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Hi Hope Ann, I liked the way you addressed this in the newsletter. I don’t have much that I’d want to add to that. I guess for your question, how I would handle this, hm. Well, I can give an example by the speculative romance my fiancé and I are working through. As a young boy he admired bits of the world-building behind the Sailor Moon 90s anime, but something he was bothered by is that male characters there are well, unimportant, ultimately. (I read the manga before, and can definitely attest to that observation.) Instead of supporting the girls, they’re like obstacles and eventually lose purpose. So he started thinking of how to write about magical space knights in a Christian brotherhood, and how their individual purposes (“quests”) were intimately linked to their Father-King/Our Lord, with every knight’s quest involved healing something of the myriad male/female relationships post-Fall.

In other words, instead of copying Sailor Moon, he took the thing he admired most strongly (magical fighters from the stars), considered what he liked and disliked about how that concept was applied in the show, and created something very different while inspired by something basic — as you said, Hope Ann, about base ideas and making the base ideas one’s own through the details. I hope his example sketches out how your thoughts could be applied. 🙂

Me? I threw in a couple of young videogaming women with estranged mothers into his brainstorm. Ohohoho~