Some Thoughts About Gender Politics and BSG

[lls_mutant]

So, I finished my outline for the bsg_bigbang today! Yay! Well, I finished it by hand, and I'm aware it's fairly sketchy. But as I was finishing it, I started thinking "You know, there were a lot of complaints about how RDM killed off every major human, unmarried female (and heck, even the married ones for good measure), and I started looking at some of my ratios.



I'm bad about thinking about gender politics when I write. I really am. It's a bit hypocritical, but there it is. I don't tend to write weak women, I don't think, but I DO tend to write more male characters. I was actually working on something in my original fic where I needed a crime boss, and I immediately- without even considering that crime bosses could be female- started thinking of guys' names. And maybe that's partly because Mark Shepphard immediately jumped into my head to play the role, but still.

My fic is basically going AU with 4.5, starting at the Face of the Enemy webisodes. Instead of the Raptor being hit by a random particle, Sweet!Eight tampered with it and jumped them to a place where she thinks she can find Cavil. She succeeds. The rules are: if it was revealed or happened before when Face of the Enemy SHOULD have aired, it must stay as RDM decreed. (Dee must stay dead, Starbuck still finds her own body, etc.) If it was revealed after that point, it can change. (The whole mutiny changes shape, Starbuck is not an angel, and anyone who made it this far can live or die.)

So I started counting my "who dies" numbers, just to make sure I didn't, like, kill off all the women. I came out with both sides even- five female deaths, five male deaths. (One of each of those may change, but if it does, it will go down to four and four.) That sounds fair enough, but by the end of this, none of the characters I'm using are female humans. I'm wondering how I can work Racetrack in, or Ishay, or SOMEONE, because otherwise, all the main human females are dead.

Now, this isn't entirely my fault. Ron killed Cally. Ron killed Dee. (I would have killed Hoshi and made Dee Admiral.) Ron killed Kara. Ron killed Kat. Ron killed Mathias. Ron killed Barolay. Ron killed all of em. As I looked at my stats, I saw I even only STARTED with one human woman (Roslin) in my major set. There are a few other female humans in this fic- Easy, I could work a spot for Racetrack, Sian, Paulla and Jean will probably show, and maybe Seelix or someone, but for the most part, I'm stuck on female characters that are human.

I do have some female "other" characters. Ellen, Kara, Caprica, Athena, and Boomer all figure in big. The Pilot!Eight on the Raptor plays a MAJOR role. And I actually found something interesting for Tory to do. (I'm quite pleased with Tory's story, actually.) And Dee plays a role as well.

But I guess I start with MORE male characters. I have Adama, Lee, Baltar, Gaeta and Hoshi (who get a little elevated in prominence because I love them), Tom and Narcho (ditto), Helo.... plus Tigh, Sam, Tyrol, the engineer!Two (Who really needs a name), the Four on the Colony, and Cavil. I WANT to balance it out better, but I'm not sure I can without making it artificial to the detriment of the story. If I could, I'd have Dee play a bigger role, but frankly, she's getting a better, more important role dead than she would alive.

I'm also feeling some huge frustration because Ron really had nothing for Laura or Gaius to DO all of 4.5. I feel like I HAVE to keep Gaius alive. I always firmly believed Gaius would survive the entire series because Baltar is a cockroach. He survives everything. And that's right for him. But I'm afraid I might have to kill Laura, and that REALLY pisses me off. Because frankly, I can't think of anything to do with her life, but I CAN get something going with her death. I want my female characters to die for more noble reasons than motivation.

I think that's why I started questioning. Two of my female characters are dying partly because the plot works better with it. One is Laura, and one is Sweet!Eight, who gets murdered by Cavil after he accepts her apology. Because, let's face it, that is a TOTAL Cavil thing to do. But it also gets Four going, because I'm not sure I can make Eight turn around to help the humans and betray Cavil realistically, not with the set-up where she brings the humans to Cavil in the first place. I suppose Cavil could kill her FOUR, but I think it makes more sense to kill the Eight.

Am I overthinking this? I think so. I hope so. But when writing an AU, I get to fix some of the things I didn't like about Ron's vision. I don't know. It makes my head hurt if I think about it too long.

But I have the outline!!!! kappamaki33, watch for it soon :)



Oh yeah- speaking of gender and women in fic, I posted Part 10 of A Lot to Live Up To on Friday.

Comments

[rap541.livejournal.com]

Make Felix "Daniel" :)

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Heh, I considered it, but there's too much going on. I'm keeping "Daniel" as is, if I bother to mention him at all. :)

[frolicndetour.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I sympathize. Like you said, this is a problem already there in the source, so I don't know how much you can fix it.

I do have some female "other" characters. Ellen, Kara, Caprica, Athena, and Boomer all figure in big. The Pilot!Eight on the Raptor plays a MAJOR role. And I actually found something interesting for Tory to do. (I'm quite pleased with Tory's story, actually.) And Dee plays a role as well.

I think you're already ahead at this point. My personal issue with only the three Cylon women surviving wasn't so much that they were Cylon as that they were each the other half of couples that they'd managed to basically disappear into. (Ellen possibly least of all at the end there, but she was such a tertiary character as compared to Tigh that I don't know.) That was a bit of a problem with the way female characters in general were written on BSG in the last couple of seasons, but particularly with the Cylon women, it seems to me. So the fact that you're having them play important roles in your story already puts you ahead.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is a point. (Although Pilot!Eight and Sweet!Eight were in couples, too. But oh well. There's a difference between being in a couple and disappearing into a couple. And since Pilot!Eight and her Two spend the entire fic in different locales....)

But yeah, I think my frustration is the source material, and given where I'm choosing to go AU, I can't really change it. (If I was, I'd eventually have Cally leave Galen's ass and raise Nicky with participation from him (because I wouldn't bother to retcon Nicky), and when Chief went bonkers, Cally would be deck chief.

Admiral Dee and Chief Cally. Tell me I'm not cooler than RDM :)

[frolicndetour.livejournal.com]

Admiral Dee and Chief Cally. Tell me I'm not cooler than RDM :)

*weeps for what was not* That would have been amazing. =( You are way cooler than RDM!

[kappamaki33.livejournal.com]

Amen! :D

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

Another human female who wasn't specifically killed (though she wasn't around much ever anyway) is Showboat. Just to give you another option. My own preference is that she didn't mutiny and she lived and helped explore Earth II in her viper before it got put on Galactica to be flown to the sun.
Also, she never stopped missing her ship, even though she had a long happy life on Earth II.

I always firmly believed Gaius would survive the entire series because Baltar is a cockroach. He survives everything.

Absolutely. ::laughs:: I've had this thought many times.

But I'm afraid I might have to kill Laura, and that REALLY pisses me off. Because frankly, I can't think of anything to do with her life, but I CAN get something going with her death. I want my female characters to die for more noble reasons than motivation.

Yes, but it's also a logical path to take. She was already very ill at your starting point. Since it did happen in canon, I don't think you have much to worry about in killing her in your story.

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, I think the other red-headed Jean--not the one in this icon, the one in Baltar's harem--is actually spelled Jeanne. I assume she's the one you meant up there when you were listing human females who survived...

I'm not sure why red-headed women have to be Jean or variations of it. *g* Jean Grey (Phoenix). Jean Barolay. Jeanne the groupie. Jean--oops, I forgot the other one I had in mind when I started this comment.

On a more personal note, I'm sort of your opposite in writing tendencies. Pretty much all of my fics have prominent roles for women, and I get bored with stories that are only/mostly about men. Not that this is admirable or horrible, it's just my general preference. ::shrugs::

I'm glad you're trying to include more female characters (that you don't kill) in the story, though. 'Cause I'm more likely to read it! Heh.

[prophetkristy.livejournal.com]

I hereby demand that you write that story about Showboat! ;-)

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

It's entirely likely to happen, since my penchant seems to be writing stories about female characters that hardly anyone remembers. (Also I'm trying to convince myself to write a series of post-finale ficlets, because I love survival stories.)

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Ah, Showboat! She becomes my Pegasus CAG in A Lot to Live Up To when Stinger goes down to New Caprica. I even needed to kill off someone and left her alive and created a male squadron leader to kill :) (I think because I knew she was alive later, too.) She's almost entirely off screen, but I remember Showboat :)

And I like your ending for her.

And yeah, that's the thing with Laura. Truthfully, I think RDM should have killed her off earlier, at least earlier in 4.5. I can have her death galvanize Adama then, at least. ::Smacks Adama::

It's funny, because I don't get bored with stories that are mostly about women. I mean, Dee's the main character in my big thing. (Of course, please be noting that the other main characters are men.) And in Firefly, I'll gravitate towards a Kaylee fic before anything else. And my original stuff is more balanced. But I do write a lot of men. It's interesting.

Of course, it's not so much I write a lot of men. I write a lot of Gaeta, and before A Lot to Live Up To, almost all of my BSG stories were somehow focused on Gaeta, or Hoshi dealing with losing Gaeta, and except for Dee, Gaeta's world is a very masculine one. And in Harry Potter, my OTP was Remus/Sirius, and almost everything focuses on one or both of those two. So, it's characters more than genders, I think.

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

...it's characters more than genders, I think.
I guess for me it's both? My favorite character on Life is the male lead, Charlie Crews, but I really needed the female buddycop to complete the show... and there's Charlie's lawyer, his ex-wife, his superior officer in season one. Lots of interesting female roles.

I'd agree, other than Dee, Gaeta is surrounded mostly by men. CIC is dominated by men. (Huh, I never really thought about how Dee was also surrounded by men, even though I've occasionally noticed how very tiny she looks when in CIC. Now I wanna write Dee female friendship fic!)

And yeah, that's the thing with Laura. Truthfully, I think RDM should have killed her off earlier, at least earlier in 4.5. I can have her death galvanize Adama then, at least.

Considering that she wasn't being used as a balance during 4.5, she might as well have been gone... not that I begrudge her a rest and romance, but what I liked about her role on the show was how she kept the military in check and made a lot of the hard choices. That was mostly gone in 4.5.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

(Huh, I never really thought about how Dee was also surrounded by men, even though I've occasionally noticed how very tiny she looks when in CIC. Now I wanna write Dee female friendship fic!)


This is something that's driving me a bit crazy about A Lot to Live Up To! The whole original premise was that it was Dee's relationship with Hoshi. It originally started as a bit of fun- I was calling it the Dee-Hoshi bitchfight fic for the longest time, and going on the premise that Hoshi and Dee used to HATE each other (mainly because Hoshi thought HE should have been XO on the Pegasus, and was very resentful that Dee was jumped up from NCO to XO on HIS ship). And I gave Dee another best friend in Narcho, because it fit in with Hoshi and because it fit in with Felix and the mutiny. And I've now formed this tight little group that's Dee, Hoshi, Gaeta, and Narcho. Dee and three guys. Plus you have Lee, there's canon evidence of friendship between Dee and Helo, and Adama and Tigh are running around... I'm finding that the women just aren't getting all that represented. And sadly, it makes sense in the plot, because the focus of the fic is Dee-Hoshi, and Dee's reaction to a few other things. Her friendships with women, which are probably important to her as well, are regulated to the side because they don't drive the plot forward.

So yes. There needs to be more Dee female friendship fic!!!!

not that I begrudge her a rest and romance, but what I liked about her role on the show was how she kept the military in check and made a lot of the hard choices. That was mostly gone in 4.5.

Yeah. She really doesn't DO anything. ANd to be honest, this fic is so big and complex, taking Laura out by killing her off neatly makes one less character I have to find a plotline for. It would be one thing if I could- like I said, I found an AWESOME plotline for Tory. But I just can't. She's so broken post-Earth.... So, oh well. ::sigh::

[prophetkristy.livejournal.com]

a. I never think about gender politics, because thinking about it sort of misses the point, IMHO.

b. Hey, Laura very well should have been dead by now anyway. She's had cancer for YEARS.

c. YAY outline stage!! \o/

d. I miss Mathias. She was badass.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suppose it does and it doesn't. I just want to make sure I'm not regulating all my women to motivational deaths :)

And yeah, that's what I've been thinking about Laura!

Why did it have to be Mathias? There were other Marines they could have killed.

[puszysty.livejournal.com]

Like Hadrian. I never much liked her. Or Venner, he was kind of a wuss anyway. :)

[prophetkristy.livejournal.com]

yeah, I definitely would not have missed Hadrian! Did she actually survive the whole thing?

[puszysty.livejournal.com]

No clue. I don't know if she ever even showed up past season 1.

[kappamaki33.livejournal.com]

Yay! I am sooo excited!

For one, canon has backed you into a corner on including females who are not Other, because there really weren't that many to start out with. Even Laura ends up being Othered (I don't think that's a verb, but I'm using it anyway) through the Dying Leader/prophecy/mysticism/connection to the Cylons and Opera House. Just look at the top-billed female characters: Dying Leader, Angel/who knows, Cylon, Cylon, Dee, Cylon, Cally, Cylon, Cylon... I think one of the reasons I missed Dee was because she and Racetrack were the last women alive who didn't have destinies.

Though I defintely felt the gender imbalance at the end of the series (particularly when Hoshi, Adama, Cottle, Lee, and Baltar were all watching the Earth humans through binoculars), I think the thing that struck me more throughout the series was the sharp male/female divide between Skeptics/Men of Science and Destined/Women of Faith. Leoben is really the only big exception. Baltar is sort of a bridge between the two, but even his conversion(s) don't really make him Other; he's more like a tourist vacationing in Other-land who eventually decides that the crazy chick in his head--and the crazy chicks outside his head--might be on to something. I think that might be why so few women made it to the end; if you've got a destiny, once you've fulfilled it, there's kind of a narrative pull to die.

As far as gender equity in your fic goes, I'd say being conscious of it is a good thing, but there's a line between being conscious of gender equity issues and letting them dictate your plot to you. I went to a reading by a really fascinating author (whose books I haven't read yet, and I feel really bad about that, because they sounded awesome) who had a scary but incredible method of deciding who lived and who died in one of her novels: she flipped a coin. Not saying that that would work for any story--she explained that she felt it was particularly appropriate for her novel, a WWII/Holocaust story, because the difference between life and death for any one individual in those situations was luck--but I found it informative. I think it's legitimate to think about why you're killing off particular characters, because you want to make sure you're doing it for the right story reasons. That doesn't necessarily mean keeping a tally sheet.

It may have been sort of an odd story choice, but I kind of liked that Roslin made it as long as she did in canon. For one, canon-wise, I don't think her death would have rallied Adama at that point; I think he would've just sank further into drunken obsessive-tooth-brushing misery and defeat. More importantly, though, I liked how her survival ended up contradicting prophecy. Perhaps there are alternate interpretations of the Dying Leader prophecy that you could put together to make it so it did come true (like *Galactica* was the Dying Leader, which isn't a bad interpretation), but I really like the idea that it just didn't happen the way it usually did this time through the cycle, that the Dying Leader *did* live to see a little of Earth. It makes me think that the prophecies and the future aren't set in stone--they're predictions, based on human nature and what's happened before, but there's still wiggle room for free will and different decisions. Could they have found something more interesting for her to do between the mutiny and the end, though? Yes, I think so. Are there situations where her pre-Earth death could have worked very well? Most definitely.

[kappamaki33.livejournal.com]

Oops, I meant Hoshi, Adama, Cottle, *Tigh*, and Baltar, not Lee.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

That's a really interesting point about the divide between the men of science and the women of faith. (And when you wrote that, it made me realize that in ALTLUT, while it's not explicitly addressed, I sort of turned that a little on its head- Hoshi's implied to still be fairly religious, and Dee sort of does the lip service.)

I have little patience with Destiny, and I've nearly eliminated that. I've come up with an explanation for Kara's destiny that REALLY excites me... partly because it's a rational explanation for why Leoben is SO convinced she's got one and why he's WRONG that doesn't say "God doesn't exist." Because I do believe in God- I just believe He's a lot more subtle than Ron Moore. :)

I love the idea of the prophecy being wrong- I don't object at all to Laura not dying before she reached Earth. More my objection when I'm trying to write an AU is there's this major character that is just hanging around on the sidelines, and I can't find anything for her to do!!! :) Because the story is getting SO complicated and complex, it's almost easier just to kill her off. I haven't decided on that for sure, but it's attractive.

Either way, it makes my head hurt :)

[scifiaddict86.livejournal.com]

Now I don't want to offend you at all but I think what your doing still defeats the purpose somewhat. I think by paying this much attention to this sort of thing you wind up focusing to much on the characters genders rather than the characters themselves. I think feminism is important and I'm actually amazed by how much has worked its way into my latest story but I think its best used when it grows organically out of the story. I think when actually thinking about to the level your talking about here its not equality. When your actually taking it to the level where you say "Well I killed this many men so I have to kill this many women" or vice versa your still making character decision based on gender.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Not offended. However, I agree and I don't.

On the one hand, you're right. I don't think people should be sitting here and saying "Okay, I killed a guy, let's kill a woman to make it equal." The deaths I have plotted out happen for reasons, and if there isn't a reason to kill a character, I'm not doing it. And there are a few spots where I COULD kill someone like Tigh or Tyrol, and I'm choosing not to and going for the redshirts like Jaffee or Sian.

On the other hand, now that I've plotted out my deaths, I wanted to take a look at them, because people don't change their thought processes without thinking about them. And I sort of wanted to see how I stacked up. What sort of deaths were the women getting versus the men? This is a fairly high body-count fic, although a lot of the bodies are redshirt types.

The potential change where the deaths would go from five and five to four and four would not be because of gender equality, but because I'm not 100% sure of what I want to do with the Agathons yet. For some reason, I just refuse to consider killing off just one of them. Either they both die or they both live. As far as I'm concerned, you just don't separate Helo and Athena like that. :) I don't know why this is- it's not like I'm afraid of angst. (::Hides as Hoshi kicks me violently.::) But I just can't bring myself to widow either one of them.

A bit of an imbalance doesn't bother me. If I killed, say, seven of one gender and four of another, I'd be fine with that. But I want to make sure I'm not killing off all of one or the other, as that was a problem I had with the show. There's one spot where the bodies start mounting that frankly, it doesn't matter too much WHO the bodies are. I'd like them to be recognizable, but at the same time, I don't want them to be important :) The point there isn't so much with the deaths as what the deaths are accomplishing, so... yeah. That's one of the spots where I feel like I should think about equality, because the situation doesn't dictate who should die- just that some people should.

I hope that makes a modicum of sense :)

[grey-sw.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much you can do about the gender imbalance -- by season 4.5, I think it was pretty deeply baked-in. As you pointed out, just about every female character is either dead or Magically Delicious(tm) by that point, so what can you really do about it? Judging by your other stories, though, I'm sure it'll come out OK by the end.

But I guess I start with MORE male characters. I have [...] the engineer!Two (Who really needs a name), the Four on the Colony, and Cavil.

Don't forget Doral! XD

One is Laura, and one is Sweet!Eight, who gets murdered by Cavil after he accepts her apology. Because, let's face it, that is a TOTAL Cavil thing to do.

Yeah, yeah it is. "Thanks for admitting you're broken! I really appreciate it. By the way, you're broken. Die." :D

That said, I hope you can find something for Cavil to do other than frown a lot and then die. I think he's a (slightly!) more nuanced character than that... but then again, I thought the same about Tory, and they made her even more cardboardy in season 4.5! :(