now they haven’t just told a story that you don’t like, they have defaced your childhood. And when that happens, especially to long running properties, the consequences can be dire once someone with a grudge gets in the writer’s seat.
Spider-Man used to be a good comic, but then the Clone Saga kneecapped it, and it’s never recovered. For the next twenty years, Spider-Man lurched from half-baked story to the next as different writers and editors fought a decades-long battle about what deserved to be canon in Spider-Man. At one point we found out his origin story wasn’t true, and he was actually possessed by a mystical spider ghost. Then there was the time he made a literal deal with the devil just so that the writer at the time could give a big middle finger to the parts of Spidey canon that he didn’t like. So now the Spider-Man comics are a wasteland, the narrative equivalent of a landscape the day after a nuclear war. The most interestingSpider-Man stories of the past 20 years have been the ones that happened after Peter Parker was dead!
And it doesn’t necessarily hurt just a single storyline, or set of characters. It can corrode and disrupt entire companies. Witness the slow, lingering demise of DC Comics: death by canon misfire. The New 52 has been a catastrophe, a wholly unneeded self-inflicted wound premised entirely on the notion of designating one continuity to be more important than another. They had to kill the old setting so that the new one could be canon, because like the Highlanders there can be only one, so why not have a petty, destructive fight to the death, no matter how much carnage that leaves strewn across our cultural landscape? (And of course, predictably, DC began chickening out almost immediately and started seeding escape hatches to let them bring things from the old canon back into play. All this work and stress to satisfy the canon fairies. It seems a waste.)
So now Episode II‘s “I don’t like sand” speech is canon, but Bastila’s fall to the Dark Side isn’t. Disney would have us believe that this means Anikin’s whining is more important than the actually touching and painful story in KOTOR. I’m sure Disney has all sorts of compelling financial interests in making such a stupid proclamation. I’m less clear about why any of us would care about their opinion on the matter.
No, really: why the hell do we care what Disney thinks about this? They don’t own Star Wars. We own Star Wars. They just hold the licences.
Go back, way back to the folklore and mythology that modern pop culture is descended from, and you’ll find stories of gods and monsters and heroes that simply don’t care about which one of them is “more true” than the others. Take Lilith, for example. In some tellings, she is the incarnation of sensual femininity. In others, she’s a bird-footed demon. In still others, she’s a hairy, intersex deity.
There are more modern examples of stories and settings which benefit from a disregard for canon. Neon Genesis Evangelion basically gave up on the concept of canon when they did End of Evangelion. The new movies they’re making to retell the whole series are a big, fancy gravestone to the idea that there is one way to view and understand that story. This gleeful disregard for which is the “real” telling of the tale hasn’t stopped it from being the most successful anime Gainax has ever produced.
Canon serves no narrative function. The cues and signals that creators can use to delineate one continuity from another are wholly unimportant to the actual quality of the stories contained within those continuities. What’s worse is that the modern concept of canon is almost entirely a tool of big business, used to privilege one of their product lines over the others, even as they make money on other, non-canon story-lines. Star Trek gave up on its 24th century setting years ago, but that hasn’t stopped the Star Trek tie-in books from continuing telling the story of, for example, Deep Space Nine long after the TV series stopped running. None of those works are canon, no, but the money from them still makes its way to Paramount.
So here we see how hollow canon has become: now it doesn’t even apply to all of the works created by whoever owns the copyright to the stories. When canon was created, it was a means to differentiate professional works from fanfic, but now, even work that isn’t fanfic, work that’s actually making money for the entities which hold the copyright, isn’t necessarily considered canon.
Please note: I have nothing against fanfic; I got my start writing in fanfic. But if canon at least had a function of distinguishing fanfic from professional work, then it might still be useful. But it doesn’t, and the fact that some (ignorant, blinkered, elitist) people deride tie-in fiction as “glorified fan fiction” kinda shows how arbitrary and meaningless the distinction of canon and non-canon can become when the ownership of copyright gets divorced from the actual people who created the stories in the first place.
So, so very much of our culture is now owned by corporate entities which consider them little more than assets to balance a ledger. To them, canon is only a tool that can be used to enhance one product line at the expense of another. It’s an absurd state of affairs to let someone else’s accountant tell us which stories we are supposed to pay more attention to.
This tragic farce has recently reached a crescendo with the story of L.J. Smith’s Vampire Diaries. L.J. Smith was a writer who hired by a company to do some work-for-hire writing to create a “Interview With a Vampire for Kids” series back in the early 90s. Then when the books blew up huge in the wake of Twilight’s success and they got a TV show, Smith and her publisher started having creative differences. Because it was a work for hire deal, the publisher owned the copyrights, and so they kicked her off of the series and brought in another to finish the series in her place. But then the publisher also cut a deal with Amazon to allow Amazon to sell licensed fanfic of the Vampire Diaries, so Smith started and selling novel-length fanfic of the series she created through Amazon’s Kindle store. Now many of the fans consider her fanfic to be the true continuation series, even though the copyright owners disagree. So which Vampire Diaries books are canon?
Answer: it doesn’t frakking matter. Fans continue to support both lines. Some say they’ll only read the stuff that Smith wrote, others don’t care either way. But the idea that one of the three Vampire Dairies continuities is the “true” one has been thoroughly discredited, and that’s a good thing. The fans will support whichever of the continuities they prefer, either because they have affection for the author, or because they like one more than the other, or maybe some of them will support all of them because they like all of them. That’s how it should be.
And it is our culture. We’re the ones who care about it, who find meaning in it. We’re the ones that give it life. We should be the ones who decide which parts of our culture we think are the most important. Not some boardroom where rich people decide what kinds of stories get privileged in our spaces. There’s a reason why fanon and headcanon are so popular these days; we’re getting sick of being told which fiction is “true” and which “false.” We’re getting sick of seeing the stories and characters we love being debased, spun off, re-branded, and mutilated.
This latest absurd declaration from Disney about what is and isn’t true in the Star Wars galaxy should be canon’s epitaph. Let it die. Let it all die. And when it’s gone, and we’ve danced around the pyre, let’s build something new in its place. Something better. Something we control.
