= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Alicorn comments on The Hero With A Thousand Chances - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (156)
Ha! I tried doing that, the generator came up female... and I realized that I couldn't make Aerhien a man, and that having two "hers" and "shes" would make the dialogue harder to track.
Sometimes a random number generator only tells you what you already know.
(FYI, I was in an airport at the time, so I decided to close my eyes, look in a random direction, open them, and see what gender the first person I saw was... and even though they were both female, I then realized I had to discard the result.)
Why couldn't Aerhien have been a man? Were you that committed to the "perfect eyelash" line? Would having a dead spouse be an uncompelling backstory for a male character?
Uh... I have to ask, at this point, if you've ever tried your hand at writing fiction. Some characters are male, some characters are female, some can be either. The hero might have been either-able. Aerhien wasn't. She is the wise female council leader, not the wise male council leader. Galadriel and Elrond are not interchangeable. And besides, she was female in my mind and that's that.
What I want to know is if any of them are black.
I honestly haven't the vaguest idea. In the beginning I was visualizing Aerhien as having pointed ears, which made her light-elvish, but I decided against that. Generally I don't give my characters a color unless they need an ethnic background.
Make her octarine. That would be eminently appropriate.
You know when it comes to racism, people say: " I don't care if they're black, white, purple or green"... Ooh hold on now: Purple or Green? You gotta draw the line somewhere! To hell with purple people! - Unless they're suffocating - then help'em. ~Mitch Hedburg
Yes, I have. I guess you just didn't communicate the essential female-ness of Aerhien very effectively (at least to me), because it didn't seem to me like it was very important to what limited character development she got.
The background story that was alluded to came across quite clearly. Not only did the character emerge sufficiently that a sex change would have felt awkward, it left me grasping for the tantalising details that couldn't quite be fit into the short story format.
The question of "what gender is", when you strip away the purely anatomical, is a topic of great interest to me.
It seems to me that while Aerhien's gender wasn't essential to the story, there were certain aspects of her personality that hinted at it (and I'm not talking about the eyelashes) -- but I wouldn't go beyond that; if she had been written as male, I don't think I would have sensed any incongruity.
Without further biasing the discussion by mentioning what I think those personality aspects might be, I'm curious to find out what attributes other people thought made her essentially female -- among those who hold this position, that is.
"Essential" in what sense?
Are we arguing about some Platonic "essentials", in that fictional characters "actually exist somewhere"? I believe that the fictional characters were formed in Eliezer's brain as representations of certain archetypes (such as, as he noted, the "wise female council leader") that he felt best represented the characterization he was intending to give them.
It doesn't mean the story wouldn't work if the characters were given different genders or other different characteristics. It means that the author would find it unfitting to his semi-conscious concept of the story and its fictional setting, which is unknown to us except for what's revealed in the text, and is necessarily richer than the text. Or at least, I generously assume that this is what Eliezer was arguing - that "she had to be female" meant "I believe she worked best as female as the representation of my character role concept", not a postulation of some fictional Platonism.
Why couldn't a man dip his perfect eyelashes?
He could. I just would have been surprised to see it mentioned in a story. It's rarely considered to bear mentioning in a work of fiction if a male character has perfect eyelashes and happens to bat/dip/flutter them, unless this is used as a way to lampshade some stereotypical notion of effeminacy.
He was suddenly very aware that he hadn't checked his lipstick in three hours.
And for the part of that story that would not sit well with feminists (1) , check out this excerpt :
Interesting discussion follows in the comments.
(1) ETA: Or me, or most people in general.
My guess is that Aerhien was inspired by a specific character from another story.
Either that, or Eliezer simply liked the name. But, yeah, that's a good question.
Actually, I was reminded of the immortal empress in Harry Turtledove's novel "Noninterference".