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| Sometimes, the only proper response is withering sarcasm. |
Or: Stop Twin Nonsense 2K15!
A couple of years ago, my sister and I came up with what I’m
going to call Leda’s Law.* It goes like this: in a fictional family with more
than four children, two of the children will be a pair of twins. Try it out for
a second. The Weasleys in Harry Potter?
Check. The Stantons in The Dark is Rising?
Check. George R. R. Martin managed to avoid this with the Starks, but that’s
probably because he already had a pair of twins on the board. I don’t know for
a fact that Leda’s Law is more prevalent in science fiction and fantasy than in
other genres, but I do know it’s prevalent enough to be irritating.
Here’s the thing. Like most tropes, Leda’s Law exists because
it is convenient for writers, and like most tropes that are convenient for
writers, the reason for its convenience is pretty gross. Writers decide that
they want a particular family to have a mystically significant number of
children—say, seven. But they don’t want to go through the effort of devising
seven distinct characters. They think the solution to this problem is to write
in a pair of twins who are, for all narrative intents and purposes, the same
character.
Writing seven physical descriptions? Now you only have to write
six! Coming up with seven mystical powers? Now you only need six! Killing off
seven people in a series of contrived coincidences? Now you only need to
contrive six!
I wish I were kidding.
I ran into Leda’s Law yesterday while reading a short story
in the archives of a popular online SF magazine. I’m not going to name and
shame, but I will say that the structure of the story entailed one section
dedicated to the death of each of five siblings. Well, each of four siblings, because of Leda’s Law—the
twins had to share a section. From a narrative point of view, the twins were
the same character.
Writers, from the very bottom of my heart, I am begging you:
Please stop doing this. It is gross.
Please stop writing stories, scenes, and sentences in which
twins function as a single character. Please stop writing sentences like “Castor
and Pollux went to CVS because they had run out of cotton balls.” (Both of them
coincidentally ran out of cotton balls at the same time? Or do you think they
share a bag of cotton balls?) Please stop writing things like “Linda and the twins
were waiting in the car.” (Linda gets a name but the other two people in the
car don’t? Why is that?) Please, please, please stop writing bullshit like “The
serial killer had six victims—seven, if you count the Smith twins.” (People who
do this—do you honestly think one of the victims was going to stand still while
the serial killer was going after their sibling? The day a serial killer tries
to take on a pair of twins at once is the day that serial killer is going down,
IMHO.)
I’m one hundred per cent sure that the people who write
this kind of nonsense don’t bear any animosity towards twins. They probably even
know twins in real life. (I assume most people know twins in real life? It’s
hard to tell, since everyone who knows me knows a twin.) They’re just…I don’t
know. Lazy? Unobservant? They think no one is going to care?
Speaking as a twin: I care. I care a lot. When I was eight,
I cried when I read books with twins in them because fiction kept screwing us
up. I’m a bit past crying now, but I have definitely cursed at my computer
screen. I’m sure fictional representations of twins don’t have a major impact
on my quality of life. But they are responsible for a lot of minor annoyances,
and you know what? They make me feel terrible. I'm betting they make a lot of twins feel terrible.
Maybe people have somehow gone through several decades of
life without realizing that talking about individuals as though they were not
individuals is insulting. If this is you, consider this your
wake-up call. Stop writing about twins
as though they were a single character. Stop publishing stories that do this.
Stop reading stories that do this and letting it pass without comment. It’s a very minor thing. It’s a very gross thing.
Please, stop doing it.
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| And don't even get me started on people who write about twins as though they were the same constellation. |
*Ironically, one place where Leda’s Law doesn’t seem to apply is Greek mythology, where large groups of siblings (the Perseides, the
Muses) are all singletons and the twins tend not to have other siblings (Artemis
and Apollo)—or if they do have other siblings, those siblings are also twins
(Helen and Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux). Of course, if you're siblings in Greek mythology, you probably already share a collective name and a catasterism, so your desire for individuality was probably doomed from the beginning.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
