flemmings | (no subject)

You have to write to be able to write. But. But. What if everything you write is the wrong thing? I mean the wrong voice and the wrong details and all that?

I find this with the dragon stuff a lot. None of it is instinctive (except for those blessed stories when it is.) Everything has to be considered and accepted or rejected. I have never been a dragon or a king, which isn't a problem. But I've never spent any time considering what the world looks like to a dragon or a king- or, in this case, a king's cousin. The automatic western assumptions don't work, which is a problem when I'm trying to show intimacy of feeling between people who speak with a superficial formality of language. Servants I can do, because I know how servants used to speak in the west. Kin of differing rank I can't do, because really the only models I have are Shakespeare's history plays and a handful of better historical novels. And the trouble with those is that even there nobody is speaking the English version of keigo except in the public scenes. Intimate English for intimate moments is our default. It's not the Japanese one, where well-bred wives can have husbands who ossharu when they say things. (Of course there's the paradigm where the politer a wife becomes about her husband the angrier she is at him, but that's a different situation.)

This kind of segues into something I was thinking about N's novel that happens in A/U ancient Egypt with a different set of cultural assumptions. Her character doesn't express outward defiance of the social order and thus may come off as wimpy.

But the assumption we have is that when we feel an emotion we must express it or suffer from repression (ahh the monsters freud created.) So if a character opposes some aspect of authority she states her opposition in words- defiance- or states it to herself- burning determination to do what she wants- etc etc. But consider a society like Japan where /expressing/ emotions or defiance makes you hideously uncomfortable: like giving details of your evacuations to your boss. "So how was the BM this morning, Ms. Johnson?" Equally a society that isn't as adversarial as ours. 'This is wrong thus they are wrong thus I will show them how wrong they are.' Or as individualistic-- thhere being separate from the group or different from the group is like having a physical handicap: you aren't entirely whole. In Japan you aren't entirely yourself when separate from people. It's not that your marvellous individualism is constantly subordinated to and constrained by the group, as here. It's that you operate best and most happily as an individual when part of a group. I'd say 'like family, and think how awful to be totally without family' except that here being without family doesn't phase a lot of people at all.

So one could have a character who dislikes certain aspects of the society she finds herself in but who deals with that without opposing those aspects. Agrees quite happily with what is said (as do we all in Japan because after all, what do mere words matter?) and goes ahead doing whatever she wants to do and /doesn't see that as a contradiction./ The Japanese never tell you why they do things. They don't have whys. They don't think it necessary to justify what they do in terms of motivation or circumstances or whatever. They just do it. Ask them why they did and they apologize- assuming Why did you do that? means I am angry! and not Why did you do that? becausew hwy would anyone ask why. Drives gaijin batty. Try reasoning with a Japanese student and you come up against the blank wall of a smile and an apology and a continuation of the nuts-driving behaviour because you haven't addressed the situation in terms that make sense to her. Which seemingly are any terms but the ones we think important.

agh work must run

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You're caught in a bind here, as you've said yourself, of (presumably) having to appeal to that white western female middle-class audience to sell your work, while what you really want to do (and what this white western female middle-class person wishes you'd do as well) is present something different. The different thing that we haven't even considered over here because we've never seen it. If you could do that and do it big-- ahh, think what worlds might open up. Because no-one believes a thing can be done until they see it being done and then they say Of course. Which is annoying.

(I'm glad the dragons come across as inhuman to somebody, because I find them distressingly cozy and domestic and wonder where the strangeness might lie and how to express it.)

I'm not sure feminism = Westernism is a valid assumption about the readers. It's probably a valid assumption about the editors, since they are all coastal urban residents, probably mostly liberal, and have to be pretty aggressive to get to their positions of power.

There are a lot of women out there who do not identify with feminism exactly because it's so 'in your face' aggressive. They would much rather work within the system than oppose the system. I think there's enough 'wry manipulators of the system' in fiction to show that in-system characters can work. The problem is that your character doesn't have that cliched wry/sarcastic head narrative going on to counterbalance the outward passiveness.

Even if one doesn't identify as feminist, I think N's right in that most people reading about a protagonist expect what I call a feminist response but most people would call a pro-active one. They expect her to *express* her defiance and individual disapproval of the system, in what she says and does and thinks. But what if it's a society where expression isn't considered as highly as here- is in fact frowned on? If your character indeed opposes the order and acts against it but never states her opposition in words? How much showing not telling will the western reader stand for?

I find that one can do more with male characters who act like this and work- silently- from within the system because paasivity isn't the male default, and there's a certain transgression in having a passive-appearing hero. The female hero is caught between two stereotypes- wimpy passive traditional and spunky acts-like-a-man nouveau. There's a further problem if the society she's in approves of traditional passive behaviour and itself changes slowly. (Japan, yes.) How do you show that she's just as active as anyone else, she just doesn't *talk* about it?

I see what you're saying. Not everyone is a "group" person though, even in Japan where the sake of the group is lauded more than the individual a lot. Still, even in that "groupism" society, you still have people who create things on their own, like the guy who made the playstation and who couldn't sell it at first. He hopped from couch to couch for several years before he got picked up by Sony. And then you have people who reject the groupism/society and stay at home. They're considered weird, but they're very there.

The west is very us vs. them too. It's easier to break out of the mold here, I think, but there very much is a mold, and if you don't follow it in certain areas, it can be dangerous.

So one could have a character who dislikes certain aspects of the society she finds herself in but who deals with that without opposing those aspects. Agrees quite happily with what is said (as do we all in Japan because after all, what do mere words matter?) and goes ahead doing whatever she wants to do and /doesn't see that as a contradiction./

I think a lot of people live their lives like that though- not actively fighting the system, but figuring out their own personal short cuts to live in a system that doesn't fit them as well as it might fit others. If you're a person with a disability, you're always adapting and adopting methods in order to get by in a society not made for you (nor will it really try to change itself for you.) Some people go above and beyond to advocate for change, but it never really levels the field. For those people, handicapped or not, who face walls and obstacles, they figure a way around it, over it, or just live with it rather than try to eliminate it.

Even in Japan, like this one man I met, who put all his energy into his flower garden. A growing, blossoming maze of flowers and plants. (He loved Martha Stewart too.) He was very much his own "group".

That was a lot of random talk. Gomen. m(_ _)m

See, I think half the problem of genre fic (and maybe mainstream fic as well) is that it isn't allowed to be like real life. In RL there are people who do indeed find ways over and around the obstacles or annoyances in their lives without overtly bucking the system. But the default for fiction is the hero (or maybe that should be Hero) who opposes and overcomes and must be seen opposing and overcoming to feel right. What N wants is an unspunky heroine who still feels like a heroine, but the defaults are set against her.

I'm reminded of the Japanese fairytales I was looking at while trying to find Gaiman's spurious Emperor of All Night's Dreaming. They don't read like ours at all. The Luck of the Sea and the Luck of the Mountain (http://www.washburn.edu/reference/bridge24/Kojiki.html) has an older brother who abuses his privileges and his younger brother. What struck me was that the younger brother remains deferential throughout the story in the face of his brother's unreasonableness. This seemed quite rational to the fairytale redactor and the point to be pushed (though in the Kojiki original I see that the younger brother is finally revenged on the older) but it's totally against our sense of what's right, which was why I liked it.

(I see a student (http://www.genji54.com/cpoetry/lori.htm) of my former professor thinks differently. Culture-bound twit. But yes, one is going to be read by many culture-bound twits, alas. I still don't think that's a reason to cater to them and- to change the metaphor a bit- to produce an endless stream of Hollywood movies in the belief that white America wants only to see films about a fantasy white America.)

But the default for fiction is the hero (or maybe that should be Hero) who opposes and overcomes and must be seen opposing and overcoming to feel right. What N wants is an unspunky heroine who still feels like a heroine, but the defaults are set against her.

I agree. In a regular story, there needs to be some kind of conflict, and also change. If someone stays the same (just short-cutting around the system), it's not interesting. Normally someone would have to happen that would shake the character out of their somewhat comfortable stasis of "the world's not right, but I figured out my way in it." Two opitons would be to completely take away what that character had (but that doesn't work as well since that character could just work their way back to stasis level) or, a more stronger impetus, something happens to someone else the main character cares about. Often people work harder for someone else than for themselves. (Thus equaling "hero"-status. A lot of advocates are parents; they're fighting for their kids. If they weren't "given" the opportunity to see how the wrong affects people they care about, they probably would not have ever considered fighting it. For a story, there should be some sort of conflict or risk to make it interesting, and also to help identify the audience with the character.