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Women in fantasy

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saellys

Inkling
The scenes you have with two women in conversation include subjects other than men, though, right? Because as long as they talk about something else at some point, you totally pass. There are loads of legit reasons for two women to talk about a man or men, but very few reasons for them to talk exclusively about a man.

The two most recent pieces of media I've consumed are the trailer for The East and a few episodes of Hannibal. The East passes Bechdel in the trailer, which made my day, even though the three female leads will probably have cause at some point to discuss male characters when in conversation with each other. And Hannibal passes in the third episode, even though Abigail and Alanna discuss Abigail's dad in the same conversation. Point is, passing Bechdel does not require the complete avoidance of discussing any man, ever; it just requires that female characters have something else to talk about sometimes.
 

Nameback

Troubadour
The scenes you have with two women in conversation include subjects other than men, though, right? Because as long as they talk about something else at some point, you totally pass. There are loads of legit reasons for two women to talk about a man or men, but very few reasons for them to talk exclusively about a man.

Well, so far I only have one scene with dialogue that consists of only female characters, and they're mostly talking about a dude. I have plenty of scenes with a mixed group of characters where women talk about all sorts of stuff and move the plot forward, but I don't have any scene with two or more women who have a conversation that doesn't revolve around a man, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, I have four scenes with only male characters--and I went back and realized that two of these do actually qualify as inverse-Bechdel, meaning that they don't mention women. I mean, it's a little tough, because I'm deliberately setting the story mainly in a patriarchal culture so that the protagonist can grow to rebel against it, but the result is that most of the characters in positions of power are men, so if a female character is interacting with a non-POV character important to the plot, it's usually a dude.

Like, all the mages in the main city are men, because women are barred from learning or practicing magic, because the men fear it (women have an inherent advantage as mages; since mages mainly gain power by extracting potential from living things [by destroying them ritualistically], female mages can purposefully get pregnant, and magically abort their fetuses to absorb the potential within them).
 
(women have an inherent advantage as mages; since mages mainly gain power by extracting potential from living things [by destroying them ritualistically], female mages can purposefully get pregnant, and magically abort their fetuses to absorb the potential within them).

Congratulations. You've just beaten out the Wess'har series for second-most disturbing thing ever done with a fetus. (Shintaro Kago still wins first place.)
 

Nameback

Troubadour
Congratulations. You've just beaten out the Wess'har series for second-most disturbing thing ever done with a fetus. (Shintaro Kago still wins first place.)

Thanks! I was pretty happy with it.

Obviously it's a metaphor for the fear that men have in general of women having control of their reproduction.
 

Mindfire

Istar
Thanks! I was pretty happy with it.

Obviously it's a metaphor for the fear that men have in general of women having control of their reproduction.

If your intent is to support pro-choice, I think that story element might be counter-productive. It doesn't so much make me question my views on abortion as it makes me think how sick, depraved, and downright evil these women would have to be to intentionally get pregnant and then kill their babies purely for personal gain. At least in the real world people can argue abortion for health reasons or what have you. But here, they're explicitly doing it just to increase their own magical power. That's just... evil.
 

Jessquoi

Troubadour
If your intent is to support pro-choice, I think that story element might be counter-productive. It doesn't so much make me question my views on abortion as it makes me think how sick, depraved, and downright evil these women would have to be to intentionally get pregnant and then kill their babies purely for personal gain. At least in the real world people can argue abortion for health reasons or what have you. But here, they're explicitly doing it just to increase their own magical power. That's just... evil.


My guess is that that is the point.
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
If your intent is to support pro-choice, I think that story element might be counter-productive. It doesn't so much make me question my views on abortion as it makes me think how sick, depraved, and downright evil these women would have to be to intentionally get pregnant and then kill their babies purely for personal gain. At least in the real world people can argue abortion for health reasons or what have you. But here, they're explicitly doing it just to increase their own magical power. That's just... evil.

That's going to be the read on it from people with a certain viewpoint, but that's no reason not to include it, in my view. For someone who is pro-life it is going to cast the character in a certain way, and the author can either work with that or build up the character in a way that counters it. For someone who is pro-choice anyway, the effect is going to be a lot more mild, if it exists at all, and the author will have an easier time building up the character to counter the perception.

Either way, I'd run with it and see how it works. I don't find it works so well as a metaphor, however, because I think the underlying assumption that men generally fear a woman being in control of reproduction is a flawed assumption. Probably true in a minority of cases, but not as a general rule, so if you try to extend the metaphor to make a generalized point (sort of a universal truth) I think it will fall on its face.
 

saellys

Inkling
Well, so far I only have one scene with dialogue that consists of only female characters, and they're mostly talking about a dude. I have plenty of scenes with a mixed group of characters where women talk about all sorts of stuff and move the plot forward, but I don't have any scene with two or more women who have a conversation that doesn't revolve around a man, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, I have four scenes with only male characters--and I went back and realized that two of these do actually qualify as inverse-Bechdel, meaning that they don't mention women. I mean, it's a little tough, because I'm deliberately setting the story mainly in a patriarchal culture so that the protagonist can grow to rebel against it, but the result is that most of the characters in positions of power are men, so if a female character is interacting with a non-POV character important to the plot, it's usually a dude.

Like, all the mages in the main city are men, because women are barred from learning or practicing magic, because the men fear it (women have an inherent advantage as mages; since mages mainly gain power by extracting potential from living things [by destroying them ritualistically], female mages can purposefully get pregnant, and magically abort their fetuses to absorb the potential within them).

I laugh a little every time I see a mention of inverse or reverse Bechdel, because that is literally every story (with two male characters) ever. Since men are overwhelmingly the main protagonists of the stories we consume, and generally have things to think/talk about other than women, it is staggeringly easy to pass. The Bechdel test is significantly more difficult because we have a tendency to make female characters ancillary to their male counterparts.

I'm staunchly pro-choice, but I think that mage mechanic metaphor might backfire on you unless you make it really clear that this is a rule made by male mages based on no actual incidences of female mages aborting their fetuses for power. Then it would more or less mirror the logic of "We can't let kids have the HPV vaccine because ~promiscuity~!"
 

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
Like, all the mages in the main city are men, because women are barred from learning or practicing magic, because the men fear it (women have an inherent advantage as mages; since mages mainly gain power by extracting potential from living things [by destroying them ritualistically], female mages can purposefully get pregnant, and magically abort their fetuses to absorb the potential within them).

I'm going to take a little poke at your meta-physics, now, because that's just the kind of crazy I am...

I understand you're basing your magical system on what is essentially death magic - am I reading that right? So, as co-mingled as life-forces would be between a pregnant woman and her fetus (shared blood streams, air supplies, etc.), wouldn't that actually make practicing death magic within her own body extremely difficult, if not lethal?

What if what makes women as mages so scary to their male counterparts is not their potential for creating death from within their own bodies, but the power of life itself? That would give a female mage powers over both life AND death, making her potentially twice as powerful as a male mage.
 
I laugh a little every time I see a mention of inverse or reverse Bechdel, because that is literally every story (with two male characters) ever. Since men are overwhelmingly the main protagonists of the stories we consume, and generally have things to think/talk about other than women, it is staggeringly easy to pass. The Bechdel test is significantly more difficult because we have a tendency to make female characters ancillary to their male counterparts.

Your parentheses weaken the statement quite a bit. Quite a few of my short stories never have more than two characters in the same conversation. In those cases where the viewpoint character is female, the men only speak to her, and the inverse Bechdel test is not passed.
 
Here I thought after 9872389 threads and pages of discussion we've moved on from Bechdel and found it to be a somewhat flawed test in general. To me, the Bechdel Test is no more valid than the Prologue Test (books are only worth reading if there is a prologue) or Inverse-Prologue Test (books are only worth reading if there isn't a prologue).

Maybe we haven't had almost 10 billion threads and pages of discussion, but we at least had two Bechdel-Test threads.
 

saellys

Inkling
Your parentheses weaken the statement quite a bit. Quite a few of my short stories never have more than two characters in the same conversation. In those cases where the viewpoint character is female, the men only speak to her, and the inverse Bechdel test is not passed.

I don't see how the parenthetical weakens my statement. Passing Bechdel requires two female characters; passing reverse-Bechdel requires two male characters. I was being facetious and ironic with that whole "literally" thing, but my point was that in any story in which two male characters speak to each other, the likelihood of passing reverse-Bechdel is far, far higher than the likelihood of two female characters passing Bechdel.

Here I thought after 9872389 threads and pages of discussion we've moved on from Bechdel and found it to be a somewhat flawed test in general. To me, the Bechdel Test is no more valid than the Prologue Test (books are only worth reading if there is a prologue) or Inverse-Prologue Test (books are only worth reading if there isn't a prologue).

Maybe we haven't had almost 10 billion threads and pages of discussion, but we at least had two Bechdel-Test threads.

No one is discussing whether Bechdel is somewhat flawed or not anymore, except, apparently, you. To the people talking about it right now (again, except you), it's valid. You've already established you don't consider it valid, so why jump back in to remind people that something they consider valid isn't as far as you're concerned? We were discussing how it pertains to Nameback's work, not yours.

Honest question: why bother talking about something you clearly hate talking about so much? Why is it so important to shut that discussion down just because we've already had threads about the Bechdel test?
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
Honest question: why bother talking about something you clearly hate talking about so much? Why is it so important to shut that discussion down just because we've already had threads about the Bechdel test?

I can't speak for Zero, but I somewhat understand the negative reaction.

There's something about Bechdel which, I think, targets the formula of a certain kind of book. That is, a shorter novel, with not too many characters, has a male protagonist fighting a similar-but-opposite male antagonist, and along the way there's a light love triangle which pits two women as minor antagonists to each other in the subplot, and at some point they have to talk about it for the triangle to be satisfying.

I get that it's an old and tired formula, but it's a mainstay. If you strip away the fantasy, we could find a number of high school dramas which fail the inverse Bechdel. The formula is ubiquitous. To say, "If you fail Bechdel, it somehow implies" - well, I'm not sure what it's supposed to imply. But if they both like the same guy, then wouldn't that probably be the part of their conversation which is relevant to the story?

To me, Bechdel looks more like a trap than a test, so I don't see much point in it, except to score points making something harmless look like something sinister.
 
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Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
It can be a good threshold question. If you're writing a story about two soldiers in a trench in WWI, you're going to fail the Bechdel test, but so what? On the other hand, if you're trying to write a story with a cast of well-developed male and female characters, and you realize you failed the Bechdel Test, it's a good indicator that you need to go back and work on the female characters.
 
No one is discussing whether Bechdel is somewhat flawed or not anymore, except, apparently, you. To the people talking about it right now (again, except you), it's valid. You've already established you don't consider it valid, so why jump back in to remind people that something they consider valid isn't as far as you're concerned? We were discussing how it pertains to Nameback's work, not yours.

Honest question: why bother talking about something you clearly hate talking about so much? Why is it so important to shut that discussion down just because we've already had threads about the Bechdel test?

I never said I hated it. I find it irrelevant. I thought it was a group consensus (including you) that came to the conclusion that passing or not passing the Bechdel Test does not tell us anything beyond that two female characters don't get together and talk about something that's not a male. Apparently, I am misremembering.

I brought up the (again, I thought) group consensus because Nameback was commenting on this as though it was a flaw in their work.
 

saellys

Inkling
Yes, we established exactly what the Bechdel test demonstrates in a given work. Not that all the discussion about that was necessary or anything, since the conclusion we reached is exactly what the test states. We did not, however, reach a common consensus about what the Bechdel test is useful for showing us about our own work if we choose to look deeper, or whether it's valid for a writer to want to pass it on purpose. Nameback wants to pass to complement other, broader themes in their work. That's their prerogative because it's a priority to them; the fact that they view it as a flaw in their work has nothing to do with the fact that you find it irrelevant in your own.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
It can be a good threshold question. If you're writing a story about two soldiers in a trench in WWI, you're going to fail the Bechdel test, but so what? On the other hand, if you're trying to write a story with a cast of well-developed male and female characters, and you realize you failed the Bechdel Test, it's a good indicator that you need to go back and work on the female characters.

When it comes with all the qualifiers, and isn't used just to make points in an argument, I can kind of see that (not to imply that it was brought up for points now - it's not). If you have a larger cast, or any kind of complexity to your plot, and especially if you have female POVs, then maybe it would be a red flag to fail Bechdel.

But I react negatively to all of these tests. The Mary Sue, the Fantasy Cliches and so on. Nevermind that there's something pretentious about putting down a large number of story types, it just seems silly to take an isolated trait out of context and pretend it means much of anything.

I mean, I passed Bechdel in the first chapter. To me, that doesn't say much of anything about what I'm writing.
 
I mean, I passed Bechdel in the first chapter. To me, that doesn't say much of anything about what I'm writing.

Bechdel is one of those tests that passing it doesn't mean anything to those that find it laudable. It's failing it that matters...unless it's an exception where failing it is alright.

Anyway, I just watched "Brave". I was expecting more. I didn't find the character all that brave in fact and only reactionary when it came to danger. I mean, it's still nice that it wasn't a romance, which is a HUGE step forward o_O The fact that this is touted as being so different is very worrying. Everything is so messed up in media. "Brave" is more conservative than liberal, and yet since there's hardly anything out there it's this huge liberal movie.

It was alright and I don't think Merida is a bad role-model by any stretch, but it would have been nice to see a little bit more from her.
The whole needle-and-thread being more useful than a bow thing was quite bothersome and also that the mom ended up beating the bad-bear. All she had to do was shoot the thing in the eye, which she's clearly capable of from everything else they show of her in the movie.

I'm OK with romance being present, and I've even heard it said that there NEEDS to be romantic elements in EVERY work or that it at least makes every work better (I disagree, but I've heard it), but why is it always the FOCUS of these movies? Most of the time in movies like this where the girl doesn't want romance, she ends up finding out that she secretly does. It's insane and so frustrating!

I really can't stand it. I apologize if this stuff was mentioned before about "Brave", I probably skipped it since I hadn't seen it. If a guy wants to be a hermit, there may be some subtle hints of homosexuality if you read between the lines, but it's just as likely that it's just a choice they made to be a hermit, but if a woman doesn't want to marry it seems like it HAS to be addressed why she didn't marry. If you're a female character you're either pro-romance or anti-romance (and I'm using romance to encompass relationships and the like, not just wining and dining, etc), but you have to have a stance. (And if you're anti-romance then you'll usually be forced to become pro-romance). Guys don't have to have stances.

By the way, I don't think "Brave" passes the Bechdel Test unless you count some of her conversations with the bear.
 

Mindfire

Istar
I think you have to view Brave through the lens of "Mom-Daughter bonding film". It's pretty much exactly like Father-Son bonding films (e.g. A Goofy Movie) except female. They have similar structure if you think about it.
 

Nameback

Troubadour
If your intent is to support pro-choice, I think that story element might be counter-productive. It doesn't so much make me question my views on abortion as it makes me think how sick, depraved, and downright evil these women would have to be to intentionally get pregnant and then kill their babies purely for personal gain. At least in the real world people can argue abortion for health reasons or what have you. But here, they're explicitly doing it just to increase their own magical power. That's just... evil.

In your opinion! Which, of course, is one of a broad variety of opinions I hope to provoke by writing this into my story. No matter what, I'm sure readers will find it engaging in the sense that it will arouse strong emotion--and to my mind, that's always a good thing for a book to do.

Removed by Moderator.
 
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