fandomhigh | Powers, Identity, and The World; Embracing the Real You

Once again, Jono and Rinoa's class were going to find themselves meeting in a classroom. And once again, they'd find their teachers standing at the front of the room, looking… about as ready as anybody could possibly look, while teaching this particular pack of students.

//Hello again,// Jono said, nodding once it looked as though everyone had taken their seats. //And welcome back. Good to see we didn't scare you off last week, because this week, we're going to talk about more of the same… you. Last week, we discussed a bit about who you are. This week, we're going to stretch things a little, to talk about who it is you might become.//

There weren't any clairvoyants in the room, were there? Not that it mattered, but that could be an interesting insight to have at one's disposal for this lesson.

“For some people, you’ve got this whole life mapped out until one day, bam, it all changes,” Rinoa said. “And then you’re left wondering whether you can still be what you want, while now having to be what you are. Other people have always been different, and so their dreams and hopes are built around that framework. I can’t play basketball, because I’m too short. I can’t be a general, because the Galbadian army only has men in it. I can’t be a doctor, because I keep failing anatomy.”

It wasn’t just people with powers who had that problem, and it wasn’t just powers that might keep students away from some of their dreams. Reality was messy.

//And me, I can't get people to stop bloody well calling me 'General,' and I would really rather they never do so again,// Jono added, wryly. //Spent half my life thinking I was going to be frontman for my own grunge band, that's sort of fallen through for, er, obvious reasons. But I wouldn't mind perhaps getting up to something over at the Boards - the theatre I used to run - again. Even if I can't sing, it's… a compromise. Sometimes, even if you can't have exactly what you want, at least there's that much.//

“I thought I’d be a librarian,” Rinoa said, shrugging her shoulders. “And now I’m the Sorceress, which makes me into an international diplomat whether I want to be or not. But I’m working on restoring the Great Library in Dollet, and I could pick up an extra shift working in a bookstore here if I wanted to.” Or if she had the free time, which, lately, she hadn’t.

“The point is that maybe you can’t have everything you want, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have some of it. Maybe you can start a basketball league for short people. Maybe you can work somewhere else in the medical field that has less strict grade requirements, but still lets you heal people. Maybe you can start your own army. Just because there are limitations doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It just means you need to get creative.”

//This week, we're opening the discussion floor to you lot again. We want to talk about your futures… where you see yourself after high school. Where you would like to see yourself after high school. Maybe your life has been set out for you from this point onward already. Maybe you had a game plan, but like myself and Rinoa, that didn't quite work out the way you would've liked, thanks to your powers, or thanks to some other factor in your life. Open discussion time, for those who care to share… What you want to do, what the probable reality is… and then we can talk possible compromises, or workarounds. Or just clap you on the shoulder and say well-done if things are working out as you'd like. And if you have any suggestions for your classmates for alternatives if what they want isn't shaping up to be what they're going to get, please, share. Maybe we can give some people something to strive for, today.//

[OOC: Open!]

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"I sort of do," Celia offered, looking over to Anders. "Not the same way, but the idea that anyone can do anything is really quite new, here. If you go back a century or two, the options are much slimmer -- particularly for the poor, and especially for women. I don't think the idea of...job opportunity equality really emerged until recently. At least, it's not like that in my own time. I could hope for theater work, or to be a seamstress or maybe work in a factory, with my social standing back home if I didn't have magic on my side. As it is, I'll likely wind up in a theater anyway."

Anders sighed in relief that someone understood what he meant. "That's what I was getting at," he said. "Social status. We may not have had the same choices, but neither of us grew up thinking we could do anything."

Almost as an afterthought, he frowned. "Wait, why are things especially limited for women in your world?"

"Oh, Anders, don't you know anything?" Celia asked sarcastically, giving him a doe-eyed look. "We ladies should all be at home tending our babies and cooking for our men. Part of my poor social standing stems from the fact that I come from a class of women who might actually work outside of the home. We're quite looked down-upon."

Anders had picked up that women were treated differently from men in this world in some ways that didn't happen much at home, but he'd never given it much thought. (Mostly because he didn't have to.) But if Celia was going to spell it out for him:

"That's incredibly stupid," he informed her. "I promise I'm not trying to be funny -- it's just not the way people think at home. Kathy tried to explain feminism to me once and I sort of" -- he mimed smiling and nodding -- "but nobody's said women weren't supposed to work. Is that why all the priests seem to be men?"

"I think it must be?" Celia said thoughtfully. "Or maybe they have to be men because Christ was a man? Either way, it's definitely related. But yes, there's loads of things women can't do in my time. I mean, we can't vote in this country. From what I've read, that won't happen until about forty years in the future, for me."

"Probably. Ours are women because Andraste was a woman," Anders noted, with a tiny smile at the convergence. "We don't vote much at all -- we've got a king -- but when we do, women can, and the law's supposed to treat men and women the same all around. So this is all interesting to me. Terrible for girls, but interesting."

"It's gotten better, in this time," Celia said with a small smile. "And even my time is a little more progressive than Ichabod's or Cosette's. But the really radical changes seem to have happened in the last hundred years, which is honestly sort of embarrassing to me -- for once, your world sounds really nice, if they treat everyone equally."

"We have to get at least a few things right," Anders said philosophically. "It's terrible in so many ways, but we seem to be better than average about women and not caring who people sleep with. So that's something."

Powers, Identity, and The World; Embracing the Real You - Friday, Period One

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