Dispatches from Stepford

Maya awakes with a gasp. [TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNING: briefly hinted-at domestic abuse] —————— Last one, I promise! To be honest, Maya only came to me the week before I made this blog. After I realised I hadn’t really gone into Dale Coba Jr.’s personal life a whole lot, I went back to this transcript I’d written for a Stepford tourism video that is actually a Coba Technique instructional video in disguise if you keep watching after a certain length of time. I had the idea that he’d recorded his first attempts to try and improve on his methods, and the woman featured in those recordings is the one I’ve written about here. This one’s a little different because Rachel isn’t in it lmao, but I kinda liked the idea of this little series starting and ending with Maria, even though she’s by no means the first or the last Stepford Wife that Rachel goes to see. And I think that the Wives deserve a chance to talk to each other about something other than cooking, cleaning and pleasing their husbands ...

Don’t look down, Annie. It’s easier if you just look straight ahead. [TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNING: implied rape, I’m serious about this one, mentions of racist microaggressions] —————— One more to go and that’s it I swear!!! And of course being a massive fucking goth I have to put goths and goth music in pretty much everything I do. Yeah, the song mentioned is exactly the one you think it is, it’s Michelle by Clan of Xymox . There’s also a delightful turn of phrase in here which I credit solely to Charlie Brooker in his bit from Screenwipe about how to get your idea on TV  – specifically how if you’re lucky it’ll never happen and if it does it’ll be a NIGHTMARE – and I do feel a little called out hahaha. Annieway, —————— Annie, The Last “Errr… Lone Nuh-gooyin?” “It’s… pronounced Loan Nguyen…” “I didn’t ask you how your name is pronounced, I asked if you were present.” “Sorry, Mr Hoffman. Present.”

The Songbird of Staten Island, they’d called her. —————— Once again, ACAB. I honestly don’t really have much else to say about this one, except I don’t have the most extensive knowledge of jazz and blues music so I may very well have just listed the most basic entry-level artists out there. Very sorry about that! I am not smart. I only know how to listen to one of the two songs I know by Tamaryn on repeat for days until it ends up in the top 5 on my Spotify Wrapped!!! —————— Jasmine, The Singer The Songbird of Staten Island, they’d called her.

Blood drips on asphalt. Blood drips on concrete. The body pays it no mind. —————— Oh look it’s the one other Stepford Wife beside Rachel who has lines in the script!! That’s the one thing I wish I could change without having to scrap it and start over to be fair, because even in the source material the other Stepford Wives had loads of lines, but then again I wanted to avoid overstuffing it with more characters than it needed. I originally conceived of this character as a cis woman, but then I thought a little more about the conversion therapy aspect of the present day Stepford Wife method and I figured it’d make a little more sense for this character to be nonbinary. One thing I worked in is the idea of certain characters’ paths crossing before the story even takes place. There was a couple called the Cornells in the originals so I’m thinking the guy who kidnapped Ellie is the adult son of the Cornells, if they even had kids. I didn’t find a mention of any kids in the book so maybe I’...

Nina Blake learned to fake it a long time ago. —————— My fuckin’ kingdom for an easy way to format posts on mobile that don’t leave behind a billion ugly-ass span tags in their wake lmao I honestly have no idea how far along Nina is in her pregnancy here tbh, like I had the idea that it’d be enough for her to be showing but not too long that she couldn’t safely get an abortion when she got back to New York? But given the state of reproductive rights in the US I never know anymore man. Also yes there’s a Hannibal reference AND a Steamed Hams reference because, as I say, these women had lives before they were taken to Stepford. And the best way to show that is with memes and pop culture references :) also yeah, Jeremy Claybrook is a holdover from the Stepford Wives book, obviously he's a kid in that but here he’s uhhhhh. Not a kid —————— Nina, The Violinist Nina Blake learned to fake it a long time ago.

“Listen, does the name Olivia Murray mean anything to you?” Mrs Van Sant stops in her tracks. A tea cup falls to the floor, shattering to pieces. “N–no, I don’t think so,” she says, her hands trembling. “Does she l–live nearby?” —————— In terms of my creative process, the names of the Wives came first, then their appearances, then their backstories. I made an effort to make all those things match up somehow, so if the name Olivia Murray goes with the round-faced gap-toothed girl I drew, then Olivia Murray is what she’s called. I did originally have it in mind that she’d been kidnapped and married by a son of the Van Sants from the original book & movie – you know, Miss I’ll Just Die If I Don’t Get This Recipe Whoops I Crashed My Car But I Only Have A Minor Headache – but after consulting the copy of the book that’s on the Internet Archive it would appear that they only have daughters. Whoops. But I guess it wouldn’t matter if I did a few cheeky retcons here or there right? I mean, ...

Ryuko had struggled to contain her excitement as the booth began to dispense her passport photo. She was going to get to see America. She would be the envy of all her old school friends. —————— Ok so the implication with this one is that the men in the Stepford Men’s Association are so desperate to hold onto the status quo that they’ll take any measure possible to quash anything that could threaten it, which could also include kidnapping someone whose first language isn’t English and not allowing them to learn it beyond the basics. One thing I’ve also noticed is that white supremacists are fuckin stupid, waxing lyrical about the preservation of the white race and Western values while either having a partner who isn’t white or not even being white themselves??? And obviously a lot of my leftist distrust for law enforcement has pretty much seeped into the script, and the supplemental material that goes with it lmao.  I have a very barebones understanding of Japanese and I admit I use...

Mrs Miller awakes with a start.  —————— Since I finished the screenplay I’ve been spending a lot of time working on stories following different characters in and around it, no matter how much they actually appear in the damn thing. I did a series of little vignettes about some of the Stepford Wives mentioned by name in the script, about how they managed to get out with the help of Rachel Martinez, and they’re all kinda smushed together in one Google Docs file but I feel like it’d make more sense to post them one by one. Unfortunately I don’t have a name for the whole package, just the individual chapters I guess. Here’s the first one! —————— Maria, The Wife Mrs Miller awakes with a start.