On Writing Women. Looking for honesty...

IMO, both the Lord Of The Rings and Dune are long winded. They are boring in many places. I'm not surprised people cannot finished them. In fact, Dune became know as the book nobody finishes on their first read. But their movies keep to their ideals, so one can watch them instead.

 

The same movies that show trembling and confused eleven year old boys being given swords and armour in order to fight 10,000 hulking Uruk-hai, while the fully trained, grown ass women are sent to the caves to weep and cower.

 

Could be true, could be false. Many of the non-fantasy classics are very male oriented. Did you have trouble with Treasure Island? Three Musketeers? Been a long time, but even the Count of Monte Cristo... pretty much a testosterone fest. A Christmas Carol. Most Dickens as I recall. Twain too.

My knee-jerk reaction would be this is a misdiagnosis. While it could be a piece of the issue, I expect there's something more. Part of this will be generational, when I was a lad, the selection of fantasy was atrocious and thin. Now days, its mostly atrocious but a helluva lot of it, heh heh.

But then, I am a dude who read Dune straight through the first time (err, close to 3 decades ago?)... book 2, no, I didn't make it past book 1, LOL.

 

And Eowyn's role is significantly diminished in the movies, unfortunately.

The Silmarillion at least has the Tale of Beren and Luthien, wherein Luthien does most of the rescuing instead of the other way round.

Speaking of The Mists of Avalon, I finally have all three books in the trilogy. One issue I had with the 'first' one was that all of the characters were so multi-dimensional, perhaps too much so, that I found it hard to sympathize with any of them.

Also, so far, all of my protagonists are female. I really don't have much experience with writing male characters...

 

Oh, oh, The Old Kingdom series has female protagonists. They're some of my favourites. Also, Diana Wynne Jones has some very feisty female characters in her books. [Fire and Hemlock is my favourite of hers. I could read it over and over again.]

 

Though the first and third Earthsea books by Ursula le Guin are male-orientated, the second and fourth are not, and all four are worth a read. The fourth one, Tehanu, is my favourite of all of her books.

Claymore is my favourite manga, mainly because it has an all-female cast [except for three important male characters].

 

Other recommendations from my bookshelf are:
Seraphina [features unusual dragons and a half human half dragon protagonists] and its sequel, Shadow Scale.

The Enchanted Forest tetology [the first three have very strong and determined female protagonists who refuse to let men boss them around, though the fourth does not].

 

Yes, and more than that, I gravitate heavily to female authors as well. My introduction to fantasy was Patricia Wrede, Tamora Pierce, Robin McKinley—Garth Nix is the exception here, but as Crystal says, his Old Kingdom books have great female protagonists. My favorite authors now are still a majority women—Lois McMasters-Bujold is my absolute favorite.

Books with a female protagonist, authors who write women as often as they write men...there’s an unconscious litmus test there for me for whether I’ll enjoy those books. The focus and the characterization tends to be different. Of course, there are plenty of men in these books, and they tend to be written perfectly well. I’m not sure if it’s a bias so much as it is seeking the absence of a bias...

 

Huh. This thread is interesting to me because it's making me wonder how being a trans guy has influenced my reading. I read LotR and the first Dune book for the first time back when I thought I was female, and I...didn't really think about the lack of good women characters. I mean, once I got into fandom discussions online I began to realize that a lot of fantasy had a problem with this, but on my own I didn't see it.

I didn't see myself in female characters even when I thought I was a girl, instead identifying with the male protagonists. I wonder if any other trans men have similar experiences.

 

<I just don’t like the conclusions Lewis comes to, after all that analysis, the way he shuts children out from heaven, or whatever it is, on the grounds that the one girl is interested in boys.>
I agree with this point, from the Philip Pulman interview. That's one of the many problems I have with the Narnia books. It's not that I dislike them so much as I keep poking holes in them, which started after I actually understood the allegory and realized that the Telemoran "god", Tash, was far more interesting to me than anything else in the entire series, and I was confused as to why a Hindu-esque raven creature was seen as a horrific beast.

I apologize for getting slightly sidetracked. I've never told anyone how I feel about the Narnia books, come to think of it.