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    • Showing only topics with the tag "characters". Back to normal view

    2. On M*A*S*H, was Klinger a cross-dresser? Was Klinger trans?

      ~lgbt Ask
      I had a long-running discussion about this last year with a trans person on the Fediverse. Before that conversation, it had never even crossed my mind that Klinger was anything other than a...

      I had a long-running discussion about this last year with a trans person on the Fediverse. Before that conversation, it had never even crossed my mind that Klinger was anything other than a cis-het guy desperately trying to exploit a weird Army regulation to escape from a war zone ... who may admittedly have become a bit too attached to his wardrobe in the process.

      However, she pointed out that Klinger was the closest thing to a role model she had on TV growing up at the time, and that she had definitely seen and identified a lot of traits in Klinger that strongly suggest he (she?) was a semi-closeted trans character, effectively pulling a double-switch, pretending to be a "regular guy" who was pretending to be a cross-dresser just to get out of the Army, while actually having found a way to be openly trans in the US Army all the way back in the 1950s.

      Thoughts?

      19 votes

    26. Which character from a story has impacted you most significantly, and why?

      ~talk Ask (survey)
      Warning: this post may contain spoilers

      From book, painting, song, movie, television show, comic, manga, sculpture, etc. — it’s all fair game. Also, feel free to include figures from religious texts, which sometimes get left out of such discussions, but which are more than welcome here.

      As always, don’t be pricks about people’s choices; to each their own.

      In addition: Spoiler tagging encouraged for anything that might ruin a plot.

      14 votes

    35. Writers: Do your characters leave you alone? If not, what do you do?

      ~creative Ask (advice)
      I'm slowly picking up writing again, but I've run into an old time-honoured tradition of mine; obsessing over certain characters. To me, my characters are as real as real-life people; they have...

      I'm slowly picking up writing again, but I've run into an old time-honoured tradition of mine; obsessing over certain characters. To me, my characters are as real as real-life people; they have their own personalities, likes/dislikes, manners of speech, body language and so on. Unfortunately, some of them also tend to get stuck in my mind and I hyper-fixate on them to the point where they overshadow the rest of the cast. To be clear, I'm not imagining myself hanging out with them or anything, just what they do in the plot itself; it's a bit like watching movie clips on re-run but out of order. Sometimes I wish I could just put those characters into a locked box and focus on other parts of the story. I tend to daydream a lot so that doesn't really help the problem.

      Any other writers who have or have had issues with characters who won't leave them alone? What would you suggest to someone in a similar predicament?

      16 votes