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pod_together, poetree, and "The Fairest Of Them All": planning
Sep. 3rd, 2013 07:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexconall posting in poetree"The best way to predict the future", reads
a sign kept near my desk, "is to create
it." So I must be mindful of folks' needs
when making art; I cannot let me skate.
Today I'd like to talk about how I planned out mypod_together project, "The Fairest Of Them All".
The usual thing that happens when I have a story idea is I email my friend Anne. I did in fact email Anne when I started putting together the thoughts that became "Fairest", though I was sitting on her couch at the time. She was in the adjacent chair. (Her responses are not recorded.) I think she and her roommate and I had watched Disney's Snow White that afternoon (the roommate being a Disney fan), and I was thinking about a part of the Grimm story omitted from Disney: the reason Snow White has hair black as ebony, skin white as snow, lips red as blood. The reason, that is to say, Snow White is "the fairest of them all". The first place my mind went was fair as in justice, but...
I've read Princeless. More to the point, I've read the Princeless sample pages that keep doing the rounds of Tumblr. The gist of the pages is that a prince has come seeking princess-in-tower Adrienne, and refers to her as "fair". "Do you know what fair means?" Adrienne demands. "Um...beautiful?" Adrienne, who is brown, explains that the word also means "white".
Snow White, in the traditional story, is the fairest of all because she's the palest.
That isn't always applicable in retellings (though I do like how Seanan McGuire handles it in Indexing: her Snow White freaks out her Pied Piper by being inhumanly pale): Mercedes Lackey's The Serpent's Shadow casts Snow White as a woman of half English, half Indian ancestry. I like the rhythm of the traditional description of Snow White, though. Which presented me immediately with a problem: I'm an intersectional feminist. As such, I try not to be one of those white feminists of whom feminists of color speak derisively due to said white feminists' lack of concern for the problems of women of color. One of those problems is lack of media representation, and another is how standards of female beauty invariably favor the paler person over the less pale.
I chose to resolve this by making my Snow White princess of a fantasy Wales, pale enough to pass as white herself, while having the facial features common to inhabitants of a fantasy Japan. This may not have been the ideal solution, but it's one I stand by.
My next email to Anne concerning what became "Fairest" was the next day. I believe she and I had discussed differentiating Snow's seven friends from one another, because that email names them and the next distinguishes them by class and by job. The email after identifies Snow's rescuer. An email from the day after that notes that the magic in "Fairest" follows the Chinese system of Wu Xing ('five elements' is, I'm told, a poor translation): I did not want to go with the Western four elements, fire earth water air, because I might be setting the story in a predominantly white area but that didn't mean I had to set it in a white-dominated world. I did not want to go with the Japanese five elements, earth water fire wind void, for fear of confusing people who had heard of the Western four but not the Japanese five. Wu Xing is wood fire earth metal water, which suited my intent for the story much better.
a sign kept near my desk, "is to create
it." So I must be mindful of folks' needs
when making art; I cannot let me skate.
Today I'd like to talk about how I planned out my
pod_together project, "The Fairest Of Them All".The usual thing that happens when I have a story idea is I email my friend Anne. I did in fact email Anne when I started putting together the thoughts that became "Fairest", though I was sitting on her couch at the time. She was in the adjacent chair. (Her responses are not recorded.) I think she and her roommate and I had watched Disney's Snow White that afternoon (the roommate being a Disney fan), and I was thinking about a part of the Grimm story omitted from Disney: the reason Snow White has hair black as ebony, skin white as snow, lips red as blood. The reason, that is to say, Snow White is "the fairest of them all". The first place my mind went was fair as in justice, but...
I've read Princeless. More to the point, I've read the Princeless sample pages that keep doing the rounds of Tumblr. The gist of the pages is that a prince has come seeking princess-in-tower Adrienne, and refers to her as "fair". "Do you know what fair means?" Adrienne demands. "Um...beautiful?" Adrienne, who is brown, explains that the word also means "white".
Snow White, in the traditional story, is the fairest of all because she's the palest.
That isn't always applicable in retellings (though I do like how Seanan McGuire handles it in Indexing: her Snow White freaks out her Pied Piper by being inhumanly pale): Mercedes Lackey's The Serpent's Shadow casts Snow White as a woman of half English, half Indian ancestry. I like the rhythm of the traditional description of Snow White, though. Which presented me immediately with a problem: I'm an intersectional feminist. As such, I try not to be one of those white feminists of whom feminists of color speak derisively due to said white feminists' lack of concern for the problems of women of color. One of those problems is lack of media representation, and another is how standards of female beauty invariably favor the paler person over the less pale.
I chose to resolve this by making my Snow White princess of a fantasy Wales, pale enough to pass as white herself, while having the facial features common to inhabitants of a fantasy Japan. This may not have been the ideal solution, but it's one I stand by.
My next email to Anne concerning what became "Fairest" was the next day. I believe she and I had discussed differentiating Snow's seven friends from one another, because that email names them and the next distinguishes them by class and by job. The email after identifies Snow's rescuer. An email from the day after that notes that the magic in "Fairest" follows the Chinese system of Wu Xing ('five elements' is, I'm told, a poor translation): I did not want to go with the Western four elements, fire earth water air, because I might be setting the story in a predominantly white area but that didn't mean I had to set it in a white-dominated world. I did not want to go with the Japanese five elements, earth water fire wind void, for fear of confusing people who had heard of the Western four but not the Japanese five. Wu Xing is wood fire earth metal water, which suited my intent for the story much better.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-03 03:49 pm (UTC)I know you aren't posting your poem in full until the end of this week, but this seems like an apt time to delve a little deeper into how your meta decisions about the poem's cultural setting ("fantasy Wales") and cues re: Snow's geographic ancestry ("facial features common to inhabitants of a fantasy Japan")
translated into word choice & descriptions in the poem text. Would you be up for sharing some excerpts where you reference characters' physical appearance?
no subject
Date: 2013-09-03 04:02 pm (UTC)I would, but I can't till I get home from work.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-03 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-03 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-04 11:09 am (UTC)Also, I really like that you reach for 'paleness' as or more readily than 'white' for descriptions of low-melanin skin tones; it's more accurate (skin lacking in melanin is more translucent, which is why the blueish-white connective stuff underneath the skin + red tint of blood filtration gives such skin shades of pale pink with fluctuations toward stark blue-tinged white or tomato red possible with sufficient change in blood flow) and makes 'white' [as snow] skin seems as fairy tale fanciful a description as lips red as blood or hair black as ebony.