Your dragon. Your knight. Your argument. Did you say this without having a solid reasoning in mind, then?
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Too few female characters?
- Thread starter Trick
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Your dragon. Your knight. Your argument. Did you say this without having a solid reasoning in mind, then?
InklingSteerpike please tell me your a dragon slaying expert, you'll be my hero.
Valentinator
Minstrel
Maybe he was slightly better in fighting than other knights, no? What kind of answer are you expecting from me?
I saw a Komodo Dragon run from a group of photographers on YouTube. Does that count?
Is this a serious reply? As fantasy writers we write about things that aren't real. You have to be able to draw logical conclusions or make rational assumptions based on common knowledge. If you had to be an expert on dragons to write about them there wouldn't be any books with them.
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Trick
Auror
Just going to leave this here to make a point -
That is impressive and she could probably beat many/most men. I doubt she could best Bruce Lee or even Jet Li for that matter. My own point, for what it's worth (about $0.02), is not that women cannot achieve athletic greatness but that the highest level of athletic greatness is dominated by men.
Okay, but why would it matter? Your hormones are a part of you. They're triggered by things that you do and experiences that you have. Your upbringing and your choices will affect your biology on the hormonal level.
If your point is that hormones make a difference, and you'll still see it if we could somehow look at the hormones of women who behave a certain way or not, then absolutely. But a woman who succeeds and has a higher than average testosterone level is in no way an anomaly. Nor would it be a simple matter of a woman behaving like that just because she has a hormone imbalance. Her body and her hormones would have adjusted to her behavior. They're a part of her.
I think you might be missing the point. The hero and the villain are both important. Between the two they're also diverse. As a stereotype, the women are mostly being left out. It's not just that men are brave knights and women are courtly ladies. It's that men are important to the story, and women are not.
Yes, there are male stereotypes, and I've known a few people who were more than a little messed up by them. Maybe if you were to isolate the spectrum of stereotypes and biases you might have an argument that there's a range in which they're both pretty significant.
But I'm not sure how you can casually jump the hurdle between being important or not. It seems like a bias that's pretty clearly on a different scale to me.
Maybe a little. In that sense stereotypes are a little like your standard trope, a familiar launching pad for creating a common understanding of the topic. It's just that, we can't ignore that stereotypes affect real people.
People are different. I'll say that over and over and over. People are different and we should try to understand those differences. But we need to get byond the dumb, simple version of those differences and understand how they shape and affect people.
Sure, everyone stereotypes. Maybe I'm crazy, but to me, that sounds like another reason to try not to.
*facepalm*
Valentinator
Minstrel
Oh, my dragon? Than it's easy. My dragon is not that big and increased physical strength actually helps to kill him. Are we done?
Eye-batting only works on me when my daughter does it, whether she is wearing makeup or not. She can pretty much get her way, within some rather broad limits
Butterfly
Auror
I have no idea. I was curious, kind of brainstorming the possibilities and ideas.
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Eye-batting only works on me when my daughter does it, whether she is wearing makeup or not. She can pretty much get her way, within some rather broad limits
So basically your a talking magic ring wrapped around her finger.
While I agree with sex diterminism based on biology I think the recent posts arguing for are way to heavy handed. Yes men have an advantage in all sports where strength count a lot, based of bio fine but it doesn't mean they are not good at that sport or incapable compared to a guy. And not all sports are strength intensive. Hell with the best rock climbers in the world it's a pretty even mix. It takes more than strength, actually your an idiot if you try to power through.
Edit: I think I need to work on my humor
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Butterfly
Auror
Actually... I think I've worked it out after several minutes of pondering.
The survivor is the one who came to fight last, after the dragon had fought and killed all the other knights. They've all had their battles, probably quite a few made their hits and left their wounds. So he came when the dragon was weakened and wounded by all the others hard work and simply finished it off.
That seems to make more sense than it being down to a matter of strength, stamina, weaponry differences. After all they were all knights, all trained to fight, all likely would have a similar strength base, stamina and fitness and a similar quality of weaponry. So the dragon must have been weakened first...
Valentinator
Minstrel
I think the reason why women are often being left out is because many of the stories are about war. And men are predisposed to make wars that's why they are always in the middle of the action. My point is not to exclude females but to give them different roles. IMO, female warriors 'men with breasts' type is as stereotypical as housewife type.
Valentinator
Minstrel
OK, as you wish. My dragon is not that big. A knight can fight him. And strength matters because he needs to cut through the scales that protect vital organs. There are no weak spots. 15% in this case make huge difference. Does it make sense?
cupiscent
Sage
Which just raises a bigger question for me: why is the story of the men's "action" privileged for telling over the story of the women trying to maintain civilisation back home while the men are killing each other?
Ok dude I agree with guys and gals being different and taking into account biology but your painting the house with shop broom. People are predisposed to react to a chemical stimuli at the cellular level pulling that out to making war is not predisposed. I have gene xyzb I'm predisposed to have heart disease(made up gene I'm fine....I think). The cellular level interactions of the brain are way to complex to blame war mongering on the biology of just one sex.
For f's sake why does it keep double posting or whatever its doing adding old quotes
If you like, but you're doing some serious backpedaling from your previous over-arching generalizations.
Having a reason for it, good or not, doesn't mean there aren't significant negative consequences to it. And in this case, they affect real women.
And don't get me wrong. I'm not left right or center, but kind of zig zagging across the board, here. I know that. If you want to write about men at war, that's great. But it seems weird not to acknowledge that the history of books which leave women out has done some harm, especially insomuch as those are the books which are setting the tropes used by modern writers.
It's one thing to say, most stories are about war, so they don't have many women. It's another to forget why so many stories are about war in the first place.
I think there's truth in that.
You can write women in war, as soldiers, without resorting to a men with breasts stereotype. See, for example, Elizabeth Moon's character Paks. Moon herself was in the Marine Corps, as I recall.
You can see it in real history too. As I posted before, look at Jean de Clisson or any of the similar links people posted in this thread.
