Mood: Anxious
Blughglhggh my mood has been absolutely terrible ever since my short story draft got critiqued. Honestly getting my critique from the class was really really helpful, and now I know what I need to include in order for my story to work a bit better... but I just have no idea how to incorporate the necessary information into the story and IT'S STRESSING ME OUT!!! Save me.... from this agony ughslghsdg...........
The more I think about it, though, the more I really wish I chose a different set of characters for the story. Idk if I mentioned, but I'm writing about Lafayette and Dmitri when they were kids. Gender's kind of been a central point of the conflict, but I was really hoping I wouldn't have to write about gender because even though gender is something relevant to who Laf is as a person, I don't want that to be the crutch of his story.
This is actually why I avoided making "coming out" stuff happen in Nerdy and Jock, and also more or less why I've stopped A Life Like This. A Life Like This was really a coming out story for both Rick (mostly Rick) and Tim. It also was going to have bullying in it, where Rick would be bullied for being gay. But now that gay rights issues are being addressed and normalized, having Rick be bullied to the extent he would be, and having Tim be so paranoid about coming out as bi the way I planned, would be pretty anachronistic. I also don't want to write a preachy story anymore that rides solely on themes like "DON'T BULLY GAY KIDS!" and "DON'T BE AFRAID TO COME OUT!!!" because if that's what I'm going to rely on, I risk losing depth of character. I think the lack of depth really shows with Rick--really all he was was some gay kid who gets bullied, and if that's all he is then all his story would be nothing but a "warning/morality" thing. And that's just so pretentiously boring. Honestly, having a story where someone can come out/be gay/etc without bullying feels a lot more powerful to me than one where bullying is used as a device to teach the audience a lesson.
In relation to Lafayette, I really want to avoid any sort of bullying that happens to him. Also, I'm gonna just straight up and say that Laf is intersex, if you didn't know. I wasn't planning bringing his biological sex into the forefront, but thinking about it more he's actually pretty open about being intersex because he thinks it's something that ought to be recognized. I GUESS WHAT I'M SAYING IS... HE'D BE FINE WITH ME TELLING YOU GUYS, HAHA. But in terms of bullying, I kind of want to avoid external bullying in exchange for maybe internal conflict and conflict with Dmitri or whatever. Not because I think that bullying doesn't happen to intersex people or something, but because I don't think bullying will really bring out anything significant about Lafayette's character. And it's also just an issue that there's so much more to Lafayette than his sex and gender, I really want to have the chance to talk about who he is and how he sees the world rather than just how he conceives himself.
My story's not about bullying, by the way. I guess it's more about gender norms and what's normal between Dmitri and Lafayette, but since what's considered "normal" changes so much with time, stories about these sorts of things really do face the fear of being dated and irrelevant quickly. So I'm really trying to find a way to make it less about "here's what the current gender norms are and how Laf responds to them," but more about "here's how Laf responds to his friend having a crush on him." But since he's a kid and not really solid or open about his gender yet, and also since he doesn't know he's intersex yet, I feel like what I want to get across is going to be really hard to get across. """orz But I'll be thinking on it.
Right now a lot of people in the class thought Laf was trans, which is HMMMMNR... I kind of expected it, but I also still need to fix that. It was actually kind of unusual to hear so many people refer to Laf with feminine pronouns because most people online will use male ones (because that's what I use) or neutral ones (because he's non-binary). But anyway. I'm rambling about stuff. I actually had typed a whole lot more here, but it wasn't really about anything relevant, so I got rid of it. FOR ANOTHER TIME, MAYBE....
ANYWAY, I just really needed to get a lot of stuff off my chest bc Lafayette is a STRESSFUL CHARACTER! He's been stressful since day 1. But somehow he's managed to stick around, haha.... that's all, tho. Thanks for reading if you did, I guess, sorry it's so incoherent and whatever. xD I KNOW THIS POST HAS BEEN SUPER VAGUE... It'll probably make more sense once I finish and post my short story on theO (maybe by next week). I might copy this post to have in Various Planning, too, just so it's there tagged for reference.
