#Guys I love teeing up and then subverting tropes and expectations

[erisenyo]

Questions for fic writers 1, 3, 5

Anon thank you so much for indicating the ask game, I did not realize I reblogged them both so close together lol

What inspired you to start writing fanfiction?

Epistles by Lady_of_the_Flowers lol. It is an absolutely stellar fic and I couldn't get it out of my head when I finished it. I kept imagining how the story might have gone on, what their BSS reunion could have looked like, how they might have found their happy ending...

And eventually I couldn't get it out of my head to the point that I wrote the BSS reunion (the teashop alley scene for any Burning Bright readers). And then I went hm, this could be better with a bit of context... (880K words later.)

3. Are there any specific themes you enjoy exploring in your fics?

I LOVE playing around with perception! How can two people experience the same event but interpret it differently because of their different frames of references. How can a character's behavior suddenly be recast in an entirely different light because of revelations about their background. How does an external POV contextualize or challenge or reframe an event. How does the reader's own perception come into play, whether through canon events or tropes or genre conventions, where expectation builds perception which then is challenged and recast by the unfolding events, not just within the text but within the reader as well.

5. What techniques do you use to create believable dialogue?

I really like writing dialogue, and I tend to think of building up an exchange in a few layers:

Verbal Habits: is your character a rambler (Sokka)? Blunt and terse (Zuko)? Always trying to poke fun (Toph)? Those verbal habits help build out the conversational voice of each character, and are often rooted in their characterization

Recognize Rhythm: Actual conversations tend to be a mixture of long and short sentences, exchanging listening and speaking, nonverbal as well as verbal cues. A hear-to-heart will have a different flow to it than shooting the shit after work.

Dialogue Isn't Perfect: People stutter and stumble, thoughts start and stop, there's cross-talk and interruptions, spoken word tends to be less formal than written word--building in those pauses and half-thoughts can help it feel more natural, and also show where a character is stumbling or struggling with a thought

Build Around the Words: layering in even simple action is a great way to make a piece of dialogue more engaging while also accomplishing some needed point A-to-point B or worldbuilding or exposition. Characters are also reacting to and thinking about what they're hearing, what they might say next, how it makes them feel.

Don't Forget Nonverbal Cues: Someone saying something with averted eyes and fidgeting hands suggests something very different than the exact same thing said with a direct gaze and squared shoulders. Body language makes the dialogue more rich.

Mix Up Your Sentence Structure: This is related to rhythm, but switch between using dialogue tags or not, put your internal aside at the front of a line of dialogue or the middle or the end, switch between long and short sentences. And do it all with a purpose--fewer dialogue tags and shorter lines of dialogue generally feel like a faster conversation, dialogue breaking in the middle tends to shift the emphasis of the sentence. Get a feel for the ways you can leverage your sentence structure itself to signal tone or pace or pauses!

For this Questions for Fic Writers asks game!

#Guys I love teeing up and then subverting tropes and expectations #I love directly engaging with the reader's expectations and assumptions #Makes it a little conversation we're having together and a little fic experience created in tandem #Also I love dialogue lol

[ronbegleyformayor]

So this is going to be a long post—your question gets to the larger topic that is episode 100. Also to anyone reading this I would appreciate if you took a minute or two to read the whole thing—I purposefully waited a while to respond to this so my response would come across as measured as possible.

So anyone plugged into queer theory and media has probably heard of the term “bury your gays”. It’s a trope that goes at least as far back as lesbian pulp fiction novels from the early 20th century, and for a number of reasons that I’m not remotely qualified to comment on the trope has persisted into modern media. As the name implies, bury your gays is the implicit belief that for a story about gay people to end correctly, usually one or both members of a gay couple are killed before the it ends. Whether intentional or not, the trope is rooted in the idea that gay couples are not supposed to be together, that queer love is a temporary fantasy that must be righted by the end of the story. A weird kind of offshoot of this is the causing of gay characters to suffer through loneliness or separation from a partner, and it comes from the underlying idea that gay=alone. Frequently this manifests in queer characters feeling that they have to choose between family and friends and the “"gay lifestyle”“ when in reality those two things frequently are not mutually exclusive. A subset of this trope is featuring a gay character (or frequently the partner of a more-established gay character) as possessed by some form of “evil” to emphasize which side of the temptation is “correct” and which isn’t.

I’m guessing you can see what I’m teeing up here, so I’ll just add as a caveat that most writers (especially straight writers) do not necessarily agree with the homophobia behind these tropes, nor is it (usually) their intent to perpetuate negative stereotypes about gay people. That being said the legacy of this trope is alive in a lot of media, and intentional or not: gay people suffering is entrenched in how we think about writing them.

Now to be extra clear, I’m not (necessarily) saying this is what King Falls is doing. So far the writing of queer themes and homophobia has been nuanced and has avoided a lot of the pitfalls that have come to be expected, but I would also be lying if I didn’t say episode 100 didn’t rub me the wrong way, and for a couple of specific reasons, too.

For me what that boils down to is characterization and timing.

Let’s talk about characterization first.

Just think about this for a second: what do you know about Jack Wright? No really, can you name anything beyond the bare minimum of characteristics? He’s a journalist and radio host, has a belief in the paranormal, and loves Sammy. He has a sister and a fiancé, has black hair and brown eyes, and plays rugby. I can’t think of a single other concrete fact we’ve learned about him specifically, and being generous like less than half of the things on that list don’t directly have to do with Sammy. Now we could extrapolate bits of his personality based on the two very short clips we’ve ever heard of him and from what’s implied by Sammy and Lily, but that’s also kind of the point: everything we know about Jack Wright is almost exclusively based off his sister and his fiancé, both of whom are anything but unbiased. Did you notice how Lily trashed Sammy and Jack’s radio show in the first King Falls Chronicles but then went on to call Jack smart and prolific in his field like five minutes later? It’s a(n understandable) level of cognitive dissonance for someone who was going through the difficult process of grieving. Both Sammy and Lily are biased sources of information because both care very deeply for Jack. On it’s own that really isn’t a problem—in fact I would say it’s an opportunity for an interesting bit of narrative contrast between the perception of Jack and the reality of when we actually get to meet him.

That at least was my opinion.

Instead we have this ”“dark”“ version of Jack, a lover just out of reach who’s trying to tempt Sammy into leaving his family and friends for the “freedom” of the void. This is a situation that, if I’m being honest, has some homophobic tinges, and hearing the dialogue played out the way it was kind of made my stomach turn (and not in the fun, scared-to-death at 3AM way I’m used to).

Now please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think this is what the writers were intending, nor do I think that there is anything necessarily wrong with having a normally good character occupy a “bad guy” role. When done correctly it can be interesting and compelling, and help tease out different aspects of a character or relationship dynamic. The issue isn’t that we’re seeing a “bad” version of Jack, the issue is that a. the specific wording of his interaction made my homophobia alarm bells go off, and more critically b. this “bad” version of of Jack is the only true version of him we know. Having him in a “bad” role outside his norm would be interesting if we actually had a real-time, in-person Jack with which to compare him. We might have a constructed idea of who he is from descriptions of biased sources close to him or tapes that are probably a decade old, but we only need to hear from this ”“shadow”“ Jack two more times and it’ll be more times than we’ve heard even recordings of the real Jack.

Emily, for example, had a baseline character established before her abduction. We got to know her as a character before she went missing, so when we eventually saw her as a different version of herself, we had a baseline understanding of how she typically acts in a situation, which is something we just don’t have with Jack.

Also, do you notice how Jack never directly spoke to Lily? He talked about her, but never to her, and can we take a moment to appreciate the gravity of that moment? Jack (or whatever was controlling him) had the opportunity to lure one of the four members of the "named” in the prophecy in the book, and instead of choosing his sister, the person he has known for his entire life and the only flesh and blood family with whom he’s in contact, and he chose to lure Sammy instead, to make Sammy choose between a gay relationship and the support system he’s built up.

Can you understand why this kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth? It feels a little like the “love the sinner” (Jack), hate the sin (being “bad”, trying to make Sammy have to decide between romance and a family), and that’s an adage that queer people tend to get tired of really quickly.

Again, because I really don’t want to be misunderstood, I don’t think this is what the writers intended; in fact I’m guessing the thought probably never even crossed their minds. But at the end of the day that’s kind of the point: if you’re going to make a show that subverts homophobic tropes (which I will readily say that they have done up until this point), you have to make sure not to accidentally fall into any of them yourself.

This leads me into my other issue with the episode: the timing.

My opinion toward the show right now would be considerably less harsh if this was not the last episode before a hiatus. I’m not saying the show can’t take breaks, but ending after this episode specifically? We are left with a very specific image of who Jack is, and exactly what kind of influence he has on Sammy. We’re left with the impression that Sammy has to choose between his found family and a gay relationship, and just to put icing on the cake we’re being told there is going to be another hiatus, prolonging the suffering of a character who has been through quite a lot already.

If this wasn’t the episode before a hiatus, I wouldn’t be as unhappy because we would have more immediate reactions to what had happened. We would have the four of them discussing it in detail. Maybe we even would have gotten a chance to hear Sammy himself say that this wasn’t Jack, and even get to hear more detail from him about who Jack is, if not what we heard. Maybe we would have actually gotten to see them get a step closer to getting Jack back instead of now knowing that the void has been opened, and we have to wait for another few months to see if the gay characters will ever get something even resembling a happy ending.

But we didn’t get any of that. Instead we got a cold, empty laugh that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since.

This isn’t to say that the show is headed in a bad direction. I think because this was not the intent that there is still plenty potential for things to stay on the rails. But what it looks like from here is that we are just continuing to prolong the suffering of the gay couple that sits at the emotional heart of the show’s main plotline. I’m just getting to a point where I’m starting to lose faith that we will see anything but it.

also huge thanks to @calebmichaels and @deputytroy. a lot of these points were the distillation of conversations between us, and if you think that I made a particularly interesting point at all in this post, it was probably their idea, not mine.

#kfam #king falls am #mine #wow that was a lot #also none of this is specifically directed at the person that sent me the anon #I just used your ask as a jumping-off point