Widen the lens: Who is left out of your retelling?

Last time we said to focus. Well, now we want you to zoom out, to think critically about what characters and audience members might have been excluded in the original.

For our last prompt, we discussed the contemporary prevalence of reboots and retellings, and we asked you to give it a whirl yourself. This month, we want you to think critically about the limitations of a pure retell or reboot. Can your story survive today's world?

We're post Occupy Wall Street, well into Black Lives Matter, inundated with celebrity "wokeness," and maybe learning a more inclusive understanding of audience. We are also in the same world it's always been -- where money, whiteness, patriarchy, and xenophobia support and protect the loci of power.

Consider the Gilmore Girls reboot, in which our two spunky heroines emerge nine years later. Except they don't emerge. They're still safely trapped in their anodyne lives of whiteness and money-adjacent privilege. The racist jokes, the fat jokes, the homophobic jokes...tired as they were in the 1990s, they were flat out embarrassing by 2016. That reboot failed because it refused to allow characters to grow or be affected by the forces (and millions of humans) that existed outside (and inside) Stars Hollow. Thus the choices, trajectories, and preoccupations of the characters rang false.

Now think about something like the One Day at a Time reboot on Netflix (originally 1975-1984), in which the single white mother is now a Cuban-American military vet supporting her mother and two children on a nurse's salary while navigating anti-Latinx prejudice, immigration & deportation laws, a child's lesbian identity and her non-binary partner, and her own PTSD and nearly-impossible-to-obtain VA benefits.

Which is better?

Prompt: Review your retelling from last time (whether you wrote it down or simply considered it). If you previously adjusted the components and the characters of your story to reflect your own experience, or allowed them to be pressured by contemporary external forces...RAD! Go further! Fight the bland "universal"! Liberate your characters and your story -- it's yours now. Let it sing!

...And if you find that your retelling was constrained by outmoded ideas of audience, character, or situation? It happens to the best of us. We did tell you not to worry about it. Revision is where we worry about it. Identify opportunities to allow the exigencies of the real, contemporary, maybe-has-always-been-that-way-world to push the story to new and imaginative places!

Recommended viewing and reading: Chi-Raq (retelling of Lysistrata); One Day at a Time; Dynasty (reboot); Charmed (reboot), Homecoming (American vs. Israeli original); The Office (American vs. British original); Ugly Betty (American vs. Mexican original); Jane the Virgin (American vs. Venezuelan original); The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood; "Paprika Jiro" by Yukiko Motoya.

Reflection: Many of us have consistently been defined outside of the "universal" or default audience/character construction, and we know that widening the lens doesn't mean that the non-normative audience is new. Fuck, we've always been here! Much of the work we (and you) are doing is reparative -- pulling back the camera, putting the focus on the people and forces that were pushed to the sidelines for millennia. Think about what it feels like to be on the inside or the outside of that definition, and what your responsibilities are as a writer.