Shapeshifting
Apr. 19th, 2006 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseI had a good Easter weekend: for one thing, if you count the tail end of Thursday, I got to use the word "Anthropologically" twice in natural conversation (Once to a pair of Mormons who pounced on me on my walk home, in explaining why their book is a racist tract, and once grumbling about the Role-playing universe we're using, where people ethnically and technologically like West Coast Indians next to people ethnically and technologically more like Renaissance Holland.) Yes, I do think that's a good thing. Sort of.
We did actually end up running the game Good Friday, as all the various religious observances were morning or afternoon.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_aura_ has joined the group (Her husband, abacchus has been with us pretty much from the start), which means that all but two of the members are on Livejournal (And one of those at least reads it.)
The family get-together was a bit smaller than usual, with more family members moved out of the city, and some of those in town not available for one reason or another, but the conversations seemed more dynamic than they have sometimes ended up being – although there were, inevitably, a lot of questions about the wedding. (Le Sigh.) But I continue to be grateful; that there have been very few family squabbles over the years. We don't all "get" each other, but we get along. And hurrah, I have my RSVPs from all but a teeny handful of people on mom's side of the family. (Dad's is another matter…)
We visited Colin's aunts the next night – his only in town family. That was pleasant, but I was starting to fade out by the end. They're essentially good people, but there are a few topics of interest to me that I can't discuss with very traditional sixty-some Mennonite ladies.
I also got the living room swept and vacuumed, even into the back corners, though by the state of the table-tops and other surfaces, it's hard to tell the room was cleaned. I meant to clean even more of the house through the weekend, but a dedicated attack on the writing project and a cold put paid to that (I did finally sweep out the kitchen, but bleah. Too much still to do.)
Monday and yesterday were spent arranging jewellery for the wedding, including the appointment for rings. We know now what we're wearing, though two pieces still have to be bought. We also finalized ourt gift registry with the huge stuff nobody's actually going to buy us (Although it would be I don't-know-how fantabulous to have a queen-sized bed instead of a double.)
_____________________________________________________
Writing was… odd. I made visible progress, then went back and fixed stuff, then made visible progress, then discovered that an impulsive minor plot change, while it made sense character-wise, would be a dead end story-wise. So I hurried back and rewrote it, before derailing Raising the Storm could once again destroy a computer.
I also poked at another project, to see if it would stir. It rolled around and grinned at me. It could be a very fun story, and like Labyrinth, it's mostly unwritten, not revision. Then I had a temporary panic:
There were no shapeshifters! Even the character who, by the usual rules of magic, should change appearance, very pointedly finds a way around that.
Oh wait. There is one -- he's just (unusually enough) one of the villains of the piece.
I felt better.
It's like this; some months ago, a meme went around LJ where writers were supposed to identify ten ways that a reader could tell a story was theirs, and theirs alone. I didn't participate, because I felt that it helps to have something published and current so the readers can say "yes, you're right, you do that a lot," or "You do what? I never noticed!"
But I know my habits. I could have talked about how most of the major characters are artists, by work or by hobby, and how folklore creeps into every story. The rash of alternate sexualities. The resistance to using a straight "medieval" setting. There are stories that are exceptions, deliberate or otherwise, to each of these above, except one:
In every story, there's at least one major character, usually the protagonist, who changes shape one way or another.
For some, it's a natural trait – Selkies, of course, put on and remove their seal-selves, and my Maze-Makers, the hermaphroditic Sashelskova from this tidbit , can change shape to just about any other creature that is close to their mass. For others, it's a side-effect, incidental to the major plot or magic going on (Labyrinth being all about illusions, one of the things that goes wrong is who looks like what.) For still others, it's the nature of one of the rules of magic; the outward form changes when the inward form does*. Possession, too, changes things, in concordance with that same rule of magic – though often, the thing possessing one prefers its presence be known.
Part of it is the "cool shit" factor – I think the idea of someone physically becoming something else, or seeming to so so, is just "neat!" it was always one of those powers I wanted for myself, in those kid's "What magic power would you want?" type questions, though I always put it behind being able to commune with, heal, and speed the growth of plants & trees, or to do the same for water (Basically, to be a sea-sprite or a dryad. Then again, dryads & their ilk are also shapeshifters... best of both worlds?) That's the writer's equivalent of the lizard-brain.
There are also the tropes of the genre. Werewolves are what they are, selkies are what they are. If you use these things, even if you use them for their other traits, you have shapeshifters. Heck, even Dragons seem to take altering their appearance as a natural habit, these days. (That being said, I do have were-wolf things that don't change shape, and a relative of the selkies who isn't a shapeshifter – but I also have their true cousins, and reasons of plot, world-building, history, and motivation for having these things. Subverting a trope is good as far as I'm concerned – as long as it isn't betrayed by being changed frivolously without any grounding in the story or world.)
There are several factors to why I hung onto the idea of selkies and not to mermaids, other than shapeshifting -- the limits of mermaid tropes don't tell the story I wanted to tell. Their limit – not being able to leave the sea without outright ceasing to be what they are, and in most cases, being unable to speak – was not interesting to me. The selkie, able to walk on land and pretend to be as other people -- but only by leaving a part of themselves exposed, in danger of being stolen, abused, coerced – now, there's a story to be told.
Also, I imprinted on Susan Cooper's Seaward, and Yolen's "The White Seal Maid" short story. There was no room in the story-stuff part of my brain to house mermaids. Aside from Labyrinth and my "real world" stories, I mostly work in one universe, so there also wasn't room setting-wise. (I read the latter author's "the Mermaid's Three Wisdoms" and deLint's "Our Lady of the Harbour", only after the damage was done and the selkies were permanently snagged in my psyche.)
The thing is, shifting shape can mean so many things. Of course, it can be played as an all too convenient escape route, a handy plot twist when things are boring. That's the one use I resist (Although forgetting that the ability is available and missing a plot twist is as great a sin as "Oh. How convenient." But giving a character the ability to change just so you can save a plot twist is probably the most damning usage of the ability. It needs to be written into the character right from the marrow of their bones.) For me, its psychological uses for character are greater, its metaphoric uses -- if touched carefully -- more powerful.
Weirdly, one of the most common reasons it crops up for me is when a character is trying to get away psychologically rather then physically; from things they are but don't want to be, or from being forced to lie about themselves, or from the truth about themselves, or from assumptions about them that are no longer true, but which others still project onto them because they still look the same.
A second shape can be a clever disguise, or a reflection of what one truly is, a prison, or a release.
The shapes my Maze-makers pick are generally disguises, though they usually leave unconscious clues about themselves in the details. The secret of selkies isn't that they're really people underneath their pelt -- it's that they really are partly something else, something other. (I don't think I write about this other part well enough; it comes across as other culture, even if the culture is extrapolated partly from a bit of naturalist reading.)
And the ghosts. My ghosts get gradually pared down, reduced to the essentials; this can mean the result looks nothing like the person-who-was. There are ghosts who, left in the world too long, end up silent falls of rain, or a story told over and over in the dark. They become first their essential selves, than their caricatured selves, then not even that. Which is why some of the cultures think letting a ghost linger any time at all is a capital crime, and others think it is more healthy to have them stay a little while – long enough to settle affairs with the living, and to learn what their essential self is -- and only then to leave.
Then there are the inadvertent changes. The enemy transformations. Werewolves.
There are dozens of versions of were-wolves. The Buffy/Harry Potter werewolf is one of the most traditional; the ordinary man turned to bloodthirsty killer, but forgetting it all in the morning. I'm dissatisfied with this take. The character who doesn't know what he's doing is, well, more likely to be a handy plot device (Lupin is a good character, but when he turns into the werewolf, he's nothing more than a random danger, so Rowling can put her characters where they need to be. I don't necessarily object to the were-wolf whose bloodthirsty killer side is a violation of their true self, but I definitely prefer it when the person inside has to see what they do.
A great many modern authors seem to prefer versions where were-wolves are more like the Animal People of North American folklore crossed with goth/vampire mythos. Good things can be done with this, especially when they're played with by people who use real wolves as the template, and not the "Wolf" that is basically the "Scary thing in the dark".
The weakest werewolves I've seen depicted – the weakest shapechangers of any kind -- are humans with human thoughts, but a convenient second shape. Because then, it's almost "Why bother?" What does a human with a nifty skill really reflect if they don’t have to think through the implications, of why they change to that in particular? (This, I always think, is one of the places *some* superhero comics fall flat and turn me off.) I like Ranma ½, but the part of it I've read so far (to about collection 7) shies from the question of whether Ranma is at all mentally a girl – and none of the characters who turn to animals really seem at all like their animal. But then, it is pretty much a light comedy and lighter romance, with no attempt to be anything but funny and occasionally cutely romantic.
The radio likes me today. If that ain't the perfect song for the moment, I don't know what is.
* This particular rule of magic has been misused to make all pretty people naturally good and all ugly people evil. That's not proper magic; magic isn’t concerned with the changeable aesthetics of the human species. (Oscar Wilde got a damn good book out of the concept, but he's about the only one.) A human-shaped figure is still, as far as the rules of magic are concerned, human in its nature. When the nature is tainted – or even cleansed -- by an unhuman magic -- it doesn't get uglier; it gets less human. Or cancerous, or too ordered. If that coincides with our aesthetics, that's another matter.
We did actually end up running the game Good Friday, as all the various religious observances were morning or afternoon.
_aura_ has joined the group (Her husband, abacchus has been with us pretty much from the start), which means that all but two of the members are on Livejournal (And one of those at least reads it.) The family get-together was a bit smaller than usual, with more family members moved out of the city, and some of those in town not available for one reason or another, but the conversations seemed more dynamic than they have sometimes ended up being – although there were, inevitably, a lot of questions about the wedding. (Le Sigh.) But I continue to be grateful; that there have been very few family squabbles over the years. We don't all "get" each other, but we get along. And hurrah, I have my RSVPs from all but a teeny handful of people on mom's side of the family. (Dad's is another matter…)
We visited Colin's aunts the next night – his only in town family. That was pleasant, but I was starting to fade out by the end. They're essentially good people, but there are a few topics of interest to me that I can't discuss with very traditional sixty-some Mennonite ladies.
I also got the living room swept and vacuumed, even into the back corners, though by the state of the table-tops and other surfaces, it's hard to tell the room was cleaned. I meant to clean even more of the house through the weekend, but a dedicated attack on the writing project and a cold put paid to that (I did finally sweep out the kitchen, but bleah. Too much still to do.)
Monday and yesterday were spent arranging jewellery for the wedding, including the appointment for rings. We know now what we're wearing, though two pieces still have to be bought. We also finalized ourt gift registry with the huge stuff nobody's actually going to buy us (Although it would be I don't-know-how fantabulous to have a queen-sized bed instead of a double.)
_____________________________________________________
Writing was… odd. I made visible progress, then went back and fixed stuff, then made visible progress, then discovered that an impulsive minor plot change, while it made sense character-wise, would be a dead end story-wise. So I hurried back and rewrote it, before derailing Raising the Storm could once again destroy a computer.
I also poked at another project, to see if it would stir. It rolled around and grinned at me. It could be a very fun story, and like Labyrinth, it's mostly unwritten, not revision. Then I had a temporary panic:
There were no shapeshifters! Even the character who, by the usual rules of magic, should change appearance, very pointedly finds a way around that.
Oh wait. There is one -- he's just (unusually enough) one of the villains of the piece.
I felt better.
It's like this; some months ago, a meme went around LJ where writers were supposed to identify ten ways that a reader could tell a story was theirs, and theirs alone. I didn't participate, because I felt that it helps to have something published and current so the readers can say "yes, you're right, you do that a lot," or "You do what? I never noticed!"
But I know my habits. I could have talked about how most of the major characters are artists, by work or by hobby, and how folklore creeps into every story. The rash of alternate sexualities. The resistance to using a straight "medieval" setting. There are stories that are exceptions, deliberate or otherwise, to each of these above, except one:
In every story, there's at least one major character, usually the protagonist, who changes shape one way or another.
For some, it's a natural trait – Selkies, of course, put on and remove their seal-selves, and my Maze-Makers, the hermaphroditic Sashelskova from this tidbit , can change shape to just about any other creature that is close to their mass. For others, it's a side-effect, incidental to the major plot or magic going on (Labyrinth being all about illusions, one of the things that goes wrong is who looks like what.) For still others, it's the nature of one of the rules of magic; the outward form changes when the inward form does*. Possession, too, changes things, in concordance with that same rule of magic – though often, the thing possessing one prefers its presence be known.
Part of it is the "cool shit" factor – I think the idea of someone physically becoming something else, or seeming to so so, is just "neat!" it was always one of those powers I wanted for myself, in those kid's "What magic power would you want?" type questions, though I always put it behind being able to commune with, heal, and speed the growth of plants & trees, or to do the same for water (Basically, to be a sea-sprite or a dryad. Then again, dryads & their ilk are also shapeshifters... best of both worlds?) That's the writer's equivalent of the lizard-brain.
There are also the tropes of the genre. Werewolves are what they are, selkies are what they are. If you use these things, even if you use them for their other traits, you have shapeshifters. Heck, even Dragons seem to take altering their appearance as a natural habit, these days. (That being said, I do have were-wolf things that don't change shape, and a relative of the selkies who isn't a shapeshifter – but I also have their true cousins, and reasons of plot, world-building, history, and motivation for having these things. Subverting a trope is good as far as I'm concerned – as long as it isn't betrayed by being changed frivolously without any grounding in the story or world.)
There are several factors to why I hung onto the idea of selkies and not to mermaids, other than shapeshifting -- the limits of mermaid tropes don't tell the story I wanted to tell. Their limit – not being able to leave the sea without outright ceasing to be what they are, and in most cases, being unable to speak – was not interesting to me. The selkie, able to walk on land and pretend to be as other people -- but only by leaving a part of themselves exposed, in danger of being stolen, abused, coerced – now, there's a story to be told.
Also, I imprinted on Susan Cooper's Seaward, and Yolen's "The White Seal Maid" short story. There was no room in the story-stuff part of my brain to house mermaids. Aside from Labyrinth and my "real world" stories, I mostly work in one universe, so there also wasn't room setting-wise. (I read the latter author's "the Mermaid's Three Wisdoms" and deLint's "Our Lady of the Harbour", only after the damage was done and the selkies were permanently snagged in my psyche.)
The thing is, shifting shape can mean so many things. Of course, it can be played as an all too convenient escape route, a handy plot twist when things are boring. That's the one use I resist (Although forgetting that the ability is available and missing a plot twist is as great a sin as "Oh. How convenient." But giving a character the ability to change just so you can save a plot twist is probably the most damning usage of the ability. It needs to be written into the character right from the marrow of their bones.) For me, its psychological uses for character are greater, its metaphoric uses -- if touched carefully -- more powerful.
Weirdly, one of the most common reasons it crops up for me is when a character is trying to get away psychologically rather then physically; from things they are but don't want to be, or from being forced to lie about themselves, or from the truth about themselves, or from assumptions about them that are no longer true, but which others still project onto them because they still look the same.
A second shape can be a clever disguise, or a reflection of what one truly is, a prison, or a release.
The shapes my Maze-makers pick are generally disguises, though they usually leave unconscious clues about themselves in the details. The secret of selkies isn't that they're really people underneath their pelt -- it's that they really are partly something else, something other. (I don't think I write about this other part well enough; it comes across as other culture, even if the culture is extrapolated partly from a bit of naturalist reading.)
And the ghosts. My ghosts get gradually pared down, reduced to the essentials; this can mean the result looks nothing like the person-who-was. There are ghosts who, left in the world too long, end up silent falls of rain, or a story told over and over in the dark. They become first their essential selves, than their caricatured selves, then not even that. Which is why some of the cultures think letting a ghost linger any time at all is a capital crime, and others think it is more healthy to have them stay a little while – long enough to settle affairs with the living, and to learn what their essential self is -- and only then to leave.
Then there are the inadvertent changes. The enemy transformations. Werewolves.
There are dozens of versions of were-wolves. The Buffy/Harry Potter werewolf is one of the most traditional; the ordinary man turned to bloodthirsty killer, but forgetting it all in the morning. I'm dissatisfied with this take. The character who doesn't know what he's doing is, well, more likely to be a handy plot device (Lupin is a good character, but when he turns into the werewolf, he's nothing more than a random danger, so Rowling can put her characters where they need to be. I don't necessarily object to the were-wolf whose bloodthirsty killer side is a violation of their true self, but I definitely prefer it when the person inside has to see what they do.
A great many modern authors seem to prefer versions where were-wolves are more like the Animal People of North American folklore crossed with goth/vampire mythos. Good things can be done with this, especially when they're played with by people who use real wolves as the template, and not the "Wolf" that is basically the "Scary thing in the dark".
The weakest werewolves I've seen depicted – the weakest shapechangers of any kind -- are humans with human thoughts, but a convenient second shape. Because then, it's almost "Why bother?" What does a human with a nifty skill really reflect if they don’t have to think through the implications, of why they change to that in particular? (This, I always think, is one of the places *some* superhero comics fall flat and turn me off.) I like Ranma ½, but the part of it I've read so far (to about collection 7) shies from the question of whether Ranma is at all mentally a girl – and none of the characters who turn to animals really seem at all like their animal. But then, it is pretty much a light comedy and lighter romance, with no attempt to be anything but funny and occasionally cutely romantic.
The radio likes me today. If that ain't the perfect song for the moment, I don't know what is.
* This particular rule of magic has been misused to make all pretty people naturally good and all ugly people evil. That's not proper magic; magic isn’t concerned with the changeable aesthetics of the human species. (Oscar Wilde got a damn good book out of the concept, but he's about the only one.) A human-shaped figure is still, as far as the rules of magic are concerned, human in its nature. When the nature is tainted – or even cleansed -- by an unhuman magic -- it doesn't get uglier; it gets less human. Or cancerous, or too ordered. If that coincides with our aesthetics, that's another matter.
