#anyway taking up the name of someone/something that is important to you is core transgender experience right

[eyewyrm]

noel and identity loss...

trying to articulate why it feels wrong to call him charlie, because thats still him but at the same time not.

he's changed and things cant go back to the way they were, noel took up a new name one to remember but also to move on

i don't think noel is a fake name to him more so just a new identity he's taken up as an extension of himself. or at least someone he's rebuilt himself as after the dreamlands. i don't think he's discarded charlie as an identity but that he just has two names that are both very real to him, however just one of them is more in the forefront than the other so he'd be unused to his old name being used.

but i also think that he'd feel extremely disconnected to his old life and name that it would be uncomfortable and feel wrong for him, might feel that his past is catching up to him or maybe he'd be afraid that if he stops using noels name he'd be abandoning him in some way

or just using the name as an escape from the king in yellow who likely would've called him by his original name

i recognise this is like probably nothing at all but it is rotating in my brain and i need to get it out, i love saying shit and being completely incoherent

[themollyjay]

The Myths of Forced Diversity and Virtue Signaling.

In my novel Mail Order Bride, the three main characters are a lesbian and two agendered aliens.  In my novel Scatter, the main character is a lesbian, the love interest is a pansexual alien, and the major side characters include a half Cuban, half black Dominican lesbian, a Chinese Dragon, a New York born Jewish Dragon, and a Transgender Welsh Dragon.  In my novel The Master of Puppets, the Main Characters are a lesbian shapeshifting reptilian alien cyborg and a half black, half Japanese lesbian.  The major side characters include three gender fluid shapeshifting reptilian alien cyborgs, and a pansexual human.  In my novel Transistor, the main character is a Trans Lesbian, the love interest is a Half human/Half Angel non-observant Ethiopian Jew, and the major side characters include a Transgender Welsh Dragon (the same one from Scatter), a Transgender woman, a Latino Lesbian, an autistic man, three Middle Eastern Arch Angels, and a hive mind AI with literally hundreds of genders.  In my novel The Inevitable singularity, one of the main characters is a lesbian, another has a less clearly defined sexuality but she is definitely in love with the lesbian, and the third is functionally asexual due to a vow of chastity she takes very seriously.  The major side characters include a straight guy from a social class similar to the Dalit (commonly known as untouchables) in India, a bisexual woman, a man who is from a race of genetically modified human/frog hybrids, and a woman from a race of genetically modified humans who are bred and sold as indentured sex workers.

Why am I bringing all of this up?  Well, first, because it’s kind of cool to look at the list of different characters I’ve created, but mostly because it connects to what I want to talk about today, which should be obvious from the title of the essay.  The concepts of ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’.

For those who aren’t familiar with these terms, they’re very closely related concepts.  ‘Forced Diversity’ is the idea that characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males are only ever included in a story because of outside pressure from some group (usually called Social Justice Warriors, or The Woke Brigade or something similar) to meet some nebulous political agenda.  The caveat to this is, of course, that you can have a women/women present as long as they are hot, don’t make any major contributions to the resolution of the plot, and the hero/heroes get to fuck them before the end of the story. ‘Virtue Signaling’, according to Wikipedia, is a pejorative neologism for the expression of a disingenuous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character.

The basic argument is that Forced Diversity is a form of virtue signaling.  That no one would ever write characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males because they want to.  They only do it to please the evil SJW’s who are somehow both so powerful that they force everybody to conform to their desires, yet so irrelevant that catering to them dooms any creative project to financial failure via the infamous ‘go woke, go broke’ rule.

What the people who push this idea of Forced Diversity tend to forget is that we exist at a point in time when creators actually have more creative freedom than are any other people in history.  Comic writers can throw up a website and publish their work as a webcomic without having to go through Marvel, DC or one of the other big names, or get a place in the dying realm of the news paper comics page.  Novelists can self-publish with fairly little upfront costs, musicians can use places like YouTube and Soundcloud to get their work out without having to worry about music publishers.  Artists can hock their work on twitter and tumblr and a dozen other places. Podcasts are relatively cheap to make, which has opened up a resurgence in audio dramas.  Even the barrier to entry for live action drama is ridiculously low.

So, in a world where creators have more freedom than ever before, why would they choose to people their stories with characters they don’t want there?  The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t.  Authors, comic creators, indie film creators and so on aren’t putting diverse characters into their stories because they are being forced to. They’re putting diverse characters into their stories because they want to.  Creators want to tell stories about someone other than the generically handsome hypermasculine cisgendered heterosexual white males that have been the protagonists of so many stories over the years that we’ve choking on it. A lot of times, creators want to tell stories about people like themselves.  Black creators want to tell stories about the black experience. Queer creators want to tell stories about the queer experience.

I’m an autistic, mentally ill trans feminine abuse survivor.  Every day, I get up and I struggle with PTSD, with an eating disorder, with severe body dysmorphia, with anxiety and depression and just the reality of being autistic and transgender.  I deal with the fact that the religious community I grew up in views me as an abomination, and genuinely believes I’m going to spend eternity burning in hell.  I deal with the fact that people I’ve known for decades, even members of my own family, regularly vote for politician who publicly state that they want to strip me of my civil rights because I’m queer.  I’m part of a community that experiences a disproportionately high murder and suicide rate.  I’ve spent multiple years of my life deep in suicidal depression, and to this day, I still don’t trust myself around guns.

As a creator, I want to talk about those issues.  I want to deal with my life experiences.  I want to create characters that embody and express aspects of my lived experience and my day-to-day reality.  No one is forcing me to put diversity into my books.  I try to include Jewish characters as often as I can because there have been a number of important Jewish people in my life.  I include queer people because I’m queer and the vast majority of friends I interact with on a regular basis are queer.  I include people with mental illnesses and trauma because I am mentally ill and have trauma, and I know a lot of people with mental illnesses and trauma.  My work may be full of fantastical elements, aliens and dragons and angels and superheroes and magic and ultra-high technology and AI’s and talking cats and robot dogs and shape shifters and telepaths and all sorts of other things, but at the core of the stories is my own lived experience, and neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males are vanishingly rare in that experience.

Now, I can hear the comments already.  The ‘okay, maybe that’s true for individual creators, but what about corporate artwork?’.   Maybe not in those exact words, but you get the idea.

The thought here is that corporations are bowing to social pressure to include characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males, and that is somehow bad. But here’s the thing. Corporations are going to chase the dollars.  They aren’t bowing to social pressure.  There’s no one holding a gun to some executive’s head saying, “You must have this many diversity tokens in every script.”  What is happening is that corporations are starting to clue into the fact that people who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males have money.  They are putting black characters in their shows and movies because black people watch shows and spend money on movies.  They are putting queer people in shows and movies because queer people watch shows and spend money on movies.  They are putting women in shows and movies because women watch shows and spend money on movies.

No one is forcing these companies to do this.  They are choosing to do it, the same way individual creators are choosing to do it.  In the companies’ cases the choices are made for different reasons.  It’s not because they are necessarily passionate about telling stories about a particular experience, but because they want to create art to be consumed by the largest audience possible, which means that they have to expand their audience beyond the neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white male by including characters from outside of that demographic.

And the reality is, the cries of ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ almost always come from within that demographic.  Note the almost.  There are a scattering of individuals from outside that demographic which do subscribe to the ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ myths, but that is a whole other essay.  However, within that demographic, lot of the people who cry about ‘forced diversity’ see media and content as a Zero-Sum game.  The more that’s created for other people, the less that is created for them.

In a way, they’re right. There are only so many slots for TV shows each week, there are only so many theaters, only so much space on comic bookshelves and so on.  But at the end of the day, its literally impossible for them to consume all the content that’s being produced anyway.  So, while there is, theoretically less content for them to consume, as a practical matter it’s a bit like someone who is a meat eater going to a buffet with two hundred items, and then throwing a tantrum because five of the items happen to be vegan.

The worst part is, if they could let go of how wound up they are about the ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ they could probably enjoy the content that’s produced for people other than them.  I mean, I’m a pasty ass white girl, and I loved Black Panther.

So, to wrap out, creators, make what you want to make, and ignore anyone who cries about forced diversity or virtue signaling.  And to people who are complaining about forced diversity and virtue signaling, I want to go back to the buffet metaphor.  You need to relax.  Even if there are a few vegan options on the buffet, you can still get your medium rare steak, or your chicken teriyaki or whatever it is you want.  Or, maybe, just maybe, you could give the falafel a try. That shit is delicious.

[weather-witch]

Maybe we could find common ground if you knew what we stood for.

It has been a while since I was sufficiently frustrated to sit down and write a bit by bit response to a piece of writing, but here I am baffled at how utterly misunderstood our position as gender critical feminists is. However, it is not my frustration nor my bewilderment that has me writing this tonight after sitting in Auckland traffic for over an hour. Nope. It is a pathetic skerrick of hope I have that if people who have expressed so much hate for us can be so fundamentally wrong about what we stand for then perhaps if they learnt the truth we could find just a little bit of middle ground.

Gotta love a trier, right?

The piece is What is ‘Gender Critical’ anyway? On essentialism and transphobia by Danielle Moreau — hopefully I can help her find out.

Transphobes are having a moment in Aotearoa. Attempts to pass a bill allowing transgender people to change the sex on their birth certificates without having to go through the courts have been met by vigorous opposition from a small but well-organised group of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) or — as they would rather be called — ‘gender critical feminists’. These activists, who probably number in the dozens rather than thousands, have been joined on social media and petition websites by a large contingent of overseas allies, most notably from the UK. In the process, we have learned of the existence in that country of a trans-exclusionary subculture that has been radicalised by, of all places, the parenting forum Mumsnet.

First of all, thank you. Our campaign to halt the BDMRR Bill and sex self-identification was hard work and I appreciate that you could see how well organised it was. However, the persistent myth that we are two ‘TERFs’ in a trenchcoat is as ever totally inaccurate. Likewise, the conspiracy theory of an army of Mumsnet poms wielding cups of tea and scary opinions is laughable. We are in contact with gender critical feminists in the UK though…and Canada…the United States, Australia, France, South Korea, Portugal, Argentina, Nigeria, and more. There is an international community of gender critical feminists because we are all fighting a lot of the same battles. We support each other; commiserate, celebrate, and share resources. We are just like any other community.

It may be a good time, then, to examine what being ‘gender critical’ actually means.

At first blush, the phrase ‘gender critical feminist’ is essentially meaningless: all feminism is ‘gender critical’ by definition. The TERF label is at least partially descriptive, since exponents of this ideology are certainly trans-exclusionary, but it may be too generous to suggest that they are either radical or feminists. Feminism is a big tent, but it is hard to welcome into it a group so dedicated to returning us to the values of the Victorians.

Feminism is at its roots (that’s where the name Radical Feminism comes from by the way) gender critical. Past iterations of feminism were entirely gender critical, but there is little that can be said to be gender critical about third wave feminism. This is why gender critical feminists reject it. We prefer the radical analysis of our foremothers. Radical does not mean wild or extreme it simply refers to “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something”. It is about stripping everything back and analysing the nature of female oppression. For gender critical or radical feminists our “central tenet is that women as a biological class are globally oppressed by men as a biological class.”

What makes TERF ideology reactionary rather than radical is its dedication to binary gender essentialism. The concept of gender essentialism is practically timeless, and reaction to it is key to understanding why feminist theory exists in the first place. Gender essentialism is the idea that there is an innate, immutable ‘womanness’ or ‘manness’ which expresses itself in what we consider ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’. It posits, for example, that women as a group are naturally more caring and empathetic and men as a group are more aggressive and clever, and — crucially — that these gendered qualities exist inherently, without societal influence. Another key aspect of essentialism is that it is often, but not always, tied to bodies and ‘biology’. So, because a lot of women give birth, gender essentialism associates childcare with women because they are biologically ‘destined’ for it.

I’ll ignore the incorrect use of the word radical for the rest of this piece and move on to the extraordinary claim that we are dedicated to “gender essentialism.” Not only are gender critical feminists not gender essentialists, we are actually the complete opposite. In our CRITIQUE of gender we are more accurately described as gender ABOLITIONISTS. There is nothing immutable about gender. It is not innate. Rather, based on thousands of years of socialisation, survival, hierarchy, and oppression, gender is the set of stereotypes and roles that we as societies have imposed on the sexes. A more accurate moniker for gender critical feminists would be “sex essentialist”. That is because we believe that it is our biological sex and our biological sex alone that makes us women. It is not the gender stereotypes that we are socialised to associate with womanhood. It is not the “empathy” or outward expressions of femininity like how we dress or style our hair. Our POTENTIAL to become pregnant is a core part of our femaleness and it is central to a lot of the experiences women have in common. I say ‘potential’ because not all women want to or are able to get pregnant. However, it is society’s perception of us as potential ‘breeders’ that brings with it some of our most acute oppressions around bodily autonomy and biological functions.

I am going to take my refutation of the assertion that gender critical feminists are “gender essentialists” a step further. I contend that it is in fact proponents of gender identity ideology who are gender essentialist. After all, it is they who think gender is so innate that someone can be born in the wrong body. They conceptualise gender as a kind of soul that exists as separate from the biology of the person. Is it not terribly gender essentialist to suggest that a man who feels an innate sense of ‘womanness’ because he is (perhaps) empathetic, nurturing, gentle, sensitive, and presents femininely, must actually be a woman? Because no man could possibly possess those characteristics and present in that way? Rather than embrace the feminine man or the masculine women, gender identity ideology would have them switch place to ‘match’ their gender identity to the ‘appropriate’ sex.

Destined for it?

Feminism’s first wave, popularly associated with the suffragists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bought into gender essentialism in a big way. This wasn’t entirely their fault, for several reasons. They were heavily influenced by the dichotomous Victorian concept of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women — men in the world, women in the home — even if they tried to reject it in some limited ways. ‘HOUSEKEEPERS need the ballot to regulate the sanitary conditions under which they and their families must live… MOTHERS need the ballot to regulate the moral conditions under which their children must be brought up’, said the New York Woman Suffrage Association in 1915. The suffrage movement was more broadly linked to things like the temperance movement, and the temperance movement used essentialist ideas about women and their caring, empathetic natures in order to influence politics and get alcohol banned. (Alcohol was a huge issue for women mainly because they had so few other legal rights, and so drunk husbands could beat and rape them with no real recourse. We know now, unfortunately, that alcohol is not the thing doing the raping and beating.)

I have nothing to dispute here, but I will just point out that the history of the construction of public toilet facilities specifically for women is a fascinating part of the opening up of the public sphere to the female sex class.

Another reason for the first wave’s reliance on essentialism is that reliable contraception had yet to be invented. If you are not familiar with feminist theory, the cause and effect may seem quite tenuous here, but it is difficult for anyone to conceive of non-gendered, unfettered humanity if you are forced into a brood mare situation from young adulthood. As a result of these factors, among others, the first wave had painted itself into a theoretical corner with its essentialism. Buying into dichotomist ideas about gender used by patriarchy since time immemorial meant accepting hard limits. It meant accepting inferiority and never being able to achieve true equity.

I don’t agree that first wave feminists “relied” on gender essentialism. The realities of their sex (as you point out with reference to the lack of contraception) and the gender roles they enacted were simply all they knew. They weren’t using gender essentialism. It was the framework in which they existed and in fighting for a place in political life they were only beginning to peel the layers off their oppression.

With few exceptions, the second wave of feminist theory questioned and rejected gender essentialism. One of the important aspects of why the second wave was different from the first wave of feminist theory is that by this stage reliable contraception had being invented, accepted, and come into wide use. People were, for the first time, able to divorce their existence from sexual reproduction. Linda Cisler, in 1969: ‘different reproductive roles are the basic dichotomy in humankind, and have been used to rationalize all the other, ascribed differences between men and women and to justify all the oppression women have suffered.’ Feminists argued that social influence was the primary reason we assumed women were such-a-way and men were such-a-way; that men had written nearly all the history and psychology to that date; that patriarchy created hegemonic propaganda based on binary essentialist ideas. Second-wave writers were exhilarated by the newfound theoretical power to refute their inferiority, and you can feel it emanating from their engaged, emphatic, often uproarious writings.

In this paragraph, you see the beginnings of the gender critical movement. We as a movement identify far more with second wave feminism than with the convoluted nonsense that has followed. Cisler’s quote neatly encapsulates our true position on sex and gender. This is gender critical theory.

The second wave did, of course, get many things wrong. It tried to use its new powers of analysis to make ‘womanness’ many different things, theorising that women were a ‘class’, or ignoring voices that dealt with racism. Many of its ideas weren’t nuanced. Being associated with their bodies for their whole lives, and exploited within those bodies, gave some feminists from this era problematic ideas about sex and sexuality. There was also a subculture of hippy mysticism that associated the female reproductive organs with purity or power.

It is bizarre and, I cynically think, intentional that this idea of gender critical feminists as only white keeps getting rolled out. Believe it or not, when founder of race critical theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, coined the term ‘intersectionality’, she used it to analyse the intersections of sex, race, and class, and this analysis is a core part of gender critical theory. This piece by Dr Holly Lawford-Smith explains really well what intersectionality really is and what it isn’t. We understand the ways race and class make us different while analysing how as a female class our lived experiences are unique from our male counterparts.

Call me a hippy, but I love celebrating the wonder of the female body. The world we live in is a jumble of phallic one-up-manship. The male is everywhere; our architecture, art, cultures, everything! Phalluses everywhere! I love that second wave feminists decided to do a bit of collective self love. As females we are pitted against our own body from day dot and I fail to see what is wrong with celebrating its power. To be honest, it is a bit of fun too. Having shared iconography that represents shared realities is a wonderful part of bonding as a community of any kind.

However, although feminists with uteruses or vaginas wanted to know more about them — because that knowledge had been systematically hidden or controlled by ‘men of science’ — they rejected being defined by their bodies. Binary gender essentialism was, in sum, not the primary theoretical view of second-wave feminists. In fact, second-wave theory laid much of the groundwork for our current, welcome conception of a society-wide removal of a restrictive gender binary. Karen Sacks wrote in 1970: ‘For women to merely fight men would be to miss the point. The point is to change the social order …. Perhaps for the first time in human history we are faced with the possibility of a pan-human, non-exploitative society.’ By 1986 Judith Butler had taken the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to their logical conclusion: ‘it is no longer possible to attribute the values or social functions of women to biological necessity … it becomes unclear whether being a given sex has any necessary consequence for becoming a given gender.’

Women still don’t know enough about our bodies. Research and funding for male bodies and medicine far outstrips that for females. Simply compare the money and care that has gone into developing erectile dysfunction medication to the relative void of information on the debilitating condition endometriosis which affects approximately 10% of women. The true form of the clitoris and all its glory were not known until shamefully recently either. We have every right to be obsessed with learning about our bodies; there is so much yet to learn.

Judith Butler has a lot to answer for. Her post-modern, deconstructive anarchism is at the heart of the worst parts of gender identity ideology. Please tell me you aren’t going to quote Foucault. However, that particular quote is one of her more benign. She is right that as women we should not be valued primarily on our biological ability to bear life. Our lives need not be dictated by breeding, however, that does not erase our bodies. It does not erase the fact that society still treats us in certain ways because of their perception of our ability to become pregnant. We are still oppressed in many ways because we belong to the sex class of female.

TERFs ultimately tie rights to body parts. Their approach seems to be that, because women were originally oppressed to some extent because of their bodies, their rights should be forever tied to qualities within those bodies, when in fact the precise opposite is true. Their reactionary ideology, with its obsession with binary gender essentialism, is actively harmful to all genders. TERFs aren’t even calling back to the second wave — they’re calling back to the first wave. Their ideas are over one hundred years old, and they aren’t good ones.

This is a bizarre conclusion to draw. But I’m glad I got to the end without having to read a Michel Foucault quote so, thank you. I have a question for you, Danielle. A genuine one.

If not because of our bodies, our sex, why were and are women oppressed?

It is our bodies which have always differentiated us from men. It is the fact, as you say, that before contraception we spent our lives pregnant and in the home. It is our bodies and our potential to become mothers that sees us valued less in the workforce (as well as gendered sex stereotypes). It is because we are female that we are overwhelmingly the victims of sexual violence, but rarely the perpetrators. It is because we are female that in some parts of the world little girls have their genitals mutilated, are married off to men, and deprived of education. I am terribly and genuinely confused as to what you think sexism, female oppression, and male violence are, if not based around our respective realities as members of our sex classes. What is feminism for if not to liberate the female sex class?

This does not mean that any of this oppression is our destiny. However, we simply must know what we are fighting for and against if we are to effect change. Sex is WHY we are oppressed. Gender is HOW we are oppressed.

I really hope you read some of this at least. I’m not telling you how to think, I’m telling you how we think. You have seriously misunderstood our position on things that seem to form the basis for why you hate us. It is your choice if you wish to still paint a picture of us as the antithesis of decency, but I wanted to make sure you’re at least hating us for positions we actually hold.

My Twitter DMs are always open for respectful, confidential conversation. I welcome questions and hope that maybe some of you who are afraid to be seen engaging in taboo subjects with blacklisted people will feel comfortable to reach out privately.

We need to talk to avoid further misunderstandings.

[dgcatanisiri]

The key to any good adaption is understanding a certain set of things.

1. Don’t be afraid to update the source material. Yes, even if it’s “timeless.”

All media is a product of its time, so you need to recognize that what worked for the original will not necessarily translate for the new audience. If a basic conceit of your product is a certain societal mindset is the norm (just, for example, that “homosexuality is inherently bad,” or “transgender people are inherently hilarious,” or “a woman’s place is unquestionably in the home”), you’re probably best off just packing it in then and there, it’s not going to work. Society evolves, times change, and while we can let these things slide for media that is older, we do not extend this same slack to media made now.

There’s a reason that a lot of stagings of something like Taming of the Shrew, or more modern adaptations like Kiss Me Kate or 10 Things I Hate About You, will often twist what is, on the page, Kate’s “tameness” being a show for the sake of winning the wager, that she is merely performing what is expected of her, while still maintaining her own independence and attitude, and that she has learned that she could use this performance to make Petruchio do as she wanted, or even that the both of them are in on it and have found an equal in the other - in the 15th century, “taming” a “shrew” was considered how one was supposed to be, that a woman was supposed to be subservient to her husband, and that her being so brash and bold from the start was already pushing the values of Shakespeare’s original audience. 

And this is the case of adapting something even as recent as ten, fifteen, twenty years ago - society has changed, and it’s recognized that what was seen as acceptable then was actually punching down at marginalized groups. That’s not funny. Comedy is the quickest genre to age, and the most likely to age poorly. Look at any given 90s romcom and you’ll notice a LOT of issues - the heteronormativity, where no one is gay (aside from MAYBE a single token character), the cast is mostly white - there may, at most, be a black best friend who may or may not be paired up with someone who literally exists for the purpose of arm candy, and you might spot an extra or two in the background, and they’ll use words that we now recognize as slurs so casually you’ll have to go back to realize yeah, they actually said that. And that’s not even scratching the surface.

When it comes to coming to an old piece of media and deciding “I want to do this again,” you absolutely MUST recognize what is no longer acceptable. And if the baseline concept of your selected media is something unacceptable, put aside the dream, this will not end well for you if you attempt to go through with it.

2. Recognize what works and what doesn’t for your medium.

This is something more for straightforward adaptations - book to movie, movie to TV show, stage to screen, etc. A change in medium is going to require a change to the material. It just is. This is why, for example, straight adaptations of video games are extremely hard to pull off - you’re changing an interactive media to a noninteractive one, and, in a lot of cases, that guts the core investment. It’s one thing to play Lara Croft as she raids the tombs, doing the platforming and puzzle challenges yourself. But as a movie, just taking any given game and making a direct 1:1 reshoot, you’re basically just watching her do the same thing with no involvement yourself, and, as a result, you end up watching a glorified cutscene.

It’s the same with stage to screen. Theatre is a medium of its own, with its own internal logic, rules, and structure. In theatre, a character can address the audience, it’s accepted. It doesn’t quite work as well on screen. (For further expansion, there’s a segment of Lindsay Ellis’s video essay on Mel Brooks and The Ethics of Satire that discusses how this works for the stage version of The Producers, but fizzled out in the 2006 film adaptation.) This is often a problem in film adaptations of stage musicals, that the directors don’t know what to focus on or how to film a large group of people, dancing and singing, so, while there’s some general competence, a lot of the film directors don’t have the same eye for them that they would in a straightforward dialogue-driven movie. Stopping the dramatic interaction between two people for what is, in effect, a symbolic struggle as they exchange heated high notes throws off the momentum of a director who knows how to stage the actors and move the camera in a direct argument, but gets confused when both parties dance across the soundstage all through the scene.

Likewise, books allow the audience to understand what is going through a character’s head during a scene, we are able to hear their thoughts and recognize what they’re doing without the character ever speaking a word. That is a luxury film’s nature doesn’t offer. Voice overs are a frequent way around this, but that too is limiting, generally forcing the film into a single viewpoint, which may not be how the narrative was structured. So this is where establishing dialogue has to be included.

This can be a problem, though, as the screenwriter may have a different style than the original writer, so, instead of transplanting dialogue, they have to come up with their own words, which can often end up just being an exposition dump. It can be done, but it is a tightrope walk.

3. Understand what can and can’t be cut.

A frequent problem of adaptations, especially to film, is that they are drawing on source material that maybe be, in a direct, 1:1 adaptation of the original, too long for a modern adaptation. This is a frequent issue with the Harry Potter adaptations, for example, where to cover all of the events of just the first book, would probably have clocked in at three and a half, even four hours, and they only got longer from there. Some things just had to go.

Which is a problem, because for the most part, if something is in the source material, it is there for a reason. Foreshadowing, character establishment, worldbuilding, whatever, there is a reason that any content is included in the first place. 

So you need to find ways to either condense or work around things - going back to Harry Potter, as a character, while he’d had his uses in the books, Peeves’s contribution to the overall tapestry of the series was small enough that he could be removed. Same with a character like Professor Binns, whose largest contribution was the exposition of the Chamber of Secrets, could have that shunted over to a character like Professor McGonagall, with no need to hire another actor for one scene and account for this character later (this later came into play with characters like Professor Trelawney, who appeared in all the books after her introduction, but not every film). 

The runtime makes a difference, especially given how much we see movies try to have as many showing per day as they can - the shorter the film, the more times it can be shown. So you need to know what can go and what can be condensed. 

But this can backfire - cutting a scene can often remove important context and characterization, even if it’s short or small. Star Trek, the 09 film, cut a scene between young James Kirk and his older brother. Now, it’s not really that important in this adaptation that Kirk has an older brother, so on paper, yeah, this scene getting cut made sense. BUT this scene featured Kirk’s older brother walking out because of the abuse being inflicted on them by “Uncle Frank,” and how he intended to sell their father’s car, how Frank was denying James Kirk a sense of being who he was, telling him “You’re no one.” This is what leads to the reckless theft of said car that did make it into the final cut, and made that joyride less into a moment of “fuck the man, I do what I want,” and more of a moment of declaration of him trying to find himself (and makes this kid shouting to the robo-cop “My name is James Tiberius Kirk!” less of a cutesy way of getting in the character’s full name and more a way of, again, showing him declaring who he is.) It also shows James Kirk’s desire for justice and fairness for people, a VERY important element for this character, showing him standing up for his older brother, ostensibly someone who should be standing up for him instead. This is a pretty big characterization moment that got cut, presumably because the casual audience didn’t know that Kirk had an older brother.

I realize that this is using a cut scene from the film script and not a direct adaptation, but I think that’s an important thing to bring up anyway, given that Star Trek 09 was an adaptation of a three year TV series - of course they had to condense, launch arcs that successive movies could pick up, all of that. But they still needed to establish these characters. By cutting this scene, you lose that core nugget of Kirk’s character, and we’re left with reckless asshole Kirk, the character a lot of people thought didn’t deserve the center chair by the end of the movie because moments like this didn’t make the final cut.

Know your story, know your characters, and understand how to keep their core identities while still cutting the things you can’t keep, because of medium changes or runtime concerns.

4. What new elements are you bringing to the table?

If you’re making a new adaptation of something, WHY are you making it? What is the benefit of not just a new version of old material, but even what makes YOU the correct storyteller?

Let’s give another example here. Let’s say that I am given the green light to go for a new adaptation of... oh, let’s say Superman’s early years, we’re ten years out from the end of Smallville, surely someone’s gonna start kicking that around eventually, let’s go with it here and now. My requirements are to keep the baseline of Smallville for a new show - high school Clark Kent, no flights, no tights to start with, developing, growing powers, friendship with Lex Luthor, same core cast to start with (so Clark, Pete, Chloe, Lana, Whitney, Lex, Lionel, Martha, and Jonathan), basically start the series fresh from the point of the original series’s pilot. How I go from there is up to me, re: how much/how little to incorporate from later in the series, when powers develop and in what order, when to introduce other characters... I just basically have to start fresh with the same components of Smallville that the original had.

So when given these components, I feel it is my obligation to create a new picture with them, because to just retread the old material, updates to the time and cast notwithstanding, is saying I don’t see this as worth doing anything different. And if that’s the case, why bother? It is incumbent on me to do different things with these pieces - maybe in this version, Lana’s a lesbian and dating Chloe, which mostly puts to bed the Clark-Lana relationship (or maybe she briefly uses Clark as a beard to cover her attraction). Whitney can become a part of the core cast, instead of being like the only opening credits characters who never learns Clark’s secret. Pete’s known about Clark’s powers for years. The meteor freaks ...okay, no, I’m calling them ‘metahumans’ from the start here, are going to be a more persistent element to the central struggle - none of the convenient karmic killing, Clark has to deal with the consequences of these characters having enhanced abilities, not just have them conveniently fall down and break their neck or something. Lex ends up brought into the core group, and it becomes a central conflict of his character arc that he may actually have the potential to not be the ultimate villain - this is an adaptation, it’s entirely possible that Lex being the bad guy is NOT a foregone conclusion, especially if one wants to take the moral of “nothing is written in stone, there is no fate.”

...shit, now I actually WANT to do this version...

See, that’s taking the same pieces and making a new picture with them. Because if you’re just going to redo the original, just let the original air in place of your new thing, because you have made no effort to change anything other than the bare minimum. Hell, even Smallville brought something new to the table by creating Chloe Sullivan, who did not exist in Superman media before, but has since appeared sporadically in the comics. 

Don’t just tell the same old story to tell the same old story. Bring something new to the table. If you’re really lucky, you may just add something that becomes so definitive to the franchise, when people talk about it later, they’ll wonder why it wasn’t there to begin with - another DC hero example, look at Batman the Animated Series, without which we would not have either Harley Quinn or Victor Fries’s tragic backstory, yet now both are considered iconic and core to the franchise and the character, respectively.

[crvwly]

anyway i feel like this is extremely topical at the moment so if anyone is interested, this is the piece i recently wrote on representation in media and why it’s important. some names are redacted bc i wrote this for my university newspaper but it doesn’t change much!

According to the US Census, about 40 percent of the country is composed of people of color—in Hollywood’s world, however, only a quarter of all characters are non-white, and something isn’t adding up.

“We live in this community where popular media is catered to white, cisgender, straight, and able-bodied people, especially men,” J. F., a CU Denver English major, said. “Positively representing minorities in media acknowledges that they do exist and they are important. It allows them to look up to someone just like them and show them that it’s okay to be who they are.”

Unfortunately, many minority groups are given hardly any material to love and identify with. According to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), less than five percent of characters on TV in 2016 were identified as part of the LGBTQ+ community, which is the highest that rate has ever been. The list of media representation gets more depressing as it goes on. A report from The Media, Diversity, & Social Change (MDSC) Initiative at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that, in 2015, less than two and a half percent of characters in film had a disability. The same study showed that only 28 percent of characters were non-white, and barely 33 percent of characters were women.

In case it wasn’t obvious enough, here it is spelled out: women make up half the world’s population, but are only represented as a third of the world’s population in TV and movies.

Minority characters in TV and movies are also negatively stigmatized, abused, and killed on TV shows and movies for what people have started to call the “trauma porn” genre. The minority characters are typically built up to be very genuine, kind, well-mannered characters in order to get the audience to grow attached to them, after which they are beaten down to their last grain of sanity or physical strength, and usually killed. One trend within the trauma porn genre is called the “bury your gays” trope, in which gay characters are killed off for shock value.

This past October, a new sports anime about figure skating—Yuri!!! On Ice—premiered and, as its opening song implies, ‘made history’ by having an openly gay and interracial relationship between two main characters on Japanese television.

A lot of shows—sports animes in particular—are guilty of queerbaiting viewers by writing characters to appear stereotypically queer without following through in the show. Yuri!!! On Ice, however, stunned the audience by doing the opposite; there was very little queer coding aside from the romantic interactions between the two main characters, and by making the focus of the show the skaters’ careers, it proved that gay people don’t need to be hair-flipping, scarf-wearing, and flamboyant to be gay.

The main characters’ relationship wasn’t the only feature of interest that had fans hooked on the show. Both men, Viktor Nikiforov and Yuuri Katsuki, suffered from mental illnesses that were directly addressed throughout the course of the show. Viktor had depression and Yuuri had severe anxiety and panic attacks.

Many mentally ill queer fans have latched onto these characters like a lifeline. Their narrative is far different than the many others spun out for queer characters on TV. The show doesn’t focus on the trials and tribulations of being a queer person; it’s about figure skating and love of all different kinds, and one of those kinds just happens to be between two men. There are no painful coming out stories, no family disownment, and absolutely no gay people are killed. The characters are relatable to queer people without making the story about how horribly and painful it is to be a queer person.

Another trope is called “disposable women,” in which female characters are killed off to motivate the male lead’s plot and character development.

A list of minority character deaths which occurred for no significant reason includes: Poussey Washington (Orange is the New Black), a black lesbian; Lexa (The 100), a lesbian; Queen Ygraine (Merlin); Mary Winchester (Supernatural); Abbie Mills (Sleepy Hollow), a black woman; Larry Blaisdell (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), a gay man; Michael Corrigan (House of Cards), a black gay man; and about a thousand more.

These characters can further the plot and the diversity of the show without being killed off for shock value. Poussey Washington’s death aired in the midst of the growing Black Lives Matter movement and was supposedly meant to show solidarity. However, rather than having the show’s characters host a rally or the show creators coming together to give a message of gratitude for those in need, they killed yet another black person. The major problem with this kind of representation is that it tells the people who identify with these characters that they are expendable if it benefits someone else, and real life tells them this enough already.

“When roles are given to people in media that aren’t accurate representations or aren’t representation at all, it leaves an entire perspective out,” B. N., an MSU Denver student, said. “We already live in a society where rights aren’t given to real people in those marginalized communities. When inaccurate narratives are shown to the majority group, it makes them think that a more diverse population doesn’t exist and doesn’t deserve rights or recognition. Putting focus and value on marginalized communities gives them more power, which is the reason that a lot of people don’t do it.”

However, creating diverse stories has caused a problem when it comes to casting actors to fill those roles. Doctor Strange, a new Marvel movie, recently came out and met strong audience backlash when it was discovered that the Tibetan characters were cast as white and other non-Asian actors, including Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton, the two leads.

This act of whitewashing is nowhere near an isolated event in Hollywood, and it occurs in other formats as well; there is a growing trend of casting cisgender actors to play transgender roles and having straight actors play queer characters, and the worst part is that the actors are applauded for their bravery in taking on such “controversial” jobs. Offenders include Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl), Jared Leto (Dallas Buyer’s Club), Johnny Depp (The Lone Ranger), Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games), and dozens more.

“People shouldn’t be able to proclaim that stories include a transgender narrative unless there’s a transgender actor filling that role,” B.N. said. “The same goes for narratives that are meant for people of color, or disabled people. Getting proper representation is a big step toward getting positive representation.”

Society’s lacking representation of minority groups is what makes shows like Yuri!!! On Ice such a fantastic reprieve. The creator, Kubo Mitsurou, tweeted a few weeks before the show’s finale, “No matter what everyone in the real world thinks of this work, the world within it will remain a place where there will be no discrimination for what you love. I will protect that world, no matter what it takes, even if it’s the last thing I do.” She stood astoundingly true to her word to the last episode. The show was, at its core, happy, and clearly intended to make the LGBTQ+ community feel welcome.

“Seeing yourself in media is so important for validating your identity and coming to love and accept yourself,” B.N. said. Having positive representations of marginalized groups is about more than proving to majority groups that minorities exist outside of their stereotypes. There’s more to representation than sticking a few people of color, queer people, and women in the backgrounds of movies and television shows. Allowing young people to grow up and be inspired by fictional characters that look like them and feel like them gives those kids the ability to think, “If they can be successful, strong, and happy, then I can, too.”