Some things on my mind have me thinking about authorial voice. So I’m going to do a few posts on various related topics. Authorial intent vs. reader response will come up later this week, but today I want to talk about authorial voice vs. a character’s voice.
Often times when I am teaching, this distinction is one that students struggle with. I think of the character Tecmessa in Sophocles’ Ajax. I actually used to have a pair of cats named Tecmessa and Ajax.
When I read it with students, they often think the play is sexist because of how Ajax treats Tecmessa (a sort of “shut up, woman” attitude). But I encourage them to note that there is a difference between a character’s voice and an author’s voice. To look beyond that one voice to see how she fits in the play as a whole. Ajax himself is dead halfway through the play, due to his rigid attitudes towards relationships and inability to adapt. Meanwhile, the definition of nobility Tecmessa asserted to Ajax (recognizing common humanity and the responsibilities we have to one another in community) is where Odysseus and Teucer (the two main positive characters) end up at the end of the play. Just because Ajax is sexist doesn’t make the play necessarily sexist. The authorial attitude towards Tecmessa is different than a single character.
This came to mind as I was reading reviews of the new Avatar: The Last Airbender series. Confession: I haven’t seen it yet. School is so crazy, I’m probably going to wait until spring break to resubscribe to Netflix and binge the dickens out of it. And the reviews don’t leave me in a hurry to watch it. I’ve already noted the discussions of Aang’s character being flattened out. The treatment of Sokka also seems flatter. Specifically, his character arc with his growth in his attitude towards women and traditional gender roles has been eliminated. As The Mary Sue notes in comparison to the Netflix One Piece live action treatment,
Taz Skylar’s Sanji was able to embrace the less-savory aspects of his character, so why was the choice to make Ian Ousley’s Sokka less sexist so prominent?Why introduce a character to develop if there is no character to develop? Much like Sanji, Sokka’s attitude toward women is a key trait that is necessary to include, in order to show growth. If the One Piece writers could navigate how to adjust Sanji to fit their series while reflecting his in-anime character, surely those writing Avatar: The Last Airbender could have done the same with Sokka.
In another post centered on this issue, the actor playing Sokka is quoted as saying:
“I feel like we also took out the element of how sexist [Sokka] was. I feel like there were a lot of moments in the original show that were iffy.”
🤦🏻♀️ Having a sexist character isn’t iffy -it’s how the world around the character reacts that makes it iffy or not. And Sokka’s sexism was (as I recall) shown to be in error and occasions for learning. The Mary Sue provides good specific examples and how they are handled. And note how it relates the larger issues of the social norms of the Water Tribe (that were challenged and changed in later books) as well as the war trauma Sokka had suffered as a young boy. And if you want to fight sexism, eliminating it from your narrative doesn’t accomplish anything. Including it in a character who grows from it might lead readers to see themselves and grow along with the character.
I’ll highlight how it is handled in the opening episode, as Rambler Kai notes and provides the video for on Twitter:
(This and many other Twitter examples at the Mary Sue).
I’m sad to think about the character as made less interesting and just more flat, but also see that mistake I’ve often seen in my students – mistaking a character’s voice for the authorial voice. I’ll repeat what I said about: watch how the world around the character reacts when weighing how the author might be leading you to respond to that character’s point of view.
Ramblings 