jeancrocker-blog asked: In the shower, I was thinking of how I would describe my novel in one sentence. There's the normal version ("Rising threats from a nearby country cause a war to break out, and a princess and her newly-made friends must help protect their home.) and then there's the Tumblr version: "The GSA of a magical high school go around doing gay shenanigans." Because muh representation and all that jazz.
Yeah, honestly, this is a problem that Tumblr has with summarizing fiction in a way that’s easy to pick up. It’s like representation HAS to be the most important and advertised aspect in it or else it’s not worth talking about
This is why I was hesitant to watching Fury Road at first; because literally every post I saw talking about it was “It’s so inclusive and feminist friendly! It doesn’t have a sexualized female character!” Like, okay, what’s the plot? Is it a reboot of the old movies? A sequel to Thunderdome? Nothing else; just talking about representation
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about diverse casts, but Jesus, did everyone forget how to sell stuff?
I still haven’t seen Fury Road because of that. I wanted to, but then I saw people saying how feminist it is and it just turned me off, and now that it’s piqued my interest, I don’t have the opportunity to see it.
It’s also prevalent in the Steven Universe fandom. I don’t give a crap about the representation, especially because I’m never going to be represented due to Matt Burnett saying that all men are hypermasculine and whatnot.
And OITNB. My friend tried to get me to watch it by saying “The main character is a lesbian and there’s a trans woman blah blah blah” and I’m like, yeah okay but what’s the plot? I’ve never heard anything about the plot of that show besides it being about prison, just that there’s a trans woman and a lot of POC characters and it’s overly feminist.
My story has a lot of representation, yes. That’s due to the main cast being a band of misfits that all come together because of being social outcasts. They’re bound to have a wide variety of interests and come from different places in the world. I did change some things for representation, like changing Tura from lesbian to ace and Rosemarie from female to nonbinary, and I honestly regret those decisions. But now that people have told me that they like seeing an ace character and a nonbinary character in positive lights, I’m reluctant to change it back.
I’m sort of tempted to have one of the characters spout off about how gay she is, and someone butts in and says something along the lines of “Do you have a personality outside of your sexuality?” as a jab at Tumblr. I mean, I make jokes about how I’m not straight and trans a lot, but those parts of me don’t control my life. But it seems like it does to people I know personally, and others on this website.
