“Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She’s on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.”

Trust the Onion AV Club to put a name on it. I’m as guilty of this bit of wish-fulfillment fantasy as the next gloomy male protagonist, but I think I’ve mostly kept it out of my writing, so far.

Just to be safe, though, I’d better put a six-month moratorium on re-watching Emily’s ‘Code Monkey’ dance.

– well, nothing recent here, anyway — I would just like to thank you, my friends, for your dependable willingness to call me on my bullshit.

The Laundry stories are, I think, a fail. (Not 100% certain.) Singularity Sky is a fail. My most recent novellas are fails. I need to pay more attention.

That brave admission is from Charlie Stross, who had a couple of posts last week about Bechdel’s Law (a.k.a. the Mo Movie Measure and the Dykes To Watch Out For Test), the Frank Miller Test, and similar. The second post is mostly a collection of links to other discussions of these and similar issues that you may or may not have seen before; the comment thread on the first “richly demonstrates” — as Charlie himself puts it — “[that] there are still quite a lot of men out there (and reading this blog) who Don’t Get It with respect to their own privileged status.”

I think I’m good on the Miller. The Bechdel… I don’t think I’ve written a conversation between two women of more than a couple of lines where a man doesn’t at least get mentioned in passing. I have a feeling this may be tied up with the main frustration I’m starting to have with genre fiction, namely that characters spend a lot of time with the plot.

Be told.

In case you haven’t heard yet: quite a few stories originally published in Helix are now available on a new site, rather cleverly named Transcriptase. There are also statements from a few ex-Helix authors, and a discussion section.

(Via Niall at Torque Control.)

…back later.