spacetwinks:

i think “agency” is mostly shorthand. any fictional characters we create, by rule of the fact that they are characters we create and control in the first place, do not actually have agency. they do what we write them to do. agency in fictional characters does not exist, really.

agency, then, becomes shorthand for a larger discussion and analysis and just a general feel of “is what the character doing work for the character, or is this done for the thrill of the audience”.

i’ll give an example from comics. rogue is a pretty well liked member from the x-men, right? and black widow has her own pretty good share of fans, both from the movies and the comics.

in A+X #2, an avengers and x-men teamup book, chris bachalo writes a story where rogue and black widow have to team up and fight a sentinel. but, he writes a scene which feels pretty clearly not for the characters, but for the audience.

of all the ways for rogue to get natasha’s knowledge, there’s tons - nose to nose contact would have done it, and rogue herself knows her powers well enough that she doesn’t need to be told that she can just absorb the knowledge from natasha on how to fire a sniper rifle. what’s more, the info she absorbs/remarks almost immediately turns to natasha’s private romantic/sexual life, and rogue remarks on what a good kisser she is. the scene, the plot, was put together to get them to kiss, everything else be damned.

it’s a scene that breaks any illusion of agency, because it comes off pretty clearly “i wrote a scenario to get the two hot girls to make out”, and like, exists solely for that. it’s not for the characters, it’s for the audience and it feels like, to some degree, the author themselves.

this isn’t even going into the horrible Emma Frost/Black Widow team up, which is a million times worse.

natasha and rogue do not have agency, flat out. they’re fictional characters, and they do what they are written and drawn to do. however, a writer and artist can construct a story, a narrative, where what the characters do feel like they are doing for the characters, and not for the author, and much more pertinently, the audience. discussion of camera angles and focus in any medium would be useful here, not just story choices - what the camera focuses on and how it frames characters very much changes internal feelings and ideas about a character’s “agency”.

agency doesn’t exist in fictional works, but how media frames characters, how they setup their stories, actions, and reactions, determines whether we feel like the character is being themselves, or if the character is doing something that raps on the glass of the TV screen or the glossy pages of the comic book and makes it clear that they have no agency.

Thing is it’s not even hard, I got two off the top of my head;

First is okay, girl can’t kiss anyone without powersucking them, that was the whole tension of the R/G thing. Which means her only opportunity to consensually kiss someone is if they volunteer for a powersuck, which means every time someone volunteers for a powersuck she’s going to want, and press for, intimate contact, a kiss at least, out of skinship hunger. Her sexual desperation expresses both as lonely vulnerability and ruthless predation at the same time, so match her up with any given character and she can bottom from the top while perfectly expressing the X-titles “mutant=puberty” theme. (Plus between all the personas she’s internalized she’s the pannest pansexual there is.)

That’d take some setup outside of any given scene, though. For a one-off the correct answer is she absorbs demurely through gloveless fingertips, then once she has a taste goes in for the kiss. They look shocked and she says “come on, you always wondered what that would be like”, they go “what, making out with you?”, she smirks and says “no, sugar, making out with yourself” and flies off to kick ass.