#that au is specifically getting my attention bcos i am not well

[kavennnn]

🤨what do you know

wouldnt you like to know weatherboy

[equalseleventhirds]

hi! feel free to ignore this, but i love your posts about annabelle and the major problems/missed opportunities about her in canon, which i COMPLETELY agree with and i’ll often change things in my au fics, but i was wondering if u had any advice for writing her character respectfully in canon compliant works?

ok so i'm only recently home from work and currently eating dinner, so my thoughts are (vague noises), but

i think there's like, two main elements to treating annabelle with respect when writing her: her canon characterization and her identity as a black woman. and while i can talk abt her canon characterization & my reading of her forever, i'm not rly qualified to give in-depth advice on writing a black woman beyond 'do research' and also like, 'don't do these clearly fucked up things'? (i can like, tell u some stuff abt researching to write poc tho, that's... in there. this thing got rly long.) anyway.

first & easiest is writing her with proper consideration given to her canon characterization (prior to the uhhhh end bit that rly reduced her down to someone much simpler than previously established). so often people make annabelle purely villainous, or basically just a mouthpiece for the web with no wishes of her own, or focus on what she can do for/to jon and/or martin (wrt either helping or hurting them this is kinda shitty tbh. like, making her interact with them? yeah! making her entirely story revolve around them and their wants/needs/feelings/story? come on). she's so much more than that!! she is complex!!! she is her own person!!!!!

pay attention to her story arc! her parallels to jon! the bits of personality that we hear! look at the fact that she was terrified of spiders for most of her life (and perhaps still is, even though she now must serve the web). consider her musings on free will, and her wondering if she herself even has any. think about how awful the experiment that made her an avatar must have been, how her unwilling transformation was brought upon her by unethical authority figures using her greatest fear. look at how her childhood may have influenced her, how she may crave attention or feel like she needs to be self-sufficient or resent people who shirk their responsibilities. also she canonically enjoys reading and wants to make television, she is an Artist and also rly smart, write her like that.

also like... ok listen....... supposedly she's amazing at manipulation; use that! i know s5 did a lot of.... not that, but as a child she bit herself to get her sister in trouble! let her play fucking five dimensional chess!! fuck mind control, fuck 'everyone knows she always lies', give her manipulation some gotdamn complexity. or, if you're choosing not to do that, make a reason? like, is she actively trying to change and be more honest? does she feel like it's not worth putting in the effort for what the web wants, when the web does have mind control at its disposal?

the second part of writing annabelle respectfully has to do with her identity as a black woman. i'm not black. i am not qualified to tell you exactly what you should and shouldn't do when writing a black woman (and also no group is a monolith you're gonna have conflicting opinions etc etc).

i am a poc and i spend a lot of time thinking about race in media, and my go-to advice is always to do research. for annabelle, look for experiences and things written by black people, especially black women, especially living in britain (bcos society & politics & things vary in different places). learn history; there's specific history that you should look at, especially when writing horror or about specific topics. for example, there's really awful history wrt black people being unethically experimented on by the medical industry (which canon does not address even tho that's literally annabelle's backstory). there's also, let's face it, a lot about police and police brutality in this show, both with police as major characters and with police/police investigations used to advance plot, and annabelle is a black woman. i've seen fics use police (daisy and basira, or cops in general) as threats against her, and somehow present that as a good thing bcos 'well she's evil'??? i.... listen i'm not black but i know that's fucked up to write.

additionally, and tbh broadly applicable to writing any poc, learn about offensive racial stereotypes and tropes. you have to know about them in order to avoid them. you have to learn why those stereotypes and tropes are racist and offensive, so you can understand what about them is bad and how to avoid them. and tbh, there are awful racist stereotypes in every direction, so you can't just do the opposite of one stereotype you found, or you may wind up falling into another one. imo one of the best ways to do this is to like....... make a fully fleshed-out character who doesn't become a one-dimensional stereotype?

and this was rly just a very longwinded way of saying 'pay attention to canon and do careful research' but yeah, pay attention to canon and do careful research (and be ready to abandon canon when some of those uhhhh racism issues in tma come up? or when earlier characterization is flattened in order to serve someone else's storyline, etc.)