#and to a lesser extent whether love is worth her independence which was pretty rare

[the-english-student-studyblr]

So even though I haven't had time to actually do any work on the Book(tm), I have been thinking about it a lot (especially when I watch documentaries about teh norse/iceland which is a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine. Indulge your special interests, people!).

Anyway, I recently saw a writing post (which I now can't find) that basically suggested genderbending your characters to see hwat changes, and that concept fascinates me. I cannot stop thinking about it.

If you change the gender of any of the characters the story is completely different. There is no way around that. Because so much of it is rooted in gender dynamics and stories of female lives in a preconceptually male-dominated society (I say preconceptually because there are a whole load of historical things about women in the norse/viking age including in the sagas that disproves the whole 'only men were important' thing but that's a story for another day, namely the Book(tm). ), you cannot make any of the central cast the opposite gender without telling a completely different story.

We start with two twin girls, Rúna and Ragni. If you flip one of their genders, you lose a lot of the plot surrounding inheritance. There's a male heir so you can't explore the really complicated law surrounding how daughters can act as sons. If you flip both, you suddenly end up with the set up of a really great traditional saga narrative full of revenge and blood feuds, which is great but also has been done to death by now and isn't really the story I want to tell. In Rúna's case specifically, flipping her gender opens up an entirely new exploration of gender dynamics, centred on how magic is viewed with regards to gender. Boys weren't really allowed to do magic, or at least it was frowned upon, so flipping that would set up a great conflict with society. Of course that would come at the expense of any other plot, and the motivations of the story would be so monumentally different I'm not even sure magic would even play into it, so it's really not worth it.

At the end of the day, I have learnt two things from this:

1. it is way to easy to distract me from the work I have to do by waving shiny writing thought exercises in my face along with historical context

2. I like to write about women.

It is also kinda gratifying to know that if you flipped the gender I do have the set up for the traditional norse saga, because that was my starting point (what if we took a saga, made them women, and made the retelling actually accurate and not...hollywood).

So yeah, that's a very rambly update on the state of the Book(tm) that is still sitting at approximately 15k words of snippets.

#writeblr #norse mythology #writing the Book(tm) #i forgot what the tag is #musings #i was talking about this with a friend the other night and god i still can't stop thinking about it #like would Rúna even pursue magic without the motivation of 'i am powerless in a society that's all about power'? #Ragni's internal conflict is all about whether her happiness is worth her family's honour #and to a lesser extent whether love is worth her independence which was pretty rare #and the fact that that independence allows her choices in these things #that struggle would not exist if she were a guy #if you genderbent Ragni the story becomes almost entirely Rúna's just because she's the one facing the more interesting subversive challeng #if you genderbent Rúna the story becomes Ragni's struggle to find a place in a narrative that does not want her there #if you genderbent both it's just a traditional family feud saga over an inheritance which is formally legitimate but also kinda dull and no #i feel like this is only interesting to me #but oh well #you get my rambling anyway