An Experiment With Gender Numbers

You may already be familiar with Geena Davis's Institute for Gender In Media.  Discussing the results of the Institute's studies, Ms Davis has stated:

“If there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50.  And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.”

Now, in SFF we're sadly familiar with stories that barely manage one or two female characters, often with background characters strangely almost completely male (even when the story is ostensibly focused on women - such as the Pixar film Brave - they're apparently set in worlds where men outnumber women 100 to 1).

In my own books, outside the main characters, I usually aim for a roughly even split: if the last passing character was male, the next will be female.  If there are two guards, one will be male, one female (or alternating sets).  If the Chamberlain is male, the Captain of the Guard will be female.  I don't use a precise split, and have never counted them up, but I've always aimed for an equal 'feel'.

When drafting The Pyramids of London, I decided to try something different.  I would skew the background character numbers female to see how a book would read with 33 percent men 'in the room'.

Pyramids is set in an alternate Britain (Prytennia) where there's a legal equality between men and women that has grown out of a near-unbroken rule by a Trifold under the aegis of the goddess Sulis.  Only women can become one of the Trifold, and so no man can rule Prytennia.  However, while the country has become matrilineal, it is not strictly a matriarchy, but one where both men and women are equal partners in marriage, and where gender is not a factor for most roles in society.

Reader reaction (and keeping in mind that most people who have read Pyramids come from a background of my already woman-heavy other books) has been mostly positive.  Readers notice that there are a plethora of women, but find it novel or enjoyable.  Only a minority of reviewers comment negatively on the balance.

Anyway, a while ago I read this post by Marie Brennan about the absence of women in a particular fantasy work and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take with Pyramids

And it was!  Very interesting, in this book where I'd set out to to achieve a 70/30 skew in favour of women, I created 82 female-presenting characters and 83 male-presenting characters.

I don't think I'll do this exercise with the books that I thought were 50/50.  That may bring embarrassment.

I suspect that one of the reasons that Pyramids feels so full of female characters (beyond our apparently ingrained perceptions) is that the skew of powerful women to powerful men is much more distinct.  Prytennia's Trifold is always made up of women.  And when making clear that both men and women could hold important office, I did so by mentioning men formerly holding the roles, but naming current women.  With the exception of Lord Msrah and Lord Fennington (and the foreign Gustav) all the people shown to be in charge of groups and organisations in Prytennia 'just happen' to be women.

I ended up with a meeting where I added a male secretary just so the vampire wasn't the only man at the table.

Quite possibly Prytennia is, in my subconscious, biased against men in roles of power.  But would a reader even notice the skew if it was all powerful men, plus Lady Msrah and Lady Fennington?

I'll be returning to attempting relatively equal numbers in the next book, Tangleways, and hope that doesn't mean I accidentally produce 30/70 F/M.  I don't think I'll count them, but I'm glad to have done this exercise.  As eye-opening as a white-gold/blue-black dress.

For those who love detail, below is the breakdown of characters (divided up by importance in the story, and taking gender presentation at POV character assumption in regards to less binary gender identities).  I also chose to count all characters, even those identified only as "a girl".

Critical to the plot (F: 4/ M:3)

One Aunt (F)

Two Nieces (F)(F)

One Nephew (M)

One Vampire (M)

A Suleviae Princess (F)

An Alban (M)

Important to the plot (F: 2/ M: 4)

Another Suleviae Princess (F)

Another Alban (F)

A Swedish Prince (M)

A Bound (M)

A Roman friend (M)

An Eccentric (M)

Plot role/several paragraphs of dialogue (F: 26/ M: 11)

Another Bound (F)

A collection of Royal Heirs (F)(F)(F)(M)

Two Sphinxes (FF)

A Consort (M)

A Suleviae Queen (F)

Another Vampire (M)

A Cab Driver (F)

A Dragonfly Rider (F)

A Daughter of Lakshmi (F)

A Warden of the Borough (F)

A Family of Grocers (MF)

An Eccentric's Assistant (M)

Two God-touched (M)(F)

A Pharaoh (F)

A Curator (F)

A Police Commander (F)

Conspirators (F)(M)(F)(F)

A Wisdom (M)

A Coafor (F)

A Page (F)

A Minister (F)

Fulgite Conspirators (MFFF)

A Custodian (F)

Gods/higher powers affecting plot (M)(F)(M)(Unspecified)

Brief role/appearance/dialogue (F: 22/ M: 27)

A couple on a train (UU)

Station Master (M)

Train driver (F)

Two train guards (MM)

A Courser Rider (M)

A Workshop Manager (F)

A gawp of Warehouse Workers (MMM)

A Shop Gossip (M)

Volunteers and Grove Visitors (FM, U)

A Warden's grandchildren (FM)

A gift dog (M)

A horned serpent (F)

Various triskelion (N)(N)(N)(N)

Various other horned serpents (U)

Folies (U)

A current First Minister (F)

The Daughter of a Pharaoh (F)

Hotel doorman (M)

A Roman Engineer (M)

A Palace Factotum (M)

A Sacred Mare (F)

A Wind Stag (M)

Hounds, Owls, Mice, etc (U)

A Grove Administrator (F)

Three Potential Students (FFF)

A Fencing Instructor (M)

A Brace of Drunkards (FMF)

A Hand of Huntresses (FFFFF)

A Secretary (M)

Day Staff (M)

A Foreman (M)

Roman Expert (M)

Cart Driver (M)

Minister's Second (M)

A Chauffer (M)

An Attendant (U)

Dead People (MMFF)

A Caracal (F)

Siege Fellows (MUUUUU)

Mentioned, but do not appear (F: 28/ M: 38)

Niblings' parents (MF)

The Three Sisters (three former Suleviae) (FFF)

Three Prytennian Dragons (FMF)

Aunt's parents (MF)

Cantankerous great-uncle (M)

A Dacian Proconsul and his son (MM)

A French Princess (F)

Mayor Desh-aht (not specified)

A former First Minister (M)

Train passenger (F)

Hotel staff (not specified)

A former Keeper of the Deep Grove (F)

Aquitanian Hoteliers (FF)

A Lawyer (U)

An Apprentice (F)

A Vendor of Patent Medicine (F)

An Egyptian King (M)

A Student Artist (M)

Wisdoms (M, unspecified)

A Coafor (M)

A Karnatan King (M)

A dog walker (F)

A French Great-Aunt (F)

A Taxi Driver (U)

Palace Guards (F, U)

A Princess' Grandfather (M)

A member of the Tuatha De Danaan (U)

A King of the Tuatha De Danaan (M)

A Dragon Emperor (M)

A Tutor (U)

A Kitten (M)

A French Prince (M)

A Roman Consul (M)

An Auction Purchaser (M)

An Artist's Model (U)

Feuding Siblings (M)(F)

A Deiographer (M)

An Estate Guide (U)

An Art Teacher (M)

A Drink Inventor (F)

Four Nephews (MMMM)

An Avid Driver (F)

Unlucky Child (M)

Fulgite Dealer (M)

Artists (UUUF)

A Captured Driver (M)

Nomarch of the East (F)

Gods/higher powers (M)(M)(M)(F)(F)(F)(F)(F)(M)(F)(F)(M)(M)(M)(M)(F)(M) 8/9

From the shelves

I've a guest post over at The Book Smugglers today, where I recommend women writers by listing all the ones on my shelves.

The Artistic Superiority of Tits Out

Recently Julie Dillon, the first female artist to be nominated for a Best Professional Artist Hugo in close to 30 years, posted on Tumblr a gigantic compilation of pictures by women artists, stating:

This year, I was incredibly honored to be nominated for a Hugo award in the Best Professional Artist category, but I was a little shocked to find out there hadn’t been another woman nominated in that category since Rowena Morrill in 1986. That’s more than a little ridiculous, considering there are so many women artists out there, they are all amazing, and they all need more visibility and recognition.

And the question of course is, how is the disparity in nominations possible?  There are clearly a ton of female artists out there.  Quite a lot of them are working in the SFF field, producing covers that would come to the attention of the SFF community.  Why then are so many male artists being acknowledged, and female artists somehow failing to exist when award season rolls around?

A couple of years ago I joined the Tumblr crowd, mostly as a lurker, and one of the accounts I followed was an art reblogger.  Every day without fail gorgeous art would appear in my Tumblr feed - a selection of representative works duly accredited, with a link to the artist's site.  And it was awesome!  Lovely art, very impressive.  I've discovered tons of awesome artists through Tumblr. (Euclase, I am in awe).

But as a side-effect of this particular Tumblr feed my dashboard was suddenly full of half-naked ladies.  Tiny, cutesy women defying the laws of gravity.  Curvy women with their asses in the air.  "Strong" women in that weird pose where you can somehow see their front and their back at the same time.

Now, there are plenty of women out there who like a fine pair of breasts.  And professional artists are generally working to some sort of order - a request from an art director, a specified scene from a book, a strong imperative from marketing to match other covers that work.  Artists don't all get to decide what they depict, and how they depict it.  So a percentage of "tits out" poses are to order.  But I started looking at the names of the artists behind all those sexy sexy ladies and noticed a distinct correlation between (my guess at) author gender and amount of nakedness, and type of pose.

When the statistics regarding the Hugo artist nominations were raised these last few months, a  connection formed for me between that Tumblr feed featuring so many naked ladies, and also with this rather awesome cartoon of Batman drawn for the female gaze.  And when I saw Julie's incredible compilation, I could not help but notice a rather outstandingly small percentage of asses raised in the air.  There was certainly the occasional breast, but vastly more complete coverage or restrained cleavage, and far fewer women in invitingly submissive poses.

Now it would be ridiculous for me to say that the sole reason for the disparity in Hugo nominations is the presence or lack of tits in a particular artist's work.  There's clearly a lot more going on here than (het cis-)gender preferences impacting on voting (just as I cannot overlook the from-the-beginning presence of individuals attracted to men in the science fiction community, with their own preferences where art is concerned).

All I can really do is point, ask the question, and hope in future we see more female artists on the Hugo ballot.

The Absence Sue

Mary Sue, as first defined in the Star Trek fandom, was an original character introduced to the Trek universe whose presence bent the plot to serve a wish-fulfilment fantasy of a fanfic's author.  Mary Sue was a self-insertion valorised to the detriment of the existing characters.

This definition has been expanded to include "any authorial self-insertion" even in original fiction, (and in the worst instances distorted to substantively cover "any female who is valorised at all, in any circumstance"), but lately I've been thinking back on the occurrence of Mary Sue as a fanfic insertion and wondering at the purpose she served.

In particular, I've been thinking about Mary Sue in relation to this web comic by Interrobang Studios.  It's a very funny comic!  In the first episode, "Mary Sue Must Die", the Enterprise suffers a Sue, and the crew takes drastic action.  But it's the second episode, and specifically this page, which has been bubbling over in the back of my mind.  This episode, "The Wrath of Sue", involves a veritable plague of Sues, which have spread from the Trek universe and gone to take over other stories.

The page features a bunch of different men characters from stories I had enjoyed over the years - represented here as "the greatest minds in the Universe" and I found myself saying: "Speaking of Sues...".

But, of course, these were men characters with their own stories, and thus the plot cannot be distorted to serve them, as it was shaped around them in the first place.  The Doctor and Sherlock there most definitely fit the "overloaded with virtues" criteria, but not the Enterprise crew.  There we have Kirk the action guy, Spock the Smartest, Sulu the Swordsman, Bones the Cynic and medical genius, Scotty the reliable, and Uhura the linguist.

Then it hit me.  The Smurfette Principle.  The stories where Mary Sue was born, and where we hear the most about her obnoxiousness, are the stories where the main characters are almost all men - and all different types of men - and perhaps one main female character (who usually doesn't get to do as much cool stuff as the guys).  A male fan of Trek has a range of male characters in which to identify, who are all cool and valorised in their own different ways.  A female character either gets to identify with the male characters, or with Uhura (who is cool and valorised but is frequently not given much to do in the plot).  The same with female Lord of the Rings fans.  There are a broad range of male characters, one of whom is likely to suit a male reader's personality.  There are no female characters in the Fellowship, and the female characters (particularly in the novels) are either brief appearances, or kept out of the main action.

We don't hear about the plague of Mary Sue inserts in Cardcaptor Sakura fanfic.  Or the Powerpuff Girls.  Sure, there might be a little, but where a story offers a range of female characters, who are not sidelined from the action, a female fan is in the situation which the male fan enjoys in Star Trek or Lord of the Rings.  A range of characters of the gender she identifies with, actively participating in the story as a main player.

And so I ask myself: Is Mary Sue - obnoxious and world-distorting as she can be - simply making up for a lack in the world she has entered?  When we see Mary Sue, should we be deriding the fanfic writer?  Or questioning the gender breakdown of the original universe?

Is Mary Sue in fact Absence Sue, working hard to make up for the 50% of the population missing out on the fun?

Jill Bond

Ever done the character creation process in a roleplaying game?  It usually involves a distribution of points, sometimes combined with dice rolls.  Quite a few of the systems will give you more points to spend on positive traits and skills if you 'buy' negative attributes.  You have enough points to buy "Driving" and "Swords", but if in addition you want to know a martial art, be a skilled shot, and have some very handy medical skills, you have to balance those skills with something negative.

 

World of Darkness, the vampire-focused RPG by White Wolf, gives you extra experience (levelling-up points) if you pick a flaw and then role play it well during game play.  You can see from this handy list, that some of these flaws are considerably sexier than others.  "Lost Love" will give you a very different roleplaying experience compared to "Coward".  In some systems you can purchase multiple flaws, potentially creating yourself a one-eyed, mute, addicted, halitosis-inflicted astronaut-ninja-brain surgeon.

 

Occasionally you'll encounter a game deliberately weighted toward "ridiculous hero", where flaws aren't required, and skills are free.  They tend to be fun, over the top but not quite serious games.  Every contrivance of plot will be thrown against these characters, but they will overcome because of sheer weight of skill overload.

 

Most stories attempt to balance their characters similarly, if not so crudely.  A main character with some strengths, and some weaknesses, who is 'rounded' by possessing some trait which keeps them from being overly perfect.  Anyone who has read widely in the young adult genre will be familiar with the purchase of "clumsy".

 

But occasionally you want a hero, someone almost over the top with their number of skills and their lack of flaws.  You want James Bond.  Or Batman.  Near-infallible, except for a slight tendency to disobey orders, or angst darkly about dead parents.  Their faults are cool faults, they play a long game, plan ahead, go through hell, and are proved right in the end, overcome ambushes, fight long and hard to win, adjust smoothly, and land with a double-pike twist and a cheer from the crowd.

 

Now.  How often have you read a review stating something in the order of: "I couldn't get into this story because the main character was too perfect"?  What percentage of the main characters were female?

 

It's not that we don't have a host of stories featuring Jill Bond, where the kitchen sink is thrown at her and she backflips and kicks it over the goal.  But Jill's existence seems to bother many readers.  Too often I've seen a story with a Jill Bond, who succeeds and succeeds, and plays that long game, plans ahead, wins at the end…and I'm told that she is the author's darling.  Irritating.  Unrealistic.

 

Isn't that the point?

 

There's a lot of fun to be had with those characters overloaded with all the positive traits, romping through their over-the-top stories.  James is fun.  Jill is fun.

 

Jill's name is not Mary Sue.  There is room for the Jill Bonds of the fictional world.  Let's celebrate them.

Managing the self-publisher's chip

When I'm asked about self-publishing vs trade publishing, I'll list strengths and weaknesses of both options, and strongly recommend Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Business Rusch" series of blog posts.  Rusch is a hybrid author and has invaluable information on traps and issues which face both trade and self-published writers.  Even if you're intending to only follow a trade publishing path, reading Rusch (and her commenters) on issues with various contract clauses can potentially save you an infinite amount of grief.

But one thing Rusch doesn't cover in great detail is disdain.

Yes, attitudes towards self-publishing are changing, and self-publishers can put out books and try to gain an audience.  A tiny minority are stunningly successful (in the millions of dollars territory), a solid number are able to become full-time writers, and a far larger body hover around my level - enough that it's a viable second income, but not enough to give up the day job (rather like many trade published writers).  And there's plenty of people self-publishing who don't sell at all - either because they don't write very well, write in an extremely niche area, package their books poorly, or are just unlucky.  Self-publishing is no more a guaranteed path to success than that old saw: "If you write a good enough book, and keep submitting it, it will get published".

Even successful self-published books are often treated as "not good, just successful", and one thing most self-publishers have in common is the need to deal with scorn, hostility, derisive comments and - worst of all - complete indifference.

Many self-publishers have come from submitting their books to trade publishing and receiving either form rejections or frustrating "almosts".  Years of it.  Decades.  And going into self-publishing, they will face not only the apparently insurmountable task of interesting readers in their books, but also people who state "I don't read self-published books at all", or "I only read self-published books by trade published authors" and forums which (burned by a flood of over-the-top self-promotion) have strict "don't mention your books" rules.  And that's not even starting on the direct mocking.

Any person facing a long negative experience is likely to build up at least a small chip on their shoulder.  This past week demonstrated that even enormous success will not necessarily remove that chip.  Hugh Howey - one of the most successful self-publishers out there, with a major movie deal, a print-only book deal, and promotion which includes airport placement (ie. someone who is more successful than the vast majority of trade published writers) - posted a now-deleted blog entry entitled "The Bitch from Worldcon".

The blog post demonstrated two things: Howey has no comprehension of offensively gendered language, and Howey is carrying around an enormous 'self-publisher's chip'.  The story involves Howey playing incognito at a recent science fiction and fantasy convention, listening to a very rude person dismiss self-publishing, and gloating to himself (and later to his blog readers) over the secret knowledge of his own success, while indulging in a little power fantasy of, basically, rubbing his detractor's face in it.

Enormous success obviously hasn't made the resentment go away.  And the negativity toward self-publishing and self-publishers isn't going to go away either.  It's now just couched in terms which include "outliers" and "popular but bad" and "cult-like mentality" or "self-publishing is really really really hard and most of you will fail at it".  If you label yourself a self-publisher, the attitudes toward the group as a whole will shower down upon you, no matter your opinion of trade publishing, or the quality of your writing.

I'm not immune to self-publisher's chip.  It bugs me when people make statements about the quality of my books without having read them.  And I'm strongly aware of not being "part of the conversation" in the SFF world.  One of my clearest memories as a writer will always be the 2010 Aurealis Awards.  Sitting in a big auditorium full of people, watching my book's cover flash up on screen as a finalist for Best Fantasy Novel.  It was an amazing feeling.  And then I thought: "The only people in this entire room who have read that book are the judges."

Strategies for managing self-publisher's chip will vary from writer to writer, depending on the particular negativity being faced at the time.  I can only share the methods I use to keep that chip in check:

1. Focus on the good bits

I might not be a bestselling self-publisher, but in many ways I'm an incredibly fortunate one.  I've had some external validation thanks to those (highly discerning!) Aurealis judges, which in the worst moments I can point to and say: "See!  See!  Not rubbish!"

I have a small core of readers who have liked my work enough to consider themselves fans.  And they tell other people they should look at my books.  Or they just send me an email saying how much they liked them.  And that is an astonishingly wonderful thing.

I do read my negative reviews, but I save them up, get them over with like a dose of medicine, and move on.  Spending energy on negative reviews of your book is like stabbing yourself in the knee.

2. Care less about other people's decisions

Self-publishing is a wonderful option, but I don't evangelise it, and I accept that readers might use it as a criteria to winnow down the millions of books available to them.  Ultimately, it matters very little if a particular individual avoids self-publishing.

It's incredibly hard to do this when you're just starting out, and no-one is reading you.  It makes you feel like you'll never be read, that you're unfairly penalised, that it's all hopeless.  It will be even harder if your writing isn't quite there yet, and you've rushed to self-publishing perhaps before you're ready for a critical audience.  If nothing else, you can fall back on an "Hey, at least I have nice copies of my books on my bookshelf" attitude.

3. Don't try to be part of the conversation

This is probably the hardest one for me.  I like talking about SFF, and I'd certainly like to see my books considered part of the conversation in discussions of the genre, but one of the first lessons self-publishers learn is "don't talk about your own books outside your own blog".  I sometimes stray on this one - I'll see someone posting or tweeting: "I'm looking for SFF examples of X".  "There's hardly any SFF which does X, please someone give me examples!"  And eventually, against my better judgment, I'll be drawn in, and respond with two of three examples, including a book of my own which does precisely what the person is looking for.  And it seems like every time I do this, the person asking for examples will meticulously thank every single person for their suggestions - except for that pushy self-publisher, of course.

That's my chip in action.

4. Think long term

Self-publishing inverts the trade publishing model where pre-release buzz is built up, there's a mass burst of publicity on release, and the book has to sell sufficiently in its first year (or months) to keep the author's career alive.  If I judged my likely success on my first few months after release (where I sold only a handful of books), then I'd be an abject failure.  Except for the rare instant successes, self-publishers aren't really in a position to judge their careers for at least a couple of years.  And you never know if your next book might be your break out book, which in turn will juice your sluggishly selling backlist.

When I started I had an idea of a "five year plan". My first book went live in October 2010, so I won't really be able to judge how I'm going till October 2015, but the view from April 2013 is pretty good.

5. Next book?

Disinterest and occasional outbreaks of vitriol toward self-publishers are far easier for me to deal with than the immense negativity I suffered submitting books which never went anywhere, because it's balanced by lots of lovely positives.  And the biggest positive is the knowledge that there are readers out there waiting for my next book.

And so in conclusion I seem to be saying much the same as what most of the self-publishing advice posts say: The best thing to do is put your head down and write!

Tomb Raider reboot: One Less Game to Play

Back when a Playstation first came into our household, I played a lot of Tomb Raider.  Yes, Lara had silly proportions, but the puzzles were fun, she had unflappable attitude, said cool things in a neat accent, and it was a change to play a female character who could hold her own.  I played her through many different incarnations, and a while back I saw a little animation for a reboot origin story.

And it was kinda skeevy.  Doe-eyed torture porn skeevy.

Wait for the game, I figured.  Probably just a bad clip.  But then this interview surfaces:

But in the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot, things will be different. She hasn't become that woman yet. And executive producer Ron Rosenberg says you'll want to keep her safe.

"When people play Lara, they don't really project themselves into the character," Rosenberg told me at E3 last week when I asked if it was difficult to develop for a female protagonist.

"They're more like 'I want to protect her.' There's this sort of dynamic of 'I'm going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.'"

So is she still the hero? I asked Rosenberg if we should expect to look at Lara a little bit differently than we have in the past.

"She's definitely the hero but— you're kind of like her helper," he said. "When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character."

The new Lara Croft isn't just less battle-hardened; she's less voluptuous. Gone are her ridiculous proportions and skimpy clothing. This Lara feels more human, more real. That's intentional, Rosenberg says.

"The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear," he said. "She literally goes from zero to hero... we're sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again."

In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Her best friend will be kidnapped. She'll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her.

"She is literally turned into a cornered animal," Rosenberg said. "It's a huge step in her evolution: she's forced to either fight back or die."

This is causing a bit of a furore, and I'm one of the many crossing this game off the play list.  Some say "wait for the game, it mightn't be as bad as it sounds", and to that I offer up a little word substitution game:

"When people play Master Chief, they don't really project themselves into the character," Rosenberg told me at E3 last week when I asked if it was difficult to develop for a male protagonist.

"They're more like 'I want to protect him.' There's this sort of dynamic of 'I'm going to this adventure with him and trying to protect him.'"

So is he still the hero? I asked Rosenberg if we should expect to look at Master Chief a little bit differently than we have in the past.

"He's definitely the hero but— you're kind of like his helper," he said. "When you see him have to face these challenges, you start to root for him in a way that you might not root for a self-reliant character."

The new Master Chief isn't just less battle-hardened; he's less muscled. Gone are his ridiculous proportions and all-covering armor. This Master Chief feels more human, more real. That's intentional, Rosenberg says.

"The ability to see him as a human is even more enticing to me than the more idealized version of yesteryear," he said. "He literally goes from zero to hero... we're sort of building him up and just when he gets confident, we break him down again."

In the new Halo, Master Chief will suffer. His best friend will be kidnapped. He'll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape him.

"He is literally turned into a cornered animal," Rosenberg said. "It's a huge step in his evolution: he's forced to either fight back or die."

Would you wait for that game?  I think I'll pass.  Thanks.

Brave: Gutsy Girl Proves Herself: News at Eleven

Brave is the first Pixar movie with a female main character:

Merida [Kelly Macdonald] is a skilled archer and impetuous daughter of King Fergus (voice of Billy Connolly) and Queen Elinor (voice of Emma Thompson). Determined to carve her own path in life, Merida defies an age-old custom sacred to the uproarious lords of the land: massive Lord MacGuffin (voice of Kevin McKidd), surly Lord Macintosh (voice of Craig Ferguson) and cantankerous Lord Dingwall (voice of Robbie Coltrane). Merida's actions inadvertently unleash chaos and fury in the kingdom, and when she turns to an eccentric old Wise Woman (voice of Julie Walters) for help, she is granted an ill-fated wish. The ensuing peril forces Merida to discover the meaning of true bravery in order to undo a beastly curse before it's too late.
See trailer. 

Why I'm looking forward to Brave

- Awesome hair.
- Billy Connelly.
- AWESOME hair.
- All the clips so far have been effortlessly funny.
- Doesn't seem to have "find true love" as the main plotline.
- Billy Connelly.  [And Emma Thompson and Robbie Coltrane, for that matter.]
- OMG the HAIR!

I am so definitely going to see this movie.  And I know I'll enjoy it.  I love the adventures of Girls Doing Stuff.

Why I'm not looking forward to Brave

It's not just that we've had this story before - that stories about a girl proving that girls can do "non-girly" things are about the only Girls Doing Stuff stories that some people seem able to tell.  It's the way this one seems to be presented.

Merida starts out exceptional (a princess).  She disdains things normally associated with girls (dresses).  Her skills are greater than all her peers (beyond exceptional).  She chooses to refuse the role her society expects of their princesses (getting married off to the winner of an archery contest) and this brings disaster (possibly because the three fathers of the archery contestants will end up in a civil war unless their princess obligingly settles the rulership of the land on her back).  Trying to fix the situation brings about a curse (I would assume that this is the bear which Merida will kill, thus resolving the curse).

Problematic.

The story so far is GIRLSCAN'TDOTHAT GIRLSCAN'TDOTHAT GIRLSCAN'TDOTHAT GIRLSCAN'TDOTHAT - even if they're super-exceptional.  Girly things are bad.  Girls doing non-girly things cause disaster.  Disaster is to be fixed by girl doing non-girly thing.

At a guess Merida will end up being allowed to inherit her kingdom rather than being a vessel for someone else to inherit it.  She will probably win her freedom from those horrible restrictive dresses.  Possibly she will be able to inspire less exceptional girls to disdain girly things and kill bears as well.

Whether any of this leads Merida to attain the political and economic nous to actually rule a country is another question.  And, oddly enough, everything I've seen of her suggests that Merida's mother would be a great person to learn how to rule a country from.

I'm sure Brave will be a wonderful movie, and I expect to enjoy it.  But instead of Merida-Hates-Dresses trying to escape an arranged marriage, I would have adored Merida-the-exceptional leading her people into battle, or Merida-the-wise outwitting those trying to undermine her father's rule, or Merida-the-can't-shoot-straight inventing a new and far better method of killing bears.  All of those great possible stories which I could love, which will never come into being because over and over and over again the story has to waste its time on GIRLSCAN'TDOTHAT.

This is why I write egalitarian worlds.

Interview at Adarna SF

My first ever interview!  Frida at Adarna SF took me into the nuts and bolts behind what I write and why.  A very interesting process which left me with a question of my own - WHY are there so few fantasy novels with egalitarian societies?  It's not uncommon to see it in SF, but rarer in fantasy.

Can anyone recommend to me some good fantasy novels set in egalitarian worlds?

And on a related note, anyone interested in Indie SFF (or, indeed, just SFF) should definitely add Adarna SF (formerly Frida Fantastic) to their blogroll.  I've been really enjoying the level of analysis in the reviews!

Impacts of Magic: Women

When creating my worlds some of the primary questions I start with are:

1. Does magic exist?
2. What can it do?
3. What will it change?

What will it change is the thing which fascinates me.  It's so central to the process of my novel-writing, that I'm embarking on a series of posts about the impacts of magic, exploring magic and worldbuilding.  For the purposes of this exercise, the answer to (1) is Yes and (2) is Lots!

The first topic on the cards is one which is of primary interest to me: Women.

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What does the existence of  bountiful, working magic mean to women?

Babies

Using magic to get a baby is at least as old as Rapunzel, but magic's key benefit is the avoidance of babies.  Whether charmed necklaces, potions, or useful cantrips, effective, readily obtainable birth control can bring about a fundamental shift in the world's society, primarily because the threat of an unplanned pregnancy will no longer hang over "non-committed" sex.  Additionally, couples might choose to delay children, to spend more time consolidating wealth or pursuing careers and interests.

And, of course, magic offers the possibility of not only safer childbirth, or safer abortion, but can toss out all those doubts concerning paternity.  Where does that leave that insistence on virgin brides?  A quick divination before the marriage vows to confirm that there's no baby on the way (or if there is, then the groom was involved), then it's time for the ceremony!

Will birth control necessarily bring about a sexually free society?  Of course not.  But the chances are much higher, and when building that high-magic fantasy world, it's worth taking the time to ask "why not?" and follow through which rules and symbols (that hymen veil, for instance) will be absent or altered as a result.

Strength

Women are not measurably less intelligent than men, or less perceptive, or less agile.  They share the same number of limbs, the same senses, the same ability to walk upright, to pick up tools and use them.  Yet women, through broad stretches of history and across multiple cultures, have been reduced to chattel - property passed from father to husband.

Why?

At its most simplified, this power imbalance comes down the fact that men are physically stronger than women.  If you ever see any cartoon about caveman courtship, it will involve a woman being dragged back to the cave by her hair.  While, arguably, women are less aggressive than men due to lower testosterone levels, there's a difference between being less aggressive and accepting without protest no property rights, no voting rights, no ability to say No.

Now add working magic to that caveman courtship.  Back in prehistory days, we'd expect a fairly simplified form of magic, perhaps a matter of will and emotion.  Are you really going to risk dragging sexycavegirl99 around by her hair if, when she's driven and desperate and frightened enough, she can make you burst into flame?  Suddenly gender equality hits the negotiating table.

Of course, it's not just a question of mating rituals.  A woman who can detonate boulders when she's riled would likely have some interesting approaches to hunting mammoths.  If you're having a war, do you send the women to cower in the caverns beneath the fort when they can call lightning down on your enemies?  And not to forget the Buffy Summers Effect - just because you tower over the pint-sized blonde doesn't mean she won't have some inborn ability to kick you down the street when you try to drag her into a convenient alley.

Again, no guarantee.  The society which forms around women who can overcome inferiority of strength with an equalizer such as guardian spirits will not necessarily be any less inclined to call them chattel.  But the odds are better, and when you're putting your world together, and you decide how your magic works, you have to ask: if women can do THIS, why do they allow THAT?

Other

There's a great many more things which will impact on women in a world of actual, working magic, although I think Babies and Strength are the pivotal alterations.  I called this section "Other" because it's common to discuss woman's role as "The Other", and there's always a bunch of people who work from the "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" point of view - believing that men and women are too fundamentally different to ever really understand each other, to ever really step into each other's shoes and KNOW what it is to be a man, to be a woman, to be Other.

Add magic.

Girls Stand About

Alan Wake is an interesting, atmosopheric game about a writer whose holiday turns into a nightmare of monstrous shadows.  I'd heard a lot of good things about it, and going in found it intriguing as Alan has a precognitive vision or two, and he and his wife take a ferry and then drive to the holiday house they've rented on a spit of land almost like an island.

Alan's wife apparently has a crippling fear of the dark, and so when they arrive at the house around sunset, and the lights aren't on, she won't go into the house and waits on the porch for Alan to find the problem and fix it.  Alan (or I, rather) explored the house, the back porch, wandered down the back and finally returned to the porch.  Whereupon Alan's wife, still standing there in the growing gloom, helpfully pointed out a power line leading to a nearby shed for Alan to follow and fix the problem.

Two tips for people who have a crippling fear of the dark:

1. Carry a small powerful torch at all times.
2. Learn how to fix fuses and start generators yourself.

Not long before playing Alan Wake, I was playing a hidden object game which took this issue to new levels.  Two people in a shattered city, man and woman, trying to escape.  Scene after scene the woman would be standing about, while her boyfriend fetched her clothes, fetched the items she wanted, solved the issues related to escaping the city, while the woman literally just stood there.  She wasn't injured, she didn't have the excuse of being paralysed by fear: she just stood there.

In both games the stand-about woman was quickly kidnapped, to my intense relief.  In both cases, my appreciation of the game completely changed because I found them so annoying.

It's small things like these, often highly individual reactions to issues the writers didn't even consider, which can completely change the way a reader/player reacts to a story.

Please don't...

... introduce me to a frustrated, unhappy, petty person who transcends her faults and limitations to be glorious, then wipe her memory so she doesn't remember how truly wonderful she could be.

... give me a female character who can defeat all comers with one hand tied behind her back - except for her love interest.

... offer me a vivacious woman who cherishes her independence, and then have her get into a 'pickle' and need to be rescued.

... show me a smart active woman doing her utmost to save her world, then make me watch her raped by a monster while the virginal passive and 'pure' woman ends up happily married.

... capture me heart and soul with the story of a girl who was the useless baggage of a team, who vowed to be more to save someone she loved, who stepped up and stepped up, overcame set-back after set-back, until finally...she decided she would never be strong enough and that she would leave it to the guy to fulfil her vow.

... make me regret all that I loved about a story.

This post was brought to you by teeth-grinding plot developments.

The Role of the Girl...

The role of the girl is to:

• Be kidnapped, and rescued.
• Be kidnapped, and not rescued, providing endless angst for the real characters.
• Be told it's too dangerous for her to come along, and be told to go home.
• Be told it's too dangerous for her to come along, but to come along anyway and cause problems.
• Ask questions, so someone can explain.
• Fight the female villain.
• Bestow her favours as a reward for victory.
• Heal.
• Make sandwiches.

This post was sponsored by "Professor Layton and the Unwound Future" and the new series of "Hawaii 5-0".  While there are now many many glorious stories which don't fall within these examples, it's just so tedious for me when the sole girl in the party gets kidnapped and has to be rescued.