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So, I finally figured out that the problem I'm having with chapter 18 of "Rheotaxis" has to do with figuring out what the High Lord looks like. It's trivial. It has no importance to the plot. He's only going to be around for this chapter and maybe one or two more.
I've been thinking about his appearance for a while. I haven't done much with it because none of the previous point of view characters would notice it. Ken and Nagi already knew what the High Lord looked like, so they didn't really notice anything. Ken was also interested in whether or not the High Lord could fight while wearing his current clothes. Yohji was simply too traumatized to process what the High Lord looked like.
Chapter 18, however, is from Ran's point of view. Nobody's shown him a picture of the High Lord. He doesn't have an agenda or any reason to focus on anything else. He's going to pay attention to what the High Lord looks like and is going to offer a perfect opportunity for description.
Before I started thinking about it, back before the High Lord ever showed up in the story, I knew that he moved like the Seventh Doctor. He doesn't *look* like Sylvester McCoy, not in the least, but that was the closest I could come and was when I realized how much my 'looks like' means 'moves like.'
When I started thinking about what the High Lord looked like, I considered making him dark skinned. I was kind of amused by the thought-- way outside of the scope of the story--of the reaction by a lot of North American whites to having the world suddenly ruled by a person they'd consider black.
I've been able to avoid making the decision so far. Neither Ken nor Yohji would be likely to think of international implications of visible racial indicators or be particularly aware of what those indicators are in cultures other than their own. They're not politically aware either. Crawford is, but I've not written from his point of view. Omi would be, but he's not seen the High Lord. Nagi would be kind of vaguely aware, but he leaves thinking about that sort of thing to Crawford. He'll outgrow doing that, but he hasn't yet.
But the High Lord is an alien. (There's a whole side topic about the human looking aliens in the Rheotaxis universe. I'm thinking that there's speculation within the Taisken scientific community that their gates often cross from universe to universe rather than from point to point within one universe. They find the same species on multiple worlds, multiple unconnected worlds.) I don't want to other black people by making the only person in the story with that color skin an alien.
The situation with the High Lord is complicated by the fact that, while I'm not making him an out and out bad guy, he's also not a good guy. He's a dictator, a fairly absolute one (mitigated by his empire being too big for him to oversee in great detail), who plans to conquer our planet. He's at least theoretically immortal and is centuries old (possibly millennia old). A lot of people from Earth would consider him a barbarian every bit as much as he would consider them so. Do I really want my one specifically black character to be in that spot? But I don't know that I want to have no black characters, particularly not by the icky default of not saying anything about character appearance.
(Am I the only person who wants to talk about the minor characters in a fic as 'NPCs'? I know that there are a lot of writers who don't come from a role playing background, so I think that many people must not do it. I just tend to be clear in my head about who the Player Characters are and who the Non-Player Characters are. Schuldig and Aya-chan are borderline cases. I don't think they're quite player characters, but they each got sections written from their points of view, so they could be. All of the OCs here, including the High Lord, are npcs. Crawford's an npc.)
I'm not sure, too, that it would be innocuous to make him look either white or Japanese. Both of those would be easy defaults that would fit with the canon and that the characters wouldn't find remarkable. Canon contains both Japanese and white characters (one from Germany, one from the U.S. and one from Ireland). Everybody else in the fic is an original character *and* not from Earth. The human looking people come from several different planets (so do the non-human looking people, but they're not relevant to this discussion). They should look different from each other in a wide variety of ways. Not that I've described any of them before now. I tend not to write visual description and not to notice when it's missing from what I read.
::bangs head:: This is trivial for the story, but it's stopped me dead for months. I don't want to add more weight to othering, to making characters of color barbarians, aliens, scary, etc. I also don't want to omit them. Neither is a good thing. Not saying anything simply lets readers make their own assumptions, but for most of my readers, that's going to default to white. If I keep not describing people, I accept that default-- Not choosing is still a choice.
If I were writing original fiction, the obvious solution would be to diversify the rest of the cast, but I can't recast the canon so that the characters vary more. I've got nine characters from canon (ten if one counts Ouka, but she doesn't have a body, so...). Six are Japanese. Three are white. Well, two who've appeared. Farfarello's not made an appearance and probably won't unless I can figure out his character well enough to write him.
I've had five or six spear carriers who're presumably human looking because nobody's mentioned that they're not. I didn't describe any of them beyond labeling them as male or female. Only two got names. I've had one non-human alien and plan one more. I may introduce more characters because they'll matter to Ken's plotline, but I'm also trying to think of ways to work around them, to minimize how much they're there, because Ken's plotline shouldn't become too important. I'm writing about Yohji surviving as best he can and about Nagi growing up. Ken, Omi, Ouka, Ran and Aya-chan all have story threads that support Yohji and Nagi's story and that will affect the outcome, but they're less important to the story. They matter to the fate of the Earth, but I'm not writing about the fate of the Earth except that it affects Nagi and Yohji.
Bah. This is a stupid thing to freeze a story over. It matters to me, but it doesn't matter to the story.
Sorry this thing is so rambling and incoherent. Rheotaxis is a big fic, and there's a lot going on. Once I start talking about it, pieces spin off in unexpected directions. Please don't discuss this entry off this filter.
(I will note that Barack Obama's candidacy also affects my feelings on this, complicating them. I'm not completely clear *how* it does, but it does.)
I've been thinking about his appearance for a while. I haven't done much with it because none of the previous point of view characters would notice it. Ken and Nagi already knew what the High Lord looked like, so they didn't really notice anything. Ken was also interested in whether or not the High Lord could fight while wearing his current clothes. Yohji was simply too traumatized to process what the High Lord looked like.
Chapter 18, however, is from Ran's point of view. Nobody's shown him a picture of the High Lord. He doesn't have an agenda or any reason to focus on anything else. He's going to pay attention to what the High Lord looks like and is going to offer a perfect opportunity for description.
Before I started thinking about it, back before the High Lord ever showed up in the story, I knew that he moved like the Seventh Doctor. He doesn't *look* like Sylvester McCoy, not in the least, but that was the closest I could come and was when I realized how much my 'looks like' means 'moves like.'
When I started thinking about what the High Lord looked like, I considered making him dark skinned. I was kind of amused by the thought-- way outside of the scope of the story--of the reaction by a lot of North American whites to having the world suddenly ruled by a person they'd consider black.
I've been able to avoid making the decision so far. Neither Ken nor Yohji would be likely to think of international implications of visible racial indicators or be particularly aware of what those indicators are in cultures other than their own. They're not politically aware either. Crawford is, but I've not written from his point of view. Omi would be, but he's not seen the High Lord. Nagi would be kind of vaguely aware, but he leaves thinking about that sort of thing to Crawford. He'll outgrow doing that, but he hasn't yet.
But the High Lord is an alien. (There's a whole side topic about the human looking aliens in the Rheotaxis universe. I'm thinking that there's speculation within the Taisken scientific community that their gates often cross from universe to universe rather than from point to point within one universe. They find the same species on multiple worlds, multiple unconnected worlds.) I don't want to other black people by making the only person in the story with that color skin an alien.
The situation with the High Lord is complicated by the fact that, while I'm not making him an out and out bad guy, he's also not a good guy. He's a dictator, a fairly absolute one (mitigated by his empire being too big for him to oversee in great detail), who plans to conquer our planet. He's at least theoretically immortal and is centuries old (possibly millennia old). A lot of people from Earth would consider him a barbarian every bit as much as he would consider them so. Do I really want my one specifically black character to be in that spot? But I don't know that I want to have no black characters, particularly not by the icky default of not saying anything about character appearance.
(Am I the only person who wants to talk about the minor characters in a fic as 'NPCs'? I know that there are a lot of writers who don't come from a role playing background, so I think that many people must not do it. I just tend to be clear in my head about who the Player Characters are and who the Non-Player Characters are. Schuldig and Aya-chan are borderline cases. I don't think they're quite player characters, but they each got sections written from their points of view, so they could be. All of the OCs here, including the High Lord, are npcs. Crawford's an npc.)
I'm not sure, too, that it would be innocuous to make him look either white or Japanese. Both of those would be easy defaults that would fit with the canon and that the characters wouldn't find remarkable. Canon contains both Japanese and white characters (one from Germany, one from the U.S. and one from Ireland). Everybody else in the fic is an original character *and* not from Earth. The human looking people come from several different planets (so do the non-human looking people, but they're not relevant to this discussion). They should look different from each other in a wide variety of ways. Not that I've described any of them before now. I tend not to write visual description and not to notice when it's missing from what I read.
::bangs head:: This is trivial for the story, but it's stopped me dead for months. I don't want to add more weight to othering, to making characters of color barbarians, aliens, scary, etc. I also don't want to omit them. Neither is a good thing. Not saying anything simply lets readers make their own assumptions, but for most of my readers, that's going to default to white. If I keep not describing people, I accept that default-- Not choosing is still a choice.
If I were writing original fiction, the obvious solution would be to diversify the rest of the cast, but I can't recast the canon so that the characters vary more. I've got nine characters from canon (ten if one counts Ouka, but she doesn't have a body, so...). Six are Japanese. Three are white. Well, two who've appeared. Farfarello's not made an appearance and probably won't unless I can figure out his character well enough to write him.
I've had five or six spear carriers who're presumably human looking because nobody's mentioned that they're not. I didn't describe any of them beyond labeling them as male or female. Only two got names. I've had one non-human alien and plan one more. I may introduce more characters because they'll matter to Ken's plotline, but I'm also trying to think of ways to work around them, to minimize how much they're there, because Ken's plotline shouldn't become too important. I'm writing about Yohji surviving as best he can and about Nagi growing up. Ken, Omi, Ouka, Ran and Aya-chan all have story threads that support Yohji and Nagi's story and that will affect the outcome, but they're less important to the story. They matter to the fate of the Earth, but I'm not writing about the fate of the Earth except that it affects Nagi and Yohji.
Bah. This is a stupid thing to freeze a story over. It matters to me, but it doesn't matter to the story.
Sorry this thing is so rambling and incoherent. Rheotaxis is a big fic, and there's a lot going on. Once I start talking about it, pieces spin off in unexpected directions. Please don't discuss this entry off this filter.
(I will note that Barack Obama's candidacy also affects my feelings on this, complicating them. I'm not completely clear *how* it does, but it does.)
