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Laura Highcove Leave a comment

Fear
Rage
Disbelief
Pain
Dizziness
Numbness
It was such a unfathomable outcome that I simply didn’t believe. I didn’t think people could be so hateful. So scared… I watched it happen in other countries, and I didn’t believe it could happen here. I’m going to watch my country crumble. The country that has surrounded and supported me, even though it wasn’t always the best. Even though it held back much of it’s love because I was born with a vagina. Even though. And it will go kicking and screaming as it’s raped by misogyny and racism and religious intolerance, but it will go. I will watch its gasping cries knowing that what I did wasn’t enough, and that all I can do now is sit in what privilege is afforded me, shielded while I whisper ‘I’m sorry I didn’t do more. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.’ And wait to see if it swallows me too.

No One Needed Umbrella Academy Season 4

Laura Highcove Leave a comment

There were lots of problems with Umbrella Academy Season 4, and truthfully, if you want a good overview of the individual plot lines and character issues, this video brings up almost everything I would, plus some things I forgot.

What I want to talk about is the ending. Yes. Spoilers.

So the entire story is that Hargreaves released the merigold, which created our characters, and with it a ton of timelines and an equal number of world ending scenarios. The Umbrellas stave off one world ending only to find another looming. So the ultimate reality is that for the Umbrellas to actually save the world they have to wipe the marigold (and themselves, who were created by the marigold) from existence.

We watched the Umbrellas, abused misfits that they were, working to do good, to make things better, to fight for good, to struggle and fail. Their quirky lives, their vivacious humor, as they lived their lives trying to navigate their traumas and their powers and each other. Saving the world, only to have it hurtle toward another ending.

This is not a matter of not liking that the story didn’t have a happy ending. This is the fact that not only was it a shaggy dog story, but the message was: no matter how hard you try or what your intentions are, you are worthless because everything you do only makes things worse. You were born wrong. You don’t belong. You can’t improve or change it. The world will be better off if you literally never existed in the first place.

I apologize if anyone is trigger by this; but that’s the point.

That was the take away message from this story, and as a creator, I’m appalled by it. We, as creators, have a responsibility to our readers/listeners/watchers to cause no harm. The industry of storytellers as a whole is trying to change the harmful stereotypes and tropes surrounding LGBTQIA+ groups and POCs in stories because of the misinformation and negative feelings it perpetuates. And this story’s message was a painful misstep that no one needed.

You Are Not Lazy

Laura Highcove Leave a comment

You leave clothing all over the floor.
You abandon dishes to pile up on the desk, the coffee table, the sink.
You wear clothing out of the clean laundry pile.
You procrastinate chores over and over and over.
Your brain tells you, you can do it later. Always later.
You are not lazy.
You pick up a new hobby, obsess over it, then drop it.
You doom scroll through Instagram, YouTube shorts, Tumblr.
You read every article on Bored Panda.
You can’t keep focus on what you need to do.
You play a video game for five hours without looking up.
You are not lazy.
You leave things in mounting piles.
You obsessively clean.
You have so much to do but you can never start.
You are called lazy.
You are not lazy.
You say something that occurred to you and your partner says they just said that.
You are asked if you ever listen, if you care.
You don’t understand why you can’t just do this task, why you can’t focus.
You can’t grasp how time works, you’re early, or late.
You are not lazy.
You host worlds in your mind.
You have people living whole and complete in your consciousness.
You see beauty in the mundane.
You create because you must.
You bring joy and authenticity to those around you.
You are not lazy.

What Type of Stories Would Women Write?

Laura Highcove

Spoilers for Naussica of the Valley of the Wind, Uprooted, Macross Frontier, and Damsel.

I have given a lot of thought to the very real fact that men have been in charge of, well everything for most, if not all, of recorded history. This means a lot of things that we are becoming more and more aware of, like the creation of and studies for drugs and safety equipment being tested on, and thus designed almost exclusively for men. The fact that I, and a vast majority of medically trained personal, didn’t know women have different symptoms for a heart attack than man. That I tried birth control, and stopped using it because it made me insane, and then I found out that’s just how it is. Women are expected to try different birth controls until they find one they can live with, take it every day at the exact same time, and this is just considered what is expected.

So I started thinking about the fact that stories are written a certain way, and that different cultures have different structures for stories. As an American, I expect stories to have a certain structure, certain beats. And then it occurred to me, that if the male experience had so permeated the world at large, in ways we don’t even notice because it’s just always been that way (seat belts are not designed for women, and the “normal” temperature that offices are set at support men in suits, leaving women in dresses freezing.), that stories are like that too.

The content and structure of stories were created by the male writers. And so I started to think about what stories might look like if written for and consumed by women. We have a few examples of that, the genres of writing where women have been “allowed” space. Romance being the main example, cozy mysteries, and books for children (picture books through young adult) But at the same time I wonder how much of even that has been dictated by the male gaze, because that’s what was available, because with very few exceptions, that’s what we’re made to read in school. (See this article about my own blind spots.) I think the only book school had me read that was by a woman was “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

Note: I am speaking in generalities and not directly to the LGBTQIA experience at this time. I recognize ‘not all men’ and ‘not all women’ and the presence of non-binary. Now, moving on with my point…

So I tried to go back to the beginning, what type of books would women write? What stories do women write when they write naturally? Men tend to be put favor on strength, being strong, beating the odds and the opponent, physical stuff and winning. Protecting, meaning they’re doing the protecting and to do that there obviously has to be a bad guy for them to protect from.

Women are the nurturers, they want to care and connect. And I have been slowly collecting examples of what I just in general call ‘feminine endings’. For the most part I am simply looking for stories where fighting, defeating your enemy, proving your superiority is not the way the story is ‘solved’.

Examples include Naussica of the Valley of the Wind (Manga)
Uprooted by Namoi Novak (Novel)
Macross Frontier (Anime)
And most recently, Damsel (Netflix Movie)

The way I determine this is that the ending is such that fighting is tried, and does not work. The way the conflict is solved, is through compassion and learning to communicate with the ‘enemy’ and coming to understand them.

In Naussica, the titular character works her way through a world that is increasingly covered by a poisonous mushroom forest where humans fight each other over the remaining livable area. Naussica takes time to understand the forest, the creatures that live within it, and works to stop the fighting when empathy and understanding.

In a similar vein is Uprooted where the world is being taken over by a forest that corrupts everything it touches, and humans are slowly losing ground to it no matter what they do. Agnieszka finds out the forest was created by hate and regret, by using magic based less on ‘rules’ and more on ‘feeling’, works slowly to heal it.

Macross Frontier, humans are traveling through space, looking for a habitable planet because Earth has been destroyed, and run into a hive-mind species of alien that they have to fight against for survival. In typical Macross fashion, the songstresses learn to communicate with the aliens through song, and once they can talk to each other, they come to a ceasefire.

When I started watching Damsel, I was hoping it would be the same. Elodie is sacrificed to a dragon (without her knowledge or consent) and manages to survive and escape, only the kingdom that is sacrificing these women say it’s because the dragon demanded it, only Elodie finds out it was because the king of old went in and killed the dragon’s whelps. Once Elodie manages to convince the dragon that the kingdom is taking women from other kingdoms and it’s not even the original kingdom suffering, she and the dragon team up and wipe out the royal family. It’s still fighting in the end, (I mean ‘fighting’ in that the dragon just burns everything down) but the came about by alliances of people who had been wronged.

Now I’m not saying stories with fighting in them are bad in any way, or that there shouldn’t be any fighting in stories. My main goal is just pointing out that this is not the only means of conflict resolution. That it has become normalized because of the pervasiveness of the males being in charge. Again, it is not inherently ‘bad’, but it means that as a society, we’ve come to expect that the person who is ‘right’ is decided to be whoever is stronger, or louder, or confidant (huh, ‘confidanter’ isn’t a word), or trickier. There is little attempt to come to a meeting of the minds, treating reasonable people as such, and using communication as a valid way to resolve conflict.

So be aware of what kind of story you’re telling, and what message you’re portraying about ‘strength’, ‘truth’, and ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’. I’d like to see more stories that have a more feminine bend, and that these stories are actually seen. I want to know what stories women would write if they weren’t inundated with male stories, expectations, and gaze since birth. It might be impossible right now, but I strive for a world where it becomes more and more possible.

Quick Thoughts: Healthy Women Conflict

Laura Highcove

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?