_minis

[wisdomeagle]

I'm running the current round of femslash_minis. The poll is open here. After I posted the poll, WITHIN MINUTES four people had voted that they would definitely participate (it's an addiction). No one's voted that way since.

My feeling is that we spend most of our our time anxiously refreshing our flists to see if there will be _minis this week. I know I do!

Shockingly, it looks like this will be the Faith round.

Girl and I were talking last night (well, I was talking, girl was mocking me listening). There's femslash_minis and maleslashminis, and the theorized but non-existent het_minis. Which unfortunately rules out Illyria, mostly. Hence, there should be an ungendered_characters_minis. We could write about:
+Illyria
+The First
+The Senior Partners
+TPTB
+Wesley's bleached blond(e)

Ways I am spending my Saturday:
+Cleaning the living room
+Doing laundry
+Going through huge piles of crap.

Ways I am not spending my Saturday:
+Mainlining BSG
+Writing "Pinpricks"

Comments

[that_mireille]

There could be an everybody_gets_some_minis. (Which is too long for an LJ name, but still.)

[marenfic.livejournal.com]

I would love a het_minis. Who is theorizing about it, and why doesn't it exist? :)

[wisdomeagle]

Well, Mir mentioned that if someone were to create it and pimp it in maleslash_minis, that would be pretty okay. ::g::

(I was thinking about why it doesn't exist and whether I should or could create it, but I feel that right now, it's most important to me that we [and by we I mean the nebulous minis fen?] keep femslash_minis running.)

But if the minis_admin had time? I would so do almost every round of het_minis.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, not everyone treats Illyria as ungendered, though. Definitely in the early rounds of femslash_minis we were treating her as elligible; then we just sort of stopped (I do sort of blame you). [It's strange how right after the series ended, I wrote Illyria a lot, but now I haven't written her in years.)

Does the member of the Ra-Tet in my icon count as gendered?

[wisdomeagle]

Yes, but they're wrong.

"Amoral Boundaries" was written as backup for a/the Jossverse femslash ficathon circa March of '05, and that's my own personal Illyria canon right there. Yes, most of the other characters see It as female, yes, its current body is female, but It doesn't think of Itself as female in any way that's meaningful in our gendered discourse.

I'm not sure how I would answer your question personally. (In the also only theorized and it will probably never happen genderless_minis, I would say if you can make an interesting argument that your character has no gender or doesn't fit into our male/female gender system, then ze'll be included in the poll.) It's probably been too long since I've seen any of Angel.

I think Glory/Glorificus and Jasmine/unpronounceably fatal name and Dawn/the Key don't qualify for genderless_minis because, although the bodies they inhabit are "only" incarnations, they all identify quite strongly as female and inhabit without question social positions that align with their created bodies. Illyria really doesn't, certainly not unproblematically. (Then, my Illyria is a lot more... alien than most people read It, I think. Which is why most people can read It as a "her" and I really, really can't.)

(I do sort of blame you).

I'm evilly glad about this.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Then, my Illyria is a lot more... alien than most people read It, I think. Which is why most people can read It as a "her" and I really, really can't.

Yes, I think there's definitely plenty of room for interpretation in canon--I like your reading particularly because I see it as contrarian--although of course I think most fic exchanges need to be flexible enough to be able to accomodate the spectrum of interpretations.

I think Glory/Glorificus and Jasmine/unpronounceably fatal name and Dawn/the Key don't qualify for genderless_minis because, although the bodies they inhabit are "only" incarnations, they all identify quite strongly as female and inhabit without question social positions that align with their created bodies. Illyria really doesn't, certainly not unproblematically.

There's something about this logic that I find disturbing, although I can't quite articulate it at the moment.

[wisdomeagle]

I like your reading particularly because I see it as contrarian

Well, yes, a bit, but it's also one of those things (like a HP example that would probably be meaningless to you) where it's just my initial, unquestioned reading of canon, and it truly does puzzle me that the world reads it differently.

There's something about this logic that I find disturbing, although I can't quite articulate it at the moment.

Well, I think there's something problematic in my reasoning in that Glory especially is a stereotype of femininity, while Illyria is.. not. And for the record, I don't see Illyria as male or masculine at all. I think It sees the entire multiverse in categories of power and that the gender binary is irrelevant and mildly perplexing, and that some of the ways It views power might map to the ways our culture views gender, but in such a mapping Illyria would certainly not view Itself as female.

So I think what's troubling about my reading is that the existence of strong, powerful, warriorlike female characters is a good thing, and it seems like I'm disallowing Illyria from the category of female because It's strong, powerful, warriorlike, while Glory can be female because she enjoys bubble baths and manicures. Both enjoy having minions, both enjoy having power, and both are really ancient beings who weren't born into our cultural baggage.

And I can't really argue that that reads quite disturbingly, and I promise it's not what I mean.

Which is that people are female just because they inhabit female bodies, and that gender, like sexuality and religion, is a claimed category. And Illyria, who's just arrived in our universe, doesn't claim gender, being a lot more concerned with issues like sudden loss of power and imminent death and the oddities of the shell's humanity, Fred's emotions and memories and the responses of the body. Which are all things about being newly human and not newly female. Which It's not.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, I think part of what is disturbing me is a conflation between gender performance and gender identity. Of Glory, Dawn, and Jasmine, I'd have to agree that all three perform their feminity--albeit in different ways, and I can't really agree that Illyria doesn't perform femininity at all. And Dawn clearly identifies as female/feminine, as a result of her human memories. Dawn also identifies fully as human, or at least would like to.

In the case of Glory, the over-the-top way in which she performs her cultural (American, U.S., Southern California) feminity might lead us to assume that she identifies strongly as female, but I'd find that very problematic, especially since I don't think we'd make the same assumptions about a genderless being performing masculinity. The fact that she's been inhabiting a female body off and on (i.e. whenever she isn't Ben) for a quarter of a century, and has in fact grown up in it in some sense (though I believe her manifestations were much rarer when the special convergence wasn't about to happen?) does make a gender identification more plausible, though. And I'm not sure how the way she would be constructing her human persona would refect the way she constructed herself in relation to Ben. (We need more Ben/Glory backstory fic.)

I find Jasmine the least plausible to identify as a female if we assume she wasn't already sexed/gender as a Higher Power. The way that she performs gender are all designed to manipulate--she appears as a female as she wants to tap into certain mythic types and be a mother-figure, to represent peace and such. There's no place where she performs femininity for its own sake, as Glory and Dawn (and even Illyria, I would argue) do at times.

All of this assumes that Glory, Dawn, Jasmine, and Illyria were unsexed, or differently sexed, and ungendered or differently gendered, as hellgods/keys/higher powers/godkings. Despite the fact that Glory and Illyria's former statueses are referred to in "default-male" terms (god instead of goddess, king instead of queen, which I don't think is particularly significant as the male is the default in our sexist language/culture) the possibility remains for all four figures (well, I find it unlikely for Dawn) that they have always been female, or have always been some analogue of female,
either.

But your logic wrt Illyria seems to be that she should find being female strange, in some way equal to the shock of being newly human, and that the fact that she doesn't seem troubled by her biological femaleness is evidence she doesn't identify as female. But of course she doesn't identify as human either; she has humanity, like femaleness, thrust upon her, and if I were her I'd be a lot more troubled by not being a god anymore than by being a girl too.

But I definitely see an Illyria who, insofar as she agrees to interact with humans and hybrid demons at all, allows herself to be interpellated as female.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Mesektet certainly performs a type of femininity, although even more so than that she is performing a certain type of aged-ness, childhood, when she is several thousand years old at least. It's plausible that, based on quasi-familial relations within the Ra-Tet, she may indeed identify as a little child, in which case her identification as female seems plausible. On the other hand, she does seem quite aware that she's not a child, but a powerful agent of the Senior Partners who manifests as a child for certain reasons, so it'd also be plausible that she does not identify as a child, in which case I would find an identification of femaleness unlikely.

If Mesektet were to return without her powers, I would certainly call her female, because she is fairly deeply interpellated as such by the humans who interact with her in that manifestation.

I didn't do it, I swear!

[wisdomeagle]

(I actually started feeling guilty about this, so I spent an hour checking...)

Round 1 poll: Illyria was listed as a 'bad girl'
Round 1 sign-ups: three people listed Illyria as someone they could/couldn't write; one person requested Illyria
Round 1 fics: Doyle_sb4 wrote Buffy/Illyria. The fic was in 2nd person (so no gendered pronouns), but the first person who left feedback referred to Illyria as 'her.' That was me. One other commenter said "her" and one said "It's/she's"


Round 2 poll: same as above
Round 2 sign-ups: I said I couldn't write Dawn/Illyria again (nothing to do with gender). Doyle also couldn't write Dawn/Illyria (possibly she didn't have another Illyria fic in her?) Glim requested Fred and/or Illyria
Round 2 fics: -- (Glim got pure Dawn/Fred from tinpanalley)

Round 3 poll: same as above
Round 3 sign-ups: Here is where I start supressing discourse by noting that my Illyria is not a girl. Gloss agrees with me.

Free round: Illyria is listed as one of the available characters to claim for freewriting; Willa claims Illyria (but no fic seems to have resulted)

Round 4 poll: Same as above.
Round 4 sign-ups: -----

Round 5 poll: (Bri is modding now, temporarily, and there's no mention of Illyria in the poll)
Round 5 sign-ups: nor the sign-ups.

Round 6 poll: Same as above
Round 6 sign-ups: Two people list Illyria as a character they could write with Willow.

Round 7 poll: No mention (though Cady's back in the driver's seat)
Round 7 sign-ups: Two people list "Illyria/Fred" as a character they will or won't write.

Round 8 poll: Illyria's back as one of the bad girls
Round 8 sign-ups: One person mentions she can't write Illyria as "other stuff you can't write". Since this is the Fred round, both Illyria/Fred and Fred!Illyria are possibilities, I suppose.

Round 9 poll: Illyria is listed as bad girl.
Round 9 sign-ups: --

Round 10 poll: Illyria is listed as a bad girl... and bad girls win!
Round 10 sign-ups: Illyria is on the list of possible bad girls to write. Several people (obviously) say they will or won't write Illyria. Alixtii wonders how Illyria is bad, and there are two requests involving Illyria.
Round 10 fics: One Illyria fic, with lots of female pronouns in the fic and comments.

Round 11 poll: Illyria's gone (as bad girls have come and... come)
Round 11 sign-ups: Alixtii mentions Illyria as someone he could write.

Round 12 poll: No mention of Illyria, but minor characters won.

A largish disucssion about minor characters and who counts ensued. Here I am attempting to supress discourse again.

A poll ensues about who should have her own round; there is one text-box vote for Illyria.

Round 12 sign-ups: Illyria features nowhere on the list of minor characters (or excluded-for-lack-of-obscurity major characters). Illyria is mentioned nowhere in the sign-ups.

Round 13 poll: --
Round 13 sign-ups: --

Round 14 poll: --
Round 14 sign-ups: --

Round 15 poll: --
Round 15 sign-ups: One person mentions Illyria as a character she could write with Kennedy.

Round 16 poll: [didn't happen. last round.]
Round 16 sign-ups: two people mention they could write Illyria.



New Cycle!

Round 17 poll: --
Round 17 sign-ups: --

Round 18 poll: --
Round 18 sign-ups: --

Round 19 poll: --
Round 19 sign-ups: --

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[wisdomeagle]

Assume I can spell, okay? It's better that way.

[wisdomeagle]

For completenesses' sake, here I am suppressing discourse at femslash_santa, which I think of as a minis project although technically it wasn't/isn't.

(And in case it's not clear, I really like the idea of me being an all-powerful hegemonic discourse suppressor despite feeling a little guilty about it. I do regret it if I managed to make there exist less Illyria fic, since I do really like Illyria as a character, but I don't think I really did. Phew.)

(And I am thinking of an answer to your (that is, alixtii's) last comment about gender, etc.)

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I do see a sort of gradual change in the gestalt going on in the information you list. And it reminds me of another weird change that occurred as well: the ascendency of the assumption that every character would only "count" for one round (which wasn't the assumption at all at the start).

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[wisdomeagle]

the ascendency of the assumption that every character would only "count" for one round (which wasn't the assumption at all at the start).

Hmmm. I have to say I have never been a fan of the themed rounds -- especially "bad girls" -- because the definitions are so imprecise and because it doesn't seem quite right to me that there would be potentially three rounds where Faith, e.g., was a 'main' character -- her own round, bad girls, and the never-happened Slayers round. My vote would be for every female character with enough fans to have her own round (I suppose possibly with a catch-all minor characters round.) Then again, because my idea was always that I would participate in every round for as long as it took, my perspective is a little odd and doesn't reflect the values of the community.

Also, Darla and Drusilla were listed characters in both the minor characters and bad girls rounds. (Though I still wish they'd gotten their own rounds.)

On the subject of Illyria: If I were controlling discourse, no one would ever refer to "Fred/Illyria" as one character. That said, I don't really feel a shift in the first cycle about our perceptions of Illyria. Illyria was never a dominant character in _minis, and it was never suggested that Illyria have Illyria's own round (I would have suggested it, but as has been mentioned, my Illyria is not a girl). I suppose bad girls covered it, and though I agree with you that that's not necessarily where I'd group Illyria, it's not a category I really grok, either. (I think around then I sent Cady an email apologizing for how belligerent I felt I was being in the discussion, though, looking back, I'm a lot less belligerent than I remember.)

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I have to say I have never been a fan of the themed rounds -- especially "bad girls" -- because the definitions are so imprecise and because it doesn't seem quite right to me that there would be potentially three rounds where Faith, e.g., was a 'main' character -- her own round, bad girls, and the never-happened Slayers round.

See, I don't see a problem with Faith falling under many categories, because it's not a zero-sum game--the comm went on hiatus after the last round, so it's not as if, if the Slayers round had happened, writing Faith again would have taken away from being able to write Dawn or Fred or Amy again.

But by the logic under which we seemed to be operating at the end of the cycle--a logic which yes, seemed to rule out the possibility of any theme rounds other than a minor characters round--the repetition of Faith, Darla, and Dru seemed out of place, like it had been a mistake somehow or the fans of the characters "got away" with something.

I agree with Darla and Drusilla deserving a round of their own (possibly as a unit, where one agrees to write one and/or the other?). The amount they'd been written throughout the cycle certainly indicates the interest would have been there.

I'm all for having themed rounds in this second cycle, but it doesn't seem like it's going to happen. (?)

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[wisdomeagle]

I'm all for having themed rounds in this second cycle, but it doesn't seem like it's going to happen. (?)

Well, bad girls is still on the poll, and is drawing a few votes. (I admit to being partial to that round, myself, though not as partial as I am to Fred. I want to write Edna Mae again.)

I think my goal with femslash_minis is to write (and secondarily to read) as much femslash as possible, and the unstated part is in as many different pairings. That's why I've gone to minimalist writerly preferences this round.

because it's not a zero-sum game--the comm went on hiatus after the last round, so it's not as if, if the Slayers round had happened, writing Faith again would have taken away from being able to write Dawn or Fred or Amy again.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

I'm also not sure what the purpose of themed rounds is, where the theme is some fictional characteristic (evil, Slayer, forty or better), as opposed to some meta characteristic (Firefly character, character who has not gotten her own round). I mean... when thelastgoodname commented (enthusiastically) on "Motherhood and Apple Pie," she said it seemed a shame to call either Enda Mae or Faith "bad."

I guess I can see the logic of having a hypothetical "evil is sexy" ficathon, and writing about evil being sexy, or a hypothetical" "forty or better" ficathon, and writing about maturity being sexy, but I can't quite understand the logic of designating certain characters "evil" and then writing about them being evil, being sexy, or being nurturing and needy, or rescuing kittens.

So, would the Slayers round fics have to be about being Slayers in some way? Because that I can understand, but it's not really how I envisioned the actual round.

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[wisdomeagle]

Let's pretend I didn't strike through one and three quarters paragraphs, there.

I guess I'm kind of puzzling over all themed ficathons where the theme is "all characters who are x are eligible," for instance choc_fic, forty_or_better, and daysofawesome.

Choc_fic, as near as I can tell, didn't have any specifications beyond skin color, which seems to me to make sense. There's less a concern with whitewashing characters of color as with ignoring them altogether; the idea literally is to have more characters of color be written about, regardless of how, in what context, in what pairing, whether race is an issue or no. And as my racedar is very broken, I can't really comment further on that.

Days of Awesome is about Jewish characters, and they must be doing something Jewish -- religiously, culturally, ethnically, anything -- in the fics. Here the concern is that in both canon and fandom, Jewish characters Jewishness is erased, becomes a signifier without a signified; there is no content in the "Jewish" label.

At Forty or Better our concern is that characters forty or better are hot, and fandom fails to recognize this, so they should. By writing us fic for my birthday. And we're clear -- there has to be sex, and it has to be set when one character is 40+, and it can't be all about how gross and miserable it is.

And I guess something like femslash_minis (or any other slashy community), where the only stipulation is that they're both girls, is the same kind of thing as choc_fic. And there are possibly occasionally moments where people realize, "Femslash_minis is not the place to request or write my Tara-was-born-a-boy idea, or my Faith-is-ftm idea," but otherwise it's basically understood that if a character is female in canon, she's fair game, and by writing about her, you are writing about a female character without any extra work on your part to make sure the signifier points to someone.

(My feeling is that I'm always partially aware of characters' genders when I'm writing, even if it's not an explicit issue, but I'm not always aware of characters' races. [I keep forgetting that my Fred/Janine fic has an interracial couple.] Something about sameness and difference, I think. It's very low-level, but it's definitely there in everything I write. Or, if a character's not aware of gender *cough*Illyria*cough*, then I'm aware of that too, or try to be and how their experience differs from mine as a result. [Although as mentioned somewhere else in the thread, after rereading "Amoral Boundaries," I think that Illyria's awareness of Dawn's gender is inappropriate.])

Which all wraps back around to, is the Slayer round about characters who happen to be (potential) Slayers, regardless of whether that affects their lives, or even whether they're aware of it, or is it a round about Slayerness, and the characters who embody it? And if it's the former, what function does it fill? (I can see how writing Jewish, nonwhite, female, and older characters has a political function related to visibility, but Slayers don't exist in the real world*, and we probably don't want to encourage people to find meatspace evil sexy.)




*I totally can't believe I just wrote that sentence

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

And there are possibly occasionally moments where people realize, "Femslash_minis is not the place to request or write my Tara-was-born-a-boy idea, or my Faith-is-ftm idea," but otherwise it's basically understood that if a character is female in canon, she's fair game, and by writing about her, you are writing about a female character without any extra work on your part to make sure the signifier points to someone.

*nods* And within that objective, for administrative purposes, we restrict those parameters for reasons which aren't germane to the purpose of the overall community; this week we write Dawn pairings, and next week Faith pairings, not because say Dawn and Faith provide different perspectives of femaleness (although they probably do) but because its easier, administratively speaking, to do it one at a time like that. So I don't see why coming up with new and creative ways to slice up the pie, writing this week about witches and next week about Potentials, does anything different than slicing it up by individual characters.

The advantage, in my opinion, is that 1.) it provides a greater flexibility; in a Slayers round, people who feel most comfortable with main characters can write/request Buffy/Faith, and people who enjoy minor characters can write/request Caridad/Molly. Not to mention that 2.) by slicing the pie in creative ways attention may fall on characters it wouldn't otherwise; having a Slayers round would probably encourage writers to write fic about Amanda or Vi or Nikki Wood, despite the fact that those characters probably wouldn't be able to merit a round all of their own. Having a witches round would encourage people to write about Catherine, Amy, Althanea, Vaughne (CoC!), etc. Whereas otherwise they all end up having to share the minor characters round, and it gets sort of claustrophobic.

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[wisdomeagle]

I'm kind of boggling that I didn't realize this before explicitly. Although (according to the polls, at least) I was pulling for a Slayers/potentials round, and I think because, as you note, most of them weren't going to merit their own rounds.

Every day, I think more and more that lj comm=minis_admin should exist).

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I'm relieved to hear I'm not talking nonsense.

Every day, I think more and more that lj comm=minis_admin should exist).

You know, it really should.

Re: I didn't do it, I swear!

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

And looking over the forty_or_better masterlist, it seems to confirm my argument that "by slicing the pie in creative ways attention may fall on characters it wouldn't otherwise" (made in an above comment to the comment to which this comment is also a comment, if that makes any sense); of course, many forty or older characters in various canons are minor characters (as are the bad girls, the potentials, the CoCs, etc.). So I finally got Tish Jones(Martha's sister)/Harriet Jones(the Roslin-like PM) fic written for me!

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

I can't sign up for this round, unfortunately, given that any day now I will have electricity in my apartment and will be able to move in, but will thus be away from internet for what might approach a week or two, depending...

Although, if it's Faith, I might have steered clear in any event.

[frogfarm]

Although, if it's Faith, I might have steered clear in any event.

Shun the nonbeliever! Shuuuuun!

(I just had to say something because given that quote, your icon seemed a tad inappropriate :)

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

Personally, I like the double meaning... *g*