#faelapis

This is a commission I got from @faelapis for their Jasper fanfiction! The season finale is a chapter called “Steven Universe”!

it is actually board driven, according to the executive producer:

so i feel like that’s saved me a lot of grief over the now cliche cycle of “finally, true progressive media... aaand a crew member did a bad, so it’s garbage now and you must declare it bad and flawed every time you engage with it. anyway i love lord of the rings and atla ;) and they’re nostalgic so we sure as heck aren’t gonna put them on my DNI if you like it-lists :)”... so i’ve been wondering if that kind of systemic lens is indeed something i lucked out with understanding early.

i’m in my early 20s, so i’m not much older than the stereotypical age of Discourse Bloggers, but i’ve still engaged with enough media and seen the patterns of misogyny, racism, etc that exist in most of pop culture & literature (of every brow height) that, in a way, does make me feel more prepared and less punitive when bad things happen. i don’t expect perfection - so i’m not as emotionally let down if, inevitably, some hyper-scrutinized minority creator compared to their white cishet ally counterpart mucks up. maybe i am luckier than the people who don’t have that perspective, for they genuinely seem to think things will get better if we ostracize flawed individual creators without asking systemic (media) questions or examining whether we, ourselves, could’ve made the same mistakes in their shoes.

Hmm... lemme try and consider a few things that- on reflection- I think are helpful for me.

For one, I always think it’s important to write down like... every glimmer of a thought you have while in the plotting stage. Even if it’s Dumb™ or cliche, or you have no idea what on Earth to do with it. Perhaps it could be content that you come back to later and find a proper place to fit it in to the narrative. And at the very least, it’s a little brain warmup.

The other thing I personally tend to do, especially for multi-chapters, is to focus my broad plotting on one of two things, sometimes both at once depending on the story:

1) Where do I want my characters to end up emotionally, and relationally with others by the end of this story/arc?

2) What is the desired climax of my story, and what kind of general story events can lead me there?

Sometimes the climax is a mystery while I’m plotting, and sometimes I have a pretty clear idea from the get-go. It really depends. Others might instead chose to consider the themes they wish to impart with the story and work backwards from there.

But re: characters, for Crack the Paragon, I have a whole huge document that consists of exclusively character notes for all the principle characters. I work to keep careful track of what their relationship is like with other characters, and if/when any of those relationships change... what their mental state is like throughout the story, and how that might impact their decision making, stuff like that. Steven and Jasper especially have a lot of notes in that, since they’re probably the two characters who change the most over the course of what I have planned.

But in general... as long as I have at least one of those things fairly solid, the rest of my plotting is mostly filling in the blanks, finding a way to get my characters from A to B. I kinda think of it like drawing animation in-betweens. You have the key shots, and then from there it’s just a matter of solidifying the frames that sit between those. I tend to take it in stages... First, the leading points of the story... then, “hmm, what broad elements would make this character take this action?” And then I usually start thinking of specific conversation beats, and smaller details I may want to throw in to my work.

I honestly try not to overplot, though. I think there’s also something special about allowing oneself room to explore a scene that can be really fulfilling, and often lead to unexpected interactions.

I think it’s very convenient for transphobes that a core experience of transness is supposed to be deep self-hatred. Meanwhile, my observations of cis people are that the argument of “but this person is SUFFERING” don’t help (unless it’s a health insurance company, where you can flatly say, “Hormones and surgery are less expensive than a lifetime of ER visits and psych admits”).

Especially since, like... if someone transitioned decades ago and feels very comfortable in their skin, if they haven’t felt dysphoria for quite some time, that’s supposed to be the winning condition. That’s the thing we’re all supposedly aiming for. But is that person somehow less trans because dysphoria doesn’t play an active part in their life anymore? 

If it hasn’t already, it’s going to lead to a culture of bullying where any trans person who seems too self-confident or happy is going to get attacked as “not trans enough”. Which is the absolute opposite of helpful. We’re already in a world where health insurance companies hire private investigators to stalk depressed or traumatized people on social media so they can find a picture of them smiling and cut their benefits off.

hrmm you know, while the catra-cass comparisons write themselves tbh i don’t agree that catra gets butchered the way cass was–

like, characterization in she-ra across the board is impressionistic. even catra, for all her complexity, is done in pretty loose strokes. and... frankly i think this was the intention; i don’t get the impression at all that the creative team ever wanted to get into more granular detail belaboring anyone’s motivations or painting character in, to lean harder into the impressionism metaphor, photorealistic detail. 

so when catra hits rock bottom at the end of s4 and charges headlong into redeeming herself, that to me feels congruous with the way she-ra handles characterization in general. it’s less that catra gets watered down and more that her decision to stop reacting out of pain and anger and start trying to dig herself out of her self-made hole is painted in the same broad strokes as everyone else. whether this is a satisfying or engaging method of storytelling i think is very much dependent upon individual taste (i adored she-ra, but i also have very little interest in dwelling on it now that it’s finished), but that’s a rather different question. 

the point is, catra makes a clear and conscious decision to shift her priorities in s5 and then sticks to that decision, and the swiftness of her redemption following that choice is no different from the swiftness of scorpia’s or entrapta’s or even adora’s, all the way back in s1. and it follows as naturalistically from her past as scorpia’s and entrapta’s did from theirs. (is it realistic for people to be forgiven as widely and readily as scorpia, entrapta, and catra were? no, not really, but she-ra is impressionistic and realism isn’t a good metric by which to judge it.)

rta by contrast... is a show driven first and foremost by its plot. characters exist in service of the plot and characterization is subordinate to the plot; the creative team and chris in particular have been very upfront about this. (which i appreciate.) this is most obvious with regards to the behavior of the supporting cast, but it applies to rapunzel and cassandra as well despite the obvious desire on the part of the creative team to render those two in significantly greater detail.

so, cassandra. spends all of s1-s2 having grievances piled on her shoulders until she snaps and turns on rapunzel... only for s3 to turn around and say she turned on rapunzel over a single piece of new information that then becomes the sole focus of cassandra’s character while every single problem she had in s1-s2 is swept under the rug and ignored. because 1) rapunzel is a disney princess franchise and this allegedly meant a hard limit on how flawed she was allowed to be, but 2) examining cassandra’s s1-s2 grievances requires an honest examination of rapunzel’s flaws, but at the same time 3) cassandra’s villain arc as-written couldn’t function without cassandra having something to be furious at rapunzel for, and therefore 4) she’s enraged because rapunzel “stole” her mother. 

does it make sense? sure, it’s a trauma response fueled by a literal demon dripping poison in her ear, and the underlying reasoning doesn’t need to be rational for the emotional reaction to ring true. but does it build naturally from the foundations laid in s1-s2? no. absolutely not. 

so that’s my thoughts on that.

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