Entry tags:
Decembre Meme: Their Majesties' Bucketeers
A belated december meme post: ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fenellaevangella asked: could you talk a bit about Their Majesties' Bucketeers? I reread it not too long ago and I'd love to hear about what kind of fic you wish there was, or some meta if you've got it in you.
So for those of you who don't know about the thing of beauty and joy forever that is Their Majesties' Bucketeers, it is a short sf novel that is also a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that is set on a desert planet occupied by trilateral furry crab people with three genders.
But other than that it's exactly like Sherlock Holmes. It's set in that planet's equivalent of the high Victorian era, down to steam cars, a raging controversy over the new theory of natural selection, and a society built on racist imperialism. (In fact lamviin-Holmes's mother was the equivalent of east Indian, and his surfather was also foreign, though was his father was upper-class English equivalent and he seems to be successfully coasting on that, one of many things I wish canon had explored more except not really because I don't trust the writer to not suck at politics, so I guess we need fic.)
Anyway you can read more about it in this old entry about pro Holmes fic or my yuletide letter the year I asked for nothing but increasingly bizarre Holmes pastiches--everything in those still applies. And I still want more of the WIP about Srafen and rher inexplicable romantic life that I got as a treat that year, you're not off the hook.
I will also probably talk about the Srafen plot in this more in my entry on Lovelace and Babbage because they're probably my two favorite versions of steampunk ever.
But anyway.fenellaevangella knows all that already so now I am going to talk about a specific worldbuilding/speculative biology thing that Bucketeers does, and so do several other sffy things from that period, that I wish somebody would take a closer and more rigorous look at: a culture where it's taken for granted that you don't know what your adult gender will be until puberty.
In Bucketeers, this really just gets a few throwaway references - they say 'back before I knew what gender I was going to be', etc. And otherwise they just mimic Victorian gender roles (except with three genders obviously.) I really like the way he handles the three genders in a quasi-Victorian world, but I don't really buy that a society where soon-to-be boys and girls (and lurries) are raised exactly the same way as neutral-gendered children would have the brainwashing tools it needed to oppress females (and surmales) quite the same way we do.
On the other hand you've got societies like the dragons in Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, where young dragons pick their own gender when they reach maturity, but adult society has near-perfect gender equality so it really is just a question of personal preference. I find that more realistic in terms of worldbuilding logic than in Bucketeers, but it's still mostly just throwaway background - there is a major character in one of the books who hasn't picked its gender yet but that never gets really examined in the text any further.
I feel like there were other stories written around the same period that did something similar- you want to establish that this person is from a people very different from us, you toss off a comment about a genderless childhood. I don't know if there was something in the air back then or just me grasping at any hint I could find of something other than the gender system I was raised in that means they stuck out in my memory. And there are some vaguely similar earth precedents for that kind of system. But nothing I found really delved with any depth into the cultural implications of 'gender not assigned till adulthood' as the norm.
Now, one place I can find stories ad infinitum about a society where gender is not revealed until puberty is in alpha/beta/omega fic, although I think a lot of Α/Β/Ω authors still don't realize they're writing about gender. And even the ones who are, are clearly writing about the way our society does gender, with a nice safe anal lube and pon far filter over it.
So most of the Α/Β/Ω fic that I've read that does anything with the 'I didn't know what my gender was going to be until I was grown up' part of the scenario is clearly working from how something like that really does happen to human children now, even cis children - the feelings that come from spending a childhood being told that boys and girls can both do anything and sexism is over, and then growing up enough to finally accept that that was always bullshit and actually everything is terrible. Or alternatively, it works over the feelings that come of being taught that if only you'd been assigned a different gender everything would be perfect.
And it's totally valid that Α/Β/Ω works that over, it's probably as good a way any to do it. But I still feel like a childhood of 'this is your gender, this is what your gender is expected to be, how well you conform to that is going to determine how miserable you will be' is going to provide very different ways of fucking people up than one where you're raised on 'here are the genders and what they can be; one day, my child, one of these will be yours.'
I mean I'm sure we'd still be fucked up about gender but I don't think it would just reproduce the ways we currently are. I'm not sure what it would be but I would love to see more stories that explore it in a really thoughtful way.
So I guess that's one answer to your question: I'd like more stories that explore the really different ways gendering might happen in a world where gender is never assigned at birth.
Not necessarily Bucketeers, really any version of that world you'd like to build, although I would still like fic that explored that with any of the canon characters, especially Vyssu or Srafen.
(I'd also like stories that do it more like Kazul's people, where gender isn't assigned at all but you are expected to pick one sooner or later. I suspect in a human society like that we'd still be fucked up about gender, because unfortunately, as you know, people, but in ways that were expressed quite differently. Some of the non-Α/Β/Ω D/s AUs used to touch on that, but again usually in ways that pretty closely reproduced contemporary gender issues and rarely in any depth.)
fenellaevangella asked: could you talk a bit about Their Majesties' Bucketeers? I reread it not too long ago and I'd love to hear about what kind of fic you wish there was, or some meta if you've got it in you.So for those of you who don't know about the thing of beauty and joy forever that is Their Majesties' Bucketeers, it is a short sf novel that is also a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that is set on a desert planet occupied by trilateral furry crab people with three genders.
But other than that it's exactly like Sherlock Holmes. It's set in that planet's equivalent of the high Victorian era, down to steam cars, a raging controversy over the new theory of natural selection, and a society built on racist imperialism. (In fact lamviin-Holmes's mother was the equivalent of east Indian, and his surfather was also foreign, though was his father was upper-class English equivalent and he seems to be successfully coasting on that, one of many things I wish canon had explored more except not really because I don't trust the writer to not suck at politics, so I guess we need fic.)
Anyway you can read more about it in this old entry about pro Holmes fic or my yuletide letter the year I asked for nothing but increasingly bizarre Holmes pastiches--everything in those still applies. And I still want more of the WIP about Srafen and rher inexplicable romantic life that I got as a treat that year, you're not off the hook.
I will also probably talk about the Srafen plot in this more in my entry on Lovelace and Babbage because they're probably my two favorite versions of steampunk ever.
But anyway.
fenellaevangella knows all that already so now I am going to talk about a specific worldbuilding/speculative biology thing that Bucketeers does, and so do several other sffy things from that period, that I wish somebody would take a closer and more rigorous look at: a culture where it's taken for granted that you don't know what your adult gender will be until puberty.In Bucketeers, this really just gets a few throwaway references - they say 'back before I knew what gender I was going to be', etc. And otherwise they just mimic Victorian gender roles (except with three genders obviously.) I really like the way he handles the three genders in a quasi-Victorian world, but I don't really buy that a society where soon-to-be boys and girls (and lurries) are raised exactly the same way as neutral-gendered children would have the brainwashing tools it needed to oppress females (and surmales) quite the same way we do.
On the other hand you've got societies like the dragons in Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, where young dragons pick their own gender when they reach maturity, but adult society has near-perfect gender equality so it really is just a question of personal preference. I find that more realistic in terms of worldbuilding logic than in Bucketeers, but it's still mostly just throwaway background - there is a major character in one of the books who hasn't picked its gender yet but that never gets really examined in the text any further.
I feel like there were other stories written around the same period that did something similar- you want to establish that this person is from a people very different from us, you toss off a comment about a genderless childhood. I don't know if there was something in the air back then or just me grasping at any hint I could find of something other than the gender system I was raised in that means they stuck out in my memory. And there are some vaguely similar earth precedents for that kind of system. But nothing I found really delved with any depth into the cultural implications of 'gender not assigned till adulthood' as the norm.
Now, one place I can find stories ad infinitum about a society where gender is not revealed until puberty is in alpha/beta/omega fic, although I think a lot of Α/Β/Ω authors still don't realize they're writing about gender. And even the ones who are, are clearly writing about the way our society does gender, with a nice safe anal lube and pon far filter over it.
So most of the Α/Β/Ω fic that I've read that does anything with the 'I didn't know what my gender was going to be until I was grown up' part of the scenario is clearly working from how something like that really does happen to human children now, even cis children - the feelings that come from spending a childhood being told that boys and girls can both do anything and sexism is over, and then growing up enough to finally accept that that was always bullshit and actually everything is terrible. Or alternatively, it works over the feelings that come of being taught that if only you'd been assigned a different gender everything would be perfect.
And it's totally valid that Α/Β/Ω works that over, it's probably as good a way any to do it. But I still feel like a childhood of 'this is your gender, this is what your gender is expected to be, how well you conform to that is going to determine how miserable you will be' is going to provide very different ways of fucking people up than one where you're raised on 'here are the genders and what they can be; one day, my child, one of these will be yours.'
I mean I'm sure we'd still be fucked up about gender but I don't think it would just reproduce the ways we currently are. I'm not sure what it would be but I would love to see more stories that explore it in a really thoughtful way.
So I guess that's one answer to your question: I'd like more stories that explore the really different ways gendering might happen in a world where gender is never assigned at birth.
Not necessarily Bucketeers, really any version of that world you'd like to build, although I would still like fic that explored that with any of the canon characters, especially Vyssu or Srafen.
(I'd also like stories that do it more like Kazul's people, where gender isn't assigned at all but you are expected to pick one sooner or later. I suspect in a human society like that we'd still be fucked up about gender, because unfortunately, as you know, people, but in ways that were expressed quite differently. Some of the non-Α/Β/Ω D/s AUs used to touch on that, but again usually in ways that pretty closely reproduced contemporary gender issues and rarely in any depth.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
(I actually have a world I play with in my head that's like that - raise your hands if you're surprised - but have never actually written any of it down.)
no subject
no subject