Deconstructing Beth: The Genetics of the Fabray-Puckerman Cross

This might be a small thing, but it seems to me that a lot of Glee fic-writers are trying to further whitewash a white person. Namely: Drizzle, aka Jackie Daniels, aka Beth Corcoran-by-adoption.

Two words for those writers: dominant genes.

Given the little we've seen of Puck's family (his mother and sister), it is highly unlikely that Quinn and Puck's daughter is going to be blonde. The show never tells us anything about his father, so for all intents and purposes he could have had a blond allele somewhere in his gene pool, but how likely is it that his mother would have married anyone who didn't "look Jewish?" Remember, this is a woman who compared her son to the Nazis for not dating a Jewish girl.

Beth could have light eyes; her mother is probably hazel/hazel or hazel/blue (the elder Fabrays look very stereotypically Anglo), and her father has hazel-green eyes. But her father is olive-skinned and skin color is a polygenic trait, so at the very least, the child is probably not going to be ghost-pale like Quinn.

She probably also won't be a physical copy of Quinn. You don't need to know all about genetic recombination to know that the chances of inheriting every single one of one parent's traits are infinitesimally small. Now that the show has told us that Quinn may or may not be naturally thin (we're never told if her past obesity was a result of genetics, stress eating, or some other factor), this brings Beth's future body type into question, too. In fact, even without his constant workouts, Puck is fairly stocky and heavy-jawed; Beth could easily be so as well.

In short: I wish that Glee writers would take a more open-minded approach to writing about a grown-up Baby Fabray. There are enough lily-white princesses on the show as it is; there needn't be another one.

Diana Gabaldon and the Chamber of Racism

For those of you who haven't read any of Diana Gabaldon's work, here's a (comparatively light) summary of the racism, sexism, and homophobia she exhibits in her work. The seventh book is exempted from this because I haven't read it much.

The premise is all right - Claire Randall, a former field nurse in World War II, is on vacation with her husband Frank Randall in the Scottish Highlands. He wants to talk to a local reverend about a famous ancestor of his, Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall, who coincides nicely with Frank's history mania and was in Scotland at the time of the 1745 Rising.

It gets even more "interesting" when Claire steps through a stone circle and ends up two hundred years back in time. (The stone circle is utilized, backwards and forwards, multiple times.)