Smurfette

May is sort of a weird month for me in terms of being a fan of nerdy things in general and of space operas specifically.

See, in spite of loving adventure stories set in space, in spite of Star Trek: TNG, Firefly, Mass Effect, and the more recent iterations of Captain Marvel being among my all time favorite pop culture properties, I never got in to Star Wars.

Every May the 4th, I sigh and shrug and apologize for missing whatever reference I inevitably miss and try to explain why I never got in to a thing that, on paper, has the hallmarks of my favorite things.

There's not a simple answer to this question. Usually, my response is some version of "I missed the boat." Star Wars is, in my experience, sort of a difficult thing to get into as an adult in a world where it's existed for 40 years. I was ten or eleven when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, and I saw it in the theater. It, understandably, didn't get me hyped about the series as a whole. I didn't watch the original trilogy until my early twenties, and when I did finally make it through all three, my general reaction was along the lines of, "That was okay, I guess."

No one ever really accepts my "didn't get into it at the right time" explanation. Which is fair, I guess. There are some problems with it. I mean, it's not like I didn't have the opportunity to watch the originals as a kid--my parents are fans; some of my friends have been fans their whole lives. If I had asked, I could have seen them. And I obviously knew of them, so I would have been able to ask.

But I never did. I've been thinking lately about why, and I think the answer is actually pretty simple.

I've been hungry for stories for as long as I can remember. And not just stories, but stories that would pull me out of reality. I wanted space adventures, or to travel through time, or to live in a world with magic. So I sought out fantastical stories. There were plenty among children's media, and I had the good fortune of growing up around voracious readers and librarians in an overall pretty bookish community. It was great. Except for one thing that I kept noticing.

There weren't a lot of girls in these stories. I mean, there were some exceptions.

Sailor Moon had an all-female team.

Reboot had Dot from the beginning and eventually added Mouse and both the child and adult versions of Andraia (not to mention Hexadecimal, who's one of the best villains ever).

But the pattern for the stories I found was pretty much the same across the board: the main hero was a boy. Sometimes he lead a team. Pretty much always, the other members of that team were also boys, with the exception of one girl.

There's a name for this phenomenon. It's called the Smurfette Principle. And it's everywhere.

I didn't know anything about tropes when I was a kid. And I didn't know anything about how media are made that might have explained why I saw so few women and girls. (And I didn't know that I'd be living in a world that, almost 20 years later, would see a major network passing on a pilot because it skewed "too female.") All I knew was that I wanted to see stories that starred girls. And I was tired of the stuff that I liked that starred women and girls being dismissed as being badly made or too girly.

So I started being more selective. If a book or a movie didn't have a girl on the cover, or if the back copy didn't mention a girl by name (meaning not just in terms of her relationship to a boy--his sister or his crush), I put it back on the shelf.

This drastically changed the types of stories that I interacted with. I piked up fewer adventures, fewer fantasies, fewer space operas. I read a lot of historical fiction--the Dear America and Royal Diaries series made up a hefty chunk of my reading after this period because they were all about girls and (mostly) written by women. I kept going with some series--Harry Potter didn't really meet my criteria, but I started reading it before I made my changes, so I kept on (and thank goodness I did, because I need a hero like Minerva McGonagall in my life), and though many of the Animorphs books had boys as narrators, there were still two girls in the main cast.

I guess the reason why I never asked about Star Wars was because I already knew the score as far as women characters. Though I recognize now that the character of Leia has more going on than a damsel in distress narrative, at the time, the image that defined Leia for me was this one:

And ten-year-old me was aggressively not interested in another property where the girl was there to be pretty and to date one of the heroes.

Whenever I mention to someone this period in my life where I steered clear of stories about boys as much as I could, someone inevitably points out all of the cool things I missed. And, yeah, there's a lot of neat stuff that I didn't see because I was looking for things that starred girls. But, ultimately, the "look what you missed" sentiment misses the point.

It seems odd that I would actively avoid stories about boys because, even if we're not consciously thinking about it, we know that stories about boys are everywhere. They're the vast majority of the stories that get told--particularly when we're talking about genre fiction (sci fi, fantasy, action/adventure, etc. etc.). The idea of avoid stories about boys and men strikes as odd because it's practically impossible.

But do we think it's weird if boys don't want to read or watch stuff that's about girls? Do we ask what boys who didn't read Dear America books missed out on?

I guess my ultimate point is that someone shouldn't miss out on "cool stuff" because they're looking for a character that's like them. And also that maybe content makers could stand to be more aware of the messages that they're sending to their potential audience. Leia may be more than a metal bikini, but that's all that I saw. It might not be the only reason that I'm not enthusiastic about Star Wars now, but it's definitely part of it.

Also, would it have killed them to add some more women? It's a whole galaxy.

Heel-Face Turn

My best friend has been visiting from out of town this week, and we have unsurprisingly been looking back over the past--in part because our ten-year high school reunion is coming up and in part because we just generally miss the old days. As often happens in our conversations, we started talking about the stories and characters we love.

One of the things I've noticed as I've started reading and watching stories with a critical eye is that there are certain tropes, certain story gimmicks, that I fall for every time.

I'm a sucker, for instance, for a good ensemble cast (Community, for instance; or The West Wing; or les amis de l'ABC in Les Miserables). And I pretty much always love a story where a super-powerful being has to live as an average mortal (this happened to one character in the first US version of The Power Rangers twice, and if you stretch the definition a little bit, it's part of the central conceit of The Devil Is a Part-Timer).

But one of my favorite tropes--one that wins me over pretty much every time--is when a bad guy tries to be a good guy. I love a Heel-Face Turn.

The name for this trope has its origins in professional wrestling. A "heel" is a wrestler whose shtick is being unlikable--they're the one that you're supposed to hate, who's supposed to be the bad guy. A "face"--short for "babyface"--is the good guy. The face is the one that you're supposed to root for and rally behind. So, a "Heel-Face Turn" is when a heel turns a new leaf and becomes one of the good guys.

And I am 100% here for it every time.

I think what gets me about this trope (when it's well executed, and, to be fair, sometimes it's not) is that it gets to something that, to me, is so important from a character-crafting standpoint: most of the time, the baddies think of themselves as the heroes.

There are exceptions--to quote one of the Batman films, "some men just want to watch the world burn." But, usually, the villain has motivations outside of tearing everything down. Maybe they have a job to do. Maybe they're trying to protect their family. Maybe they're trying to survive in unforgiving circumstances.

Some of my favorite character arcs from childhood on work their way through this process. Zuko in Avatar: the Last Airbender. Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z. Tommy, the Green Ranger in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. H.G. Wells in Warehouse 13. Regina in Once Upon a Time (what I've seen of it, anyway). Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Kovu in The Lion King II (don't hate--that movie was precious).

There's something about a character that isn't necessarily practiced in it trying to be good--even if they're bad at it. Sometimes especially if they're bad at it.

Yuuuuuuup.

For as much as I love this trope, it's not one that's made it into my work very often. I write ensemble casts every chance I get. I've got outlines and partial drafts for stories with all manner of deities or supernatural creatures that have to live as mortals. But I've only ever written one Heel-Face Turn.

And it's in Project 2016. 

I've talked a lot lately--if not on here, then in casual conversation--about how much I love the characters in Project 2016. I think this is part of why. 

The thing with a good Heel-Face Turn is that it takes time. There has to be a build up. You've got to plant the seeds--there's something that's not quite right, something that's striking the character in an uncomfortable place or some view of the world that's not quite true. But making that switch shouldn't be easy. It can't be--not if your character's actions up to the point of the turn are going to have any meaning. You have to have a complete understanding of the character if you're going to pull it off effectively. And, beyond that, you have to know how well your other hero(es) are going to adjust to this apparent shift. How trusting are they? To what degree with they have safety measures in play if the turn isn't genuine? What will they or won't they do to protect their loved ones?

I've had a good ten years to spend thinking about these questions with the characters in Project 2016. And I've had plenty of people smarter than I am to look take second looks and ask questions I didn't think of.

Heel-Face Turns have given me some of my favorite stories and characters. All I want for Project 2016 is for it to do the same for someone else.