All Eyes on Me

Yesterday I put on the fourth run of my narrative tabletop game, The Bloom of May, for a wonderful group made up of inwaterwrit, john_in_boston, pezzonovante, and phoenix_rinna. It went very well, they were a great player group who represented their characters beautifully and did a great job of carrying the story along. This was also the first time I ever ran with four players; I decided to make Sprig Jameson an NPC, and that actually turned out just fine, though I definitely prefer her as a PC. The game is a bit too GM-intensive to fully embody a major character in addition to running, but it works fine as long as she's present when the other players want to talk to her, and injects her information at the appropriate points of the game. That's how I'll handle it in all future instances of only four players.

It is interesting to note, however, that she's the only PC who must be female. That may surprise you if you know the character, as she is really not a strongly gendered personality in any way, and she was written originally for niobien, who I think would have been equally fine playing a male character. But due to a very small but extremely important technical detail in the plot I can't think of any good way for her to be male. Of the other characters-- Alice the heiress, Lucy the actress, Matthew the carpenter, and John the cop --their flexibility is varied.

Alice and Lucy turned out to be totally flexible, turning into Alexander and Luke, as long as I flipped the genders of some of the other NPCs. The story is intended to be set in the real world with as much historicity as still allows for dramatic action, so if something like homosexuality features it can't be incidental, it would have to be a plot point, and this story isn't really designed to accommodate that. Also I may want to include a storyline involving that in the future, so I don't just want it tossed off.

As for Matthew and John, they've never been played so far as anything but male. John as a police officer might be difficult to gender flip for the 1930s setting, I'm not sure a woman cop would really be possible. But maybe Matthew could be a female carpenter if she was seen as something eccentric. That might be able to work. Especially since, now that I think about it, Matthew's already something of an outsider to the community due to the fact that he's one of the few Jews in Fairfield.

Speaking of gender flipping, the genders of the relevant NPCs not only based on how many are flipped, but in what combination they are flipped. I discovered that if I'm playing with an Alexander and a Lucy, I have to add an extra NPC that I didn't originally plan for. I discovered this when bleemoo played Alexander, and I had to do it on the fly because I hadn't anticipated it before the run. If I have an Alice and a Luke, I have to flip an NPC and add a DIFFERENT extra one. If I have Alexander AND Luke, though, at least all I have to do is flip. That seems strange, but it becomes clear why once you see how the plot of the game works.

What I should probably do from here on out is say that, okay, BOTH the original NPC in this instance as well as the new one I've had to add exist in game, all the time. But, depending on the gender balance, one will perform the function of the original as written, and the other will either perform the half of the function they can't, or else just be a background character if they are not needed. Confusing, I know, but it's the only way to make the game work!

Pondering some things lately that I want to explore here. I've been having thoughts on standards of beauty and dynamics of attraction again, spurred by certain things I've been finding lately in myself.

I want to bring my feminism into my writing. With this residency, as it was in the last, occasionally something comes up in texts that strikes me as unfeminist. In one fellow student's script, the main female character was leered at by literally every male character in the story. I found this to be an unfair portrayal of men and gratuitously sexualizing to the woman. I could say "I think you overdid it with the leering, it feels unrealistic," because that's a critique of the writing. But because we're not here to judge the social responsibility of the script, it would not have been appropriate for me to say, "I think this is an unfeminist portrayal."

Still, I do actually feel that stronger, more fully realized characterization will necessarily be feminist. So I have a responsibility to myself to monitor my writing for it. Now, I would not say that just because a piece is not Specifically Feminist that makes it Unfeminist. Sometimes the story you need to tell is not going to have those markers we are encouraged to look for As Proof of Feminist Sensibility-- an easy example would be passing the Bechdel Test --just as a matter of course. Doesn't mean it takes place in an unegalitarian world, or is evidence of unegalitarian thought. In an ideal world, we'd all be so feminist that you could just choose in a vacuum what to include and it would always come purely from the demands of the story; respect for people of all genders would be taken for granted. But sometimes this comes about because we are conditioned to not think to include those things, so at times we need to make efforts to be mindful.

So I should make efforts. In Just So, for example, the two fussy, pretentious main characters were modeled off Frasier and Niles Crane, so my first instinct was to make them men. But it occurred to me almost immediately that there was literally zero reason why they had to be. And I've resolved to myself to not just go with male characters by default (as many of us are often inclined), so in a case where it mattered so little I decided to take the opportunity to switch. Now I personally think they're much funnier as middle-aged, out-of-touch society woman than they would be as anything else. Now I have an interesting, unusual piece to my credit-- something funny, with women, where the characters' genders mattered so little that, hey, if you wanted to have them played as men, you totally could. Bechdel would be proud. ;-)

As a side note, during the in-class workshop on a whim I chose two male classmates as my readers. They "played" them as women but didn't affect themselves in any way. It pleased me how smoothly it worked. It also struck me that they would probably be hilarious as drag roles. I love the notion that you could play my little show so many different ways-- straight up, as two middle-aged ladies, gendered-swapped as equally stuffy, pretentious middle-aged men, or dragged with two male actors dressed up as women. Maybe I should add an author's note to that effect. :-)

Of course, sometimes I screw up. Fallen, a piece that has a lot of personal significance to me and one I hope I get to work on in my scifi/fantasy independent study this semester, has a pretty blatant example of what some refer to as "manpain," when a female character suffers and the truly important emotional response for the story's trajectory is not from her but from a male character who cares about her. Perhaps what falls under "Women in Refrigerators" Syndrome in it, when a female character undergoes trauma specifically in order to facilitate the emotional journey of the male character.

But being aware of it, I can work to subvert it. I can acknowledge the unfairness of such a situation. Now, Gabriel is my main character, his reaction IS most important to the story I want to tell, but that doesn't mean I should make Rachel into a less complete being by denying her a reaction to her own suffering. I can make her feelings, her journey because of this terrible thing happening TO HER, important as well. It can be about her too, not just what it does and leads to for my male protagonist. In being mindful about what our storytelling choices can mean, we can tell the stories we want to tell in a way that allows feminism to keep our characters fully realized.