Women in fantasy

[T.Allen.Smith]

This is a point that gets overlooked often in discussions of gender. Understanding the distinction is one of the keys to understanding that people don't fit into discrete boxes according to their biological sex.

This holds true for any character attribute. I don't think there's anything wrong with playing to gender expectations as long as we're also willing to go against what is expected as well. Where too much surprise may ring false, the same would hold true with too little variety. At that point, it's only about writing good, complete, and interesting characters. If your characters share too many similarities based on gender, race, culture, whatever...then your work probably won't be as interesting as it could be with distinct individuals playing those parts.

It's the attributes that fall outside expectations that often draw the strongest reader reaction.

 

[Mindfire]

I mean this Morgana Pendragon.

Morgana is starting to change in the second season, and because I have been reading the Merlin Wiki a lot these days, I already know what happens with Morgana later in the series.

I cannot wait to see how magically powerful she will be!!

Just making sure you knew she becomes evil later. (As in, irredeemably so.)

 

[Mindfire]

Mindfire, I'd like to request that you make one big post clarifying your arguments. I can't figure out how to make them not contradict each other without assuming at least one provably false premise (for instance, that all boys want to play with action figures and all girls want to play with dolls.)

They probably contradict because up to now I haven't really been making a unified argument, just asking questions, exploring ideas, along with some devil's advocate and simple contrariness.

But to clarify, what contradictions in particular?

 

[Nightender]

In the story I'm working on right now, my lead character is a minor priestess of a death religion. She spends a lot of time talking with her closest friend, another priestess, and they usually chat about all sorts of things, usually all the throats they have to slash.

I take a lot of effort to make sure they are strong characters, but I don't force them to be warriors or military leaders because they aren't trained for that sort of thing. Instead, I give them strength of conviction and ideals, morals and personal preferences.

A lot of fantasy likes to take women and make them fighters or write a male role and add female anatomy. To do it right, I think writers have to observe female behavior and sensibilities, then grow characters from there.

That's my basic thought. Just tossing it in to join with the conversation.

 

[Feo Takahari]

They probably contradict because up to know I haven't really been making a unified argument, just asking questions, exploring ideas, along with some devil's advocate and simple contrariness.

But to clarify, what contradictions in particular?

Well, it all depends on how various things you've said are interpreted. For instance, if your argument for more minority writers is read as also advocating more female writers in traditionally male-dominated spaces, that goes against the statement that it's okay if male and female genres are separate.

That's true enough, but at the same time, if I have a woman arguing about a war, it's also a good sign that too much of me is coming across, and not enough of the character. It goes towards creating your characters and their differences deliberately, rather than having your predispositions superimposed upon them by accident. Besides, I think we see enough women-who-think-and-talk-like-guys without me needing to do another one.

It depends on how you've previously set up the character. A field medic who treats the wounded of both sides may not care about the loss of the war, whereas a rank-and-file soldier may be enraged that the loss of the war rendered her comrades' deaths meaningless.

 

[Mindfire]

This right here is exactly the problem I personally am getting at. Plenty of women would be upset at the "abstraction" of losing the war, and plenty of men would be upset at how many people died. If you're only writing women who get upset at people dying, and only writing men who get upset at losing the war, you're portraying less variety than exists in real life, and I consider that a failure of imagination.

It's impossible to portray all the variety that exists in real life. At least not accurately. It's not a failure of imagination so much as it is pragmatic. One way of looking at it is that these characteristics are shorthands for what men and women are like, and are therefore useful because they allow us to acquaint a reader with a character quickly without needing to add too much extraneous detail. It is useful for a writer for a man to just be a man and a woman to just be a woman, if for no other reason than it saves time and effort. And what's more, this is fantasy after all. Maybe the people of this alternate world are more rigidly gendered by nature than people in ours. A writer is not obliged to address every variation of humanity simply because they exist.

 

[Steerpike]

It is useful for a writer for a man to just be a man and a woman to just be a woman, if for no other reason than it saves time and effort.

That's a cop out, in my view. There's no reason you can't take that approach in any given instance, since that would also be consistent with reality. But if female characters are that way consistently, and there is no variation away from it, it's just lazy character development and the reader is right to throw the book at the wall and find something else.

 

[Mindfire]

Well, it all depends on how various things you've said are interpreted. For instance, if your argument for more minority writers is read as also advocating more female writers in traditionally male-dominated spaces, that goes against the statement that it's okay if male and female genres are separate.

Well, for one thing, I specifically said I was not arguing for separate male and female genres, only wondering why nobody had tried it.

And secondly, even if I had been arguing that, that does not necessarily imply a contradiction between those two statements for the simple reason that I only said it would be a good thing if a greater variety of writers were writing. I never specified what they should write. There could be more female media creators creating media specifically for females and it would still qualify as "greater variety".

 

[Mindfire]

That's a cop out, in my view. There's no reason you can't take that approach in any given instance, since that would also be consistent with reality. But if female characters are that way consistently, and there is no variation away from it, it's just lazy character development and the reader is right to throw the book at the wall and find something else.

So because all female characters would share a single trait that would somehow be lazy character development? I don't follow you. What I'm getting at is that there's no reason for an author to flesh out the internal lives of every single character that appears, especially if their roles are small and their personal identity and inner lives are not plot relevant. Not everyone is GRR Martin. Not everyone wants to or needs to flesh out every minor character that crops up. And what's more, if the writer does wish to make a given character stand out, then they are still at liberty to do so. It's not a mutually exclusive affair.

 

[Feo Takahari]

It's impossible to portray all the variety that exists in real life. At least not accurately. It's not a failure of imagination so much as it is pragmatic. One way of looking at it is that these characteristics are shorthands for what men and women are like, and are therefore useful because they allow us to acquaint a reader with a character quickly without needing to add too much extraneous detail. It is useful for a writer for a man to just be a man and a woman to just be a woman, if for no other reason than it saves time and effort. And what's more, this is fantasy after all. Maybe the people of this alternate world are more rigidly gendered by nature than people in ours. A writer is not obliged to address every variation of humanity simply because they exist.

Have you ever read any of Isaac Asimov's short stories? He had a strong tendency towards quick-and-easy characterization, the better to get to the plot. His male characters were often traditionally male, and his female characters were often traditionally female. But he didn't do that all the time--that would have been boring. (For instance, Susan Calvin, his most frequently recurring female character, was a ruthless and pragmatic defender of humanity/oppressor of robots who only rarely showed emotion.)

 

[Steerpike]

So because all female characters would share a single trait that would somehow be lazy character development? I don't follow you.

Yeah, if every single female is the same in way X, or ways X, Y, and Z, in terms of how they act or perceive things, I think that's lazy and unrealistic character development, unless you've got a very good explanation for it (and even then, the outlier is going to be more interesting person to follow).

What I'm getting at is that there's no reason for an author to flesh out the internal lives of every single character that appears, especially if their roles are small and their personal identity and inner lives are not plot relevant.

No one is suggesting they should. People are just suggesting that the same limited characterizations of females shouldn't be consistently and predominantly appearing over and over again across the breadth of the genre.

 

[Mindfire]

Have you ever read any of Isaac Asimov's short stories? He had a strong tendency towards quick-and-easy characterization, the better to get to the plot. His male characters were often traditionally male, and his female characters were often traditionally female. But he didn't do that all the time--that would have been boring. (For instance, Susan Calvin, his most frequently recurring female character, was a ruthless and pragmatic defender of humanity/oppressor of robots who only rarely showed emotion.)

Not saying a writer has to do it all the time. (Really a writer doesn't have to do much of anything.) I'm only saying that it's unrealistic to expect an author to fully capture the immense variety of humanity in a single work. It'd be extremely ambitious to even try.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I think some of this issue of masculine and feminine traits depend on where you are. I grew up in a town where all the boys and girls respectively acted the way boys and girls were supposed to. We never saw any sort of punishment for people who acted weird, because nobody acted weird in the first place (save me, and I was considered amusingly eccentric rather than disliked.) Then I moved to a more liberal town, and I'm meeting all sorts of people who're outside the gender binary.

 

[Devor]

It depends on how you've previously set up the character. A field medic who treats the wounded of both sides may not care about the loss of the war, whereas a rank-and-file soldier may be enraged that the loss of the war rendered her comrades' deaths meaningless.

I really didn't mean it as an absolute, and it was also a pretty simple example to illustrate. But there've been a lot of men on the forums in the past who have said they have no idea how to write women. Rules are for people getting started; the people/abstraction distinction is a rule for learning how to get inside someone else's head, to be put aside once you grow beyond it.

 

[Mindfire]

No one is suggesting they should. People are just suggesting that the same limited characterizations of females shouldn't be consistently and predominantly appearing over and over again across the breadth of the genre.

Are we talking about the work of a single author and their decisions? Or are we talking about the genre as a whole? Because if the latter, than I would repeat my earlier statement: find more, and more variable, writers. If we are talking about the former, I would say that starting off with a "female template", or recognizing a distinction between male and female, or making gender integral to a character, does not preclude variety in female characters. Personal example: my female hunter-warrior and bodyguard, Meeka, is quite different from my sage and prophetess, Sarabi, who is in turn extremely different from my female cult leader, Sitara, who is worlds away from the protagonist's cousin, Kianna. Each of those characters is quite distinct from the others in my mind and each has their own persona and goals. But at the same time, if I was to make one of them a man instead of a woman, I would have a completely different character.

 

[Nightender]

In such a template, you can always mark things like the features that a character notices first. Studies have shown that women tend to observe faces more than bodies like men. Speaking to the values of a character always improves how well they come across.

 

[Steerpike]

Mindfire, I think you are purposefully disregarding things that have been repeated multiple times across this and other threads already. There is only so many times that it makes sense to re-state something. If you are content to see stereotypical, gender-biased depictions of females as the vastly predominant depiction in fantasy media, then we'll just agree to disagree.

As for the more and more diverse writers, certainly that will help, but casting the whole thing aside as "someone else's problem," and therefore we shouldn't consider it is a mistake, in my view.

 

[Devor]

If you are content to see stereotypical, gender-biased depictions of females as the vastly predominant depiction in fantasy media, then we'll just agree to disagree.

I think you're significantly overstating how limited and stereotypical the one distinction I mentioned is, and significantly understating how difficult it is to understand how someone else perceives the world. The most basic template for understanding that men and women think differently can be invaluable for some authors.

After all, were we not just saying that many of GRRM's characters were strong because of their feminine qualities? Isn't identifying what those qualities are going to be important if we're then going to make judgments based upon them?

 

[Steerpike]

I think you're significantly overstating how limited and stereotypical the one distinction I mentioned is, and significantly understating how difficult it is to understand how someone else perceives the world. The most basic template for understanding that men and women think differently can be invaluable for some authors.

After all, were we not just saying that many of GRRM's characters were strong because of their feminine qualities? Isn't identifying what those qualities are going to be important if we're then going to make judgments based upon them?

Again, I'm talking about uniformity of depictions. I don't know how to make that much more clear than by stating it outright, as I've already done in this thread.

 

[Feo Takahari]

Some female characters can act how women are expected to act.

Not all female characters should act how women are expected to act.

Everyone agrees with both these statements, right?