yuletide | The Misses Clause Challenge

Over at

freneticfloetry has a post about The Misses Clause Challenge:

Yuletide is upon us! Time for flailing and flanicking, finding new fandoms and shiny new fic. As two multi-year Yuletiders, and previous participants in the Dark Agenda challenge within a challenge, martinigrl (hauntedd) and I are thrilled that happy times are here again. While we love all the stories spun during Yuletide, and the writers who spin them, we've also noticed a trend — many fandoms fail the Bechdel Test.

The test, on its surface, is simple and three-pronged. But in fic, as in popular media, many stories fail the test, highlighting or hinging on gender bias that exists within canon and a lack of true female representation in fandom as a whole. So we're proposing a challenge within a challenge, similar to Dark Agenda. A challenge where you, dear author, meet the criteria set out in Bechdel’s original test.

Per Bechdel, and to be a part of the challenge within a challenge, so to speak, the fic you write must:

1. Include at least two women...
2. who have at least one conversation...
3. about something other than a man.

Therefore, we present to you (with all apologies to Tim Allen): The Misses Clause Challenge.*

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use your Yuletide prompts or assignment (or pinch hit, or stocking stuffer) to embrace female characters of all shapes, sizes, colors, creeds, abilities, nationalities, orientations and origins. Brown women. Trans women. Alien women. We want them all! Put the test to good use and rep women as full fledged, three-dimensional characters. You may even get an extra present under your tree. After all, who doesn’t think Mrs. Claus is the one running the show up on the North Pole?

Be sure to tag your uploaded fic with "Misses Clause" so that it can be indexed as part of the challenge and found by anyone surfing the archive for challenge response fics. Post-reveal, when all authors have been unmasked, you'll be able to add your fic to the Misses Clause Collection.

Many thanks to elynross and astolat for their assistance. :)

* The challenge name is meant as a playful pun on the subject matter, and should not denote this as a Christmas-specific challenge. No offense or exclusion intended.

A follow-up clarification:

Some of you have asked whether or not stories featuring one woman could fulfill the requirements of the challenge. in addition to fics that pass the bechdel test, if you're fic is female-focused (read: features a female protagonist) and centered on something other than the character's relationship with a man, whatever the nature of that relationship, it counts as a Misses Clause story.