Every Woman Letter
Jun. 11th, 2018 02:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maidenjediHello dear writer!
So, it was harder for me to come up with things to request for this challenge, as opposed to offering. I don't know why that was! This letter, in turn, may be less helpful to you than ones I've written before, but I'm just going to dive in and see what comes up.
My favorite things to read about female characters, in most fandoms, are friendship stories. Stuff that has characters we love bonding over the mundane, discovering they have more in common than previously assumed, overcoming barriers to friendship, etc. This exchange excites me because it's a solid shot at seeing a lot of that sort of thing, and I picked the fandoms I did with that in mind.
All my choices are technically historical fiction, and each is set in a very different period. Each one is going to be a bit problematic in some ways. I love historical fiction that includes attention to period details (whether it be the cadence of spoken language, period-specific atmosphere, discussions of then-current events, etc) and doesn't overlook historical reality. Something to consider: how do the women in these stories overcome their realities, or work within them?
I specified in my sign-up that I'm not interested in AUs like coffee shop, high school/college, etc. BUT! I love canon-divergence AUs in the sense of changing meet-cutes, specific relationship details, alter the timeline of a story, etc. And while I'd prefer you don't lift these characters into completely different time periods (no Scarlet O'Hara at Henry VIII's court, for example), in each one, reading about the characters as younger or older women in the context of the written time period is interesting to me (Prissy, all grown-up with a home of her own in post-Reconstruction South, Ellen Sue Gotlander congratulating Hank Aaron on his homerun record, Paige Jennings watching the Berlin Wall falling, etc).
I'm not really interested in any romantic pairings for these fandoms (the exceptions being Melanie Wilkes with Ashley and Dottie Hinson being with Jimmy Dugan, more about that below).
Okay, canon-specific prompts, thoughts under the cut. Feel free to take them and run with them, or ignore them outright. I'm good with whatever!! THANK YOU, DEAR WRITER!
A League of Their Own - Any one of the women in the film, dealing with the end of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Other than Dottie, does anyone stay? Do any end up as player-managers? Or tell me a story of how one of the women we only really met in passing got into the League. Tell me about Evelyn Gardner dreaming about playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers or the Boston Red Sox - maybe her seemingly rotten husband was at one point a player himself, with busted dreams, or Evelyn started playing exhibition ball to make money to buy groceries. Or tell a story about Alice Gaspers being a gangly teenager who only made friends with the boys at school. Something about Dottie and Marla keeping touch over the years, families sharing holidays or something, baseball being a verboten topic that Marla wants to get Dottie to talk about. It would be very interesting to know what Betty Horn's relationship to the game would have been after her husband was killed in the Pacific. Do any of the women keep in touch with her? Does she come back? Can she even stand to watch a baseball game after all of that? How does baseball heal her, if it can/does?
Tell me about these women and their daughters, these women and their mothers. These women and the bond they share after it's all over.
I do ship Dottie/Jimmy, and while that's not the focus of this exchange, tacit acknowledgement of a romance between them, or it happening in the background, that kind of thing would work okay.
Summer is a great time for baseball nostalgia, but you could also focus on the daily lives of these women, post-League, in a world that has basically told them to go back to the kitchen, and just mention baseball, if you're not into the game.
-
Gone with the Wind - So, canon would have us either ignore or despise India Wilkes. How about India Wilkes, intellectual, who goes on to write about her experiences, or becomes a reformer during Reconstruction? Suellen and Carreen, growing up in Scarlet's shadow, finding their own way - Suellen marries a farmer, basically, and Carreen gets very religious. What paths do their lives take after the novel ends and Scarlet comes home to Tara?
Belle Watling after the war. Does she go West, when she tires of the carpetbaggers in Atlanta and realizes, finally, that Rhett isn't giving up a life of relative respectability for her? Or Belle Watling before the war, giving up her boy, eeking out a living in antebellum Atlanta. Belle and Melanie - how is Melanie different than all the reformers and the judgmental upper echelon of Atlanta, and what does their friendship look like in closer relief?
Prissy isn't a very well-drawn character, and I'd like to know more about what happens to her. What does Atlanta look like from her eyes when it is being rebuilt? She's young and the world is more or less at her feet - does she go West? Does she marry a homesteader? What grand things does she see, because decides she is done with the South?
Mammy has the most complicated relationship with Scarlet of any character. I don't know how you would want to write about it, but part of me would like to see it as Mammy writing a memoir, or telling something of her life to interested parties. What is her real name? Does Scarlet ever care to learn it? Maybe she leaves Scarlet at last, or she stays and raises Wade Hampton Hamilton and Ella Kennedy as best she can, attempting to fill in the gaps she sees in Scarlet's mothering? What relationship does she ultimately have with those children? Mammy mourning Bonnie, because she was arguably in a position to be closer to Bonnie than even Rhett. Mammy getting to see the world - in the context of the novel, traveling with the Butlers, or outside of the novel. Mammy's relationship with Ellen O'Hara would also be very interesting.
Melanie Wilkes - oh, Melanie. She represents so many different things to so many different people, both in the novel and then among readers and critics of the novel. I sympathize with her in large part because of Olivia de Havilland's portrayal, I admit, but in any event, Melanie is fascinating to me. Let's see her from the inside. She knows about Scarlet and Ashley, and she chooses to ignore it. Why? Is she hurt by it, or has she embraced it? Is she truly ignorant of the situation? Here's a thought - Melanie represents the dying South, but also resilience. What does her day-to-day life during Reconstruction look like? She's raising a son with a husband who isn't entirely faithful to her, and who probably also suffers from post-traumatic stress; Ashley and Frank Kennedy and others in the novel struggle with what their masculinity even means when they've been defeated. How does Melanie, the novel's most venerated example of post-war femininity, deal with all of that? So many ways to go here. Also - let me state now and for all time, I think everything would have been much more interesting had Melanie lived, leaving aside all heavy-handed metaphor. So let her live - what happens to her? Assume Scarlet still realizes she loves Rhett and not Ashley, and Melanie gets a happy ending (of a sort).
Scarlet O'Hara - well. How about, throw out the sequel, and talk about what does happen to Scarlet when it's all said and done? Does she go home to Tara, and really think of a way to win Rhett back? What does she look like ten or twenty years after the novel - what's happened? Has she given up Tara, or finally chased Suellen off with her vitriol and held on to it? Does she reconcile with her children - especially Ella? Talk to me about Scarlet's relationship with Mammy - quiet moments, formative ones, Scarlet finally looking at Mammy and letting her go, as she gives up her childhood dreams and imagined realities. Or, Scarlet when she's much younger. She's a realist, most of the time, so does that form when she's a belle? At what point does she become so ruthless with regards to the other girls? It's broadly assumed that Scarlet is "good with figures" - what was that like when she was a girl?
Final thoughts: write about Scarlet and Melanie from Scarlet's POV, coming to terms with their rivalry, or discarding it altogether when the worst happens and Ashley doesn't come back from the war. Scarlet and Melanie as nurses in the war - we know they did it to a point in Atlanta, but does Melanie maybe, in a fit of missing Ashley and desperate to know what's happened to him after Gettysburg, decide to go north and find him? And does Scarlet go with her, selfishly in the beginning, but as time goes on, she does it because protecting Melanie becomes important to her?
-
The Americans - The One Where Renee is, Definitely, a Spy. Tell me about it! Is she CIA? Is she KGB? Is she neither, but Stan is her mark for different reasons? Maybe she started out as someone wanting revenge on Stan for what happened when he was undercover with white supremacists, but she fell for him. Or, and I'm serious here - is she really Marita Covarrubias, early in her own spy career?
Sandra Beeman, in the context of the above, or living her life free of the doubt and trouble that comes from being married to a federal agents. Does she know about Nina, does she suspect? Or, Sandra trying to befriend Elizabeth in the early days.
Claudia, in the Great Patriotic War. Claudia leaving the States at the end of the series, trying to go home but either being caught by the forces aligned with Gorbachev, or having to go into hiding. Does she live to see Putin come to power? Does she play a role in that? Does she care?
Elizabeth's mother, in the Great Patriotic War. Or, seeing her Nadezhda go off to fight for a cause she herself doesn't believe in (anymore? ever?). Scenes from Nadezhda's childhood, from her mother's POV, canon or imagined in canon context.
Paige survives and lives to write a memoir. Maybe it's 2018 and she's alive and well in the United States, and gets word of her mother's passing. Paige making a life for herself. Claudia and Paige, facing off, either before the events of the finale or after.
Elizabeth, in the early days, figuring out how to pretend to be an American. Elizabeth after the series, trying to learn how to be a Russian again.
Any and all of the characters witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, on television or in person. It isn't the end of the Soviet story, but it is a highly impactful visual event that would mean different things to each of the key women in the series, including those not listed in my request.
The show's creators said they weren't commenting on what they think happens to all the characters who lived through the series because they want the fans to come up with their own ideas. That sure sounds like a fanfiction challenge, doesn't it? :-)
So, it was harder for me to come up with things to request for this challenge, as opposed to offering. I don't know why that was! This letter, in turn, may be less helpful to you than ones I've written before, but I'm just going to dive in and see what comes up.
My favorite things to read about female characters, in most fandoms, are friendship stories. Stuff that has characters we love bonding over the mundane, discovering they have more in common than previously assumed, overcoming barriers to friendship, etc. This exchange excites me because it's a solid shot at seeing a lot of that sort of thing, and I picked the fandoms I did with that in mind.
All my choices are technically historical fiction, and each is set in a very different period. Each one is going to be a bit problematic in some ways. I love historical fiction that includes attention to period details (whether it be the cadence of spoken language, period-specific atmosphere, discussions of then-current events, etc) and doesn't overlook historical reality. Something to consider: how do the women in these stories overcome their realities, or work within them?
I specified in my sign-up that I'm not interested in AUs like coffee shop, high school/college, etc. BUT! I love canon-divergence AUs in the sense of changing meet-cutes, specific relationship details, alter the timeline of a story, etc. And while I'd prefer you don't lift these characters into completely different time periods (no Scarlet O'Hara at Henry VIII's court, for example), in each one, reading about the characters as younger or older women in the context of the written time period is interesting to me (Prissy, all grown-up with a home of her own in post-Reconstruction South, Ellen Sue Gotlander congratulating Hank Aaron on his homerun record, Paige Jennings watching the Berlin Wall falling, etc).
I'm not really interested in any romantic pairings for these fandoms (the exceptions being Melanie Wilkes with Ashley and Dottie Hinson being with Jimmy Dugan, more about that below).
Okay, canon-specific prompts, thoughts under the cut. Feel free to take them and run with them, or ignore them outright. I'm good with whatever!! THANK YOU, DEAR WRITER!
A League of Their Own - Any one of the women in the film, dealing with the end of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Other than Dottie, does anyone stay? Do any end up as player-managers? Or tell me a story of how one of the women we only really met in passing got into the League. Tell me about Evelyn Gardner dreaming about playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers or the Boston Red Sox - maybe her seemingly rotten husband was at one point a player himself, with busted dreams, or Evelyn started playing exhibition ball to make money to buy groceries. Or tell a story about Alice Gaspers being a gangly teenager who only made friends with the boys at school. Something about Dottie and Marla keeping touch over the years, families sharing holidays or something, baseball being a verboten topic that Marla wants to get Dottie to talk about. It would be very interesting to know what Betty Horn's relationship to the game would have been after her husband was killed in the Pacific. Do any of the women keep in touch with her? Does she come back? Can she even stand to watch a baseball game after all of that? How does baseball heal her, if it can/does?
Tell me about these women and their daughters, these women and their mothers. These women and the bond they share after it's all over.
I do ship Dottie/Jimmy, and while that's not the focus of this exchange, tacit acknowledgement of a romance between them, or it happening in the background, that kind of thing would work okay.
Summer is a great time for baseball nostalgia, but you could also focus on the daily lives of these women, post-League, in a world that has basically told them to go back to the kitchen, and just mention baseball, if you're not into the game.
-
Gone with the Wind - So, canon would have us either ignore or despise India Wilkes. How about India Wilkes, intellectual, who goes on to write about her experiences, or becomes a reformer during Reconstruction? Suellen and Carreen, growing up in Scarlet's shadow, finding their own way - Suellen marries a farmer, basically, and Carreen gets very religious. What paths do their lives take after the novel ends and Scarlet comes home to Tara?
Belle Watling after the war. Does she go West, when she tires of the carpetbaggers in Atlanta and realizes, finally, that Rhett isn't giving up a life of relative respectability for her? Or Belle Watling before the war, giving up her boy, eeking out a living in antebellum Atlanta. Belle and Melanie - how is Melanie different than all the reformers and the judgmental upper echelon of Atlanta, and what does their friendship look like in closer relief?
Prissy isn't a very well-drawn character, and I'd like to know more about what happens to her. What does Atlanta look like from her eyes when it is being rebuilt? She's young and the world is more or less at her feet - does she go West? Does she marry a homesteader? What grand things does she see, because decides she is done with the South?
Mammy has the most complicated relationship with Scarlet of any character. I don't know how you would want to write about it, but part of me would like to see it as Mammy writing a memoir, or telling something of her life to interested parties. What is her real name? Does Scarlet ever care to learn it? Maybe she leaves Scarlet at last, or she stays and raises Wade Hampton Hamilton and Ella Kennedy as best she can, attempting to fill in the gaps she sees in Scarlet's mothering? What relationship does she ultimately have with those children? Mammy mourning Bonnie, because she was arguably in a position to be closer to Bonnie than even Rhett. Mammy getting to see the world - in the context of the novel, traveling with the Butlers, or outside of the novel. Mammy's relationship with Ellen O'Hara would also be very interesting.
Melanie Wilkes - oh, Melanie. She represents so many different things to so many different people, both in the novel and then among readers and critics of the novel. I sympathize with her in large part because of Olivia de Havilland's portrayal, I admit, but in any event, Melanie is fascinating to me. Let's see her from the inside. She knows about Scarlet and Ashley, and she chooses to ignore it. Why? Is she hurt by it, or has she embraced it? Is she truly ignorant of the situation? Here's a thought - Melanie represents the dying South, but also resilience. What does her day-to-day life during Reconstruction look like? She's raising a son with a husband who isn't entirely faithful to her, and who probably also suffers from post-traumatic stress; Ashley and Frank Kennedy and others in the novel struggle with what their masculinity even means when they've been defeated. How does Melanie, the novel's most venerated example of post-war femininity, deal with all of that? So many ways to go here. Also - let me state now and for all time, I think everything would have been much more interesting had Melanie lived, leaving aside all heavy-handed metaphor. So let her live - what happens to her? Assume Scarlet still realizes she loves Rhett and not Ashley, and Melanie gets a happy ending (of a sort).
Scarlet O'Hara - well. How about, throw out the sequel, and talk about what does happen to Scarlet when it's all said and done? Does she go home to Tara, and really think of a way to win Rhett back? What does she look like ten or twenty years after the novel - what's happened? Has she given up Tara, or finally chased Suellen off with her vitriol and held on to it? Does she reconcile with her children - especially Ella? Talk to me about Scarlet's relationship with Mammy - quiet moments, formative ones, Scarlet finally looking at Mammy and letting her go, as she gives up her childhood dreams and imagined realities. Or, Scarlet when she's much younger. She's a realist, most of the time, so does that form when she's a belle? At what point does she become so ruthless with regards to the other girls? It's broadly assumed that Scarlet is "good with figures" - what was that like when she was a girl?
Final thoughts: write about Scarlet and Melanie from Scarlet's POV, coming to terms with their rivalry, or discarding it altogether when the worst happens and Ashley doesn't come back from the war. Scarlet and Melanie as nurses in the war - we know they did it to a point in Atlanta, but does Melanie maybe, in a fit of missing Ashley and desperate to know what's happened to him after Gettysburg, decide to go north and find him? And does Scarlet go with her, selfishly in the beginning, but as time goes on, she does it because protecting Melanie becomes important to her?
-
The Americans - The One Where Renee is, Definitely, a Spy. Tell me about it! Is she CIA? Is she KGB? Is she neither, but Stan is her mark for different reasons? Maybe she started out as someone wanting revenge on Stan for what happened when he was undercover with white supremacists, but she fell for him. Or, and I'm serious here - is she really Marita Covarrubias, early in her own spy career?
Sandra Beeman, in the context of the above, or living her life free of the doubt and trouble that comes from being married to a federal agents. Does she know about Nina, does she suspect? Or, Sandra trying to befriend Elizabeth in the early days.
Claudia, in the Great Patriotic War. Claudia leaving the States at the end of the series, trying to go home but either being caught by the forces aligned with Gorbachev, or having to go into hiding. Does she live to see Putin come to power? Does she play a role in that? Does she care?
Elizabeth's mother, in the Great Patriotic War. Or, seeing her Nadezhda go off to fight for a cause she herself doesn't believe in (anymore? ever?). Scenes from Nadezhda's childhood, from her mother's POV, canon or imagined in canon context.
Paige survives and lives to write a memoir. Maybe it's 2018 and she's alive and well in the United States, and gets word of her mother's passing. Paige making a life for herself. Claudia and Paige, facing off, either before the events of the finale or after.
Elizabeth, in the early days, figuring out how to pretend to be an American. Elizabeth after the series, trying to learn how to be a Russian again.
Any and all of the characters witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, on television or in person. It isn't the end of the Soviet story, but it is a highly impactful visual event that would mean different things to each of the key women in the series, including those not listed in my request.
The show's creators said they weren't commenting on what they think happens to all the characters who lived through the series because they want the fans to come up with their own ideas. That sure sounds like a fanfiction challenge, doesn't it? :-)
