PurpleSunflower

I’m rereading the Tortall books. When I first started in 2000 or 2001 in the middle of Kel then back to the beginning with Alanna, mixed in with Emelan, then caught up and have read by publication date ever since.

Well I never really paid attention to their ages.

At this reread, I decided I really wanted to pay attention to their ages.

Alanna was easy to follow enough with her four books. I could tell she was early twenties ish when we leave her.

Then Daine begins. We leave a mid twenty something and return to the world of a 13 year old.

This is where it gets interesting.

I’ve known these characters for at least 15 years now. Daine has been my favorite because I’ve claimed Numair as my literary husband.

So I start Daines book with a handwritten timeline I coppies from Tammy’s website with everyone’s updated ages.

In the first Daine book, things are going along swimmingly.

Then we get to the scene where Jon is grilling Daine on her father and her magic and Numair is arguing with him about going with Daine to Pirates Swoop.

So I decide to check my timeline because just how old are these people now anyway. When I was 13 and reading about Daine, the big 5; Alanna, George, Jon, Thayet and now Numair were all “adults” meaning aged “40-50”.

Oh no.

They are not.

They are 30, 36, 32, 30 and AND 24.

Numair is 24 and telling off the King who is 32.

WHAT.

This country is being run by a bunch of CHILDREN in the 7th year of their reign because Jon took the throne 7 years ago at like 25.

And he’s being told off by my now 24 year old husband who is really just a trussed up post-doc who thinks he’s an academic.

He even says so to Daine that he forgets not everyone is an academic. Numair, you are 24. I was finishing grad school at 24. Oh no.

But look again. When you read the descriptions of this country, it has mandated schools for everyone, open job opportunities for anyone who can complete the training, and a king who comes down to help everyone out when some enemies attack where he lives, women can get fighting jobs and the queen regularly helps out the program of fighters that she partially oversees. Then they ask a 13 year old for help.

Is this what would happen if you left a kingdom to some mid twenty somethings? Jobs for everyone, education, talking to teenagers for help and advice. Especially teenage girls.

And also.

When I was 13 and I read about their trouble with the emperor in Carthak...

I imagined this guy

But no.

The Emperor of Carthak is 26.

Not an old man.

My brain is hurting. Where I work, I’m one of the youngest out of 100 people, and yet I’m of this age group that is governing Tortall.

I don’t know what to make of this information yet.

Share when you also were no longer 13 and started figuring out relative ages of everyone and as you got older and had different opinions about your life long literary friends.

Reading these books at 31 still holds that special magic. I grieved when I had to close Alanna and leave her, only to feel the tearful joy when she comes back in the first Daine book. It’s like Tammy knew we wouldn’t be able to let go.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.