HOME | DD

Destiny-Smasher In reply to Sonja-from-Finland [2014-09-21 20:30:22 +0000 UTC]

Smellerbee was originally a blonde, actually, and Jet originally a red-head. The Freedom Fighters look very different in design from the rest of the characters in that world because they were created by a different person, but the lead artists/directors or someone loved the designs so much they wanted to find a way to work them into the world.

Jane started life as an alternate version of Smellerbee -- I looked at 'Smellerbee' more as a title (like how there are multiple Batmans or Green Lanterns), but of course people just drew her similar to the canon version, which I personally don't mind. I don't think of them as the same character at all anymore, but even originally, Jane wasn't meant to become important. It just ended up happening on its own -- and later on, SRU!Korra came into the primary fold, as well.

Jane is actually someone who was born intersexual, meaning she was kind of both physiological genders at once, and chose to assume a female identity (and body) when she was in high school. There is a short original comic I wrote about that here:
doodlebuggy.deviantart.com/art…

This is all to say, the androgyny is very deliberate and not everyone gets this when I commission art of her. Many folks try to feminize her more than she's supposed to be. Her figure and appearance become a bit more feminine over the course of the story's run (about a year and a half or two) as her diet changes and she takes medication to basically trick her body into being physiologically female (on top of surgery she had done in high school). By the end of the story, she becomes very comfortable swapping around outfits between more feminine and more masculine appearances, with the whole point being that gender roles are limiting and that people can dress however they want, and it shouldn't be restricted by societal norms. Jane's character is not proactive and doesn't make a fuss about this matter, she just lives it, which I felt was more effective and less preachy and being preachy isn't really my thing. I prefer to just write fictional human beings and let people draw their own conclusions from them.

Jane was the original spark that ended up helping me realize that as she shed away her title of Smellerbee and assumed a role as a solid character in her own right, inspired by someone else, that the entire story and its characters were doing that, too. It cannot be understated how wonderful it was to take the spark of inspiration that was Smellerbee and create a fully-fledged character from it with a complete character arc all its own, apart from anything in canon. The rest of the SRU!Gaang (and Korra) all had character arcs deliberately inspired by canon, but Jane's was all original, with only a part of it (the sexuality aspect) being based on Smellerbee.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

Sonja-from-Finland In reply to Destiny-Smasher [2014-09-22 09:51:10 +0000 UTC]

I didn't know that about the character design prosess of the Freedom Fighters, but then again I have never been interested in them, so I haven't exactly researched them at all either.

Jane and Smellerbee definately aren't the same character any more. I also totally understand how some character you planned to be minor supporting character ends up stealing the show and joining the main cast, since that has been the outcome in the few original stories I have written as well (the stories are horrible, but the show stealing characters just ended up more intersting than the relatively generic hero).

I know what intersex means, I'm just not very good at maybe expressing that in English. I would read the comic, but my computer just doesn't load it right now, so I will probably comment on it one day when I remember to do so and have read it all.

I love that you made Jane so androgynous looking, since it makes sense with intersex, since in most documents I have seen people with intersex tend to be really ambiguous looking, if they aren't wearing womens clothing or other obviously female indentifier (as in I'm never sure of the gender of intersex men, since they have so many female features, but wear mens clothes, so I'm unsure if they are tomboys or slightly more female looking men). You have Jane take female hormones like transwomen? The type that cause the body to have more feminine curves and so on.
Taking the less preachy aproach is definately the right one, since this type of plot comes across much stronger when it isn't about "Look how progressive and liberal my story is! I have an intersex protagonist, isn't that tolerant. Etc.". Often the more preachy ones don't come across as the author actually caring about the strugles intersex people go through, just as the author wanting praise for dealing with such plot.

I like that you realised that the story would be much better if you left behind the canon and just used the parts you actually have inspiration to write and to tell the stories you want, not the ones fans expect you to tell, since it's based on canon. Changing the characters to actually suit the story you want to tell and not worrying about the differences from the canon, seems to definately be helping you to tell the story.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

Destiny-Smasher In reply to missmadopts [2014-06-13 08:06:31 +0000 UTC]

Heheh. Yep, she's an original character who was hiding behind a reference to a minor side character. xD
Of course, that wasn't the original plan, it's just how things happened.
Really, SRU as a whole is just an original fiction "disguised," accidentally, as an Avatar fic.
So I'm looking forward to ripping that "mask" off all the way and improving the story through that process.

Jane, of all of the main characters, will actually see the most changes to her story, I think.
Her parents won't have been killed in a fire, she'll have a more personal motive for gang warfare and getting out of it and getting back INTO it.
But designing the characters, designing their different outfits for different occasions, that's something you usually don't get much in fiction and it inspires me when I have clear images of characters whose appearance evolves over time.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0