What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

an experiment I would like to see

step 1: craft a brief but passionate dialogue exchange between two characters - a scene which demonstrates that the two parties care deeply for each other despite some present conflict, but which doesn’t specify the nature of their relationship.

step 2: have the scene performed by different pairs of actors in set combinations of race and gender, so that you end up with ten different versions: WOC/MOC, WOC/WOC, MOC/MOC, WW/WM, WW/WW, WM/WM, WOC/WM, MOC/WW, WOC/WW and MOC/WM 

step 3: give all the actors the same basic blocking for the scene and tell them all to play it as a romance. film their performances.

step 4: show each performance to a different group of people without telling them the true purpose of the experiment, then ask each audience member what they thought the relationship between the characters was, and why. collate the results, noting the age, gender, race and sexual orientation of the audience members.

reasoning: we have a lot of conversations in fandom about shipping on the basis of chemistry alone, but we also have a problem with the continual minimising of femslash and the sidelining of characters of colour - and of course, beyond fandom, there’s the default assumption of heteronormativity. I would therefore be really interested to see how different performances of the same scene played by different pairings would be received by audiences relative to their demographics. 

if anyone has the means and will to do this, please let me know! academic fandom would, I suspect, be very interested in your findings.

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    I just want to quietly add to this that it’d be even more noteworthy if every pair with a PoC was magnificently diverse...
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