Title ideas for genderbent fic

[ljwrites]

In a case of synchronicity, chordatesrock put up a post about lazy genderbends just as I was searching out title ideas for a series of genderbent ATLA short fics. (This is an idea I played around with in an earlier post about genderbent fanart.)

I thought it would be cool to quote some sort of poetry in the title, so I started looking for gender imagery in poetry. I learned that androgyny was a major recurring motif in the poems of William Blake, including notably Jerusalem, where I found this promising line:

For the Male is a Furnace of beryll : the Female is a golden Loom.

So I thought of something like "Golden Furnace" or "Loom of Beryl" or both to signal the switch, but neither seems evocative enough. "Gold and Beryl" might be workable if I can't think of anything else, though it's a bit obscure. i don't think most readers would associate gold with the feminine and beryl with the masculine without having the reference explained. "Hammer and loom" is also a contrast that comes up, but ends up feeling vaguely Communistic as a title. Or maybe abstract the imagery a little, like "The Fire and the Weave?" Except, um, fire has a pretty specific meaning in my chosen universe. "Spear and Mirror?"

I went on searching for more poems about gender and stumbled upon The Phoenix and the Turtle, a Shakespeare sonnet I'd heard about before because lb_lee mentioned basing their tattoos on the words. I think it showed up in my search because it contained the word "gender," though I'm not sure it's used in the sense I was searching for. (The word as used in "That thy sable gender mak'st / With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st" sounds more like species than sex.) My title candidate from this work is

Single nature's double name

This seems to fit with the story's theme of characters being given a different characteristic, in this case gender. Still, The Phoenix and the Turtle is a love sonnet so it would be an out-of-context quote for my title.

In the midst of this searching it occurred to me, hey, maybe I should look East, not West. Isn't there a tremendous amount of writings on yin and yang, the feminine/masculine principles and how they interact? So I went searching on a collection of translated Chinese writings for keywords like "man" "woman" "yin" "yang" "sun" "moon" and so on. By searching for "woman" I did find this impressively sexist poem whose third stanza reads:

A wise man builds up the wall [of a city],
But a wise woman overthrows it.
Admirable may be the wise woman,
But she is [no batter than] an owl.
A woman with a long tongue,
Is [like] a stepping-stone to disorder.
[Disorder] does not come down from heaven ; –
It is produced by the woman.
Those from whom come no lessons, no instruction,
Are women and eunuchs.

The first few lines actually seemed awesome if not suited to my immediate purposes. It sounds like an appropriate quote for radical feminism (in the original sense, not the trans hate-group sense). Unfortunately the overall intent is clearly misogynistic, but still I think the poet said something profound here even if he didn't mean it that way. It's like he sensed how threatening women and non-gender-conforming men ("eunuchs") are to the ruling order, though his reaction is fear and disgust.

At any rate, it seemed my search terms were too restrictive and I needed to actually read some texts to extract the relevant meaning, using this meat-based search and indexing engine I call the "brain." I started with the Dao De Jing, and immediately found some things to like. The start of Chapter 28 seems particularly apt:

He who knows the males, yet cleaves to what is female
Because like a ravine, receiving all things under heaven,

The translation seemed to conflict with my Korean source (Korean page, obvs) so I looked up a third source, which gives the lines as:

Know the masculine, hold to the feminine
Be the watercourse of the world

So yeah, it's not about holding the yin over the yang, but rather how you need both (by knowing one and holding to the other) to walk the Way. I'm thinking about getting fancy with the second line and making it into a title like:

Valley Under Heaven's Arc

...But again I'm not sure how clear it is, and my fancying up makes it seem overwrought.

So at current my title candidates are:

1. Single Nature's Double Name
2. Of Beryl and Gold
3. Valley Under Heaven's Arc

...None of which feels right. Maybe I'm overthinking (and over-researching) this. Maybe I should keep reading the Dao De Jing to see what else I find, or go with something more obvious. This is the hardest I've ever thought about a title and it's frustrating.

Comments

[chordatesrock]

You're naming him Azul rather than Azulon? I thought it was obvious Azula was named after her grandfather, using the feminine form of his name. So she ought to be named Azulon, oughtn't she?

What about taking out one of those words? Maybe just Valley Under Heaven?

Or maybe a title about something other than gender? If the change has affected the plot in any way, what about naming it after the resulting changes?

[ljwrites]

I think I read somewhere that Azul was Azula's name back when she was a boy (during pre-production and not during her actual background, though that would be interesting). Maybe Azul is short for Azulon?

Valley Under Heaven is better, but it still doesn't give an accurate expectation of the story. Maybe I should think less philosophy and more concrete plot developments, like you suggest.

Maybe I'm having difficulties with the title precisely because the story doesn't change the plot significantly. It's mostly an exploration into how the dynamics of some of the scenes change when the genders are flipped around. Maybe something to do with surprises and expectations. IDK. *headdesks*

[loopy777]

The "Azul" thing came from the supposed production bible that was leaked to the internet, and elements of it have been verified since then, so the fandom is more or less content to treat the whole thing as fact.

Azul is the Spanish word for "Blue," so I'm inclined to think that it might not have been the guaranteed final form of the name even if Azula had remained a guy, but rather something to convey the intent. Azula was certainly derived from that once her gender was nailed down, and then they probably worked backwards to Azulon as something that would clearly sound like Azula while still feeling regal and masculine.

In-universe, it could be justified as Ozai simply not wanting to completely reuse the name- perhaps because there's a cultural more against naming children after living relatives- and so taking the root of it in a clear homage.

[lb_lee]

I'm down with that explanation. (But I LOATHE having characters with the same name, even if they ARE related.)

Who knows, maybe there's a tiny contingent of Azulon fans who would be disappointed to find it wasn't THEIR Azulon.

--Rogan

[lb_lee]

Aw, I love the Turtle and the Phoenix. I had it read for my chunk of the wedding service, just because so much of it can be tweaked for multi stuff in a way that entertains me. Stay universal, Shakespeare! But I'm not sure it'd fit for what you're doing, since Avatar has a lot of cultures, but none of them are really Shakespearean. My vote goes for chasing down stuff from one of the cultures the Avatar-verse is based on.

If you felt like being really hardcore about it, maybe you could kinda invent your own sorta gender mythology to base it on? And then reference from something you discuss in the fic? I would argue Sun/Moon stuff would work pretty well--since the Sun is associated with the Fire Nation and Lord Ozai, while the Moon is associated with the Water Nation and... um. What'sherface. The girl who got turned into the moon.

Which to me naturally brings to question what gender/roles/celestial bodies are associated with Earth and Air! A four-gender system would be pretty fucking cool, and not unheard of in societies. I mean, the Air Nomads seem to be all about giving up various earthly things; I wonder if they would see gender similarly, as something earthly?

I'm sure I'm not helping you make the choice easier. :p I'm trans, my automatic impulse with genderswap is to think about trans and alternative gender structures.

--Rogan

PS: by the way, I randomly found a local paper for Chinese expatriats, and there was an article about the simplification of the Chinese writing system and much pearl-clutching over it. Reminded me of some of the politics of Chinese in Korea you discussed! It was interesting.

[ljwrites]

A four-gender system would be pretty fucking cool, and not unheard of in societies

Whoa, I never thought to connect that with gender, but it makes perfect sense! I think I read that the Air Nomads were entirely gender-egalitarian. Of their four temples, it was said that South and East were for priests and West and North were for priestesses, but it would indeed be totally fucking cool if each was for one gender.

I'm sure I'm not helping you make the choice easier. :p I'm trans, my automatic impulse with genderswap is to think about trans and alternative gender structures.

My own thinking, by contrast, is almost painfully binary so it'll be interesting to try and broaden my perspective. I can think of masculine, feminine, and non-binary. I guess non-binary comprises genderfluid, genderqueer, agender etc.? Maybe genderfluid could be the third category, and the fourth... hmm, agender or pangender? I'm looking up various nonbinary genders but most of them seem to refer to trans* people.

PS: by the way, I randomly found a local paper for Chinese expatriats, and there was an article about the simplification of the Chinese writing system and much pearl-clutching over it.

Change never goes over well, huh? And yet it's something people take for granted these days. I guess it's the same story every time.

[lb_lee]

Some of the cultures I think of offhand will often have two genders for (roughly speaking, and due to lack of language) for people we would consider men who take up a female role, and vice versa. They would have special places in their societies--warriors, doctors, or people of specific religious significance. We often boil them down to "trans women" or "trans men" but that more reflects our OWN culture's sights on gender rather than theirs.

For Princess and Monster, I actually did research on some old Jewish texts, and they reported four gender terms besides male and female that are kinda ambiguous to modern readers.

While trans people have existed since pretty much day one, far as I can tell, the CONCEPTION of them as trans is a pretty modern recent thing, and often associated with the medical industry.

Also, how gender is even presumed in cultures can be kinda complicated. Just using my own work as an example, 'gender' for some insects in Treehouse are more about the jobs they do and fertility or lack thereof than anatomy or identity. (And I based that around real insects-- the vast majority of all bees are female, but I honestly think it makes more sense to divide those female bees into two different categories because they inhabit vastly different social and biological roles.)

Gender is a social construct, more so than a lot of people realize, which makes it complicated and squishy as hell.

--Rogan