Detective Baby is on the case!
We discuss mysteries, whodunnits, procedurals, and other murdery shows.
Topics Discussed and/or Spoiled
Wild Seed, Oddmall, Geek Watch One, Arcadia, Sleepy Hollow, Lucifer, Fringe, Angel, Hannibal, Murder She Wrote, Mystery! Peter Wimsy, Murder By Death, Castle, House, Prime Suspect, Luther, Wallander, and Brooklyn 99
Our outro is Debs & Errol’s Walthrough
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The topic you brought up about what does it mean to deal with marginalized groups when the characters are not limited to specific bodies is one I have thought about a lot. For a little backstory, one of the projects I am working on is a novel about immortals who live by reincarnating into and then taking over the bodies of teenagers whenever they die. There’s no particular pattern to the bodies they end up in so the main immortal is currently taking over the body of a 15-year-old Caucasian girl, but was previously a 24 year old Chinese-American man. Now it turns out for my story that race doesn’t play a huge part in what’s going on, but there’s some really tricky aspects of gender that it took me a really long time to work out.
I wanted to make it really clear that there is no rhyme or reason to where they end up when they die, while still maintaining a basically 50/50 split on male vs female characters. This means that (since only two generations appear in the story) there needed to be a significant number of characters who swapped sex as well as a significant number of characters who maintained the same sex across the generation gap. Because the immortals have a character and personality outside their physical body, there were basically no restrictions about how they appear in the story–their body’s history almost doesn’t matter. This meant that I got to mindfully and deliberately pick every single character’s apparent gender with the pros/cons it would have on their perceptions by the audience. It’s really made me painfully aware of some of the double standards the culture has about characters in this way. (So for instance, a character who kills his immortal (male) friend’s mortal (female) love interest while in a female body, comes off as “obviously” romantically pining after the friend, whereas two guys yields a more neutral form of discomfort wherein he is obviously villainous.)
This is not even getting into what the immortals’ “real” genders are. Are any/all of my characters periodically transgender? How do they even feel about gender as a concept, after bouncing between bodies for so long? Then there’s pronouns. Most of the characters just adopt the pronouns of the body they’re in currently, but if they still have a gender, and it’s opposite of their current body’s gender, should they be so cool with that? Is the fact that I have a huge category of potentially really important representation characters who are basically just ok with the status quo and adapt to the environment they’re in really damaging? On the other hand, their experience is so different that maybe they aren’t really even representative at all. Like, I have a pair of immortals who are in love, they were originally a heterosexual couple, but they reincarnate as pretty much every combination imaginable and have gotten used to breaking all sorts of taboos, from young/old to every combination of genders and races, but am I almost giving an “out” where you can argue that they aren’t *really* a gay couple, or an interracial couple at any given time?
I think there’s just a lot of tricky questions that arise at the intersection of fantastic circumstance and real world social complexity. I am not sure how easy it is to tackle such a thing *well*. But I think it’s some of the most rich and interesting soil to examine our own culture and values as well. I might not be the one who will make it work, but maybe some one who sees me flailing through will.
Oh hey your podcast is longer than 7 minutes. Maybe I should listen to the rest of it….
That’s intense stuff! I imagine you’ll have even more to say about our newest episode all about intersectionality!
I have discovered a new game that I was not aware I was even playing. Without checking the show notes, I’ve been trying to guess which D&E song Leman will choose for the outro. This time, I was racking my brain, “What will he choose? What will he choose?”
Then, without any explanation or introduction, the song began.
“Walk Through.”
Procedural. Ah…delicious. I get it!
Well played, Leman, well played.
Ooh! Now that I know there’s a game, I’ll have to be more wiley… hmmm….