I have a problem. I'm addicted to fanfiction. It used to be fine, but now I keep reading these M stories, even though I hate them. What do I do?
Well, you have several options. I've chosen my seven favorites, because there are seven seasons of Buffy, seven days until my birthday, seven members of the Scooby Gang at the end of season three, and after Iron Man III there will be seven Marvel reboot movies.Â
1. Block FFN, ao3, LJ, et cetera.
2. Read good fanfictions. Granted, in my experience, finding good Buffy (that's the only whedonverse thing I've really delved into, although if you liked Avengers, Off The Record is one of the greatest things I've ever read. And I don't even ship the main ship.) fanfic is pretty hard. I really liked DUST by KnifeEdge, but that hasn't been updated in a couple years. Embers by CoalitionGirl is good, too. (If you watch Supernatural, I have a much more extensive rec list for that. Yes, that's where I've been when I haven't been updating this blog. Shut up.)Â
3. If you haven't watched Supernatural (or everything Joss has ever touched, or Doctor Who, or Sherlock, or every vlogbrothers video,) do that.Â
4. Read a book. Read ten books.Â
5. Read every book in the world.Â
6. It just occurred to me that one of the main reason people just read M-stories is for the sex. So, maybe explore other forms of masturbation. This is not actually a topic I know anything about but I'm sure that the internet would be happy to provide.Â
7. Or just read the fanfiction. It's your fandom, bro. Skip through it. Swim in it. Roll in it. Make muffins  out of it and sell them at a bakesale.Â
This is the first draft of my letter to Team Starkid. You have until midnight (Pacific Time) Thursday to give me feedback, but constructive criticism only, please. If you want to co-sign, let me know by midnight (Pacific Time) on Sunday. I’ll have a final draft up sometime on Friday. To co-sign, send an ask letting me know that you want to, and tell me either your name or a different way to identify yourself on the list (anonymous, your tumblr url, youtube username, etc.)
 Dear Team Starkid, especially the writers,
A few days ago, I wrote an essay about issues I see in the way your musicals represent women. I posted it on Tumblr, fully expecting no one to read it. To my complete surprise, I spent the next few hours responding to feedback of all kinds. I ended up having all sorts of conversations with people I’d never spoken to before. I got a lot of comments from people who agreed with some things I said but not others. I had quite a few people thanking me for what I wrote, and adding things they had noticed. And one person suggested I write you a letter, which created a snowball response of people who said I should do it, some of whom even wanted to cosign. There was also people who were scared I would offend you, and thought I should just let it go. I want to make it clear that this is in no way a judgment of you as people, just me writing about things I’ve observed.
I love your musicals. That makes certain aspects of watching them difficult, such as the aspect that in all six musicals you’ve written, the main character has been male. Or the aspect that there are only four solos sung by female characters in your musicals, one of which is sung by Joe Walker. I’m not denying that he rocked that solo, but that means that, of all your amazing female talent, only three of the women got a song of their own. This is compared to 13 solos sung by male characters. (So that you can see what I’m counting as a solo, I’ve put a list at the end.) I’ve talked to lots of people who want to see more of the ladies of Starkid, and it’s a bummer that we don’t get to see much of them.
Another problem a lot of us have talked about was not just the quantity, but the quality of the female characters in your musicals. Obviously this subject is a little trickier to write about, because especially in the parodies, all of the characters are caricatures. However, we see the men breaking free of this much more than the women. Even though Harry is portrayed as self-absorbed, conceited, and shallow, he has moments when we see him as a real, three dimensional being. We’re supposed to care about him, and relate to him. The same is true with Ron, Voldemort, and Dumbledore. While Hermione does have her moments (Coolest Girl being one of the best), they are few and far between, and most of Ginny’s character is defined by being ditzy, squeally, and madly in love with Harry.
In Holy Musical B@man, there really aren’t that many female characters to discuss. Obviously, that does have a lot to do with the genre you were writing it; the superhero genre as a whole has not represented women well. It’d have been cool to see you flesh out female characters in spite of this, but I understand that it’s tricky, and I knew going into it that it was going to be mostly male characters.
So now we get into the original musicals, in which I think you do better. That being said, there are still problems. Starship, for example, had female characters in pretty equal numbers to the male characters, but there was not a single woman who felt like as complete a person as Bug or Commander Up. They’re all defined by a single personality trait (Taz=tough, February=dumb, Specs=brainy, Buggette=obsessed with Bug, Megagirl=robot). Bug, Up, and even Pincer have pretty interesting stories behind them, but we don’t see that with the women. Bug, Pincer, Junior, and Roach also get songs that are at least mostly sung by them, while the only female character who got one was Taz.
Me and My Dick had a female character in almost as big a role as the main male character, which was cool. I felt as though Sally didn’t really get much growth, but Miss Cooter had a great storyline, and there were a lot of songs with good female parts. Personally, I think that just in terms of believable female characters, Me and My Dick was your best musical. Definite kudos for that.
So now we come to the part of this letter that is the hardest for me to write, but probably also the most necessary. One of the things I got the most after writing the essay was people wanting to address the joke about Hermione getting sexually assaulted by Filch in AVPSY. One of the people who mentioned it to me is a sexual assault survivor, who said it made her uncomfortable watching the musical. Jokes about rape and assault are very prevalent in our culture, and a lot of people don’t think twice about making them. The reason why it’s so much worse than say, jokes about killing people, is that your audience is all alive, and most of them probably don’t know anyone who’s been murdered. That’s not true for rape; according to this website, 1 in 6 American women have been a victim of rape or attempted rape. That means that when you make rape jokes in a room full of women, 1/6 of them have had that experience. It also means that those of us who are lucky enough to have avoided it most likely know someone who wasn’t as lucky as us. (The website I linked also says that 3% of American men have experiences attempted or completed rape; just a reminder that it’s not just women.) This means that rape jokes are triggering to a lot of people, and it’s best to avoid them altogether. It’s also important to point out that treating rape and assault as humorous subjects makes people forget how serious these things are, which can result in people who stand up against their rapists being ignored.Â
One of the biggest questions I got after making my Tumblr post was this: “Who cares? Why does it matter if women are represented as complex characters?” My first mental response to that has been the indignant, “Well, why do we need complex male characters, either, then? Are complex characters just not important?” However, I do think the question is an important one to address. A lot of people look up you you. As a group, you are incredibly inspirational. So, when you, as a group that a lot of people take very seriously, show women as a backdrop to the events being created and affected mostly by men, what the people watching see, whether or not it’s conscious, is the message that women just aren’t that important. This is a message that is already all too pervasive in our society, and that becomes a little harder to fight every time we see it projected, especially by people we respect. Besides which, it’s fun to have characters who seem like us to identify with, and fun to have songs in our range to sing along to. I was talking to a friend yesterday who can’t sing any of the solos from your musicals because none of them work for her range. Obviously, that’s not the most important thing you should be looking for in your musicals, but it is a thing to think about.
I know that you’re working with who is available for the musicals, and that right now that’s caused the male/female ratio in the actors to skew some. But I also know that you’ve got some incredible talent in your female actors, talent that we would love to see more of.
So, we’ve identified what many of us see as a problem. The general consensus is that since the writers for your musicals are all male, these are pitfalls that are hard to avoid. So here’s what we propose. We’ve seen writing from female members of Team Starkid. More than that, we’ve seen really good writing from female members of Team Starkid. What would be really cool, and hopefully help solve this problem, would be to have some of them work with you on female characters. If that level of involvement doesn’t work out, you could still have them read through your future scripts and tell you where they see female characters falling flat. The problem is not unsolvable, and this seems like a good fix that wouldn’t change the nature of your storytelling (which is good storytelling) too much.
Whether or not you take the advice given in this letter, I am looking forward to seeing your upcoming projects, and constantly amazing that you do the things you do.
Sincerely,
(My name, which I’m not posting to Tumblr because I’m already getting flack for things I’ve said without people knowing anything about my identity, so I’m not eager to share my name.)
(Names of anyone who wants to cosign in a list here, in the order that I receive them)
  P.S. Here’s that list of solos:
Solos sung by male characters: Ginny/Cho; Hey Dragon; Not Over Yet; To Have a Home; I Wanna Be; Life; Status Quo; Kick it up a Notch (reprise); Beauty; Get in My Mouth; Sidekick; Goin’ Back to Hogwarts (final reprise); and Gilderoy.
 Solos sung by female characters: Harry; Coolest Girl; Stutter; and Get Back Up.
So I know this isn't Whedon, but since discussions of female representation always come up when we talk about him, I've decided this was relevant.Â
My friend Hailey runs this blog-- you might say we have a sort of wisdom-fellowship-- and a few days ago, she posted this essay on representation of women in Starkid's musicals (A Very Potter Musical, Holy Musical B@man, Starship, etc, all entertaining and available on youtube). This essay was then turned into a letter, provided below. If you'd like to cosign of offer insight-- because Whedon fans are nothing if not insightful-- please message her via the starkid blog.Â
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