Geeking about my own writing, and gender

[auronlu]

I was pondering gender, stereotypes, and my own tendency to get swept along by them, despite four years at Bryn Mawr. My fascination with Auron/Lulu has always puzzled me. Is it just that they're "hot" characters? Did Square-Enix push all the right buttons with Auron's tragic hero hunkitude, and Lulu's cynical Goth boobitude? Why on earth do I keep writing about them? (And "what's with all the het?!" but that's a whole other TMI can of worms.)



Things I've noticed about Love Her and Despair which I've been writing for a year and a half now (!)...

-- Summoner and guardians were ALL MEN until Elma crashed the party. Somewhat unavoidable, since I was trying to stick with canonical characters. So I had a choice between Dona (whom I can't write) or Isaaru (whom I wanted to "rescue" from the travesty that X-2 did to him). Isaaru comes with brothers.

-- A number of strong women, more of them in leadership roles than in a typical Final Fantasy game: Maester Lucil, Lulu, Rikku, Captain Kiyuri (who's disappeared from the story, ack).

-- But still, a lot of women in secondary/supporting roles: Elma, Shelinda (a maester, but not a mover and shaker), Paine. Oh yeah, and Rikku's daughter. Too young to do much, but important in the way that Marlene is important for FFVII.

-- Several female characters are strongly connected to nature, the body, healing, death, living things. On the whole they seem to be earthy, grounded, physical personalities, apart from Lulu who's more sky-oriented (weather, the elements).

Lulu acts as Kali, an angel of vengeance on behalf of Yuna and all of Yevon's victims, but sometimes destroying innocents as she tries to "revolutionize the world" (Utena reference). Mother goddess, death goddess, Morrigan and Valkyrie and Siren. Very slippery stuff here, ranging from blatant sex objectification to the most diligent Sin that Spira has known, meting out punishment on the church for its lies.

I'm reminded slightly of Anthy, trapped goddess in Utena. I hadn't noticed the connection with both of them maintaining wildly prolific gardens (with odd roses) as a form of mute self-expression.

My Rikku's another earth-woman: now a mother, raising a garden and a family and carving out a life for herself and her loved ones. Again, the female characters seem to have a lot of connections with body and earth and healing, although Rikku:life::Lulu:death. She also tends to cut through BS, especially Auron's.

Elma barged into the story without my intending it. Also very body-oriented. She's got a sword somewhere, but she seems to be punching things (or people) a lot, and/or getting up close and physical when there's work to be done. Another kill-the-BS character.

The guys?
They're all about tactics and plotting and planning and guns. Lots of guns, weapons, politics, keeping secrets, fighting with each other, and mistrust. They have little connection to place, physical things; a lot more emphasis on what's going on in their heads.

It's not quite that simple -- Rikku has her grenades as distance weapons, Auron's all about physical combat, and (I hope) I presented Lucil as a military tactician, ESTJ Meyers-Briggs.

I feel a little less glum after thinking this through: maybe I haven't completely fallen into Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a thousand penises" quest. (Come to think of it, the closest thing I've had to a "damsel in distress" so far is Cid.)

There's such a fine line between evocative, mythic archetypes and superficial stereotypes. FFX -- and my own writing -- are rife with both.
 

Comments

[paperclipchains.livejournal.com]

Oh, I thought it was another actual book that was just riffing off of Hero With 1000 faces. I do know what you're talking about, then.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who disagrees with some of it, though. It's interesting that everybody has a similar structure but I do think it's kind of cheating to say "Some of these characters will always be there except for when they are" and to make the princess the "sought-after-person." Macguffin works just as good!

Pffft, don't compare Lulu's design to LeBlanc and Dona. Just because they're all busty ladies doesn't mean they're all on par as far as design is concerned! And that's an interesting way of looking at it, but I can see how it would be supported even by in-game text, since Lulu is always filling you in on Spira's more esoteric information.

Why Persephone?
Her myth is kind of romantic (I don't mean in a "love" sense) and I quite like pomegranates but I'm far too ambivalent about her/it to ever incorporate it into anything.

Eh, it's never too late to change what you don't like!

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, Persephone!

My sense of Persephone is strongly grounded in a sense of her as a chthonic goddess, one who reins over mysteries like her mother. She was a powerful, hidden presence beneath my feet when I walked the broken pavement of Eleusis (http://www.squidoo.com/odyssey3) with red poppies and barley growing up through the bones of old temples. Definitely Persephone's virgin sacrifice/passive victim idea doesn't fit Lulu at all, but in Roman mythology one sometimes gets of Queen Persephone, an aloof yet powerful presence equal to Hades in the underworld. I also think of the Etruscan death-goddess-angel Vanth (http://www.thaliatook.com/OGOD/vanth.html), depicted as a powerful, detached winged woman who stands over the dead and dying and guides them to the next world.

This is all skittering very far from FFX canon, but I have a mythology degree, and the thing about FFX that caught me was the whiff of mythology.

But one has to be careful to let mythology breathe, and not strap it too tightly into patterns/archetypes/analysis. It resists explanation, like dreams.

And Lulu's National Geographic Explorer facet amused me.