Seeing Battlestar Galactica: Razor during my week of Thanksgiving vacation (I've built up so much vacation time that I was literally ordered by my boss to take some before the end of the year, lest I lose it) has made me feel like featuring Washington State Gov. Roslyn Rashomon in one of my stories again, and because a lot of my pieces have been Dream-and-April-centric lately, I was thinking of spotlighting some other supporting female characters, both mine and other posters', in a scene designed to meet all the conditions of the Alison Bechdel test, to wit:



I've already given April a number of scenes without Dream, and with other women, with discussions that involved more than just Dream, but aside from her scenes with Whitney and Griffin, all of Bettie's scenes so far have included either Dream or April, so I'd like to have her, Roslyn and Meg in a scene together (MILFs unite!), but I'd also like to have Sydney St. Sylvain, Kat Allen and Tandi the sexbot there, too.

For those who would know, is Miiri planning on applying for American citizenship? Because I think Bettie might be, as one more way of adjusting to modern times, and if Miiri will be going through a similar arc, I want to acknowledge it. Also, what is Tandi doing for a living right now, and does she have a surname yet? Because given her past line of work, I can think of a few ideas, which involve Meg taking Tandi under her wing.

Hmmmm... Interesting. Now I want to go look at my movie collection and see how many can pass that test.



And will they be fully clothed? Or do I have to wait and see?



It's an interesting question... I never thought about doing anything like that. She might naturally be curious about it if Bettie's going through it, though.

It gives me a much clearer mental image of her.

> Hmmmm... Interesting. Now I want to go look at my movie collection and see how many can pass that test.

Personally, I think all aspiring fiction writers should have it tattooed on their foreheads. Even I wind up breaking The Rule on occasion, and while there have been valid reasons for doing so (tales of male bonding are kind of hard to reconcile with its conditions), there are a number of other instances in which I've simply been guilty of lazy storytelling, much like the writers who don't consciously seek to exclude characters of color from their casts, but never think to include them, either.

> And will they be fully clothed?

Actually, yes, even though I'm currently imagining that the scene involves Sydney trying to talk Bettie into adopting a superheroine identity, complete with costume (I'm not seeing her pleas succeeding at the moment, though).

> It's an interesting question... I never thought about doing anything like that. She might naturally be curious about it if Bettie's going through it, though.

For Bettie, it's about making as much of a clean break from her past as she can, since the England she grew up in is literally less real now than the land of Faerie is to her, and because she can't bear to go back there and try to find some vestiges of the familiar in a place that's changed so much since it was last her home, she's decided to simply make America her new home. Ironically enough, the fact that America is even less recognizable to her than modern-day England makes it easier for her to adjust to, in what I suppose might amount to a geographic equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.

I suppose I know what you mean. Shrike has always been clear about her looking much like Fly from "Babe", but it's not always the image on the front of my brain when thinking about her.



Well, I certainly wouldn't think it need apply to *all* works, but it does show how much of a minority women are in the action/adventure entertainment that I enjoy... Even works like "The Princess Bride" feature one woman and a slew of males. (Okay, Carol Kane was great in that too, though she never came near to conversing with Robin Wright.)

As for your writing, I would expect it's harder to keep such a goal in focus as, quite often, the point of your stories is to discuss the characters within them... most of the dialog is about another person, often your lead. Were your cast more regularly involved in adventures requiring exposition, then they would be more likely to converse with each other about the alien monster (or whatever plot detail existed) as well.



Probably for the best. Costumes require constant laundering, where as everyday clothes allow for laundry day to be once a week or less.



Makes some good sense, I think.

Miiri's viewpoint is likely not particularly focused on nations, I would think. She's declared herself "of Earth", and she knows which Earth (and Lemurian) "houses" she feels connected to... I doubt she particularly cares about any government enough to recognize how we divide up our world. To her it's about as important as declaring yourself a citizen of whichever local county your home resides in... helpful for geography, but not much else.

... Since that's what keeps Batman from looking like Moon Knight.

> Well, I certainly wouldn't think it need apply to *all* works, but it does show how much of a minority women are in the action/adventure entertainment that I enjoy... Even works like "The Princess Bride" feature one woman and a slew of males. (Okay, Carol Kane was great in that too, though she never came near to conversing with Robin Wright.)

Yeah, sometimes, a story really does just need to be "all about the guys," for various valid creative reasons, but again, there are a lot of instances when I think it simply happens because the storytellers see "male" as the default gender setting for most of their characters.

> As for your writing, I would expect it's harder to keep such a goal in focus as, quite often, the point of your stories is to discuss the characters within them... most of the dialog is about another person, often your lead. Were your cast more regularly involved in adventures requiring exposition, then they would be more likely to converse with each other about the alien monster (or whatever plot detail existed) as well.

I'll freely admit that Dream is frequently the subject of those conversations, but what I try to do is have my female characters discuss how the current plots affect more than just him. And since I've been able to expand my own corner of the Parodyverse into its own mini-universe of sorts (I always wanted the city of Seattle, and the state of Washington by extension, to have as much of a sense of being an independent place as Gotham does in the mini-universe of Batman titles), it's usually easier than you'd think to turn any discussion of the plot into a conversation that covers more than just Dream.

> Probably for the best. Costumes require constant laundering, where as everyday clothes allow for laundry day to be once a week or less.

Bettie versus Sydney is an interesting contrast in respective methods of practicing feminism; Sydney feels it's more empowering for women to be able to play superhero right alongside the boys, whereas Bettie feels more empowered by not having to wear anything more elaborate, encumbering or revealing than modern-day casual clothing.

> Miiri's viewpoint is likely not particularly focused on nations, I would think. She's declared herself "of Earth", and she knows which Earth (and Lemurian) "houses" she feels connected to... I doubt she particularly cares about any government enough to recognize how we divide up our world. To her it's about as important as declaring yourself a citizen of whichever local county your home resides in... helpful for geography, but not much else.

I'm thinking of a line in one of shrike's stories, when Epitome told Miiri that her children would succeed because "they're Americans," and she smiled and said, "I suppose they're that, as well." And since another one of the reasons why Bettie would choose to become an American citizen is because her newly adoptive "family" is American, I thought perhaps that this might be a motivating factor for Miiri as well, especially since (as far as I know, unfortunately) there's no method of officially becoming "a citizen of Earth," as opposed to a citizen of one of its countries, even in the Parodyverse.

Certainly. And even when the cast is predominantly women, they often seem to talk about either guys or whichever one of them is sick and dying. Go figure.

Sadly, aside from movies like "Chicago", most of the ones in my collection that have conversations that fit the bill happen because one of the females is still young enough not to be involved in a romantic relationship. After a certain point, movie girls seem to have to grow up and stop adventuring, or start associating with men more exclusively as they do so.



You do manage to discuss the larger social issues quite often in your stories, with some very clever applications to your settings such as the reservation.


Does she see a difference between modern day casual clothing and revealing superhero outfits? I'd think one would be almost as shocking as the other when you're not used to the "norm".



Possibly... I just think that if you're not brought up to consider it important, you wouldn't be overly motivated to declare your allegiance to any government. Much like non-sports people who move to a heavily divided sports community just shake their heads when asked which team do they support.

From what we've seen, Caphans probably puts their emphasis on the House they belong to and then the world as a whole. If your house is famous enough, geographical division likely don't matter at all.

Additionally, many of the important people in Miiri's life don't have American citizenship and seem to do just fine: Hallie, Fleabot, Quoth, the Shoggoth, Ebony, etc. While Magweed has it, I'm not too sure about Griffin... there's no existing evidence that he was born in the US.

Crosswords are for faggots and Europeans anyway. Like the Metric system.

> Sadly, aside from movies like "Chicago", most of the ones in my collection that have conversations that fit the bill happen because one of the females is still young enough not to be involved in a romantic relationship. After a certain point, movie girls seem to have to grow up and stop adventuring, or start associating with men more exclusively as they do so.

In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher suggested that women lose a part of their identities during puberty, and only really regain it after menopause. To illustrate this, she pointed to the fact that most solo female adventurers are either children (Pippi Longstocking, Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time) or "old women" (Mrs. Whatsit, also from A Wrinkle in Time). Interestingly enough, The Sarah Jane Adventures features both, in the form of 50-something Sarah Jane Smith (Bettie's inspiration) and her 14-year-old sidekick, Maria Jackson.

Something I've tried to do with most of my female characters, even if they have love interests, is spin them off into their own "worlds," where each one can be The Best There Is At What They Do in their respective realms. Meg is the porn queen, Sydney is the fashion queen, Bettie is the one who knows how to reach the hard-knock life kids, Wendy is the voice of the hard-knock life kids, Bernice is the voice of political dissent, Roslyn is the diplomatic politician, Anna is the engineering genius, and April ... well, she's a bit more of a mixed bag, but then again, that's kind of what makes her similar to Dream, before he evolved into the Agent of Chaos.

What also helps is that I can't bear to rule out options, so most of the romances these characters have remain rather fluid. As much as I hate "love triangles" as they're usually portrayed in superhero relationships, what I really hate is how they freeze relationships in a perpetual state of anticipation without payoff, so I simply did an end-run around that part, and set up "love triangles" with consummation, as with Dream, April and Bettie, or Meg, Louis and Isis (Louis' rarely seen girlfriend, yet another character I need to try and show more often, especially since Dream can't stand her).

> You do manage to discuss the larger social issues quite often in your stories, with some very clever applications to your settings such as the reservation.

When me and my friends used to watch Scooby Doo as little kids, I was the one who was asking, "But ... where do they live, when they're not driving around in that van?" I don't think every use of super-powers should be accompanied with an '80s-era Alan Moore-style OMG THESE SUPER-POWERS WOULD CHANGE EVERYTHING ABOUT OUR WORLD IF THEY WERE REAL type of exploration, but I do think certain implications should at least be addressed. As much as I disliked a lot of Grant Morrison's tenure on the X-Men titles, I loved the fact that he updated the civil rights metaphor of mutants by showing that, if mutants existed in the real world, then suburban white kids would start appropriating mutant culture the same way they've done with black culture. That being said, once you introduce an element of "realism" into your stories, you have to play by the rules you've now established for yourself, or else you'll wind up producing A Pile Of Fail on the scale of Marvel's Civil War. Which, if you've noticed, is why I tend more toward self-contained instances of how superheroes would influence reality, rather than trying (and failing) to produce the next Watchmen.

> Does she see a difference between modern day casual clothing and revealing superhero outfits? I'd think one would be almost as shocking as the other when you're not used to the "norm".

In spite of her origins, she's not quite the Victorian/Edwardian era equivalent of Captain America's "man out of time" deal, simply because, instead of being trapped in an iceberg between then and now, she's grown old and lived in Faerie, where she's gradually gotten used to being able to shed a lot of the bullshit societal baggage that her upbringing saddled her with. In keeping with Wendy Darling, the other character who inspired her, Bettie never harbored any great love of the layers of clothing that she was required to wear, as a "proper" young lady, if only because it's damned difficult to climb trees and fight pirates wearing such billowy dresses. Even when she dresses formally, I'd imagine that she sports young Katherine Hepburn-style pantsuits. That being said, she's not going to go for an outfit that exposes any significant amount of skin, either, and the fact that so many women do so now is probably one of her many sources of culture-shock. In that sense, Bettie is even more "out of time" than Captain America, because she was too forward-thinking for the era she grew up in, but she's a bit too "traditional" by modern standards to qualify as "trendy."

> From what we've seen, Caphans probably puts their emphasis on the House they belong to and then the world as a whole. If your house is famous enough, geographical division likely don't matter at all.

And here we come to another distinction, because while Bettie has allowed Dream's family to "adopt" her, it's also important to her to be her own woman (she's already been left behind by one man she loved, and that burned her too much for her ever to let herself be that dependent again). Having a job and a home of her own, that lie at least slightly outside of Dream's social circles, matter to her.

> Additionally, many of the important people in Miiri's life don't have American citizenship and seem to do just fine: Hallie, Fleabot, Quoth, the Shoggoth, Ebony, etc. While Magweed has it, I'm not too sure about Griffin... there's no existing evidence that he was born in the US.

For someone who's rejected the rules of her proper British upbringing so much, Bettie can't help but still feel the need for some semblance of ritual and ceremony to signify the turning points in her life, which is probably another reason why the process of applying for citizenship would feel so necessary for her. She would want it to be clearly delineated, and to be her choice, so that there would be no mistake that she was taking charge of that part of her life.

> Seeing Battlestar Galactica: Razor during my week of Thanksgiving vacation (I've built up so much vacation time that I was literally ordered by my boss to take some before the end of the year, lest I lose it) has made me feel like featuring Washington State Gov. Roslyn Rashomon in one of my stories again, and because a lot of my pieces have been Dream-and-April-centric lately, I was thinking of spotlighting some other supporting female characters, both mine and other posters', in a scene designed to meet all the conditions of the Alison Bechdel test, to wit: > > > > I've already given April a number of scenes without Dream, and with other women, with discussions that involved more than just Dream, but aside from her scenes with Whitney and Griffin, all of Bettie's scenes so far have included either Dream or April, so I'd like to have her, Roslyn and Meg in a scene together (MILFs unite!), but I'd also like to have Sydney St. Sylvain, Kat Allen and Tandi the sexbot there, too. > > For those who would know, is Miiri planning on applying for American citizenship? Because I think Bettie might be, as one more way of adjusting to modern times, and if Miiri will be going through a similar arc, I want to acknowledge it. Also, what is Tandi doing for a living right now, and does she have a surname yet? Because given her past line of work, I can think of a few ideas, which involve Meg taking Tandi under her wing.