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!!!!