Another trade with corsetkitten yields a bad-ass doll [photo by Mick Balte] done by Character Options with no designated character…although I suspect she will become Alicia, Janet and Velvette’s mom, an ex-feminist porn star turned evangelical Christian and writer of devotional poetry.
After college, Alicia and friends moved out West to start their feminist porn company. Alicia had her kids with some of her fellow start-up dudes in the business, then moved to her hometown area, Boston, to escape the volatile world of Californian porn in order to raise her daughters.
She has a long history of disappointment in her daughters because they appear to take after her own sexually adventurous tendencies. She kicked Velvette out of the house when Velvette started her fetish modeling and fashion designing. Velvette went to live with Janet, who was the exemplary, smart, overachieving, successful, sexually repressed daughter, until the sex scandal that brought her dismissal from MIT. Fearing their mom’s disapproving wrath, Janet and Velvette stayed far away in Cambridge, pissing each other off instead of dealing with Alicia.
Like I said, Alicia turned her considerable zeal into evangelical Christianity. She got saved and convicted. She may be an ex-masturbator. Since both Janet and Velvette are queer, with heavily kinky associations [Janet with robo-sex, Velvette with BDSM], they both pretend that their mom doesn’t exist. It’s a protective measure because they are sure that she will condemn them. She keeps sending them books of her devotional poetry, which they keep ignoring. It’s obvious that the daughters still love their mom and the mom still loves her daughters, or at least they all WANT to love each other, but they stay apart because of painful history.
There are definite class tensions between Alicia and her daughters because Alicia was indoctrinated with the concepts of assimilating, overachieving and being an outstanding representative of her race. She not-so-secretly thinks that Velvette and Janet are not being a credit to her because their behavior reflects a reversion to the "black woman as oversexed slut" stereotype. "I wanted you to work hard and make something of yourselves, not sleep around and ruin it!" Clearly there’s an element of bitterness and possibly self-hatred here, since Alicia had kids, which interrupted her hard work on the porn co.
Clearly I’m not going to explore all these tensions in depth in one side story, but, if I can at least allude to them accurately to make a rich, believable portrayal of my favorite secondaries [who are also characters of color]. [I’ve been thinking a lot recently about, as a white writer, writing believable, convincing, non-stereotypical characters of color, which is hard.] Yay more plots for Velvette and Janet! …Especially Janet… I think everyone dumps on her, but she has a really interesting inner life and motivations and past [what was that scandal at MIT????] that she never divulges. It’s always the quiet ones….
Well, anyway, the Martha Jones doll obviously needs her hair painted grey and her face lined to show age.