Stuff and Nonsense

So first off, the whole list is SFF because that's the majority of what I read/watch/listen to, lol. I could have made other choices - talked about Jean Valjean or Sherlock Holmes or Kerewin Holmes or Georgia Warr or Miles Edgeworth - but I really love 1) sci-fi and 2) audio drama podcasts so I have many more in-depth thoughts about those. (I mean not to say I don't have in-depth thoughts about Les Mis or Ace Attorney but--anyway. Also I haven't read Loveless or The Bone People so I can't actually say much meaningful about those.)(Okay I haven't read Dungeon Crawler Carl either but I'm on the library hold list. But I believe my friends lol)

But when putting together the list it was interesting to see the patterns emerge. One of the big ones is that the lower tiers of the list are consistently not-intentionally-written-as-a-spec, male, and - and this is the big one that made me think about what it means for a work to "come off as" a-spec and especially unique to a sci-fi context - the first three characters have their primary committed, emotionally intimate, important relationship be with with a non-human entity. Princess Donut (an uplifted cat), Hera (an AI whose body is the space station), and Rocky (a spiderlike rock alien), respectively, are not only non-human but non-humanoid at all in a manner that makes a sexual relationship categorically impossible, and due to amatonormativity, that presupposes that a romantic relationship is therefore also off the table. And there is something real there about such people not wanting a romantic relationship with the protagonist, due to not being human and not having that framework be their primary mode of connection, but also due to their nonhumanness, being presented as non-viable options as romantic partners for the human protagonist. (Yes I know about shipping. I'm talking about narrative framing.)(This also isn't quite as true about Eiffel and Hera - due to the audio medium, Eiffel as a human man and Hera as a disembodied voice coming from the station itself have equal "stage presence" in a way that any other medium could not have managed, which is super cool. However their actors Zach Valenti and Michaela Swee have been friends for years and were deliberately not interested in playing the relationship as romantic for "it would feel weird to be making kissy noises at my friends" way.)

So I do think sci-fi gives a lot of opportunity to (re)construct social norms, I think that's a good observation! And sci-fi also gives plenty of Plot Stuff to write if you set out just, not wanting to write a romance subplot so you don't, which I think is also going on in all of these (I mean, I know that was a conscious choice in Wolf 359!). I also genuinely think that having a protagonist who consistently prioritizes his friendship with an entity very different from himself without expecting it to turn romantic, over the possibility of other relationships that could turn romantic, is doing part of the work when I look at these characters and go "hmm I'm getting a-spec vibes."

(Obviously that's not the whole of it. Among other things we point to in a-spec readings of these characters, all three of them also have failed romantic relationships in their pasts that are very easy to interpret as "failed due to putting heteronormative pressure on themselves they didn't actually want" which is a big part of what lands them in the lower numbers of this scale, and the contrast between the romantic relationship they didn't actually seem to like or want very much vs. the genuine fulfillment they feel with their nonhuman and also not male BFF is definitely fueling the aro / ace reading too! And like there is definitely some willful reading against the probably-intended implications of how straight men talk about their exes. That is also part of what's happening here. Eiffel and Grace manage not to be obnoxiously bro-y about it or blame their exes for it.)

The three characters representing higher tiers are the opposite on all three metrics: intentionally-written-as-a-spec, female, and their primary committed, emotionally intimate, important relationship are with another human (or rather, Star Trek-style humanoid alien, in Hatov's case). We don't need to read into the character's struggles with heteronormativity and freedom in platonic relationships that they feel no pressure to make romantic because that's categorically off the table - the authors are writing the characters as a-spec on purpose and are interested in how that affects their relationships with other people in a conscious way.

Murderbot right in the middle is a hinge point in a couple ways, both being agender and having a committed, emotionally intimate, important relationship with both a human and a non-human intelligence. It's also definitely leaning hard on "robot-as-metaphor-for-outsiderness" that sci-fi is really good at.

Laying out all these patterns makes it feel like this is an objective assessment of how different authors write these characters and how they fall into three particular categories, but it's not necessarily. Not really. It's in some ways an artifact of the characters I had on my mind and wanted to talk about, because the other character I was considering putting as the type specimen for Tier 2 was Katniss Everdeen.

Which of course breaks the pattern. Katniss was also not written to be intentionally a-spec, but she's female, her main relationships are with her regular human sister and best friend, and she's the center of the second most famous love triangle in YA literature. (She is still from sci-fi, though.) And she comes off as intensely aro due to her general attitude of assuming any expression of romantic interest is either a bizarre out-of-pocket non-sequitur or part of an elaborate mind game to perform Romance for the voyeuristic thrill of the crowd who she needs to keep appeasing to stay alive. So like, the "uninentional a-spec" character isn't just a "straight men writing straight men with an 'unmarked' sexuality who fail with their girlfriends because that's #relateable" thing.