Fetching

[mrissa]

People. I woke up this morning with bad fantasy novel heroine bedhead. No kidding: when it says, "Her hair was a tangle of curls around her heart-shaped face," and you know that she's supposed to look just adorable but when you wake up your hair always looks postpunk at best? My face is the same shape it always was, but my hair is doing that thing this morning. It is winsome. It is fetching. Quick, everybody come look, before I put it in that fork dealie to keep it off my neck while I work out and mess it up permanently. I may never have bad fantasy novel heroine bedhead again.

Also the crick in my neck is substantially improved.

Also the fridge appears to still be fixed after this weekend.

I know entropy is still winning, but if you squint just right....

Comments

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know what sort of bedhead you're talking about--when I had long hair I'd get it sometimes, too. Now I just get up and find that my bangs are sticking straight up or something. Definitely not fetching.

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

Quick, everybody come look… Okay. Sure thing! I gotta drop Gavi off at school, but then I'll be right over. What's your address again? Give me a buzz on my cellphone…

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

You are taking a pic, right? We want to see!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas for you and fredcritter, I had messed it up with a clip before I got your helpful suggestions.

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

*shuckie-darn* !

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Actually that is one of the things I like about my hair. It always looks decent about a day after washing...it's also more manageable. But it is STRAIGHT so it could never be fantasy heroine hair.

Congratulations on holding entropy back.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My hair hits its ideal point 26 hours after washing. Twenty-seven hours after washing it goes swiftly downhill. Sigh.

[mightyjesse.livejournal.com]

I'm in the same boat as pixelfish ... My hair is straight and even when it DOES get horrifically tangled at night, the best I can pull of is dreds - and everyone knows that fantasy heroines do not do dreds. Their side kicks do dreds. Their arch nemesis do dreds. But the heroine herself will never wake up in the morning looking as I did today: "Her bangs had stuck straight up and the back of her hair had dreded. She looked like a cross between an alarmed hedgehog and a pissed off hedge witch."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

At least you have the common hedge theme going?

[mightyjesse.livejournal.com]

I swear I'm not normally an *untidy* person, but last night I was so exhausted after the picnic at Tristan's house that I fell asleep on the couch... And this morning I found leaves in my hair. LEAVES!!!

...

I don't recall rhomping through any shrubbery yesterday but evidently I did. Either that, or Maggie and Jasmine have been sneaking their "outside toys" into the house and hiding them in the bed.

It was all very disconcerting.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Getting the "outside toys" idea across to Ista was a trick for awhile, too!

I hope the flora leaves you alone tonight.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Why not a fantasy heroine with dreds? I think we should definitely have one.

(And actually, now that I think of it, one of my characters has got a bit of a dred thing going on.)

[mightyjesse.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not saying that there SHOULDN'T be heroines with dreds... I'm just saying that I haven't read any that didn't set forth immediately to remedy the situation.

Generally speaking, the heroines I've read only end up dredded after tangling (YAY PUN!) with the villan or going through a horrible ordeal, but as soon as that nonsense is over they have a shower and brush their sable locks until they glow. Or whatever.

Then again, dreds are generally viewed as a hair-style pulled off best by brown people, and as of yet there are a disappointingly limited number of sci-fi/fantasy stories with brown/yellow/red heroines. Though, I notice that the aforementioned genres are doing better than many other markets when it comes to the representation of races other than the white ones.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

It also doesn't help that we tend to assume whiteness of characters if there is a lack of specific contradiction. I just finished a book in which I assumed the characters were white but thinking back, there's no real reason for me to have done so. I read another in which I discovered halfway through that the character was black- again I had assumed she was white. No good reason, I just did.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was astonished to find this to be the case -- that people usually make this assumption -- because my first-readers for my first novel definitely didn't. One specific not-specified character was Korean-American in my head, but when I asked people, they guessed a wide variety of ethnicities, most of them non-white. (And they were all white themselves. And he was a powerful character, so there was no "oh, I just assumed the busboy would be Puerto Rican" unpleasantness going on.) But I hear that lots of people do assume whiteness where not otherwise specified, and I have no reason to think they're lying about it.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I wonder what portion of that phenomenon is based on the race of the reader. I look white, so I picture white characters. Do black or Asian or darker-thatn-me Latinos picture characters in their respective colors?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Maybe some do. Maybe there are people who automatically picture characters to be mostly like themselves or the people they know best, but there are also people who automatically picture characters to what they consider a cultural default, and people who automatically picture characters to what they assume the writer's cultural default will be. And for some people there's a cultural default that writers are not people like themselves, and for others not.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Maybe it has more to do with where you grew up? Non-whites were practically nonexistent during pretty much all of my childhood.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I think that's a factor....I grew up in Utah in one of the least diverse areas EVAR....and I did use to always assume "white". Now after a couple of years of living in California, a lot of what I picture is based on how the character's name sounds. So while Anglo-sounding names tend to default still to white, if the phonetics look to be somewhere else in the world, I start trying to correlate cultures. Example of this was Jane Lindskold's Liglimom and the sort of general South American vibe I got from those characters, or the slightly Asian feel to Grateful Peace's society. (Although she did throw in a lot of cultural indicators besides names to let you know that you weren't dealing with some pseudo-Euro culture.)

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

That too. Essentially I wonder if it is related to what the reader thinks of as "normal" or "default" be that self or family or community. Of course, I grew up in a wildly diverse community and had friends of all different colors and a father and brother who were quite dark, but I still default to white.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Depending on the cultural background, there's more than just appearance that should be different (in SF or fantasy you can of course have sufficiently long-time integrated societies where physical appearance gives no clue to cultural differences).

Heinlein pulled this a few times; Juan Rico in Starship Troopers was quite specifically Puerto Rican, it's alleged that Eunice Branca in I Will Fear No Evil is black (though I can find no indication in the text), Manny is jailed on Earth because of the range of color shown in a photo of his family but there's no other indication any of them are anything but white, etc.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I am in this case considering SF and "other world" fantasy. Places where our societal/cultural backgrounds would not apply.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I think Juan Rico was Filipino. He speaks Tagalog at the end.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, sorry. Definitely Tagalog is one of the inescapable clues.

[sensational.livejournal.com]

ayekamn almost always wakes up with a mohawk or something very close to it. It doesn't quite reach post-punk and is mostly just punk. It's so awesome.

(My hair, on the other hand, is just foofy and uneven in the morning. I might've woken up with heroine hair when I had very long hair, but I don't think I ever noticed.)

Gift of the Magi

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= My hair wouldn't fetch much.

Or wait, do you mean you wake up with sticks and tennis balls in your hair? Talk about a wild night!

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I used to get that kind of bedhead when my hair was long. Now I get Alfalfa Bedhead and I do not mean the plant. I get one piece at the back of my head sticking straight up and it is very Little Rascals which is not a fetching look.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No. Whether you are male or female, the Alfalfa Look is Not In. My sympathies.

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

I know that feeling--entropy is winning but if you squint just right...

Since I pretty much have Permabedhead, any additions to it don't help.