Against the Default

[supergee]

Seanan McGuire on reading and fanfic.

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[glassonion]

Those are all true statements, but they don't have much to do with the actual effect of fandom on either improving or blunting the impact of gender representation in fiction.

If you write yourself as Kirk, or if you write Kirk as a woman, or if you write a Mary Sue where most of the attention is put to fleshing out Kirk, none of that changes the fact that what you're doing is continuing to pay word-count attention to Kirk, a dude. (Obligatory disclaimer: i have nothing against Mary Sues, and i imagine some Mary Sues put a fair bit of attention into their original character protagonists, but for most of them it's mostly about Kirk (or whoever)).

And my observation has been that most people do that. Nothing is stopping you from saying, "Gee, _Seveneves_ was an interesting premise with what should have been fully realised female characters, but Stevenson can't or won't write them so i'm gonna." But that takes a lot more authorial chops than looking at two dudes who spend 35 minutes of each episode bantering at each other and saying, "huh, what if it went beyond bantering..." And if you actually look at what people are doing with AO3, especially if you look at the stats, it's overwhelmingly the latter.

I'm definitely not saying fanfic doesn't have the *promise* of being transformative, and i've seen people hit it out of the park. But when you're riffing off a base body of work in which 85% of all interesting characterization is attributed to men, saying "well, people can do anything they want" doesn't in and of itself improve that.