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

[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