The reason for the latter is fairly understandable, in that A) I have a fetish and B) I've never made any bones about it, though I did gradually try to adjust the field away from the ultra-super-massive bag of dicks A Book of Tongues turned out to be as the Hexslinger series went along, because even I ended up looking at it afterwards and going: "Holy SHIT, that's a lot of dudes." (A whole lot of white people, too, but I tried to be at least a little better on that score from the beginning, aside from the whole "literally magical Native People" vs. "all my chicks are whores, monsters or whore-monsters" thing.)
I like to think I've tried to apply that lesson since, especially to stuff like the Hammer Pirates cycle, even though I wrote it completely for my own pleasure; though "Trap-Weed" is fairly dick-baggy, we do get Tante Ankolee being introduced in "Two Captains", then taking over the narrative entirely in "The Salt Wedding", and bringing in two more female characters as she does. Granted, when I concentrated on getting Captain Parry some het action in "Drawn Up From Deep Places", it did turn out to be with a woman who (all unknown even to her) happened to be a monster, but...that's more because Parry's life-theme is that if it wasn't for bad luck, he'd have no luck at all, really. That's my thesis, anyhow, and I'm sticking to it.
What's retroactively funny with the Cornish Sisters/A-Cat stories, however, is that they perfectly express that equation McGuire talks about near the end of her post, where a male friend of her asks whether genderflipping things to make movies suddenly as female-heavy as most movies are currently male-heavy wouldn't be similarly off-putting, and she's like: "No, because YOU NEVER SEE THAT EVER." And this, frankly, is what I keep doing with these stories. The Cornishes started out as not-the-Winchesters (from Supernatural) crossed with not-Michael-and-Lincoln (from Prison Break), while A-Cat is not-T-Bag (from Prison Break) crossed with every Silver John story ever, and now I've added not-the-Hammer-Van-Helsings, in the persons of vampire-hunting matriarch Ruhel Maartensbeck and her granddaughter/lieutenant Anapurna Maartensbeck. The only guys we've "met" thus far are Dionne Cornish's conflicted memory of her father, Jeptha, and the sadly vampirized Professor Maks Maartensbeck (played by Peter Cushing, natch), who I think of as less a villain than a bloodthirsty force of sheer anti-nature. It's...oddly refreshing, I guess.
So yeah. I definitely don't want this to come off as back-patting, because I did it accidentally, and because some people have rightly questioned whether genderflipping characters--even if you move far enough away from the source material for them to hopefully stand their own--is a particularly "feminist" act, per se, since it seems to imply you can't think of a female character with conflict and agency without first thinking of a dude and then giving him boobs. Still, though...I'm happy with the result. And I'm looking forward to seeing what other people think, if/when it's released on the world.
This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/496
