new fic

[seekingferret]

Title:We'll Rebuild, Stronger
Fandoms: West Wing/Avengers (2012)
Author: seekingferret
Length: ~800 words

Sequel to "Every Hero Needs an Origin Story", built around a major spoiler from Avengers. I posted it this morning, but didn't make an announcement here because I get a kick out of the way my Avengers stories get relatively high hitcounts on AO3 superfast even without an announcement.

This also my first attempt at Josh/Donna. I can see the appeal. It's probably worth observing that if this story had really been a West Wing storyline, there would have been about three or four scenes of Donna trying to draw Josh out and Josh stoically rebuffing her. It felt good to take those scenes as assumed and go straight to the Josh awkwardly and self-consciously spewing feelings at Donna part.

Comments

[zandperl]

Hadn't previously read "Every Hero". I don't know the West Wing universe at all, but your stories are interesting none-the-less. One thing worth pointing out in "Every Hero": when a character is black you make a point of specifying this (e.g. "A short black man at the back of the table" "The bald, black man who has somehow entered"), but when a character is white you do not (e.g. "says a tall brunette with round cheeks", no description of Mike Casper). Specifying that someone is black but not specifying when they are not is setting up the assumption that white is the norm. I don't think it's your intent to be white-normative, so I wanted to point this out to you.

[seekingferret]

Thanks for pointing this out. I'm not sure I'll make any changes to this story, but it's something to keep playing with in the future. I definitely haven't figured out the right approach to marking race and gender in my stories yet.

[seekingferret]

Thinking more about this, the point of marking particular background characters as black was because when I invent OCs, if I don't mark their race people will assume they're white. I marked some original character scientists as female in a previous story where I didn't have a strong feeling either way on their gender and found that act was a meaningful one to some readers, who responded to those OCs on a personal level. The point of marking Nick Fury as black, meanwhile, was to distinguish Movieverse Fury from classic Fury.

Also, Molly O'Bannon is a tiny, fierce FBI agent with the last name O'Bannon who went to BU. I'm not sure that explicitly calling her white would have made it any clearer that she is white, Boston Irish Catholic. Meanwhile, I used names that to my ear sound strongly Hispanic (Morales, Casillas) and African-American (Deangelo Smith) for other characters whose skin color I didn't identify.

I was definitely making an effort in this story to think about this. Ethnic identify matters to the story's characters, even though the plot doesn't care about ethnic identity. You're right that the effect of my choices is not ideal. This is something I'm going to have to be more careful and thoughtful about moving forward.

[zandperl]

Thanks for sharing your thought process on choosing names and descriptions. It's something I struggle with too - my own instance of doing this was in real life. I was asked to point out specific person at a large meeting, and described that person as the black person in the third row. There were very few people of color at this meeting, so I rationalized it as this is what made that person stand out, but the sad fact remained that there were very few people of color at that meeting, and reinforcing that white is the norm was not really helpful. The way I'm trying to fix this in real life (since I don't write much fic) is to describe white people as being white, so that I'm not only describing POC by their skin color, and when I do mention skin color for POC I try to mention that last - which of course leads to everyone else constantly asking me "why didn't you say that first?" and my having to go through this whole lengthy explanation with people who aren't as aware of racial issues as you are and thus aren't as sympathetic.

[seekingferret]

I find myself wondering if marking for ethnic identity is a better way to approach this. What if I'd marked Richardson the way I marked O'Bannon: He went to Howard University, he has a bit of a Southern drawl, he belongs to an AME Church, etc... Those kind of details build a richer portrait of a person anyway, and with just a handful we can sketch a stereotype suitable for a background character. After all, there are as many different African-American cultures as there are White American cultures, and if I'm going to invest the thirty seconds in marking Mike and Molly as not merely white but White Irish, I ought to invest the same thought into my non-white characters.