thequeenofthefallen

Chloé Zhao, who just won an Oscar for best director, writes fanfiction.

Like, it's not weird for wholly original romance novels to have otherwise disposable friend characters who act as author mouthpieces at crucial points in the story. (It's also not uncommon for romance novel characters to have NO close friends or family, in my experience, which is a different thing.) Former fanfics do not even slightly have a monopoly on, "Hey, what's up with this weird friend character? They seem a little out-of-place here? Also seems like you're maybe under-utilizing the weird, comedic relief friend, tbh; they could be doing more in this story."

Audience familiarity with (and affection for) the characters and their relationships to one another can be one of fanfiction's strengths re: storytelling. You can play with a lot of reader expectations this way.

Anyway, if I was reading a Coffee Shop AU Star Wars Reylo fanfiction (you could basically use this example fic to ward me personally off like garlic against a vampire, tbh, but let's pretend)... even if Finn had nothing to do as a character in this story besides be Rey's coworker at the coffee shop, I would be even more suspicious and dismayed if Finn was completely missing. We EXPECT to see at least briefly all of the major members of a cast in an AU fanfic of certain length, barring unusual circumstances.

Even if he is almost completely irrelevant to the meet-cute at hand, I WANT to know where Chewbacca is in this AU! I want to enjoy a little chuckle when, idk, C-3PO is turned into a high-strung, middle-aged office guy with either a short, non-English-speaking husband or a Border Collie-Corgi mix dog named Artoo that runs his entire life. It's delightful to see the characters I know and love in the background!

But when you file the serial numbers off of AU fanfiction, a character's role in a story can no longer be Being That Character. Now, you potentially have a bunch of story elements that conflict slightly or conflict very seriously. Now, you may have additional characters whose presence is no longer perfectly explained by the fact that you are expected to include all the Avengers in your MCU fanfic.

Now, Not-Chewbacca's quirks cannot be explained away by him Being Chewbacca. And suddenly, readers are like, "Hey, kind of weird throwaway detail for Not-Kylo's dad to be a former drug runner who lives in a van with an old, foreign war vet! Is that going to be relevant later???" Once you cut the fanfiction strings, your new story may feel riddled with inconsistencies and missed opportunities. Why are these characters here if they're 1) not contributing to the plot, 2) not contributing to character ans relationship development, and 3) not even really contributing tonally (humor, angst, fluff) to the story?

YOUR BODY DOES THIS ON PURPOSE

I liked these tags but I had something to say about it

I already assumed that the dresses were a choice made by the female crew, mostly for my own sanity. They do show (very infrequently) women in tos wearing pants

And they show men wearing dresses in tng, but only ever in the background (unless you count the dress uniforms)

And obviously I like that these were included, but they were clearly a cop out decision.

“Yeah see men can wear dresses, women can wear pants. They just don’t choose to” reads as “of course I’m not sexist, women just like wearing tiny little dresses in the future”

And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors. It was a progressive time, and some of the choices made in an attempt to highlight that in the show did not age well.

I think it's worth emphasizing that this very genuinely is the main reason for the "sexist" miniskirts. IRL, women were often not choosing between sexy miniskirts and non-objectifying pants, but long skirts (respectable) and short skirts (rebellious). Deliberately wearing short skirts as rebellion against patriarchal control that mandated long skirts or maaaaybe loose slacks on a good day is still hardly unknown among girls/women leaving conservative communities in the USA, and was only more commonly coded that way at the time.

Sally Kellerman, the actress for Elizabeth Dehner, found the close fit of the supposedly more feminist pants uncomfortable and is often given something to hold in front of her because she was so intensely self-conscious about them. Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand) loathed the more "proper" initial look and worked with the (gay) costume designer, William Ware Theiss, to design a different, more daring and cool-looking aesthetic for women of the future that appealed to her personally. That was what resulted in the miniskirt uniform design. No doubt it served the objectifying tastes of various straight men involved, but literally zero of them were responsible for the design of Whitney's and Nichols's uniforms.

Not only did Nichelle Nichols not consider herself suffering from the miniskirt, she admitted later to sometimes deliberately lifting the skirt even higher at Uhura's station to show off more of her legs because she hadn't worked so hard on her body to not show them off. Meanwhile, Jill Ireland, the actress for Leila Kalomi, was nervous that she might have to wear the kinds of revealing costumes so many other TOS actresses did, and Theiss instead designed her the comfortable overalls she wears as Leila in "This Side of Paradise."

The kneejerk backlash against short skirts (in decidedly more reactionary eras of both Star Trek and US culture) led to both the large-scale disappearance of the skirts and the snide commentary on them throughout later iterations of Trek, with zero consideration of the fact that they were designed by a gay man to suit the preferences of the leading actresses at a time when they commonly represented rebellion. The Berman-era Star Trek productions tut-tutting at the old costumes while actually putting actresses in uncomfortable, form-fitting uniforms they disliked is ... uh, something else.

there's having parents who can pay for your application to any college, and then there's having parents who can bribe your way into any college. there's owning your own home, and then there's owning 50 houses and getting rich off hoarding a vital resource. there's not fearing for your life whenever cops are around, and then there's being the cop and being allowed to murder anyone at any time.