Paradigmism

[bcholmes]

I had a fascinating conversation last night with James Bach and Cem Kaner. As a result, I found myself thinking about this:

I recently wrote about Jed Hartman's essay on Strange Horizons. I was particularly interested in this paragraph:

Chris Claremont, legendary writer of the X-Men in the comic's heyday, used to ask, about new characters being developed, "Is there any reason this character can't be a woman?"

There's a similar strategy that I recall reading. One of the set designers for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine liked to increase the alien-ness of the decorations that people would bring him by turning them upside-down. There's something nifty about the way that these exercises force one to see things in a different way.

This came up in my mind because we briefly discussed "allergic" reactions that people have to certain phrases. I can imagine, for example, that some people might hear a repeated question, "Is there any reason this character can't be a woman?" as a belief that most of the characters should be women, which is not, I think, what the exercise was designed to accomplish.

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Hmmm -- taking the "alleric" phrases totally within their own context, there's usually nothing wrong with them. Those own contexts do include a lot of *internal* context that isn't going to be immediately apparent. Claremont has an internal context of "I need to look at the placement of this character into the whole story in a way that doesn't presume male to be default." This context is special to the question, for Claremont. If another listener is processing the question, that internal context for that particular question is absent, and may instead fall into a different internal context of "'Is there a reason not $FOO?' is often a polite request for $FOO", which can make Claremont self-reminder into a repetative request.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I don't particularly trust John Byrne's recounting of events, but he discussed Claremont's "Is there any reason..." in an interview back in the mid-1980s. His take on it was, "Well, Chris, Scott has been a non-female since his first appearance in X-Men #1 in 1963...", which leaves one with the very strong sense that Claremont was, in fact, overusing the question.