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Writing Social Justice
Jun. 4th, 2015 10:31 amI'm still working on the not-actually-steampunk Zelgan fic I started planning in April. It has turned into something huge and unwieldy, but I am soldiering on.
The chapter I'm currently writing concludes with Zelda and Ganon at a roadside inn. In true Lord-of-the-Rings-style fantasy tavern tradition, someone asks Ganon to sing something, and he does. I ended up writing five verses of "a Gerudo song," the gist of which is that a Gerudo woman is flirt-pursuing a lady through the desert and then discovers that the girl she's about to ravage is in fact a guy. This was supposed to be a reversal of the "dude looks like a lady" scenario, which is made more interesting by the fact that it's sung by a man raised by an army of women who is playfully adopting the voice of a lesbian.
The problem I'm having is that the song comes off as transphobic.
I've been trying to edit it in such a way as to emphasize the implied but unstated "but then the female speaker sleeps with the male-presenting-as-female anyway, because of course she does" elements, but so far I've been unsuccessful, as the final-verse punchline is impossible to usurp without diminishing the appeal of what is essentially a stupid impromptu bar song.
I understand the necessity of challenging the concept of "gender trouble," but "differences between the sexes" as a comedic element is so embedded in the humor of my own culture that it's almost impossible to escape, even in fiction.
The chapter I'm currently writing concludes with Zelda and Ganon at a roadside inn. In true Lord-of-the-Rings-style fantasy tavern tradition, someone asks Ganon to sing something, and he does. I ended up writing five verses of "a Gerudo song," the gist of which is that a Gerudo woman is flirt-pursuing a lady through the desert and then discovers that the girl she's about to ravage is in fact a guy. This was supposed to be a reversal of the "dude looks like a lady" scenario, which is made more interesting by the fact that it's sung by a man raised by an army of women who is playfully adopting the voice of a lesbian.
The problem I'm having is that the song comes off as transphobic.
I've been trying to edit it in such a way as to emphasize the implied but unstated "but then the female speaker sleeps with the male-presenting-as-female anyway, because of course she does" elements, but so far I've been unsuccessful, as the final-verse punchline is impossible to usurp without diminishing the appeal of what is essentially a stupid impromptu bar song.
I understand the necessity of challenging the concept of "gender trouble," but "differences between the sexes" as a comedic element is so embedded in the humor of my own culture that it's almost impossible to escape, even in fiction.
