Subjects Objects, And Monsters

One of the simplest lines you can draw in storytelling is between subjects and objects. Again, being as simple as we can, subjects do things while objects have things done to them. Characters are often objects, and machines or the like are often subjects, but basically, it’s a question that these days you hear in a lot of videogame conversations, where we point to player characters as subjects, and non-player characters as objects. That’s a simplification, but whatever.

Right now on my mind is an idea I’m working on for the structure of Prince in Yellow. In this story, we have three central characters, and I was kicking around the idea of changing each of them throughout the story; specifically, the notion of something changing them at a fundamental level. For simplification, we’ll say they’re all going to become monsters, but cool monsters. Good monsters.

This idea is reasonably flexible for me right now.

But.

Those three characters are all girls; one of them is a woman of colour, one of them is trans. That is to say, I have these three characters who are all marginalised, some on multiple axes, and then my story is going to be about them discovering some monstrous thing about themselves, or having monstrous traits put onto them.

And I’m not sure if I want to do that.

I’m not sure if a trans girl character discovering, unrelated to her trans-ness, that she is in fact, an inheritor of a magical lineage and now she has gills and can breathe underwater, sends a right message; if it implies that her trans-ness is part of this monstrosity. If a black girl developing magical power like a witch implies that her outsider status overlaps with unnatural powers.

Basically, I am cautious about making unintentional statements. Not in a great, vast, dreadful way, but it’s something on my mind.

On the other hand… it’s still going to be a story about teens with superpowers.

So…

What do I do?

Do I let this caution of unintentional sentiment lead me to not make these kind of characters? Or do I just act as if the characters are exactly what I would expect? I’m not a marginalised woman, after all. I like writing action stories about punching things and smooching things – so I’m left wondering if maybe, just maybe, I can just do what I’d ordinarily do, and hopefully, just treating these marginalised people as if they can be the standard protagonists of stories without ‘serious thoughtful treatment.’

Choices, choices, choices.