The past few days I have been haphazardly trying to string together the space of some story or other, a piece of writing I want to make, knowing that it’s all a bit of a mess in my head and that to do the things I want to do, I need to have decisions made more or less at the start of the writing process. It’s a bit spoilery but not necessarily, since I don’t know if this thing will even get written or if it’s just a maybe or an idea or whatever, if you like my writing and want to stay untainted, feel free to slip away.
This problem comes in two basic parts crashing against one another.
TransPosition
When I try to write stories these days I sit down, look at the core characters of it – the ones who are important, the ones whose actions and reactions make the story happen – and start looking at them in terms of representation. Especially when these proto characters aren’t yet fully formed, I know, that as a writer with my own biases and as part of the works of my society, I’m going to default to making a bunch of white dudes. Because I’m not just a bad writer, I’m also a bit of a boring fuck. Nonetheless, this attitude leads me to make sure that I have prominent characters who are Not A Bunch Of Neurotypical Cis Straight White Dudes. That gave yield to things like Yull Bachthane, and Holland, and Stannisfeld, and Gael, and those major characters who didn’t stand in my own mental space necessarily (though my work is pretty white).
Based on that, I try to sit down and look at my characters who make up the core of my story, and see a slight problem. And part of that flows from where I want to go with this story’s core idea – pulling together The King In Yellow, and Twilight.
Yeah.
Yeah, Twilight.
Fuckin’ Twilight
Christ I hate Twilight. I don’t mean I hate it for being successful though god damnit, or that I hate it for being YA turgid glurge, though I also hate it for that, but I hate it because the closer I get to this source material, the more fractal layers of personal distaste I can find. There’s the subject matter in general, there’s my reaction to it being tired, there’s my irritation at it being kinda bad, there’s my irritation at how it’s painting all indulgent media, then my irritation at how it shaped the media landscape and how that seems to speak to some sort of marketing condescension and about nine layers deep I’m looking at Mormon imagery and gritting my teeth whispering to myself CS Lewis has a lot to answer for.
The thing that’s annoying me the most about Twilight right now is how ripping it off is astoundingly hard.
When you break a story down, it becomes this machinery of interlocking parts. Tropes – in the TVtropes context – are often referenced in this context, but tropes have a very liquid texture, they’re sort of thrown together like whipped cream. Tropes just blur together, churn up and splatter onto the page like they’re kinda coagulated, and there’s this very real problem with TvTrope thinking that when you start to label things it’s the same as understanding them. Tropes are grease and oil spread across the workings of this machinery, and it is that machinery that I like to look at, even if I am not particularly good at exploring it or understanding how it works.
And holy shit Twilight is not a complex machine.
I sat down to try and diagram the basic plot structures of Twilight. What is necessary. What people make choices. What peoples’ choices are themselves, informed by interacting elements. Who could be replaced by a vending machine. The core story of Twilight, that first book, comes out of it with, at best, two and a half characters – and that’s rounding up. Bella we can generously call a character, Edward we have to assume is a character, and then you have the villain antagonist. Everyone else is just there to be tour guide plaques – or set up for later ‘tensions.’ I’m not saying that this reductivist view of the story is the best way to grapple with it, but wow it doesn’t look good for Twilight.
The Juncture
See, the story idea I have at the moment orients heavily around the word king.
If there is to be a king in yellow, then there is an automatically gendered term in the story. And if this story boils down to having two and a half characters that actually push the story I’m suddenly sitting here with some frustrating options.
See, let us imagine that of my two and a half possible characters at the core of the story, we have a Bella and an Edward. Those are, basically, the only characters who really matter. And that pair are, to start with, white characters. I could put the title ‘King’ as connects to our Bella – that’s what I’d like, honestly -but now I’m in this extra quandrary.
Because now, that character, in this limited pool, kinda has to be cis.
She has to be cis, because if the point of the story was the title ‘King,’ that word becomes not a surprise, not a contrast. It becomes an act of misgendering a character. And normally this wouldn’t bother me – I’d just move on to another character in the same core structure and say ‘well, what if she or he is trans?’
Except the remaining characters are terrible assholes.
So.
This has been on my mind a lot these past few days. And it’s really silly that this annoys me so much.