Gamora and Angela

[transemacabre]

I will say this about Guardians of the Galaxy -- it's kind of cool to see two ass-kicking warrior women in a comic book who are obviously really good friends. In a boisterous "I could SO kick your ass. If I felt like it :D" mutual respect kind of way.

Comments

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

That's excellent! It's something I've noticed in most popular fiction of all genres – that, if you're lucky enough to have more than one interesting female character to start with, they are too often written as 'rivals' rather than friends/allies or (rarer still) lovers. I'm bearing it in mind with a fic that I'm writing just now: I am going to develop it so that my main female character has friendships with other women, of other ethnic groups. (The men in the story are mainly family members, so there's no 'romance' going on.)

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

Gamora and Angela have the sort of boisterous, fire-forged friends camaraderie that we've all seen a lot of MALE characters have, in like every buddy cop movie ever made, but which is conspicuously rare between FEMALE characters. I also like that there's two warrior women on one team without one having to be the "girly" one or the healer or whatever.

they are too often written as 'rivals' rather than friends/allies or (rarer still) lovers.

This got me to thinking that Angela and Gamora could be very slahashable. I'm down. Angela's still relatively new to the comic (but not to comics in general; bizarrely, she started her publication history at Image Comics, before creator Neil Gaiman took her with him to Marvel. Long story) so maybe once they get a little more visibility we'll start seeing some femslash for them. :)

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

They sound really interesting! Thank you for introducing me to them! I hope to hear more about them.

I like the femslash idea, too. I don't like m/m slash, because to a large extent it strikes me as female writers marginalising female characters even further: I've never understood how some can claim they're doing it for 'feminist'/subversive reasons. To me, it's far more of a feminist act to put the women characters centre-stage, and not make their emotional lives revolve around men.

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

I like writing m/m slash for the same reason I like writing het or femslash: because I think its hot. (Well, that and I like exploring the dynamics between a pair of characters). I sideye people who act as thought writing slash is some kind of revolutionary act; there's a lot of ways to help gay people, but putting gay porn fanfic on the internet ain't one. If you write, just write for yourself, and for readers, because you enjoy it.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I had a recent discussion/altercation with someone who had clearly read a lot of postmodernist guff on the subject in a college course, and was making all sorts of questionable claims about its importance in gender terms. Her line was that "even if people say they're just writing it because they think it's hot, you shouldn't believe their self-reported motives". At which point, I thought "WTF?!" If someone says that's why they're writing, why disbelieve them and try to dress it up in a lot of half-baked gender theory? As I said, what does irk me is that the same people will then complain about the lack of well-written female characters in their fandom, while their own writing is deliberately marginalising or ignoring women…