Swancon panels 3

[alias_sqbr]

Boy it's good to be home! Had a blast this year, met and talked to lots of people. Feeling moderately drained but not entirely terrible, time will tell how much I crash tomorrow.

The cat is trying not to make it obvious how happy she is to see us and is currently curled up by my legs :)


Galactic Suburbia podcast
I only caught part of this but it was cool seeing it being recorded. Got a promising sounding rec for "Kraken" by China Mieville.

How to write fight scenes: I didn't go to this, but apparently it was great and Alan Baxter has a website.

Religion Creation in fantasy:
Broad common problem: Why would anyone join this religion and follow it's precepts? People tend to be basically rational and like to think of themselves as good.

• If gods unambiguously exist there will be no atheists, though there might be some humanists. Any religious schisms etc will have a different dynamic.
  
• If people who worshipped "demons"/performed human sacrifice etc saw those actions as evil they wouldn't do them. So you have to come up with consistent reasons.
  
• Not all religions work like Christianity. Many are not evangelical, very personal and region specific.
  
• Religions are complex, weird, context/history specific and appeal to people's self interest (go to heaven, get a good harvest etc) People will not worship The Ultimate Being With No Defining Features just because the priests have always said they should.
  
• Public vs private: in Ancient Greece these were different gods. Household gods you had personal relationship with, others you payed no attention to unless you needed something and did a once off sacrifice etc. Athena Pallus you just thought nice/hopeful things about sometimes. (I am ignorantly oversimplifying)
  
• If you're making a thinly veiled version of Medieval Europe the church is heavily involved in all aspects of people's lives.
  
• Ancient paganism bore very little resemblance to modern paganism.
  
• Don't let your personal beliefs take over the story (all people who agree with you good, all who disagree bad etc)
  

Classic Doctor Who
I missed the start of this. They were having a discussion about Elizabeth Sladen then showed two really lovely tributes to Sarah Jane and then the Brigadier and everyone got very sniffly.

And then for reasons that were probably explained at the the start they showed some clips from what the entire panel agreed was one of the most boring Doctor Who serials ever. And then sat around agreeing how boring it was. Since I was pretty sleepy I left to find something more likely to keep me awake.

Gynaecon panel: female characters in the background

Ok, so we have a female protagonist, or some decent three dimensional female secondary characters. But what about the person who sells them coffee? Are all the minor background characters male?

• Sjabrfem noticed the disconcerting number of 'she's when she flipped all the gender pronouns in some books.
  
• Merrick's rule aka The 545 Test: Could the human population sustain itself with the shown male/female ratio?
  
• Random redshirt vampires in Buffy all seem to be male, yet go after women. Again, unsustainable population model.
  
• Do the female characters have relationships with each other? Possibly should do some network analysis…(there were a number of mathematicians at this panel :D)
  
• (tangent) History of sf tends to gloss over any period with lots of feminist writing as periods where "nothing interesting happened".
  
• Female writers publish one book then vanish.
  
• Male is the default. Also white, cisgendered, straight, able bodied etc. It is really hard to break out of these patterns! In some ways making a major character who is all "OH LOOK I AM A BLACK DISABLED LESBIAN" is easier than creating background characters, especially with stuff like asexuality where it can easily simply not come up in the story. If you make them non-default in your head and don't make a big deal about it readers will assume the default.
  
• Disconcerting when, as a reader, you don't assume the default but it turns out the writer just expected you to assume the protagonist was male etc.
  
• Even female writers have this problem, and male characters tend to take over the plot despite best intentions. One solution is to write an all female world, as did many 70s feminist sf writers.
  
• "Stars in my pocket like grains of sand" by Samuel R Delaney does interesting things with pronouns that mess with your expectations: gender never actually stated except where relevant (eg main character deciding if he's interested)
  
• Good authors for lots of female background characters (not necessarily actually good authors): Suzy McKee Charnas, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, Serano. Also: the webcomic Digger.
  
• Lack of older women in Avatar the Last Airbender despite lots of good major young female characters.
  

2012 Launch

DOOM con looks fantastic. The committee are all very young and enthusiastic (I think prk is the only person older than me) and the launch was enjoyably brief and to the point.

Vidding panel

This was great but I was very sleepy so have no deeper commentary :)

Cupidsbow has a list and links for the vids.

There was a discussion about vids about rape, here are two examples I found for Veronica Mars. Trigger warnings like whoa!
Martina
Where the boys are