Quick Thoughts: Healthy Women Conflict

Laura Highcove Leave a comment

Been watching a new Chinese Drama called ‘Everyone Loves Me’. Basic premise is Yue Qianling (female lead) is an artist at a game company and also loves playing fps games. She has a friend group who play together. Gu Xun (male lead) is a member of the friend group, and likes her, but she likes him in real life, and neither of them know the other is the online friend.

Gu Xun has Yue Qianling come work for his department due to her art skills for a particular character, and the person who was working on this character is a woman. I was impressed that they added conflict by having the woman disapprove of her in a completely reasonable way. Yue Qianling’s new and untested, hasn’t worked on this type of game before, her first draft comes out very bland, so the other artist has plenty of reasons to criticize her. And again, the criticisms are completely justified, and while blunt, are not harsh.

The reason I’m pointing it out is because it’s such a refreshing thing to have to women in conflict in an Asian drama in a reasonable way that doesn’t have anything to do with them both bring in love with the same guy or out of irrational jealousy/pettiness over the other’s looks. It’s a legitimate character interaction.

And yes, Yue Qianling does eventually earn her approval.

One Author’s Opinion on AI Generating Tools

Laura Highcove

What is your opinion on ‘AI Generating Tools’ (AIGTs)?

I mean that’s rather broad. Tldr: I see them as useful tools.

But the people who created these programs stole content to train them on without the creator’s permission.

Yes, and consider for a moment that the people who developed Midjourney put out a call and got artists to opt in with their art. Since we’re daydreaming, let’s even say Midjourney’s developers even paid! those artists.

It took longer to develop the program, cost a bit more, but Midjourney now exists! Would that change the argument against people generating pictures/stories and selling them? Would there no longer be an outcry against these tools?

I mean actors were/are signing over the rights to their likeness and being paid for it. But the argument was never about how much they were being paid, it was about how those likenesses will be used. Same thing with these tools. The method of their creation is a travesty, but it’s not the nearly the main argument.

And it’s creating tons of pollution. Like a ton.

Yes, that sucks, and I’m tired of being made to feel guilty about my individual contribution to pollution. Reducing pollution has to be done by the companies making that pollution, which requires government oversight. All I can do is try to vote for people who intend to require this kind of oversight.

So you’re using AIGTs?

Yes. To make pictures of characters, scenes. And to give me ideas; names of characters, personality ideas, or place names. My stories and my characters are my own, and I’m not using it to create anything I am then putting out whole cloth and/or charging for it.

And your Patreon?

I’ve been pretty open about that, here’s the link to that position.

So you don’t care about the artists losing their jobs?

Of course I do, but as much as it sucks, this is what happens with new technology. Every tool ever created has both improved productivity, and cost humans jobs. You wanna talk about computers themselves? Doesn’t mean it’s not painful and that people don’t suffer, but technological advancement is not something we can stop, or should.

But why should we let it replace humans?

It won’t. Maybe in the short term it will seem like it will. Greedy companies will try to save money by doing it. Non-creatives will generate pictures and words and sell them, and people will buy them.
But like I said before, this generated content is just a tool’s output. Like a camera can take the picture, but it is only art because of the human perspective.

Maybe this type of generated content will become it’s own form of art, a collaboration between a human and a computer. Maybe it won’t. But while AIGTs can recreate everything a person, and artist did, recreate the beats of it, the feel of it, it will NEVER be able to create on its own, because there is no self. It can’t predict what a person will create tomorrow because there’s no way to predict who a person will be tomorrow. Because these tools, however many of them there are, will never be more than a snapshot of what the world was up until the moment the most recent picture, song, video was input, and it will never go past that. It will never actually CREATE anything, it will only repeat, rehash, regurgitate.

So my fellow artists, keep creating, keep living, and loving, and experiencing, and struggling to share yourself with others. Because that’s what art is, and all it will ever be, because computers will never be able to predict the insanity that is humanity.

In conclusion:

Even if there were lawsuits that shut down each of the myriad AIGTs that exist now, the can of worms has been opened. It’s not going away. I understand the ’don’t use it’ argument of Chuck Wendig (and plenty of others) but it is a tool and I’m going to use it for idea generation and coming up with the f—ing SEO key-phrases and meta descriptions that are the bane of my existence. And I won’t say I’ll never change my position, nor am I saying that my conclusion is ‘right’ even now, but it is what I’m doing. Go forth, gather evidence, and make your own choice.

But please, never stop creating.

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PS: Just for funsies, the header picture of this article was generated in Midjourney v6 using the phrase “art made as a collaboration between a human and a computer” then iterated, chosen, and edited by me. You can click here for the full image. Use it however you like.

My Blind Spots

Laura Highcove

I want to be able to shed light on how women are portrayed in media, but I will admit that even I have my own blind spots. As a woman, for whom this is personal and real, and has a vested interest in raising up women in media, I am still lost in the cyclical reality in many cases.

For a moment I’m going to talk about two books that I read very close to the same time. I’m going to spoil the endings as well, because that’s where my point gets made. The first book, Legendborn by Tracy Deonn Is the story of college student, Bree, who finds out that there’s magic in the world when she runs into a society who are basically all descendants of King Arthur and his knights, who fight against demons. When the Demons endanger the world, the person directly descended from each of the knights of the round table ‘awaken’, getting powers of that knight. This happens in order of importance and thus Lancelot and King Arthur have not awakened in like…forever. Bree is discovered to be a descendant of Lancelot and Nick, the boy she falls for, is in the line of King Arthur. The twist at the end of the book is that Bree’s ancestors were raped, which caused the knight’s bloodlines to switch, thus Nick, instead awakens as Lancelot, while Bree awakens as King Arthur. Hold onto that for a moment.

The other book is King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo. One of the major plot-lines in this book is that the current king of the country, Nikolai, is possibly a bastard, and thus doesn’t deserve the throne. But he’s a great guy and a great king, so we (the reader) don’t want him to be ousted. This mystery is thrown around through the book as he and Zoya complete the rest of the plot. (Read the book it’s great. Really, read everything by Bardugo.) We finally get to the climax scene where it comes out that Nikolai is a bastard and has no right to the throne, and during the resulting conflict, he throws out the idea that Zoya should be queen. She doesn’t have royal blood, but neither did the royal family when they first became royal. And she ends up becoming queen.

Now I read both of these books within a week of each other, and while reading I just …accepted that the woman in each of these story lines would end up in a secondary position to their romantic interest. (I could name you a dozen books where this does happen.) The man was King, and the woman was going to support him. That was just the expected and comfortable reality, and when each of these authors was like ‘Okay, and now the woman is the king/queen.’, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen that as an option. I realized how complainant I was in the cyclical reality that the woman would be secondary to the man.

I, personally, like supporting other people. I don’t like being the one taking charge. Whether that’s my personality or it was beaten into me hard enough by society, I don’t quite know, BUT that doesn’t mean that it should be true for every woman I write (or read). This was a complete blind-spot for me, and it made me completely reconsider one of the books that I’ve been writing where the female lead was, to a certain extent, just support for the male lead.

And I know that there are likely other blind-spots in my view of woman’s place in society, but now that I’m more aware of it, I am aware of the necessity to question everything, not just the obvious. Because stories shape who we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change that shape.

Mourning Women Who Never Existed

Laura Highcove

I have been aware, as most of you are, about the way women are portrayed in media, and that it’s not always the best. Those are other articles for other times, but today I’m talking specifically about Peggy Carter. I became a huge fan of her from her series and while I tend to dislike period pieces where men are blatantly bigots, Peggy was just awesome and her story was great. (It was the beginning of the end when they gave her dementia, but I digress.)

I watched the Marvel’s What If series, and the first episode was ’What if Peggy had gotten the Captain America serum instead of Steve?’ . I’m watching this episode and the fact that Peggy gets injected instead of Steve comes down to whether one man in charge sends her up into the stands vs staying on the floor where the procedure is going to take place.

And it suddenly hit me. Captain America, one of Marvel’s first and biggest heroes, and all it took for that to be a woman instead of a man was an inconsequential decision in the story. That’s all it ever took, but the people in charge didn’t make those decisions. And in the middle of this episode, I began to mourn every woman superhero who was never created. Every female artist who was denied the chance. Every girl who grew up seeing only male characters doing heroic things. I even mourned the female comic book characters we do have, created in the male gaze, for the male gaze, who only in the past few years have been written with any dignity and depth.

All those stories that were never told. All that history that will never exist. And it’s not just comic books. It’s media. It’s life. Women forgotten, pushed aside, buried, and restricted by the male gaze. Stories left to die without ever being seen. And we don’t even know what we’re missing.

In that moment, it became more real to me than it had ever been before. Overwhelmingly. There is nothing I can do except shine a light on women in stories as brightly as I can, to raise awareness, to shift the expectation. Because women deserve to tell their stories, and have those stories seen.

I’ve Never Minded Spoilers

Laura Highcove

While there is a certain benefit to having stories not spoiled. I know there are a certain number of movies or books where the twist is just so brilliant and amazing that not having that ‘omg’ moment would’ve been disappointing. For instance, I still remember the feeling of realizing along with Bruce Willis that he was a ghost. The thing is, I have watched The 6th Sense multiple times since then, and I have enjoyed it every time.

The way that I judge my stories is a multi-step process. I consume the story for the first time. I take it in whole, in general I don’t try to figure out the twists before they come, I just enjoy what’s going on. I let the story do what it’s trying to do. If this is successful, then I say I enjoy that story, whatever type of media it might be.

One of the weirdest things I ever watched was a series on Netflix called Captain Laserhawk, a Blood Dragon Remix. Suggested by a friend, my partner and I binged it in one sitting and it was delightful. The aesthetic was engaging, the story kept pulling me along, I enjoyed the characters, all that. Then it was over, and I turned to my partner and I said. “None of that story made sense. This plot hole and that plot hole, and this other thing that happened but had no purpose except they were trying to fool the watcher.” An entirely enjoyable show with no actual substance or staying power behind it.

But the real test for me comes when (and if) I have a desire to re-consume the story, because, like this article says, after you know where the story is going, you can take in the sights. You can consider the details, whether the foreshadowing was on point, if the the vast amount of scenes/chapters/episodes hold up and contribute to the overall. If I consume a story a second time and still enjoy it, then I consider it to be good. There are movies I will watch over and over. There are books I can pick up, open to a page, and just read. This is just the way I enjoy my stories.

And while I wouldn’t want every story to be spoiled before I get to it, I can understand why knowing the twists of a story could help enjoyment of it. As long as the story is worthwhile in the first place.

Cyclical Reality

Laura Highcove

Do you like your name? Do you have a nickname? Did you know that your name has actually shaped the person you’ve become? Yeah, was doubtful too when I found out your name actually affects your personality. But the more I read and thought about it, the less doubt I had.

The brain always wants to simplify things, make generalizations based on available information. It calls on previous “experience” to quickly label people who wear certain clothes, or who speak a certain way which leads to us interacting with them a certain way (often times subconsciously) and we have the same thing with names.

I created a character one time that belonged to my partner and I in a shared universe and we were trying to decide what her name was. Newly formed, we knew bits of her personality and skills. I suggested Venus, and my partner vetoed it because ‘there are implications of that name we don’t want’. We eventually agreed to call her Melanie. Now you, dear reader, knowing nothing else about this character probably have some image in your head if what a woman named ‘Venus’ looks like as opposed to a woman named ‘Melanie ‘.

The thing I want to draw your attention to is that in the universe, there is nothing saying a person named ‘Venus’ would act a certain way, or a person named ‘Melanie’, or ‘Wilbert’, or ‘Deshawn’, or ‘Barbara’, but I bet your brain came up with something on reading those names?

Cyclical Reality

This is a phenomenon I’ve come to call cyclical reality. People expect someone named “Melanie’ to act a certain way and subconsciously expect them to act that way, which subconsciously pressures them into acting that way, such that ‘Melanie’ acts that way, such that people see ‘Melanie ‘ acts that way, thus expect Melanie’s to act that way… More simply put, it’s a reality humanity creates and enforces because it’s always been that way.

Now the fact that my name is Laura, and I grew up with that name, and was expected to behave the way a ‘Laura’ would act doesn’t really bother me. I don’t feel the need to go on a crusade to change the way ‘Lauras’ are seen in this world.

Except when it comes to being an author. Because ‘Laura’ is a female name, and females are still struggling to find their place as authors in the fantasy genre, which is my genre of choice. There are still too many people who won’t pick up a book written by a ‘woman’.

Why This is Bad

And cyclical reality guides more than our opinions about names. An example from an excellent movie that calls out the results of the expectations and realities of society, Nick from the movie Zootopia. People expect foxes to be con men, untrustworthy and unscrupulous, so he decides to go ahead and act that way, thus…

Such as the fact that CEOs in America are predominately older, white males. This is because people expect CEOs to look this way, so those are the people who get promoted, and become CEOs, and thus…

Then when questioned about why it’s like this, people try to rationalize it, making up excuses like ‘well women/POCs don’t have the ambition or mental ability to be a CEO. Their logic being, if they did have the skills and abilities, then they would be CEOs. Since they’re not, it must be their own deficiency.

Our Responsibility as Writers

This cyclical reality is reinforced in the stories we write as well. And they affect people’s perception of reality, because remember all stories do, so it’s important to recognize these and write stories in such a way to not perpetuate them. Make women CEOs, make black people doctors, make someone in a wheelchair a business owner, make a man a stay at home dad.

I wrote a whole book, where every time I needed a character, I made them female, unless there was a reason for them to be male. It felt weird because the default is always (white) male. I had beta readers comment on how many people are women in this story. I went and counted up all the characters and the number of each gender, and woman were still only 60% of the characters. I put effort into putting females in as much as possible and I still only ended up with 60% female characters.

Again, as writers we want to be aware that this is happening, both to be aware of it and to write better characters and societies. And while we can’t stop our brain from making its gross oversimplifications of people, we can be aware of it and consciously try to treat people as the unique individuals they are.

Seems a little less silly that parents (and writers) spend tons of time deciding what to call their children, though, huh?

The Power of Stories

Laura Highcove

Stories are the most important thing in existence. More than actual reality, stories shape who we are because they shape our experience of the world and our very identities. What happened, what could happen, who we are, who we can be, and who everyone else is in relation to us, all of these are stories.

“Wait, no, those sound like memories.” You might be thinking. Technically yes, you have memories of what has happened, but are you aware of how ridiculously unreliable your own memories are? The brain is an amazing tool, but not always the most accurate. For example, there is a known issue with eye witnesses remembering things incorrectly due to anything from ambient conditions to racial profiling. There’s also the fact that science knows your memories change every time you remember them.

This doesn’t mean you don’t remember what you remember, it just means you have your own spin on what happened. This is why you can argue with someone over what happened and both of you be so convinced you’re right. Heck, you might both be right. Because it’s very rarely ‘what happened’, but more often how you interpreted what happened…ie your ‘story’ of what happened.

And this is true for almost everyone in the world. We use stories to learn, and to plan, and to make sense of the world. Stories we internalize from events, daydreams, and actual stories from shows and books and anecdotes.

Stories have always been a big part of my life. My writing mentor once asked a group of writers, ‘when did you tell your family that you were a writer?’, like when did you admit that this was something you were passionate about and something you were pursuing? And I remember that my answer was, I never did. I was telling stories from the time I had the language to do so, and my family was just aware of it. I wrote, I created, I was a writer because I literally didn’t know any other way to be. Even now that I’m working toward being a professional and being seen on a wider scale, there was never a serious question of whether or not I would stop writing. I couldn’t stop creating stories any more than I could stop breathing.

And if you’re a writer like me, consciously making stories, it’s good to also be aware of how often you are unconsciously creating stories about everything. It’s what the brain does. Some people never acknowledge this, they assume their memories, their experience of life is the be all end all. As a writer, you want to be aware of this, both for yourself and in others.

Not only will it make you a better writer, but it will make you a more understanding and accepting person, which is never a bad thing. AND understanding how you create stories that influence your world will help you to create more believable and real characters for the intentional stories you’re writing.

First Impressions: My Demon

Laura Highcove

My Demon is a Korean Drama currently coming out on Netflix. Korean Dramas are always hit or miss for me. It is still difficult in this day and age for K-dramas to have a romantic story where the female lead is empowered, or at least not reduced to a helpless damsel in distress if she’s not outright mentally abused by the male lead.

In My Demon, an immortal demon, whose job is to grant a person’s wish for payment of their souls after ten years, loses his power-granting tattoo to a powerful young CEO who is being targeted for death.

I just started episode 3 of this series and so far it has some nice green flags:

  1. The female lead is a CEO, competent, empowered one, and does not suddenly lose agency when the male lead shows up.
  2. The male lead has magic powers, but they are limited when his tattoo transfers to her (for unknown reason) so he does not hold all the power in the relationship.
  3. The female lead is told that the tattoo has his powers and that he needs to be touching her to use them, thus avoiding infantalizing the female lead in that he would just hang around using her without her knowing why.
  4. Most of the major decisions regarding how the two of them interact are made by the female lead instead of the male lead simply forcing himself on her constantly.
  5. And though the male lead is a self-centered jerk, is not set up as a child the female lead needs to keep cleaning up after.
  6. I swear, Korean Dramas are what YA Fantasy would be without the gd age restrictions.

I remain hopeful for this series considering how many of the painful tropes it’s already countered, but I’m annoyed that it’s coming out slowly. Also, since it’s a K-drama, the fact that it’s only 16 episodes is unusual, but they’re not pussy-footing around the plot, and we know the story will be wrapped up at the end of those episodes.

So if this series interests you, like it does me, give it a shot. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

The Point of Art

Laura Highcove

I’ve been thinking about creativity and art a lot in general recently. This came mainly from an interview with Neil Newbon while he was at EGX. He was, of course, talking about Astarion, the arrogant elf vampire he voice acted and mocapped in Baldur’s Gate 3. A character I latched onto very strongly (along with most other female presenting gamers I’ve seen) while the male presenting gamers I’ve talked with generally stabbed him the first scene they found out he was a vampire.

And Neil said he was happy whenever people had any kind of strong reaction to the character, good or bad. Because art is supposed to make people feel things. It’s not up the artist to dictate what that is.

Now as a writer of fiction, I do try to dictate, but I also understand my intention is not going to be everyone’s interpretation. Eventually my novels will be released for public consumption (not that I have experience with this on a large scale yet) and then it’s for those public to decide.

I saw the above interview around the same time as one of Chuck Wendig’s posts, referencing a piece of ‘fanmail’ he’d gotten about a recently published book. The email, among other things, complained about the ‘politics’ in the book, to which Chuck replied, “Anyway, this is your reminder that all art is political and who gets to write the art and who is included in the art and who gets mad at the art — that’s all part of the politics of a piece. Like it or not. Thinking you can keep politics out of art is like thinking you can keep a fish alive out of water. It has to swim there even when it doesn’t realize it’s swimming there. Just because the fish doesn’t know what water is doesn’t mean the water doesn’t exist.”

All art is a reflection of the artist. I remember as a child hating when my English teachers would demand I see a certain message in the ‘classics’ we read. That stories should just be. What I didn’t realize at the time was that just the fact that certain books were considered classics, and certain books were read in school, and the messages therein were pushed, was all a part of the politics. I mean how many ‘classics’ did you, going to school in America, read that were written by someone other than a white male?

Now that I’m older, more experienced, and am paying attention, I can’t not see it. And I know my own politics and opinions and morals come across in my own books, because I’m human. The novel I finished most recently was very influenced by COVID and American politics (mainly 2016-2022). Both of these things have had a severe and lasting impact on the way the world occurs to me.

And part of that was an awareness, an actual understanding deep in my soul, that there are some people with whom I will never get along and never agree, even if I believe the basic nature of humans is good. This means that attempting to please everyone is impossible, and that most definitely includes with my chosen art, writing.

Because one of my main goals, when it comes to my writing, is to interact with people’s interpretation of my stories. Like I am super excited about the idea of fan fiction/fan art of something I’ve written. I’ve actually said before that if my work ever got adapted to film or TV, I would be fine with them changing things, because it’s basically just another fan fiction. And I want to get that first review or piece of mail that hates my story too. I mean I’m sure part of me will be crushed by it, because I have a fragile artist’s soul, but at the same time, it is still a strong reaction to art that I have put out there in the world. And that’s what I want.

How Baldur’s Gate 3 Changed my Life

Laura Highcove

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an amazing game, I don’t think that’s really in debate within the gaming community. But I’ve played a lot of video games, and some of them were even very good. I mean I finished Tears of the Kingdom earlier this year and that was pretty wow. But for a video game, or any other source of media for that matter, to change my life is a high bar.

Talking just straight game-play, BG3 is a masterpiece that breaks new ground and then smashes it to bits with a hammer. The ability to play through the story basically any way you want to, to have your decisions have a lasting effect on events, people, and the world is just ‘mimics brain exploding complete with sound effects’.

None of which would matter if the story you were playing through wasn’t any good. I’m a writer. Story is important to me. I want my horizons stretched, I want surprising, yet inevitable, I want characters that I care about. That game gave me all of this. It also gave me something I didn’t know I wanted, which was to questions my choices, to agonize over decisions, to make mistakes. That is something that no other game has really ever let me experience, or at least not to nearly this extent.

The wildly divergent paths you can take also allows for another unique opportunity, besides just experiencing things differently, it also allows you to see, for the first time what a person’s response would be to different inputs in the exact same situation, allowing you to experience more story/reactions/emotion than would otherwise be possible.

It’s likely no surprise that I identify female and am head over heels for Astarion. But before my mind had really grocked the insane branching paths that were possible through different dialogue choices, I had gone through a good portion of my first play-through, choosing options and getting responses. On a second play through, I knew to dig deeper into the different options, and some of the responses gave such nuance to some of the things Astarion actually said.

As a writer it is impossible (and really, not advisable) to have a character to say everything they’re feeling. If they are even aware of all their feelings in the first place, it’s still just not efficient. But the ability to see deeper into dialogue and motivation by being able to look through the branching dialogue paths was just amazing. I’ve romanced Astarion in two different play-throughs, and both of them felt completely unique.

The branching story lines also allow each character to be that much more developed as a person, and not just a character in a particular story. Shadowheart can kill or spare the Nightsong. Astarion can complete the ritual or not. Lae’zel can remain brain-washed by her cult leader. Wyll can break from his patron. Gale can blow up the world. Karlach, well she’s a sweet cinnamon roll and would never do anything to hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it.

Normally we don’t get the chance to see characters go down these different paths, and it made the characters that much more real (as well as increasing the game’s re-playability) because there isn’t just one ‘right’ path. (Except making sure Karlach’s engine is fixed so she can touch people again.)
All this to say that my expectation of games is forever changed. There will always be something in the back of my head resenting the ‘movie’ style video game story. Whether or not anyone will ever hit anything close to it again, who knows? But now the meta has been changed.

In addition, because of this variability of people’s motivations and actions and such, I have a new appreciation for heroes who are not 100% good. I mean you get anti-heros in stories, but there’s still only that one path. I have been so inspired by the story and the characters in this game that I have written over 90k words of fan fiction, and by allowing myself to write around and be influenced by story and dialogue I did not write, I have felt myself stretching, growing, and changing as a writer.

And I will forever be a fan of this game and the people who put it together with such dedication and love.