Here via a rec by torachan -- I see this in fic a lot, and it's not just something that pops up in SP fandom.
I was in the middle of reading a really fascinating "Avatar: The Last Airbender" fic; it was written much as Ces' "Written By The Victors" (SGA) is written, as if historians are writing essays about what happened to the characters after the last episode. So each chapter is a little historical narrative, really cool and authentic-sounding, and as I go from chapter to chapter, I slowly realize that the women are being written out of history. The writer minimized what they'd done on the show itself and then relegated these incredibly powerful female characters to "and then they stayed home and baked cookies for the kids" status, or she killed them off young. And I honestly don't think she did it as a comment on historians, the way they actually *do* minimize the actions of women in history, though it was a textbook case. She got a metric ton of comments, everybody praising her excellently-written story, nobody picking up on what she'd done to the female characters. I had to stop reading about 2/3 of the way through and close the tab in disgust. Now I can't find the stupid story, and I want to write an essay on it much like this one.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-11-11 03:16 pm (UTC)I was in the middle of reading a really fascinating "Avatar: The Last Airbender" fic; it was written much as Ces' "Written By The Victors" (SGA) is written, as if historians are writing essays about what happened to the characters after the last episode. So each chapter is a little historical narrative, really cool and authentic-sounding, and as I go from chapter to chapter, I slowly realize that the women are being written out of history. The writer minimized what they'd done on the show itself and then relegated these incredibly powerful female characters to "and then they stayed home and baked cookies for the kids" status, or she killed them off young. And I honestly don't think she did it as a comment on historians, the way they actually *do* minimize the actions of women in history, though it was a textbook case. She got a metric ton of comments, everybody praising her excellently-written story, nobody picking up on what she'd done to the female characters. I had to stop reading about 2/3 of the way through and close the tab in disgust. Now I can't find the stupid story, and I want to write an essay on it much like this one.