It's your classic bootleggers-and-baptists coalition - the term coined by public choice theorists to explain the strange alliances which tend to get things done in liberal democracies. Bootleggers and baptists both loved prohibition, for entirely different reasons, and together they were a powerful force behind laws restricting the selling of alcohol. The combination of high- and low-minded interests is often a winner, and it has done a number on SF and fantasy; some people care about diversity, some people have spotted bucketloads of cash going unclaimed - either way, there sure are a lot of Strong Female Characters around these days.
Not that I have a problem with Strong Female Characters. But I do have problems with certain elements of the phenomenon.
The first is just my objectionable, contrarian, bloody-minded nature: I hate being preached at, and sometimes there is an element of preachiness in an author or film-maker electing to have a Strong Female Character in a certain role - a certain sense of somebody waggling his or her finger at the audience and saying "Now, don't you be a naughty sexist and think there's anything wrong with a woman being in this role, and by the way, didn't you know women could also be engineers/soldiers/rugby players/mighty wizards/whatever?" When I sense this motive I instinctively recoil, like a slug being sprinkled with salt. Nothing makes me want to be a sexist more than a thinly-veiled lecture on the evils of sexism masquerading as a character.
The second is more serious: I understand that nowadays you're not allowed to say this in some circles, but I'm one of those befuddled lunatics who thinks he has observed that men and women tend to differ in certain important respects (on average, always with exceptions) and that being a Strong Female Character probably ought not to just mean a Strong Male Character But With Breasts. I have known, liked, loved plenty of strong women in my life, and I've never thought of them as strong because they are just like men. I know some great women karateka and judoka who could break your arm as soon as look at you. I know some women who have risen to the pinnacles of their professions. I know some women who can lift heavier weights than I can. That's not what makes them strong, because (here's a life spoiler alert!) that's not what makes anybody strong. Strength of character is what counts. And male strength of character tends to be different than female strength of character. When I see a Strong Female Character in a book or on screen, I want to see a character who makes sense to me as a woman in view of that.
To me the paradigm example of somebody writing a Strong Female Character well is this scene from Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs (which is the last good book he wrote, by the way). Clarice has been sent to look at the corpse of a brutally-mutilated female murder victim in a rural mortuary. She arrives to find that the place is crowded with men - local police officers - who have been joking around with each other. She's intimidated but it's also implied she's affronted by the lack of dignity in what she sees. Here's Harris:
"Starling took off her scarf and tied it over her hair like a mountain midwife. She took a pair of surgical gloves out of her kit. When she opened her mouth for the first time in Potter, her voice had more than its normal twang and the force of it brought Crawford to the door to listen. 'Gentlemen. Gentlemen! You officers and gentlemen! Listen here a minute. Please. Now let me take care of her.' She held her hands before their faces as she pulled on the gloves. 'There's things we need to do for her. You brought her this far, and I know her folks would thank you if they could. Now please go on out and let me take care of her.'"
They suddenly become quiet and respectful and file out to leave her with the corpse, and she makes significant discoveries as a result. Apart from its understatedness, what impresses me about this scene is that Harris doesn't adopt the line a lesser writer would have taken, the preachy line, the line of "Well Clarice Starling is a tough cop and so she butts heads with the men and shows them she's in charge." He takes the realistic line: "Clarice Starling is a tough cop and she knows how to empathise with people and how to say the right thing, the thing which will get through to them and get them to do the right thing." He gets that men relate to women differently than they do to other men, and vice versa. It's kind of immaterial that this might be socially constructed, as the inevitable response will be. The point is, whether it's socially constructed or not, it is how people actually are.
(Thomas Harris is a weird case study in the fame of writers. There is a chasm between The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. One one side, there is a powerful craftsman at the height of his powers. On the other, there is a madman who has had a rush of blood to the head because so much critical praise has been heaped on him that he's lost all connection with reality.)
Such characters are, regrettably, thin on the ground in SF and Fantasy. It is a cliche to point to Ripley in the Alien films but it's a cliche for a reason: Ripley is the classic example of a female lead who you couldn't replace with a man just as easily. Yes, she can fight, yes, she is technically accomplished, but the themes of maternity, compassion and empathy are what gives those films emotional depth. A male character in that role just wouldn't bring half as much to the party as Ripley does.
Another one is Princess Leia, who participates in the action just as effectively as the men, but who also provides an emotional core to the Star Wars 'gang', bringing some sensitivity and nuance into what without her would be a somewhat by-the-numbers boys'-own adventure story. (Think of the scene between her and Luke in Return of the Jedi when he tells her they're brother and sister - Carrie Fisher's acting is underrated; given a chance to show she had a range she was perfectly good at reciprocating.) It's not that the men get to have all the fun and derring-do and she's at home to patch up the bruises and cook them dinner. She's perfectly well involved. But she adds depth that another male character wouldn't.
Finally, I really like the Cordelia character in Lois McMaster Bujold's early books - somebody hard-headed, practical, who gets to deal with genuine ethical dilemmas (how often do Strong Female Characters get to do that in Hollywood films?) but who also leavens the violence, hatred and militarism in the male characters in the book with forgiveness and empathy. (I really ought to re-read those - it's been a good long while.)
I close in hoping this post doesn't engender (pun intended) a debate about "political correctness gone mad", "feminazis" or "mansplaining" - take the post in good faith and give some good examples of Strong Female Characters of your own.
The casting for 'Alien' was actually unisex; none of the parts were written for specific sexes. Not to throw stones or anything, just a point of interest.
ReplyDeleteI think that sort of proves the point because its "Aliens" in which the themes I mentioned really come through strongly.
DeleteI thought the story was that they were going to cast a man but then thought it'd be interesting to have a women be the main character instead. I imagine that they would've changed things around a little bit when they made that decision, to fit the main character being female rather than male?
DeleteIIRC all the parts were written as "truckers in space" without gender specifications, though I could be mistaken. The producers did decide to have a female lead. Scott's response to that was something like "sure, whatever", so I don't think he or O'Bannen changed anything on that account. Of course, as noisms notes, the sequel would have been written with Weaver in mind.
DeleteFor me, I just prefer to have a women's voice when it comes to writing...i.e. it's not so much about having "Strong Female Characters" as about having the female perspective added to the fiction. Even if I were to write adventure fiction (the only kind I *might* be qualified for), I would have strong doubts in my ability to write Strong Female Characters...at least in an authentic, not-terrible fashion. I'd think most male authors would have problems in this regard.
ReplyDeleteWhich is tough because I agree it would be nice to have more gender diversity in this kind of fiction (literature and screen). And at this time, the market is kind of saturated with the male voice.
I suppose the "woke" ideal for male authors would be to write stories that showed a non-toxic form of masculinity; perhaps that would suffice to allow a reverse Bootlegger-Baptist cash flow to kick off.
Is the market really saturated with the male voice? When I look around the shelves in my local book shop it seems more like the opposite if anything.
DeleteI don't like the phrase "toxic masculinity" but I do think there is a serious lack of good fictional role models for boys nowadays. Male main characters tend to be either bad guys or anti-heroes and that tendency seems to have got worse and worse in recent decades.
Maybe not the "market" on some level, but *something* is saturated with the male voice. Look at the books you recommended (one female author out of 20+ recommendations). Look at the people who comment on this blog. Look at the book recommendations you got when you asked.
DeleteI'm not accusing anyone of anything... not saying you're unwoke or bad whatever ... but it's pretty unmistakable.
Relatedly, my personal taste in authors makes me a bit uncomfortable because it's totally consistent. I really wish I could find a few women authors I really liked outside of Jane Austen and Flannery O'Connor. Got to read Ursula LeGuin at some point (criminal that I haven't).
Something to think about if nothing else.
I certainly think that until fairly recently SF and Fantasy were very masculine genres in the sense that most of the writers and readers were men. So the genre's heavyweights have tended to have been men through simple mathematics.
DeleteI also think that the readership of this blog is mostly comprised of people of a certain age whose formative reading was done in those years of male dominance of the genres. So they're going to recommend the books they like.
Nowadays it seems the reverse is true (actually, nowadays it seems young men in particular play video games and watch porn rather than read at all) and what I see when I look at the field post-2000, say, is one in which there are a lot of female authors and even the male authors are now writing books with female main characters.
Personally I have no problem with the idea that women might prefer to read books by woman writers and men might prefer to read books by male writers. I think people who have the same sex tend to share certain characteristics (again, generally speaking, with exceptions) that makes that completely natural.
'Nowadays it seems young men in particular play video games and watch porn rather than read at all'
DeleteThey sure do. The kind of bookish nerd who, a generation ago, would have lost himself in Tolkien (or, before that, Walter Scott) now spends his whole adolescence playing World of Warcraft, instead. Probably the last series of books he will have read will be 'Harry Potter', whereas his sister will have moved from 'Harry Potter' to 'Twilight' to 'The Hunger Games' to 'Divergent' and then maybe, just maybe, have made the jump to 'Jane Eyre' and 'Pride and Prejudice' and on into the fields of literary fiction beyond.
The student intake for my university's English and Film department is almost 90% female. If it was just an English department, the figure would probably be even higher.
The knock-on effects of this have been to turn the reading, writing, and publishing of genre fiction into much more female-dominated zones than they used to be, because the female audience is now the one that matters. Whereas men *do* continue to consume screen media, and genre film and computer games remain extremely masculine domains.
As a doom and gloom "fall of the West" kinda guy, the complete detachment of one half of the population from high culture is a pretty significant sign of decline.
Delete(A fair tangent to include here is: boys do better in single-sex schools, girls do about the same in either format. I'm not particularly a fan of single-sex ed per se, but it's certainly a relevant observation about the development of gender behaviours in late modernity.)
Hmm...I'd say the "male voice" saturates the film and game markets, at least as far as the adventure genre is concerned. As I don't read much fiction these days, I'll take your word on the book store shelves.
DeleteThe chicken-and-egg question is: have boys abandoned reading because of video games and porn and that's why there are no good books for boys anymore, or did people stop writing good books for boys and they flocked to video games and porn instead?
DeleteI'd argue that at 27 I was in the last gasp of the 'nerds who read a lot'. Keep in mind this hardly meant I wasn't into videogames, FAR from it. It's more that it was a 50/50 for me. Videogames at home, books for the bus and sitting down on breaks.
DeleteOlder fantasy books, however, weren't really a thing which appealed to the people which succeeded me. The roots of fantasy are lost and people don't even REALIZE this. And why? Because growing up they were already surrounded by the trappings of the kind of fantasy D&D popularized: supernatural beings, magic and wizards. Imitations of imitations.
This eventually made me burned out on fantasy and see it as bland and derivative. It wasn't until the (re)discovery of authors before my time that the picture emerged. That I'd been living surrounded by copies of copies who only used these elements because everybody else used them.
Let's also forget the label 'nerd' mean different things after the 2000. Gone are the social misfits with odd interests, replaced by vacant-eyed consumerism who watch mainstream telvision, mainstream movies and have mainstream beliefs and buy goddamn Funko Pops.
Noisms: Perhaps then it would be fair to say that the "canon/heavyweights" and "adult" discussion of the genre are dominated by the male voice.
Delete"Personally I have no problem with the idea that women might prefer to read books by woman writers and men might prefer to read books by male writers. I think people who have the same sex tend to share certain characteristics (again, generally speaking, with exceptions) that makes that completely natural."
It may or may not be completely natural. Still, as I mentioned above, I do have a problem at least with regard to my own inclination (as a man) to almost universally read male writers.
I don't want my appreciation of human storytelling to be limited to a male perspective. I'm also highly aware that some of my favorite authors (god love them) are almost laughably bad at writing women.
It does seem a bit inconsistent to complain about how women aren't depicted realistically in fiction, then shrug your shoulders when it's pointed out that 95% of the books you're talking about were written by men.
Not a very difficult chicken and egg question, if you ask me. People may decide they like certain things individually, but the internet & video games were like a scud missile aimed right at our brains (I remember buying Prince of Persia on a stack of 5 1/4" disks). How could they not have swept everything before them?
DeleteIvan, the only solution to that is to go out and read more women writers. The only person stopping you is yourself.
DeleteI'm not really all that sure where the inconsistency is: we seem to basically agree on the main point which is that male writers tend to be terrible at writing women. I suppose my view is that I wish they'd stop doing it, especially in a cringeworthy "woke" sort of a way.
Unless they're really good at it, that is.
DeleteHDA: You may be right about that but I played lots of computer games as a teenager but I also read books. I get the argument that computer games are better quality now, but I think part of the problem may be that boys aren't really expected to read and the only stuff available to them is YA fiction which is all about girls.
Delete"go out and read more women writers."
DeletePerhaps that's the answer to both of our issues. Maybe you should do a female author recommendation post.
I don't really have an excuse myself. I do my best, but just keep coming up short. It's hard when there are (male) authors I know I like and I only have so much time to read.
Always happy to get recommendations.
Well, as I said, it doesn't bother me massively. I'm happy to read books written by male authors in the main - I don't see anything unusual or shameful in it. I am a man.
DeleteAs an obvious addenda to the viddya & porn problematique, it bears mentioning that once upon a time the screens and the Internet connection were shackled to certain rooms in the house. The modern unshackling borne by wifi has proven to be nothing if not a decisive turning point in the loss of modern youth to a plague of screens.
Delete(...and so he wrote, from his trusty mobile device)
I don't mind a strong woman character with a gun but when I see a slip of a girl fighting in hand-to-hand combat against larger opponents it doesn't look right. Make em strong like Brienne of Tarth of Game of Thrones and no problem, make them tiny like River Tam and it's harder to swallow (although that series is awesome).
ReplyDeleteThe problem is is that every female character in a major role (and one usually focused on action) these days is the same box-ticking cliche with the same snarky, passive aggressive, quippy writing and some stale and long-debated feminist talk points. They are boring, unlikable characters with no depth because writers are afraid or unable to write them as human beings.
ReplyDeleteThey are not characters written to be good, they are written to fulfill an agenda (one which greedy, soulless corporations out for cold hard cash got their hands into), meet some quota and/or to generate outrage for attention if said character is explicitly going to replace a previously male lead in a franchise. Yet, again, at no point does anyone ever stop and even bother making a character with any kind of interesting depth or any motivation beyond the token 'hurr grr grr girl power' and/or 'she's fighting her abusers'.
They are empty, forgettable shells. Even worse, any kind of meaningful criticism of these one-sided token characters will get you labelled as a hater or a troll. The example which pissed me off the most was the lead character of Star Trek Discovery and everyone just, somehow, forgetting the entire history of the franchise and several series worth of suitably well written female characters. Okay granted, the female Captain Janeway was bad but that was more of an issue of the entire show than her being a woman and in the better episodes Janeway could be a very good and likable character with the potential to stand alongside Picard, Kirk and Sisko.
People obsessed with this 'brand' of character are *hacks*.
Yeah, I agree with you about the tone. But I think that's just modern script writing in general. I find almost all screen characters nowadays really dislikeable.
DeleteYou are entirely correct. Writing has gone massively downhill and too many characters are awful people who are only capable of speaking in snarky quips and in demeaning manners. But this is what happen when my generation, so disconnected from morality and their own humanity, start writing. They can't write good characters because they are shallow, boring, mean spirited people.
Delete"Everyone's snarky and quippy" seems like a complaint that's about 15 years too late. My impression is that current writing is relenting on that trope, along with "retold, but grimmer and grittier".
DeleteCombined with the characterisation of a whole generation as shallow, boring, mean-spirited, disconnected from morality and their humanity, the whole comment comes across as a very general "the youth of today" criticism, which is literally thousands of years old, and says more about the mood of the critic than how the youth or art or entertainment really are today.
Just as the "youth of today" criticism is thousands of years old, so is the rebuttal that it's thousands of years old!
DeleteThe thing is, you can actually compare art and entertainment produced now and stuff produced 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and so on, to see how things have changed. (You can also compare university tutorial materials and exam papers written for students now to those produced in the 80s or 70s, as I did recently: there is no question less is expected of young people today and no question they do much less work.) Old people moaning about young people doesn't change. But that doesn't mean things aren't objectively different to how they once were.
I think my go-to example of a 'Strong Female Character' would probably be Granny Weatherwax from Discworld. She's tough and independent and forthright, but she couldn't possibly be replaced by a male character. Her method of solving problems is, I would say, archetypally feminine - she spurns the use of force (and magic) to fix problems and instead uses psychology to engage with the complexities of the situation. She's not nice, per se, but she does what's right and she does what's necessary.
ReplyDeleteTerry Pratchett writes some good female characters in general.
Hayao Miyazaki is another I like. Obviously he uses a lot of female protagonists, but one character that sticks out for me is Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke, who manages to be an extremely sympathetic and morally ambiguous villain. And it's not often you see a story with themes of environmentalism where the figurehead for 'industry' is a woman. Not to mention the large female component of the ironworks' workforce.
I does seem to me though that Terry Pratchett has a tendency to write the same good female character over and over again though. Weatherwax is different but most of the female protagonists he writes are oddly similar.
DeleteAre you thinking of any in particular?
DeleteI suppose I could see Susan Sto Helit or Tiffany Aching fitting into a certain mould. But for every one of those there's a Sybil Vimes or a Nanny Ogg.
It seems much easier to make colourful and individual characters if they aren't the protagonist - main characters need to be a bit 'everyman'. Although that applies equally to male protagonists as well.
Miyazaki is a very good call.
DeleteCan you provide some examples of the badly drawn "strong female character" from popular culture? The ones that bother you so much.
ReplyDeleteA great example is Rey from The Force Awakens. Not sure what happens in the other recent Star Wars films, but her character in that one at least is a paradigm case: she is Luke Skywalker, with breasts. You could have swapped in a male actor without there being any difference whatsoever. Nothing remotely interesting was done with the fact that she's a woman as opposed to a man.
DeleteI don't want to create the impression this "bothers me so much" - I'm not one of those raging fan boys who goes on reddit and complains about feminazis. I have no particular horse in the race: I thought The Force Awakens was terrible in general and nowadays the Star Wars films are mainly a nostalgia trip for me. I don't think of myself as a "geek" and most of geek culture bores me. So it's not that I'm "butthurt" to use that great American expression about women ruining my favourite franchises. I'm just interested in good fiction, and most of these recent developments seem like bad fiction.
Additionally Rey was able to beat a Sith Lord (or whatever that guy was) with no actual training. She was also a great pilot without any training. Perhaps there is some explanation coming in the next episode but the claims of Mary Sue seem well placed at this point.
DeleteIt's one of the things I hated about the film. The climax should have been her barely surviving her encounter with Kylo Ren to set up the great climactic battles between them later on. As it was, she faced basically no adversity at all. That's just poor storytelling.
DeleteThe idea of a 'geek/nerd culture' is very much an invention of the last decade or so. While it's true there always were nerds who were into more than one 'nerdy' thing, such as any permutation of comic books/fantasy/scifi/tabletop generally I recall the fandom being much more insular and overlapping a whole lot less.
DeleteThe 2000 changed this with the mass appeal comic book movies a few years after the mass appeal of the Lord of the Rings movies and Harry Potter.
The example from Silence of The Lambs is an interesting one because almost immediately after the quoted text Clarice reflects on her choice to do it.
ReplyDeleteThat she didn't have the option to exercise a simple chain of command authority (not without having to manage and battle a swell of resentment) and so , she tapped into archetype existing in regions culture; their matriarchs of gently chiding aunts and kitchen wielding mothers.
So while the text doesn't present it as innate , it does present the social landscape between the sexs is very different and the choices (that ultimately shape ones self) are different because of that.
My nitpick answer is that it's actually Crawford who reflects on that, which in itself is kind of interesting, but yeah, you're right - Harris is a social constructivist in that sense. It's also interesting that none of his villains are just psychopaths: it's all nurture, not nature, which has made them what they are.
DeleteMy Foucauldian/Heideggerian/Wittgensteinian/Wank response would sort of be, well, so what? Everything is socially constructed and we can never stand outside of that. We live in a world which is a certain way. When it comes to fiction I would rather read about characters who inhabit that world than idealised abstractions who don't.
I didn't really have a problem with "Strong Male Character But With Breasts." Until I got hit with the same character the dozenth time.
ReplyDeleteBeing female is not a distinguishing character trait! So if you have a boring stock character and make them female you'll have a boring character.
Absolutely agree. It's a standin for poor writing or lack of ideas for a tired franchise (see e.g. Dr Who.)
DeleteI seem to remember an interview the other day, where the new Doctor actress was talking about representation, and saying that she doesn't want people to expect her to be some icon of perfection just because she is standing in for women in general.
DeleteRight, here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLu06tlLIyk&t=28m43s
This is a somewhat dangerous topic to write about these days, so thanks for hitting publish. It winds me up no end that the blogo/twittersphere censors debate on issues like gender so readily. Conflating actually sexist/ignorant stuff with good-faith attempts to debate can only end one (jackbooted, book-burning) way.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think I disagree with both main points!
There are a lot of dumb "strong female protagonists" on UK TV these days, but they're dumb in the same way as the male protagonists are IMO. They're mostly just flat, tropey plot-monkeys with unconvincing interiority.
That said, maybe someone else finds something inspirational in ITV Lady Cop? What we see as preachiness might be enjoyed innocently by someone else. I try not to presume to know what another viewer might or might not identify with. Also,
policing the motives of TV producers to determine which protagonists to like probably doesn't lead anywhere either. If someone likes a character I don't, good for them. We've had so many cis male protagonists over the years, so many hits and misses to choose between for our role models, I think it's probably healthy to have a few more women on screen, even if most of them are also misses (puns!).
In regard to your second point, while I agree that our society has worked on many men, women (and others) so as to produce groups that may be broadly distinguished along gender lines, this is both a gross oversimplification, and also not (I assume) where we want to be as a culture. We want someone's gender to be wholly useless when we try to understand or presume anything about a person, don't we? Currently, that's not the case; statistically, women are paid less, sexually abused more etc, but we still can't use that data to presume anything about a single individual. I'd say the same goes for writing Strong Female Characters. We should throw away the Female part of that label, along with any superficial pros and cons that have a gendered quality to them. IF the world we want to live in is one where gender doesn't matter, that is.
When critiquing Lambs, you can't ignore that Starling is a woman in a man's world. That's the world the book is from and depicts, and as you rightly illustrate, Harris handles that deftly. Ripley's "maternal" strength I'd say is a little more ambiguous, but it's still a fair line of argument. However, if we're talking about current and future Strong Female Characters, we should want them to be strong in all sorts of ways, entirely independent of their gender. At least some of our "art" should depict where we want to go, not just reflect where some of us may be now.
"And male strength of character tends to be different than female strength of character" may sometimes be true, or may sometimes have been true in the past, but it's not what we want to be true, is it?
Sorry, this isn't meant to be an attack. I'll fight anyone about anything.
P.S. In re an earlier comment about preferring to read "about characters who inhabit that world than idealised abstractions who don't", I see culture as a closed system wherein all fiction, however "accurate", can impact the world. It's also often easier to impact the world with fiction about those abstractions, cf Gilead, Wonder Woman, *cough* Jesus *cough*.
I agree with your first point and profoundly disagree with the second - politely of course! Yes, you're right, most TV and film (and book) main characters are stupid and badly written and we shouldn't expect the female ones to be any different. So true.
DeleteWhere I part company from you is this idea that you can even identify "where we want to be as a culture", let alone whether it's a place where "we want someone's gender to be wholly useless when we try to understand or presume anything about a person". First, I don't accept that there is a unified "we" who have a discernible set of wants or desires. Human societies aren't like that - they are composed of as many different perspectives as there are individuals - and, thank God, never will be! And I'm suspicious of arguments that begin with "we as a culture (or its variant, we as a society) want [x] or [y]". What that typically actually means is "I want things to be a certain way and I want to mobilise society to achieve it, no matter what dissenting voices there are."
But second, I just don't agree that we want someone's gender to be wholly useless when trying to understand a person. I don't want somebody to discriminate against my daughter because she's a woman, but I certainly don't want people she meets in life to treat her as though it's irrelevant. It's a fundamental part of who she is. Ignoring it is to miss a vitally important, perhaps the most important, characteristic about her. I want people to acknowledge it and take account of it in an empathetic way, which is exactly how I try to treat people I encounter in life (not that I succeed at it very well). And I certainly don't want people to treat me as though the fact I am a man is irrelevant. I am a man. I happen to think it's an important part of my makeup that I am one.
My party last night got into a fight with some frost giants, and the princess they were escorting came out of the tent with a vorpal sword and first round critted a one of them, immediately sending his head flying.
ReplyDeleteI'd call the game I run egalitarian, and by that measure feminist. I endeavor to have NPCs be male and female in equal measure, and allow the breadth of female characters speak for itself. Yes the party ran into a female inn keeper with children who gave them shelter for a night before venturing on. They also ran into a warrior princess, an oni ship captain, a cowardly goblin who nonetheless returned the favor of being spared by rounding up a small group of goblins to attack the demon the party was fighting, et cetera et cetera.
Now I run pretty combat heavy games, so I do have a lot of Strong Female Characters in that vein too. Sue me, it's fantasy.
Miyazaki, as mentioned above, is strong at writing strong, compelling female characters.
ReplyDeleteJane Austen, obviously - Emma and Lizzie are both strong, flawed women. This is definitively NOT undermined by the end goal of marriage - that's societal virtue, and would not have seemed degrading to Austen. Fanny from Mansfield Park goes further again, of course, by marking her duties to God and her proper self as more significant than financial security. (Austen wouldn't necessarily have seen this as making Fanny as better than Lizzie, say; financial security has purpose for both of them, but neither is beholden to it. Lizzie also rejects degrading financial security whilst desiring socially virtuous marriage. Emma is financially independent which is a different dynamic again.)
Jane Eyre.
The Narnia girls, particularly Lucy. Jill probably comes next. (And no, Susan didn't go to hell, and if she had done it wouldn't have been for wearing tights.)
Galadriel, whose adventurous spirit takes her into exile, whose maternal nature is the complement for Nenya's lifegiving power, whose strength of identity resists the Ring.
Historically speaking, Katherina Bora. "Katherina, why are you wearing black?" "Well, from how you've been acting, Martin, I assumed that the Holy Spirit had died."
Yes, good ones. I was going to mention Elizabeth Bennett - but hard to squeeze P&P into anyone's definition of SF or fantasy....
DeleteThe oversaturated mass of strong (usually physically) characters is especially obvious when you compare it to the vast array of diverse male character types. You've got strong heroes, sure, but you've also got good-hearted liars, whinging cowards, delusional-but-charming old hermits, slimy ass-kissing subordinate henchmen, etc. And it's fun! I love all the fictional weirdos and shitheels.
ReplyDeleteWhen's the last time you saw a female character used as the comic relief? Not to get reactionary but "could you imagine the outcry!" if there was a female henchwoman who was constantly bungling up and being chastised by the big bad? Surely it's reinforcing sexist attitudes of submissive females! But Darth Vader has to strangle somebody.
There's a lot of different personalities and character flaws for both men and women, but I feel like a lot of young consumers read too much into things and assume that one cowardly/stupid character is somehow representative of their entire race/gender in the authors eyes.
I agree entirely. It seems like we're in this immature phase at the moment in which white men actually end up being the only character type with any real depth.
DeleteI liked reading Jirel of Joiry, starring a strong female lead, but I haven't read R.E. Howard, so I can't speak to any accusations of derivatization, should they come up.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.com/Jirel-Joiry-C-L-Moore-ebook/dp/B015NAUORA/
Thinking back, I also enjoyed the entirety of R.E. Chamber's The King in Yellow, which the latter half had protagonists of both genders, but I don't recall the quality of the characters.
DeleteSorry, R. W. Chambers, not R. E.
DeleteIf you liked early Cordelia, have you yet read the recent Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen?
ReplyDeleteI have not read any of the recent Vorkosigan books - I might see what they're like, as I remember the early ones fondly.
Deletei was into games and books from 13 in 83
ReplyDeleteby about 20 i only read history and appendix n stuff but mostly history and weird horror fantasy. Clark Ashton Smith and Kim Numan and comics are most of my fiction taste since with comics dropping off gradually. I like gaming books because i like fantasy presented as non fiction and history rather than narrative. Ive always liked female characters and would be grossed out by guys saying creepy stuff about lindsey wagner, erin grey, linda carter or cheryl ladd as if they were family to me. I found Gor and anythinbg like it repugnant. I think female heroes have improved plenty vs the lazy wire martial arts of women with no muscle tone who could do everything easily (thunderbirds movie penelope worst caste i can think of plus sexualizing tweens)