Re: Female characters
- From: Lucy Kemnitzer <ritaxis@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 19:34:14 -0700
On Wed, 30 May 2007 17:53:25 -0700, David Friedman
<ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> seems to have said:
Some time back, I raised the question of why women warriors were so
common in modern fantasy (including my _Harald_, as it happens). It got
diverted into an argument about how common they were historically, but I
thought it might be worth going back to the original question.
One obvious reason is that there are women who want to identify with the
character and like the idea of being a warrior, but I think there are
others--certainly that wasn't my reason. I think part of it is that the
tension between the conventional view of women and the situation of a
woman warrior is dramatically useful. Part of that is just the effect of
breaking conventions. But a different part is that readers, at least
male readers, are likely to retain the feeling that women are
particularly vulnerable and to be protected, and that makes situations
where they are at immediate risk more poignant than the same situations
with male characters.
Other reasons?
This is only slightly different from the "breaking conventions"
reason, but I think it's significant:
People who write sf/f like to ring changes on things. They're doing
the "what-if" polka all the time. Women warriors is a big if to
what-polka with.
At the same time, it's not a new idea: it's Joan of Arc, it's
Brunhilde, it's Artemis, it's Mulan and it's the Handsome Cabin Boy,
for that matter, if we want to get bawdy.
There's another thing that's only slightly different from a reason
you've given (or maybe it's a part of the reason). As a girl, when I
wanted to read adventure books, I could read the Ransome books and
watch big sister cry when they got lost on the English Channel(I did
like them anyway), or I could read "The Boys' King Arthur," "The
Boys' Roland," "The Boys' Charlemagne," "The Boy's Ulysses . . ."
-- you get the point. Books that were specifically marketed for girls
seemed to me to be "Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown" -- the real title of a
real book (which I gather to be a very good book, as all the
Betsy-Tacy books are supposed to be) which appalled me as a child. So
I think the natural reaction of some women is to fill that void that
they felt as children.
It's true that this can and has been done while using the kinds of
divisions of labor we actually know from our history, but that's
another type of polka,
Lucy Kemnitzer
still
.
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