Random Thursday: 3 Simple Steps to Creating Non-Tragic Queer Characters

[hrj]

So I was listening to the excellent recent podcast by Fangirl Happy Hour where Ana and Renay discuss the usefulness--nay, the essential importance--of the personal-response angle in book reviews to let potential readers know about problematic aspects of an otherwise excellent story that may be overlooked by most reviewers. In short, how important it is that there be at least a few reviews that note, "In this book that everyone is raving about, here is This Thing that bothered me personally and that may bother other readers sufficiently that they might want to pass on it." The nuanced version of trigger warnings, as it were. The specific work they discussed was Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant as reviewed by Liz Bourke and Foz Meadows, both of whom found their enjoyment of the work badly damaged by the presence of Tragic Queerness. (That is, characters who are singled out to have bad things happen to them specifically because of their queerness.) Similarly relevant is Meadows' review of the evidently otherwise excellent The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. (Perhaps needless to say, spoilers abound in these reviews. That's kind of the point.)

One might expand the topic of this consideration to the positive side: the need to rely on reviews to identify books with positive (or even simply neutral-but-present) queer characters. I think I've mentioned earlier that when I was looking at the long list for the Lambda Literary Awards SFF/Horror category this year, I found that the publishers' publicity materials for the "big press" books on the list often gave no clue that the books had any queer content at all, much less sufficient content to make them appropriate for a Lammy. Similarly, if it hadn't been for reviews specifically highlighting the lesbian content in Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory I would never have known that I might be interested in reading the book for that reason.

This gets back to part of last week's Random Thursday Blog: entirely too many readers (and not just queer readers) are not allowed to have the experience of picking up a random book that the rest of the world is squeeing about and being able to assume that any (much less more than one) of their intersectional identities will be represented casually and neutrally within the story. But rather than reiterating my rant on that topic, I thought I might offer Three Simple Steps for creating non-tragic queer characters in fantasy fiction. These steps also apply, with appropriate adjustment, for creating female characters, non-white characters, non-Euro/American characters (or Euro/American analog characters), and so forth. These rules rest, in large part, on respecting and highlighting the primacy of the author as creator. These steps work equally well when working in fantasy settings inspired by "real history", so let's lock down that escape hatch right from the start.

Step #1

Within your fantasy world, identify the set of all queer individuals. I'm not talking about "within the set of people you've already chosen as named characters for your story", I'm talking about your world as an immense complex whole. (It is an immense complex whole, isn't it?)

Step #1a - If this set is empty WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR WORLD?????

If your world literally contains no individuals fitting the concept of queerness, that is an immensely relevant fact and must certainly underpin and overlay everything else happening in this world. I therefore would expect this fact to be a prominent aspect of the plot and to be immediately evident in any description or summary of the story.

*ahem* Continuing on.

Step #2

Within the set of all queer individuals existing in your fantasy world, identify the set who do not experience tragedy due to their queerness. I'm not talking about anything falling short of "all characters experience the world the same, queer or straight", I'm talking about characters being the subject of violence, horror, persecution, or loss that is tied to their queerness, either due to direct causation or by clear symbolism. "Clear symbolism" includes markedly unique experience: if ten romantic couples enter a haunted house and the only person who dies is one member of the one queer couple, that's a markedly unique experience.

Step #2a - If this set is empty WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR WORLD?????

Come on now, you're the author. You have created this world, chosen how it works, and designed the dynamics. You may have done it unconsciously without specific intent, but that's part of exactly what we're talking about here. If your world literally has no non-tragic queer characters in it, that is an immensely relevant fact and must certainly underpin and overlay everything else happening in this world. I therefore would expect this fact to be a prominent aspect of the plot and to be immediately evident in any description or summary of the story.

*ahem* Continuing on.

Step #3

Within the set of all non-tragic queer individuals existing in your fantasy world, identify the set of those who have interesting things happen to them or who are part of important events. There are eight million stories in the naked fantasy world, surely at least one of them involves non-tragic queer people. And surely at least one of those stories involving non-tragic queer people centers around something other than their queerness.

Step #3a - If this set is empty WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR WORLD?????

If nothing of any possible interest or importance ever happens to non-tragic queer characters in your world, that is an immensely relevant fact and must certainly underpin and overlay everything else happening in this world. I therefore would expect this fact to be a prominent aspect of the plot and to be immediately evident in any description or summary of the story.

Now, you don't have to go quite as far as I did in the Alpennia series, but that series does point out just how easy the process is. All I had to do was think about the set of all non-tragic queer women living in early 19th century Alpennia and then contemplate what sorts of adventures they might get into. I came up with eight or nine books worth. Surely every author could come up with at least one character's worth.

Comments

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I like your steps. Very much. I don't do much writing any more (and virtually all of it for purely selfish purposes, i.e., I write for me and me alone), but that doesn't mean that these aren't considerations that I should be bearing in mind.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

And they apply to so many personal characteristics, but I figured I'd leave that as an exercise for the reader.

[skelody.livejournal.com]

I think "all characters experience the world the same, queer or straight" is something that people can get argumenty about. For instance, Meadows' review of Fifth Season points at [gay man], [bi man], and [trans woman] as being tragic, but
> the coercion experienced by [gay man] is also experienced by every other person with his skillset, and it's hinted that his situation at the end of the book is also a fate that will eventually visit every other person with his skillset
> the fate of [bi man] was shared by almost everybody in his community
> [trans woman]'s disinheritance was due to her nonconformity to her hereditary caste

yet does that make them any less tragic? For Meadows, clearly not.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

This sounds an awful lot like the argument that both the rich man and poor man are prohibited from sleeping under bridges.

[skelody.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I wasn't able to understand your comment in relation to mine. Could you elaborate on that?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

As I understood Foz's point, it was that while a coerced breeding program is awful for anyone it's imposed on, there is an extra awfulness for any victims for whom it also runs counter to their orientation. My analogy was that even though an objective burden may apply to all people equally, it doesn't necessarily *affect* all people equally.

[rosefox]

I think "all characters experience the world the same, queer or straight" is something that people can get argumenty about.

The problem with this is that SF/F started out as books where queer people don't exist or have shitty things happen to them, and SF/F is still books where queer people don't exist or have shitty things happen to them, except that the latter is now seen as excusable because in a subset of the books where shitty things happen to queer people, shitty things happen to everyone.

But we still lack a significant subset of SF/F where queer people don't have shitty things happen to them. And that lack, that genre context, influences how people read SF/F where queer characters have shitty things happen to them. You can't just take each book on its own and pretend there's no history of erasure and tragic stories, any more than you can pretend these Rocks Fall Everyone Dies So It's Not Unfair to Queers stories are being written and read by people living in an egalitarian world.

Unlike many people, I don't regard queer tragedy as an automatic fail; I think we do need tragic stories because they reflect our tragic histories and personal experiences, and sometimes we need to see ourselves in fiction as we are or have been, not just as we would like to be. But if that's the only kind of story you get, then that's a real problem.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much this -- it's why the "everyone is forbidden from sleeping under bridges" just galls that much more.

[rosefox]

"All characters experience my bigoted queerphobic transphobic world the same way! I made it like that because realism." Feh.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

(here via rosefox). Thank you for this.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Thank you for dropping by! I do hope I get to meet you in person sometime next week at Sasquan.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Definitely hope so!

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I think Foz and I are in a strikingly similar position where it comes to being raw about queer tragedy - Foz says in the Fifth Season post that

It’s disorienting to suddenly look back over nearly three decades of your life and realise, with a sort of belated weariness, how hella fucking repressed you’ve always been – how repressed you still are, in fact, because identifying your own reactions doesn’t magically change them

and I've come to a similar epiphany about my own identity (-ies?) in the last year.

Anyway, the point of this fairly pointless comment: really like happy endings to be normal, or at least unremarkable, when it comes to queer stuff in fiction already.

[fighter-chick.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. Am now applying it to my nascent urban fantasy world.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Always happy to help!

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

David of Doncaster has told me he's gay. He's also told me he's Jewish. He and Friar Tuck want to have theological arguments.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

That will be fascinating.

[kiya]

So lately I've been working my way through the television show Leverage. And there was this moment:

Two main characters (one male, one female) are attempting to convince a police officer (female) to assist them with something; she is sympathetic, but what they're asking for is counter to policy.

The male character, portrayed as a ladies' man, cranks up the flirt, suggests that perhaps they could get a coffee, talk things over, unofficially like. The cop considers this at some length, and then writes a number on a card, and pushes it across the table, and then says something to the effect of, "To anyone who knows me, it'll be much more believable if she makes the call."

Male character looks thrown for a loop; female character says, "Oh. Oh!" and lights up.

It's just that bloody easy.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yes, it really is that easy. And, of course, the specific representation will be different in different settings. But it's always easier when you first ask, "where are the queer people in this world and how would they interact with my story?"