On the problems of exclusionary definitions of masculinity.

liv was talking earnestly about how while the idea of International Men's Day may have started as a joke, there are very real and systematic problems that come along with growing up as (or assigned as, or perceived as) a man. That if you re-orient the way you think about the bullying and problems that men suffer as boys, you realize there's a huge sex and sexuality component to it. liv was reminded about a post about men and being the survivors of sexual assault, which points out that while men may not suffer what is commonly thought of as sexual assault, i.e. penetration by someone else, all that often, much of the schoolyard taunts and the way that boys and men are supposed to relate to each other would entirely qualify as sexual assault if it was a man doing those things to a woman. liv takes that idea and follows it where it will go, and notes the difficulty for anyone to have to navigate a space that is fundamentally uninterested in the things that do genuinely happen to men in favor of much the same sort of posturing and macho that would not be out of place on the same schoolyard. How do you make space for victims and push back against the toxicity in relationships involving men without giving voice or legitimacy to the kinds of people who would appear to be inviting and then turn out to be more of the same, doing it for the lulz? There probably isn't a single answer, but there might be some general strategies that could be applied.

There's a big ball of feels tangled up in definitions of masculinity, the toxic corrosiveness of what's portrayed as masculine, especially in conservative and religiously conservative circles, being adjacent and friends to people who were finding their way through life as gay men, having friends where we might take the piss on toxic masculinity by role-playing it to absurdism in each other's company, meaning nothing serious about it at all, the ways that privilege accumulates to the masculine and how feeling that's unfair, and so being a conscientious objector to privileged masculinity, the ways in which the singular they fits better for me than the masculine he ever did, whether or not I'm really a role model for children in the work that I do, just by being a person of my presentation doing the things that I do, feeling more than a bit flame-spitty at basically being cut off from getting to talk about things I enjoy with others because the outsized toxic group have sucked all the oxygen out of the discussion space, looking at spaces that say and back up the idea that everyone is welcome, regardless of how they approach the subject, and yet feeling out of place because the role I identify most with in that space isn't the most common role taken on be people who present the same way I do, complicated feelings with regard to financial security and being a provider, and a certain amount of "if I'm not on the front lines fighting all the time, am I really doing anything that's important?", which is a worldview that's very bound up in specific ideas about what masculine activism looks like, and how one measures value and worth and progress. They're not disentangling very well, as this is the fourth attempt at finding my way through the whole thing, and this one at least feels like it's gone somewhere that I can be satisfied with. By not being specific about the details, of course.

Which is to say, I suppose, that wherever I heard the idea that toxic masculinity, The Game, "family values" and other "traditional" beliefs, and other things of its like are popular because they define the space enough with rules and outcomes and expected results such that a person doesn't feel unmoored in the wide world of possibility, I think they have at least a grain of truth about the whole thing. It's easier to adopt another person's system and try to play by those rules than to go out with your compass, some sketching pencils, and a blank sheet of parchment and try to draw your own map well enough that if someone else decides to come along, they know the way to get to you. And to loop that back to the original posts that started this train of thought, one of the hallmarks of the toxic end of the spectrum of masculinity is that it has a vested interest in controlling the sexuality of both women and men by whatever means it thinks is best and necessary.

If men and boys aren't conforming to the definition of men set before them, then they might demonstrate to others that there are multiple ways of doing masculinity successfully. Valid options breaks the control that the toxic mindset desires, and so escalating amounts of pressure get applied to someone who looks like they might be exploring their options. There's also a part where men are socialized not to have friends they can lean on for and provide emotional support to, because one of those things that happens when you really talk to each other is that you realize everyone is doing things differently, and existing outside the rules in their own ways. Having caring adult role models is a thing that makes it easier to be stable in who you are, rather than chasing a ruleset that deliberately stacks the deck against you and demands a public performativity and conformity that, well, gets along a little too well in compulsory education in the States, shall we say.

Because the entirety of that toolbox is predicated on the idea that they have the definition of masculinity and that anything that doesn't match that definition can't possibly be strong or appropriate. It's exclusionary space rather than inclusionary space - a definition of what is by knowing what isn't. Which allows it to be an ever-shifting definition suitable for making sure nobody canb stand on it, or strive against it, because it asserts nothing about itself that can be pinned down. "Men are strong," it says, but how does it define that strength? By what it isn't. "That's for girls," or. more usually, "that's gay." Except for the part where there's a strong strain of gay subculture that's about emphasising the macho attributes.

A friend of mine from early on in life used to take the piss on that particular phrase by pointing out that if a person who watches male-gaze films (up to and including pornographic ones) is exceedingly concerned with the appearance and attractiveness of the person who's supposed to be the audience surrogate as a proper (toxically) manly man, then they're at least a little bit interested in the sex appeal and sexual attractiveness of that man. And if thinking about the sexual appeal of man makes you gay, then all of those people who want to make sure their power fantasies are represented properly are at least a little bit gay. Although nowadays, I'd rephrase that to be "at least a little bit bi," because we have a perfectly cromulent word for people who are attracted to more than one gender of person, and because saying it as "a little bit gay" reinforces the false idea that one can only be either straight or gay, and more toxically, that there's one set of attraction that's acceptable and one that's taboo. Because deploying that particular take, while it might be useful in getting someone who's bought into toxicity to think about the ideas they're espousing, what it's much more likely to do is make them defensive, because they're doing all they can at that moment to be properly exclusionary based on what their chosen style of toxicity demands, and doing it performatively enough that anyone else who notices what's going on will not target them for perceived weakness.

I suspect it's a given for most of my reading audience, and they have seen more than enough examples of how the toxic parts have fundamental insecurities behind them, and how they take blame for how things are and shift it, either to the individual for not living up to the impossible standards, or to a different space entirely for not participating and conforming to their demands. It's difficult for someone to say "This is impossible, and it qualifies for the definition of neither sane nor rational to boot," when there are enough people around who appear to have succeeded by following this ruleset, at least on the outside. And there's more than enough media and advertising available for someone to see that reinforces this idea that you can be successful at masculinity by following this ruleset.

It's like multi-level marketing, though - the people who appear to be succeeding at the top have done so essentially by recruiting others into their particular approach and then skimming off of their successes and encouraging others to do the same. When you're not having their successes, there's a strong temptation to adopt their methods and see if that makes things go better, even if those methods in question are spawned in settings where television and movie writers have already scripted out what happens and know that if they're going to get people to sit and watch, they have to have their everyman get what he's pursuing. Or the status quo has to reassert itself for the next episode. We could use a lot more media that is about people who grow and change toward the idea of becoming the person they are. They can have false starts and changes and experiences that happen to them that very strongly change their opinions of themselves and that require a long amount of searching to find themselves again, or accept what's changed, or to abandon the thing that they've been using all of this time and make themselves into something new, and to show what kind of pushback that gets and the difficulties of adjustment, and sometimes finding a group that accepts the new person that they wouldn't have otherwise thought about. Especially in the pressure cooker that is secondary school, where people coming into themselves and trying to figure out who they are before they graduate is one of the tropes in the toolbox.

Because that might start people taking seriously all of the damaging, gendered, toxic commentary that's often seen as the background of what growing up presenting as a man is about, instead of only paying attention to it when it is well past the break point for a person on the receiving end of it and they do something irreversible. Or when someone is brave enough to say or try on something that might fit better for them than cis-straight-man. These ideas and their focuses are almost always on the person who is on the receiving end of the treatment - they focus on the difference point, which is what makes it easy for the toxic crowd to say "they're part of what we aren't, and because they're failing to live up to our definition of them, what we're doing is entirely justified." Not enough people are asking whether the lens we're looking at them through is flawed, or is paying attention enough to the systems that have been built that privilege conformity to toxic mindsets over authenticity. There isn't enough space for people to publicly be something that is different and for that difference to just be.

I'm not sure I have solutions, either, but I think one of the places where a lot of work can be done is in the space where masculinity gets to take on all the forms that it possibly can, and the ones that aren't actively harmful to others get to stay and coexist with each other. Ideally, perhaps, in the human maturation parts of health classes, or just regularly throughout secondary schooling, there's a panel discussion about masc, femme, and all the other ways to present. In small groups, with no exemptions or parental abilities to pull a student because they might be exposed to an idea that the parent doesn't like. I may still be a lot miffed about the fact that those exemptions exist and are sending children unprepared into the world.

December Days 2018 #9: How Do I Write a Character in a New Setting?

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

In the last post, I talked about seeing characters as collections of tropes put together. This can seem a bit reductive, as characters are more than their tropes, and the interactions between tropes and other characters is often equally as important to building a character that the audience knows, loves, and is unique enough to be distinguished among the cast.

Here's the thing, though. A large amount of fanwork, as we pointed out earlier, is based in speculative questions. "What if the hero did fall to the forces of evil?" "What would it have been like if i was the Hero's female best friend were the real hero?" "What would happen if [x] and [y] [fought/banged/seduced/allied/teamed up?" (That last one has a lot of canon answers if you're looking at the shared universes of comics and graphic novel productions, depending on the needs of the overarching mythological arc.) Several works will stay within their source's universe, but engage in a few small changes to the story as we know it to produce the desired characters they want to work with. Or rearrange the tropes and identities of the characters and work from there. "What if" stories are a lot of fun to write and read, and one of the things that ties them together is someone taking the time to think through what the ramifications of those changes would be. If the setting and the author are interested in that, anyway -- there's plenty of perfectly good "Plot? What Plot?" material out there and others that take either the MST3K Mantra or Bellisario's Maxim as their guiding principles (along with several of the various Rules of [Z] tropes, where things are handwaved away as to whether or not they work because it looks cool/it's funny/etc.). There's no need to have to plot out justifications for everything being the way it is and writing a voluminous backstory for your work if you don't want to (and sometimes that can be a trap to avoid actually writing the thing). You certainly can, if that helps, and the longer a work goes on, the more likely it is to accumulate a certain amount of this just to make sure that it holds together against itself, but it's not necessary. As I told that small who had done all of that work, it's lovely, it's wonderful, and now it needs to be put to service in writing the actual story/ies that are going to come from all of that research.

Some of the "what if" stories, though, are the ones that bring together characters from different universes together, through any sort of manner, and have them interact. Comics properties are rife with these crossovers, which are fairly easy to do when all of the characters are housed under one company's aegis. (Which, incidentally, has been why the Marvel Cinematic Universe has operated the way it has - Spider-Man was sold to Sony some time ago, so Peter Parker's appearance in an MCU film had to be negotiated. Similarly, a certain amount of the X-Men were owned by 20th Century Fox, and so they weren't around, either (and Deadpool makes fun of this in his own fourth-wall-breaking sort of way) without extensive negotiations between the two studios about appearances, compensation, and the like.) Crossover issues and series are pretty easy to do, and work as a way of cross-promotion of the titles involved, in an attempt to get people interested in one character's books to start reading another character's books and spend more money that way. It doesn't always work, and crossovers and their respective multiveresal events sometimes provoke a backlash from the fans who want their stories to stay self-contained in one book so they don't have to go buy a run of six other titles just to get everything that happens in this plot arc. (The trade paperback compilations, if a story makes it to them, help mitigate this issue, but that also means having to wait to see that arc through.)

Fanworks take it one step further, though, and more than happily run crossovers between completely separate properties that would be pretty nightmarish for rights negotitations if they were even to come into existence as an "official" anything. Steven Universe characters in the RWBY setting? No problem. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder investigating a strange event with the assistance of Olivia Dunham and the Fringe division? Sure. Harry Potter taking a trip to the Disc and meeting DEATH and his granddaughter? Sounds fun. And it's not just two franchises put to work - some settings work equally well for massive multi-franchise crossovers, like the Triwizard Tournament, the Vytal Festival, or any other setting where visitors could be equally from around the block as around the galaxy. (Super Smash Brothers, the video game, is essentially this - "What happens when we get the characters from first-party Nintendo titles, along with selected guests from other studios, together in an all-out fighting game whose plot is essentially 'a small child is playing with their dolls and imagining what this setting would be like.'?" All sorts of characters could drop into and out of the Smash universe, and the characters inside wouldn't bat an eye.)

Crossovers work on the idea of putting an established character(s) into a new setting and seeing how they work with an environment that may be radically different than their own. This is where having your trope characterization can come in handy. Some characters are more likely to charge off into the wilderness, others are going to make assumptions about the new space (that often turn out to be very wrong, and sometimes injuriously so), and some will want to get out of here as soon as possible. Some are talkers, some are fighters, and some are going to seem like they don't understand at all, except it turns out they have the best handle on the new setting out of all of the characters, because they've been patiently observing the whole time and building a model in their own heads about what's going on. Selecting which tropes apply to those characters helps them get integrated into the new setting in believable ways.

There's a special crossover set that deserves its own bit of attention. The fusion crossover idea (usually just mentioned as a fusion) doesn't pluck characters from their original space and drop them in a new one. Instead, it casts the characters from Universe A into the various roles of Universe B, creating an amalgam (fusion!) of character traits that may be applicable to the composite character created. For example, if you wanted to fuse Steven Universe and Harry Potter, you might assign Steven the role of Harry, since they're both kids with magical powers and destinies that haven't had the training on how to use them until much later on in life, as well as (at least one) absent parents and being raised by others. The trick to a fusion crossover, though, is that the characters from Universe A still have to remain recognizably themselves, even as they take on the characters of Universe B. A friend of mine said "Peridot is the Draco Malfoy of Steven Universe," which is to say they share certain characteristics, but Peridot has to remain Peridot -- brash, hotheaded, and usually clueless about the social impact of her words -- while also being Draco, who is much more concerned about class status and who doesn't generally get personally engaged in something if he doesn't have to. The two of them both like to think of themselves as the smartest in the room, or at least the most powerful, despite it not being anywhere close to true at all, so Peridot!Draco might play up that trait and their shared swiftness to resort to insults as the way of expressing distate with someone. There are still some decisions that have to be made, though - does Peridot's hotheaded nature come through as a way of making her recognizable? How does living in Draco's circumstances, where there's power and money and henchmen available, change Peridot, who generally has had to rely on the threat of power from Gems stronger than her, or mechanical advantages, to get what she wants? This is another of those times where figuring out the tropes of your characters can sometimes help in crafting them in a new setting. Making a decision about which tropes are primary and which are secondary (or nonexistent) can help build the framework of a composite character, or give some ideas on how a character might react if dumped into a world where everything they know is wrong and they have to quickly rebuild their view of the world.

One of the things that's been really helpful to me when it comes to thinking about characterization, and especially on how to approach characterization in new settings, is the idea of Three-Point Characterization. Any given character in any given medium has a multitude of mannerisms, tropes, and concepts attached to them. Generally speaking, though, there are some of them that come through more strongly than others to the viewer/reader. The creator may have some in mind, but once a thing gets out into the wild, the viewer/reader contributes as much, if not more, to how they understand the character and what parts of that character are the most important bits. Three-Point Characterization suggests that people have at most three parts of a character that they consider absolutely core to that character, and that if a creator touches on all of the points that the reader considers to be part of a character, then the character reads correctly. If there's a mismatch between the creator and the reader, then something feels off about the character, which can be anything from "this doesn't feel right" to "oh great gods of Fandom, smite this foole who has taken my character and destroyed them."

How does this help when writing new settings for characters, or engaging in crossovers, fusions, and other works of transplantation? Well, if there are really only three points of core characterization, that makes the rest of it mutable in at least one way or another, right? So long as the truly unchangeable bits stay together, it's still that character, yeah?

How do you put Peridot in Draco's role? Figure out what makes Peridot Peridot to you, preserve those elements. Figure out what makes Draco Draco to you, preserve those elements as well, toss them in the blender and sort out any contradictions. It sounds easy, but that's the essence of pulling off the successful fusion. Or crossover, for that matter, because you can keep the core elements of the character intact, and use them to inform how they react to the new setting, while making them capable of growing and learning and changing to the environment around them as needed. And yes, tropes are shorthand, but they're still effective shorthand for when you want to keep an idea in your head without having to keep all of the detailed bits together. You can set your character as "Trope [Z], but not [A] or [K]", or "Trope [J], but really heavy emphasis on the [Q]" and go from there in helping keep them intact when blending them.

At least, that's how I do it. Your mileage may vary, and it'll bet you have some neat ways of doing these things that I haven't even considered. Let's have a conversation about it.