{ unexpected Numb3rs meta, re: Amita (/women). }

[delga]

This started off as a note to self? I have no fucking idea.

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Warning: this post is really quite self-indulgent about my writing; it is also rambly, and not very well articulated towards the end. Additionally, it is long (but I hope you'll persevere anyway) and it might provoke a strong reaction in you. On the other hand, you may not give a damn and carry on as usual. Who knows? It's been a long time since I've tackled this topic, and I don't think I've ever done it in this way. I think my point dissolves towards the end. You decide.

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So, I decided that it was time to write some triumphant fic for the women of Numb3rs. I tried to do it before with Amita (so good they named it twice: i, not for lack of trying) but because of the nature of the fic, I don't know. I kind of co-opted her (supposed) dependency on Charlie and threw it onto Colby. Not the first time I've done that, either (see: asymptote and p.s. you left him). I like putting Amita in New York City. NY!Amita is ballsy in a different way, much less sympathetic. But NY!Amita is not Amita, she's an illusion. So I figured if I wanted to write Amita in a good light, I had to maintain her sympathy and not make her into something whiny, or malformed, or maligned (see: objects in space; no-one's going quietly). To be fair to myself, I've had some success in making the character more positive, though mostly through drabbles. I liked the way here comes the sun turned out because it was so much more about her joy than her resistance; some of the worst outings have been the drabbles (going for the easy plot) and especially a couple of the femslash ones (making the mistake of not equalising these strong, wonderful women). So. I don't know. I feel like for the most part, I've failed.

A few months ago I started writing mothertongue which was a sentimental look at Amita's life with her parents vs. her life with Charlie. This was before the reveal that her parents have moved back to India, and worked on the assumption that her parents and grandmother live in one area, and Amita lives much closer to CalSci. I had to put it down after a while because canon really complicates my sense of how Amita relates to her Indian heritage. On the one hand, she actively shuns it; on the other, she seems to have adapted better. On the one hand, she doesn't speak the language (Tamil? which, again, doesn't make a whole load of sense to me but it's the easiest detail to swallow); on the other, her parents were apparently of the type that arranged her marriage years before she was eligible to marry. (Considering their class status, their exposure to American culture, and the fact that they're actually diplomats of a variety, this again makes no sense. Arranged marriages do happen, but not in the way the show suggests; at least, it definitely wouldn't happen that way for someone of Amita's family's upbringing.) So I decided to put down the story and try and figure out what I think about Amita and what I can logically assume about her family, in ways that (a) make sense and (b) fit with canon (which I'm fairly certain gets retconned just so that Amita's b-plots can be shoed into whichever storyline is being played that week).

What's especially strange to me is the idea that Amita, having grown up with her parents (who presumably - in fact, most probably - spoke Tamil in the house) doesn't understand Tamil. I can understand her not being able to speak it, that's something else completely. But considering that her parents have retained their accents*, and that they return to India periodically, Amita's disengagement from the verbal aspect of her heritage is nonsensical. Her parents would have spoken to her in Tamil as a child - her grandmother definitely would have. So. Logical Fanon Assumption #1: Amita doesn't speak Tamil, but she understands more than enough to be able to haphazardly communicate with her grandmother. Logical Fanon Assumption #2: regardless of whether her grandmother actually ever lived in California, and taking into consideration her class, Amita's grandmother either has a rudimentary understanding of English, or can speak it, probably with the proficiency of a toddler. (That's not an insult; that's taking in to account education available, her age, her sex, and so on).

*) I cannot begin to express how much canon's characterisation of Amita's parents pisses me off. The season 4 episode where we finally meet them? Fuck me, but I found that so, so offensive. Also: I totally didn't understand a lot of the bullshit in that b-plot.

Amita's education and her Americanisation make a lot of sense. She's driven, she's accomplished, she wants her parents to be proud of her, and at the same time, she's American, and she didn't want to be different from the kids she grew up with. The idea that she shunned her traditions makes sense in a big way, and it's one aspect of her that's actually played out consistently. What I can't work out is whether or not she was raised by her parents (I think this is most probably the case) or if there were a lot of carers (I doubt this is what happened, but it really depends on how lucrative her parents' work is/was, and how much it forced them to be out of the house). The fact that she's a gamer speaks to the kind of American she is but stems from her educational background. For all intents and purposes, Amita's an American girl in an American world.

So. Amita and Charlie. I don't know. I liked the UST in the first season, the hamm-fisted shyness and the attempts to get past that. I hated Charlie's behaviour in the second season, and the will-they/won't-they stuff bugged the hell out of me but the more I consider it, the more 'truthful' it seemed. You know. Up until the Ivy League opportunity apparently sailed Amita by. Things I am assuming here: Amita was more attached to LA than people realised; she's not a wanderer (I don't know that's she's travelled all that much?) and the safety of her home town was a large factor (I mean, she went to a fairly 'local' college; so in some ways, she's a bit of late bloomer which makes perfect sense if you consider her upbringing. I wonder what part her family played in her decision. I think that her parents would have originally liked the idea of Amita studying at CalSci because of their familiarity with the area, but her passing up the Harvard opportunity would have been a blow to her father. I suspect. I could be projecting. I am definitely probably projecting.) I assume Charlie did play some part in her decision (because there's the comfort factor in him, too). Obviously the job offer from CalSci was a huge deciding factor - if it really was equal to the opportunity at Harvard, then it makes sense for her to choose the more local option if you consider that she probably doesn't like expanding her horizons past her comfort zone.

I feel like fandom writes Amita in relation to other characters, and that it's rare for us to talk about Amita as is. She's the girlfriend, or she's the obstacle, and that really narrows fandom's definition/idea of her as a character. A big part of the problem is canon, admittedly, because in canon she is The Girlfriend and part of the Mathematical Horde. That's her role: to support Charlie, to provide a 'personal' touch to his story. Her existence in canon - despite TPTB's attempts - is wholly dependent on Charlie. To some extent, this makes sense: this is a procedural, not a drama or a soap. This is a show that is about the process of solving crime with the aid of math. Everything else - every relationship and characterisation in the show - is tangential to this 'selling point'. So, sure, character development does come in second. But it's an important part of the show, too, because procedural drama is about formulae and audience expectations, and successful procedural dramas are about breaking formulae and subverting audience expectations. In short: the relationships/characterisations break up the monotony of the show's basic six-act formula. So a character has to relate in some way to this basic scheme. Either you're solving the crime with basic procedural tools (Don's team/cops) or you're solving the crime with mathematics and/or science (Charlie's group/teachers). The problem is that it's easy to bring people with differing purposes and personalities to Don's side of the scheme. He's a team leader, and the team (for the purpose of the plot, mostly, but in terms of practical law, too) needs to have certain components in order to successfully so its job. Thus you have a variety of personalities in that group in order to perform the varying tasks required of the FBI team.

However, on Charlie's side, the show's tag line kind of screws you over. Everything is Numbers = a need for uniformity., and less of a requisite for variety. The very nature of the mathematics at work every week means that the average audience member doesn't have a clue what the hell it is that Amita is supposed to be good at. Larry is a physicist, he's an astronomer to an extent; this much is made clear early on, and you have diversity there because Charlie is very much more the maths side of things (Larry brings the science, and philosophy, linking the maths and the science back to The Average Joe, and providing a platform for Charlie's Fucking Metaphors in a much more naturalised manner). But Amita. Amita's a mathematician and a physicist, though I'm guessing she falls more on the maths side. Her speciality is combinatorics and even though I know that, I have to turn to a dictionary to tell you what that means because regardless of the fact the show has probably defined it for us before, it fails to do that now. All you need to know, really, is that Amita can do maths on a computer. (I am now looking at Wikipedia and as far as I can tell, Combinatorics is a cross-type mathematics meaning that Amita can, conveniently, help on a range of problems using her mad skills as a person who can write a computer program to sort through data. Amita's function, in the procedural aspect of the show, is to take the data Charlie gives her and sort out what is useful and what is not. Therefore, to some extent, we can argue that Amita = Charlie's Primary Algorithm. That? Is a pretty rough deal. The fact that she's also a love interest explains why Charlie gets the same person to do this work for him every week, instead of sorting it out himself/having someone else help out now and then.) For the purposes of balance, Amita is a constant because she forms part of Charlie's 'team'.

So, really, when fandom talks about Amita, part of the reason for the misuse and abuse of her character stems from the fact that canon regularly misuses and abuses her. But— this is where I call bullshit because the whole point of fandom is to fill in the gaps that canon has left. If fandom can take Billy Cooper, who was in one episode, and construct hundreds of scenarios featuring him in a way that conforms to his characterisation and yet remains a satisfactory presentation of him, then fandom should really be able to step up to the challenge that is Amita Ramanujan. (Several things to point out: Billy Cooper's character is perhaps easier to play with because canon doesn't complicate him, the idea behind his character is straightforward, and his personality wasn't fucked with [i.e. because he was only in one episode, his characterisation was both emphatic and consistent]. So in some ways, yeah, it's easier to play with Billy Cooper because often he's filling a very specific niche - a combatant, a sexual partner, an Alpha Male Mary-Sue figure. But at the same time, it's not like Amita - as the all-American girl - is particularly complex. Especially because her ethnic heritage is rarely brought into play.) But fandom doesn't really talk about Amita. Fandom is quite happy to talk about Colby's past, his military record, his relationship with his father. Fandom is more than happy to talk about Don and Charlie's lives (although canon does facilitate this). Fandom isn't great at it, but it sometimes tries to pinpoint David, too.

I feel sore about my own writing in this respect because as I pointed out to begin with, my personal track record with Amita isn't tremendous. Another element of fandom is play, and I suspect that a lot of people are less willing to engage with Amita because she simply doesn't interest them (whereas Max Martini certainly has a very specific appeal, nudge nudge wink wink). I also think that fandom is less willing to speculate about her because of her ethnicity. Not in a direct way, but in the sense of, well, how can I get this right if I don't know what that childhood environment was like? In the same vein, I think there's less interest in David outside of a relationship for exactly that reason. And because fandom is also about projection, it's often more about shipping than it is about gen, so to ask people to write about a single character and not to think about their romantic shenanigans (which, let's face it, are part-and-parcel, if only because canon makes them so) is difficult.

Fuck it, though, because I do want to finish mothertongue. I want to read less fic where Amita is cast aside in order to facilitate a slash pairing. I'm guilty of that, too, of course - asymptote doesn't even look at how Amita responds to Colby's abandonment of her (mostly because it's not her story), whilst p.s. you left him is a marginal step up because it's all Amita's pov, and there's strength and flippancy there which suggests that she doesn't care so much about the outcome, but she's still not really the point of that story (sequel as it is to Colby and David's Bonnie&Clyde-dom). That said, in neither of those fics is Amita a harpy. In neither of those fics did I make Amita someone who couldn't stand and/or speak for herself. Which is not to say that I haven't failed Amita in that regard in the other fics: I malign Terry in as by grasping whilst making Amita out to be nymphetic; I always wrote that pairing in a violent way that I'm quite ashamed of now. I made no possibility for friendship there, whilst at the same time establishing a rivalry between them which stems from the Eppes brothers. Dependency on Don and Charlie, all over again. I do have one drabble where the pairing works out much bettter, but it's unoriginal, and more about the physicality of the relationship than the psychology. More recently I wrote no-one's going quietly and again, I'm somewhat ashamed. I still like this one, in the sense that I like the way it ends up - lots of characters are to blame, and it's not explicitly about two relationships in opposition. But again, the majority of the fic is about inaction: Amita's inability to make a decision, Megan's inability to force Amita's hand. I like the ending to the fic because the fic is about stasis, and the end of the fic is about breaking that, but I also feel like: couldn't I have written something else? Did the fic have to be complicated by a second relationship (Megan/Amita)? I can't really justify all of the decisions I made with that fic. Amita (and Megan) is weak in that story, right up until the moment where she isn't, which is why I can forgive myself for that one (in as by grasping, she's so passive that I kind of hate myself for choosing that characterisation) because the whole point of that fic is charting how Megan and Amita break free of a destructive cycle (it's Megan who suffers in no-one's going quietly, but again, I can justify that one because I think without someone to occasionally level out her neuroticism, Megan gets stuck, and in that fic in particular, Megan has shunned Larry. So).

I know this is really rambly, and if you've made it this far, I applaud you. My basic point is, whilst I'm guilty of mistreating the character (and I'm working on rectifying that) I feel like fandom treats Amita like shit. I can't remember who wrote it (tell me if you recognise what I'm talking about because I'm willing to stand behind my accusations) but recently there was a fic where Amita was shrewish and whiny and set up as a direct obstacle to Charlie/Colby - an obstacle whose removal was justified because of her shrewishness. And I felt maligned, as a reader, as a fan of Amita, because that story lacked the emotional resonance a plot like that should have. Sometimes, yes, one character gets displaced for another, but there are more sophisticated ways - more adult ways - to establish that Amita and Charlie's relationship couldn't work in that scenario. Booting Amita from that fic was pure laziness. But the idea, obviously, was to delete Amita to make way for Charlie/Colby. (In that way, I feel like asymptote is actually a fucking masterpiece, because regardless of the fact that Colby leaves Amita for Charlie at the end of that story, the fic begins with Amita making the decision to leave Charlie. Her autonomy is much greater there. I'm not going to argue asymptote is flawless because I've already pointed out more than a handful of reasons why it isn't, but in comparison to that fic that I read - and the others like it in existence - it's so generous to Amita.) Just because she's your third/fifth wheel, doesn't mean she's any less deserving of your respect.

To conclude, yo. I don't know. I'm reluctant to throw up a flag and tell fandom to sit down and write Amita fics that I like, goddammit, because (a) that's not my point here (I'm not lamenting a lack of fic that I want to read) and (b) that's not the point of fandom. In a lot of ways, Numb3rs fandom is doing exactly what other fandoms do: catering to the majority, and catering to the entertainment value. There's nothing wrong with that; fandom is supposed to be an exercise in communication, community and fun. A person should enjoy fandom. But I also feel like every time I read a fic where treatment of the female characters - treatment of Amita specifically (I don't know why, but Megan is much, much, much less likely to be a recipient of this kind of venom - possibly because she's with Larry and not Charlie, which is annoying on a whole other level) - is derogatory, that fan is maligning me. Not personally or intentionally, of course, but I like these characters. Your casual disregard of them is an insult to my opinion. It's like saying, well, Character A is not worthy of attention, and because you like Character A, your opinions on the matter aren't worth my attention either. It's also saying: I don't think much of this character because she's female and interrupting my slash. There is no way that in the aforementioned as-of-yet-unnamed-in-this-post fic would have presented a male character in the same way that Amita was presented in that fic. No way. Amita was presented that way because she was a woman, and in a roundabout way, I find that insulting because regardless of whether the author was conscious of it or not, that fic was saying to me: you're a woman; you don't understand what's going on here; you are disposable. (Or: it's okay to treat Amita this way because she is expendable. It's okay to treat her this way because My Audience is entertained by Two Guys Getting it On and she's in the way. It's okay to treat her this way because it's convenient for me. It's okay to treat her this way because nobody cares about her anyway, therefore she deserves this maltreatment. It's okay to treat her this way because she is of no consequence.)

It's not explicit. I don't think anyone in the fandom actually thinks, oh shit, you don't like This Character therefore I don't like you, because I think we're more sensible than that (um, for the most part - I know you're more likely to friend someone who agrees with you than you are someone who doesn't but I'm also of the opinion that most people can establish that you don't have to agree with someone in order to maintain a friendship - or even a dialogue - with them). But I do think this dismissal of whole portions of the fandom happens implicitly. I guess the phrase is harshing my squee. The fandom is often harshing mine because of its treatment of female characters. I am probably harshing fandom's squee because I'd really like it if people started calling people on this shit.

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I really hope that someone read that all the way through, heh. And if anyone knows the fic that I was talking about, I'd like some help in locating it. Amita proves to be a nuisance to Charlie who, I believe, has recently been injured. She believes she is his One True Love and thus forces her way into his house (I think?) and to his bedside where he quite patronisingly tells her that the relationship is over, and she sort of agrees, thereby leaving and allowing the Charlie/Colby relationship to blossom. Amita does a lot of barging about, and people are annoyed with her; Colby in particular bars her way as she tries to find Charlie. Any takers?

Comments

[asemic.livejournal.com]

This is so fucking awesome. Seriously.

But the idea, obviously, was to delete Amita to make way for Charlie/Colby.

This is a cross-fandom reality. Female characters that are seen as a threat to a slash pairing is labeled as a threat and therefore characterized like harridans. Amita is the second verse, same as the first.

I really can't comment on the cultural issues since I haven't watch the show in forever (and now I have misgivings about commenting due to that fact). However, from what I have seen on the show, the women were nothing more than extensions of the men. Terry had a relationship with Don. Amita had a crush on Charlie. Megan's issues stemmed from issues with her father. And then she began a part of Larry's life. Whatever characterization she had rang false and never caught my attention. Frankly, she bored me. In that regard, I blame TPTB. However, the fandom's reception of Amita really started to piss me off. The combination of the two as well as other factors led me to stop watching entirely.

My thoughts are nowhere as elegant as yours. So, I'll just wrap this up with you are fantastic for speaking about this. I agree with this so much. So damn much.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

I've taken myself out of fandom, but I recently got over some apathy and watched the end of the season. And I'm just incredibly frustrated with having to read the same crap over and over again. I'm also incredibly frustrated with being asked what does it matter?

But when you don't like something, do you ignore it, or do you do something about it? I don't know. I just wanted to vent a little. (I'm fair certain nobody who disagrees is going to read this, which makes this a cheap shot, really.)

[asemic.livejournal.com]

This isn't a cheap shot. It's out in the open for people to read. A cheap shot is making this friends' locked and making a detailed criticism of all the fics in question.

As for doing something, it depends upon the person. I'm glad you said this since it got to the heart of your frustration. It also is one answer to the "what does it matter" question. This is why it matters to you and why it should matter to the fandom.