Not sure if this belongs in character or plot development (or god forbid, the Debate Room), but a while ago, there was a, ummm, spirited discussion in the Debate Room about the Bechdel Test. That, combined with a comment I made on someone else's story, sort of sproinged! something loose in my head, and I got to thinking. Now, this is not to imply that your character is the wrong gender, or that you're being sexist, or that your character needs to explore their (feminine/masculine/agender) side more, but when I envisioned my MC as female rather than male, a whole bunch of other possibilities and problems popped up, which actually gave me a better handle on how to approach him as male. My guy is confined to a hospital bed, but has the newfound ability to temporarily take over other bodies. Changing him to her doesn't affect that ability, but it does affect how (s)he views the world when in a body that's different from his/her original situation. Another story I've got rattling around in my head also features a male MC, but one who is a bit of a bad fit for his job (fake psychic). Thinking about the ways it would be easier for a woman to defraud other women of their money has given me some pretty good insights into what I need to do to make things work in the original story. So, gender-flip your MC, and tell us what happens. Especially if Lee Child is lurking somewhere out there....
My MC would use her newfound "sexism card" as an excuse in social situations as often as she could. She's still the same old gun-nut cop, except she's just an old lady now.
Realistically making my main MC 'blade' female would only have minor plot consequences as the recon commandos have both men and women serving anyway. making my FMC Keri , male (which I'd have to because her and blade wind up together and i'm not cut out for writing LGBT - not that i have anything against it but as a straight guy i don't have the experience to make it work) , it would make interesting the first scene where she (now he) is giving a guy a blow job until interrupted by an incoming laws rocket.
Maybe "Writing Prompts" Doctor Who fanfic Spoiler: Very very long ;) Kyra Sylvan: making my devout Muslim hero a "Kyle" instead feels like it would be perpetuating the stereotype that "true" Islam is unfriendly to women's rights. I'm probably over-reacting (I do that a lot), but I'm still not a fan. Damien Mitchell: just looking at the character himself, my smarta** first officer with a math/science bent could easily be made into a Daria, but then I would have to make Damien's boyfriend into a girlfriend to get the point across that I wanted to get across, and at this point all three of my leading gay/bi characters are women and they almost outnumber my straight women. I could add a fourth gay/bi character, make this one a guy so that I'm not using LGBT as a way of fetishizing women to my straight male readers, and fit him into the narrative without making him a Token, but it would take a lot more work than it did for the last character I added simply because so much of the narrative has already tied together with so much of the rest of the narrative. Captain Harper: given that June was modelled after Captain Jack Harkness and Captain John Hart, I would need to come up with yet another "J" name like Judd. I'm also realizing that the disconnect between my serial killer being sweet and sensitive to the people she likes and bloodthirsty and sadistic to the people she doesn't like would feel more strange if he was a guy. Huh. "Sweet and sensitive, bloodthirsty vigilante serial killer" feels more female to me. This part I don't get. A lot of my non-vigilante villains are extremely sensitive guys, why doesn't "sensitive vigilante villain" work as well as a guy for me? Shanjik: having my insectoid doctor with a strong sens of honor and unusually weak emotional sensitivity could be interesting as a woman, but I've already had Damien complain about how promiscuous Captain Harper is. Having Damien turn out to be a die-hard monogonous bi made it clear that he wasn't complaining "bisexuals are promiscuous," so the big reason I came up with Shanjik was so that Damien could complain about a second person being promiscuous and have this one be straight. Having a guy complain about two women being promiscuous doesn't seem a lot better than the original mistake I only came up with Shanjik in the first place to fix. Nathan Durst: You know, turning my brooding computer-genius loner into a Natalie wouldn't actually change a lot. Urban Fantasy WIP Spoiler: Even longer :D Alec Shorman: if I made my self-described Lawful Evil egalitarian people-person into an Alice, then I would lose the impact of "white guy willing to let a black woman tell him what to do because she's his friend, even if it means shooting an innocent person in the face," I would lose the impact of having Amy Carmine's best friend in the world being a man that she is strictly Platonic with, and the backstory where Alec/Amy show Amy's rapist what it felt like for her would, again, come across as fetishistic if it was an Alice/Amy doing it to him instead (despite it not happening on-screen). It could be interesting to invert the High Heel Face Turn by having the only man in the group (Amy's baby brother Jason) be the only one who's not evil (as opposed to the more traditional "lone female in a group of villains being the least committed to being evil," and yes, I'm looking at you Iron Man III), but it could also go too far in the other direction and come across as mysogynistic to have only men be strong enough to resist the lure of evil's easy life. Amy Carmine: turning Amy into a James instead would also make his transformation from rape victim to serial killer come across as something that male survivors do differently than female survivors, rather than something that makes Amy/James personally different from almost every survivor (male, female, or anything in between). Less importantly, it would also cost the platonic love between a man and a woman who have no interest in getting physical/romantic with each other. It occurred to me that I could turn Alec into Alice and Amy into James to keep the man-woman platonic love story, but that would still a) play into the problem with falsely making male rape survivors appear more violent than female rape survivors, and b) it would add the new problem that Alice being proud of James for becoming a world-class serial killer would come across as more paternalistic ("men do great things, women admire men for doing great things") than Alec being proud of Amy for becoming a world-class serial killer. Charlie Petersen: changing Charleen into a Charles would, again, cost me the "white guy wants to do what the black woman tells him to" angle with Alec, and I think it's cooler to have the most cold-blooded professional in the group be one of the women rather than one of the men. I'm also not sure if Amy would've been as amenable to living with and working for a man while her PTSD was still at it's strongest, even if it was a man who respected the fact that her capacity for violence and bloodshed exceeded his own. Jason Carmine: I get the impression that brother-sister relationships don't get as much attention as brother-brother and sister-sister, but barring that detail, changing Amy's baby brother into a Janice would probably be the least problematic. Having a woman pull a Heel Face Turn but not a man doesn't give the "women aren't tough enough to be evil" impression as much when it's three women in the group and one man, and now that I think about it, Janice and Charlie bonding over their love of spreadsheets would be one of the greatest "f*** you"s to the anti-Bechdel crowd that I've ever come up with in my life ... OK, this is weird: so I'm sure everybody here by now knows how much I love using D&D Alignment and MyersBriggs personality in my characterization, but let me just point to the characters that I just talked about and then boldface the two that could be most easily gender-bent. Kyra Sylvan: Lawful Good ESFJ female Damien Mitchell: Lawful Good ENTP male June Harper: Chaotic Evil ENFJ female Shanjik: Lawful Neutral ESTJ male Nathan Durst: Neutral Good INFJ male Alec Shorman: Lawful Evil ESFP male Charlie Petersen: Neutral Evil ISTJ female Amy Carmine: Chaotic Evil ESFJ female Jason Carmine: True Neutral INFJ male That is an absurdly specific category to be the only characters that I'm able to gender-bend easily. How the **** did that just happen? You, know, there's actually two schools of writing LGBT+ : Differently from the way you write cis/straight: Fighting the stereotypes by showing the destructive effects that being ostracized has on people In exactly the same way you write cis/straight: Fighting the stereotypes by ignoring them and normalizing the peoples' lives instead You do have to research into the stereotypes either way, but if you want to write LGBT but don't trust yourself to handle the ostracization correctly, then try normalizing it instead My first ever completed short story has a) a throwaway line about Linda's wife, and b) a throwaway line about their son Alec (no connection whatsoever with Shorman) calling into the house "Mom? Mum? Are you home?"
Interesting notion, but with some consideration it puts you in a position of altering the story significantly, I would imagine. However, upon considering doing this with my current work, it's doubtful much would change at all. The setting which in turn drives the natures of the characters, is heavily-corporate industry functionary. Ones only identity is ones job. In doing this job no gender characteristics enter into it at all - probably one of the features which makes it a rather colorless place. Then, the idea is to show how absolute capitalism requires the subjugation of what we believe makes us "human" - or, in the case of this particular piece, what creates the elements of culture. Gender characteristics can be seen in two ways; one is how an individual wishes to appear with regard to his or her gender, the other is what is organically manifested by the fact of being a particular gender. Should a male, for instance, attempt to accurately characterize a female, I'd have to suggest this couldn't be from personal experience. Some sort of outside reference would be required, and (depending upon how well the characters are developed) there seems to be a threat of lopsidedness. I mean, can this be achieved by a male writer attempting to accurately depict a male bus driver having never before driven a bus, or done any work remotely similar? The pitfall being; writing the driver as what the driver would be like if I were the driver, as opposed to what a bus driver actually is. To try to cross gender lines in such a fashion, if even occupation lines in same gender is treacherous ground to traverse, seems like a rather ballsy thing to do. Do men think they can write women better than women think they can write men? Are we ending up with a lot of thin impressions heavily weighted on one side or the other despite our best efforts...at what, writing....or comprehending? Though an interesting parlor debate subject (I guess) I'd have to suggest if ones writing is so malleable as to make them that interchangeable, you're either in an Orwellian situation (as with my current piece) or you're kidding yourself about your apprehension of the "other gender".
Good point, and a great line. The normalization thing reminds me of Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein, where the two people, who work together only in full environment suits and know (literally) nothing about each other agree to go to a love hotel for a quick hookup. Upon removing their suits, the one comments "Oh, you're male", and the other responds something like "And you're female. Well, that's a surprise." Not that I think tolerance will eventually morph to acceptance and thence to apathy in one's choice of sexual partners, but it was a cool one-off that showed where the society's attitudes stood nevertheless.
Oh, I didn't mean that you should rewrite your story with the MC's gender flipped, just that examining how it would be different if you did so might be a helpful way to take another look at it. For example, one of the things that I found really unsettling about the film Jupiter Ascending was the way that Mila Kunis's character repeatedly sexually harasses her bodyguard, who (IIRC) is not permitted to disobey her. However, the number of movies and books (and real life situations) where male characters behave exactly the same way towards their female subordinates is too high to count. Ditto with James Bond. Try writing a "Jane Bond" series where she has multiple sexual partners per episode and see how far your story gets. But this isn't intended to go into the debate room, I just think it might be helpful to take a look at the question of "Did your character do that because she's female, or because the story needed her to do that?" I mean, I know the author has said he's happy with Tom Cruise, but Jack Reacher needs to not only be male, but he needs to be huge, physical intimidation played a large part in the couple stories I read, and Mr. Cruise? Well, no.
You may have noticed that I compared and contrasted 9 different characters for effectiveness at gender-bending
Autumn is MTF, so I guess then she'd be FTM. Instead of painting nails and having long hair for her femininity, he'd shave less and have short hair. Might be a little happier because it's easier and acceptable for a person assigned female to look male than the other way around.
I don't imagine there'd be much change in any of my mcs. I've changed some of their genders before (side characters as well) and it's always been part of bigger overhauls to their personalities / stories, but I don't tend to heavily gender my characters regardless. Their genders are part of who they are, but not a defining part, so if it changes it doesn't necessarily effect anything else about them. In fairness I mostly write far-future sci-fi where gender wouldn't've affected their upbringing or position in society at all, so maybe that's cheating. My UF heroine Claudia might change a bit, given that her plot deals with mental illness, and men and women typically get both different treatment and different implicit instructions on how to deal with mental illness themselves. It might be more likely that guy!Claudia wouldn't talk to anyone about his experiences and would bury it and refuse to deal with it, which would definitely make for a much different plot since Clauds' whole impetus at the beginning of the story is to deal with it. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, my 'superhero' heroine would have a totally different role too since early on, being the cute harmless girl 'hero' is a source of much antagonization for her and getting past that stereotype is a big part of her initial development. Guy!Serena would need a whole different character arc. Though, it could be tweaked and repackaged to make the point about redefining masculinity instead, since he'd still be the person with the ability that's kinda weak and useless in comparison to his contemporaries. It'd still be an interesting story to tell, for sure, but in this case yeah: a different one.
The mighty captain of the king's guard would have actually tested my MC's intellect and strength, as a male child of nobility. As a matter of routine. That one act would have dire consequences across reality. The Captain would be astonished by this child's genius. He would be careful to protect this find that's beyond rare. Maybe even one of a kind. The Captain however has no time to focus on one student, so he makes the child watch their training sessions for hours everyday. When the child becomes a teen, he joins alongside a new generation of recruits. Things start off fine, my MC gets extremely popular as he's a pretty boy. The girls flock to him as a teen idol of sorts. But the boy was noticing something else. With each training session he was making light of what others found hard. He was advancing far faster than his peers, to whom he was unbeatable. Being praised all the time, started to grow prideful, and coasted through training. He dated the princess, and his passion focused on her and an indulgent lifestyle. He soon resented the Captain for controlling him, and taking his childhood and quits the army that was boring him anyway. As such he wanted nothing to do with war. As he saw any interest he had as a result of indoctrination. He instead focuses on inventing, things that can make people's lives better. So when his brother askd him one day, to write a book on the citizen militia, he naturally refused. His brother goes away again for awhile. The MC married the princess.When his brother returned, he carried dire warnings to the king and queen that bandits have infiltrated every level of their society. He is warnings were met with denial. The MC accused him of being a bandit himself, and that this is the attempt to cause panic and chaos across society.The brother refused to have his mind read, so they force him, and discover the horrifying things he's done to rise up the bandit ranks to learn it. They know he heard it from Mar Asheron the bandit chief, but they still don't know if it's true or not. Even if it was, the solution to completely untangling society would be just as dire. So they locked him in a dungeon, never to be released. Life went on, and the MC had a baby boy with the princess. One day, reports of murders across the city start happening. The MC checked on the royal family and they were all murdered. Their mutilated bodies paraded and taken for the banners of Mar Asheron. Out of the blue, fathers killed wives, mothers killed children, cities burn and overnight society descended into anarchy. With the world he knew gone, my MC hanged himself. What followed was a brutal world with no laws and with only anarchists and nihlists remaining. With murder and rape in the streets. Their patron deity arrives. But seeing this, lives in solitude, in the wild. At last the great black dragon, conquered them all unopposed. This began the age of the divine game. Where the gods pit giant armies of people, drawn from across their universes, to fight, for amusement and to settle disputes. With trillions of lives fed into the meatgrinder everyday. So it was for eternity.
Same here. I don't write strongly gendered characters and I frequently change characters' genders mid-story, or never assign them a gender in the first place. I slip into the same stupid cliches a lot of people do when writing women, so I often to make everyone male for the first draft, then go through and change names and pronouns. I suppose it depends on what world you're in whether a change of gender makes any difference to the story. The worlds I write in, it doesn't matter at all.
Ow, if I make one of my MCs female I'd have a whole lot more kettle of fish to deal with - and I don't need that, definitely. Quite enough tension/arcs there as it is
They'd both be a stereotypical man and woman funnily enough. I wrote her as extremely tomboyish and him as effeminate to begin with. Mainly because I really wanted to play with gender roles.
In what way? Interesting that if the MC's brother was female, the same thing would happen as she'd be unable to rise the bandit ranks and trusted with all their plans. And it's doubtful that she'd leave a life of a wealthy regent to go and sleep rough and stay with a bunch of abusive murderers who treat girls like slaves.
I did this a long time ago actually, and found out just how gendered my women were... It was positively hilarious to see my male MC duck his head and blush while fiddling with the hem of his dress On the other hand, my male MCs were all right really, and sounded all right too when switched to being female.
It's an interesting question but it's one I find hard to answer as someone who writes primarily female MCs. I think part of the reason that I as a male writer tend to prefer writing female protagonists is that dynamics of society tend to provide an extra layer of difficulties with which to confront a character that wouldn't be there if the character was male. So in that sense it's a cheat to give the character a steeper hill to climb - the old saw is that "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except she did it backwards and in heels." From a writing perspective, especially genres where the character in real danger, I tend to make them female precisely because it forces them to do everything backwards and in heels, which means more tension (it also tends to take brute force off the table as as problem-solving option in a lot of cases, and I personally think brute force makes stories less interesting). If I flip that and try to think of male versions, I have a lot of difficulty seeing them as being quite as motivated, because in a lot of cases they have motivations that are tied to gender at some level. The only one I can kind of see it working for is "Maha", the MC from my current NaNoWriMo WIP. She has so much resentment and hostility toward her parents that even a male version of her would have enough anger to propel him forward into crazy plot territory (although he'd probably be a lot more depressive and emo than Maha, who's kind of this take-no-crap-from-anyone heavy metal fan).
