#female characters

headspace-hotel:

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The Epic of Gilgamesh has sparked me into thinking about women in literature and storytelling, and how in some ways we are unusually misogynistic in the way we tell stories compared to…most of history

I’ve been reading the Foster translation of the epic, and it’s striking how…not-antagonistic the text is toward women.

For one thing, a significant portion of the characters with important roles are female. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are obviously the important ones, and Utnapishtim to a degree, but we also have Inanna, Ninsun, Shamhat, Siduri, Utnapishtim’s wife, and even Aruru, who gets credit here for being the supreme creator being.

I was surprised as well by how neutral the text is in portraying them. Shamhat, the ‘harlot’ (“sex worker” doesn’t work here, because there are some spiritual/religious connotations here as well i think?), is…just a character. She isn’t demonized, we aren’t supposed to despise her. Siduri is just a weird lady running a tavern at the end of the world all alone. Ninsun, Gilgamesh’s mother, is a source of wisdom and authority.

There are repeated occasions throughout the story where other characters seek out female characters because of their power and/or wisdom (e.g. Gilgamesh going to Ninsun for help interpreting his dreams, the gods summoning Aruru to create someone to oppose Gilgamesh). They’re also actually allowed to speak in the story.

I remember being surprised by it when I read the Iliad that we actually got to hear Briseis speak, just as I was by how much talking women do in Shakespeare.

I think I expected less because the storytelling produced by the present day world around me set the bar so low.

In the Original and Prequel trilogies of Star Wars, there are, like, at most six female characters with speaking roles that I can remember (Leia, Padme, Mon Mothma, Zam Wessell, Beru Lars, and the decoy queen in The Phantom Menace whose name I can’t remember). You probably don’t even remember some of these, because they were not important at all. It’s like if Dexter Jettster happened to be female.

That’s just the thing, though, isn’t it? Dexter Jettster is male. Chewbacca is male. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mace Windu, Yoda and Qui-Gon Jinn are male. Sebulba, the pod-racer that explodes in Episode 1, is male, Jen Porkins is male, Greedo is male, Poggle the Lesser is male, Boss Nass is male, Salacious Crumb is male, Captain Panaka is male, even the droids are at least coded as male. There is no reason for it.

I don’t know quite enough about Marvel to compare, and honestly haven’t bothered with Marvel in a few years, but only one of the original Avengers is female, as well as only one of the original Guardians of the Galaxy, both were defined by their relationships to major male characters, and both died. The focus on the male characters is overwhelming. 

We’re used to stories that barely have any female characters in them. The Lord of the Rings has what, three? four? women? Stories that actually have similar proportions of men and women receive backlash, as Scott Lynch did when Red Seas under Red Skies had “too many” women (it was still predominantly male!) Even books that are praised as “feminist” or appear to be focused on women neglect the actual presence of women. I only read the first two Throne of Glass novels, but I can only remember two female characters in it apart from the main character, and iirc both of them die. (It’s not a 'feminist’ series at all, but I digress.)

We’re actually backsliding in some respects, if you ask me—in visual media, traditionally “unattractive” women are disappearing. Weird women are disappearing. “Strong Female Character” has become just another trope as restrictive as any of the other roles “allowed” for women. We see people looking backward at characters like Edna Mode as unusually human and well-represented when I’m not convinced that they were at the time.

And now the Epic of Gilgamesh seems unusually woman-focused and not-misogynistic. I wonder how we got here…

I’ve just started to really look at people funny when they praise books, esp YA books, for having “strong female characters.”

Like someone in my YA lit class praised Children of Blood and Bone for having women that are “allowed” to fight and be independent and have significant roles in the story, and how important the book is for including that. And I just.

Alanna: The First Adventure is 30+ years old, Dealing with Dragons is 30+ years old, Sabriel is 25+ years old, so it’s not like independent, self determining female leads were invented yesterday in YA. Graceling, the Hunger Games, and a lot of the foundational Girl That Fights YA turns fifteen years old soon. A girl that was 16 when the first of the Hunger Games trilogy came out is now 30, and in a few years may be able to give the books to her own daughter to read.

Meanwhile, over the recent 3 or so years popular YA books are dominated by plots about girls trapped in castles, bound by curses, or in arranged marriages whose stories all hinge on falling for boys.

YA romance and romance subplots have always been a thing, sure.

But I seriously feel like, idk, 10 years ago, plots where the romance was a vital element (or the primary element)fit into their own niche significantly more, and books that were primarily “fantasy” actually were, well, primarily fantasy.

Am I making this up in my head? Has anyone else noticed this? There definitely used to be YA fantasy that actually centered significantly on worldbuilding and non-romance plot instead of being primarily romance with either a court intrigue or a fairy tale retelling backdrop.

What i’m trying to highlight is the huge boom in YA books where

• the female protagonist falling in love with a man
• the female protagonist being betrothed or otherwise having her sexuality controlled and restricted

is a REQUIRED element of the plot (and often the magic and worldbuilding) as in the story itself hinges on it.

There’s also been a small explosion of YA books with the female MC being a “sacrifice,” being given over to something as currency/appeasement, or otherwise fulfilling a very passive, inanimate role (e.g. Poppy being the “Maiden” in From Blood and Ash or whatever the title was.) What is UP with that.

It would be ridiculous to attribute something like this to a single author, but I’m still going to say that Sarah J. Maas did not help any of this good god

YA readers are growing up with ACOTAR and TOG now, not any of the numerous “strong” heroines that were defining in the 90’s and 2000’s, which means they’re growing up with SJM’s INTENSELY gender essentialist, tradwifey A/B/O lite faeries labeled as “feminist” fantasy.

Both series have a 500+ year old faery “male” “claim” and impregnate an 18-19 year old girl, and both series sexualize the “domination” and aggression of the “males” (in the throne of glass series, the endgame love interest fucking. bites the protagonist without her consent to uhh. “claim” her.) In ACOTAR in particular the plot eventually revolves around the pregnancies of the main female characters, by their aggressive, controlling fae “male” “mates.”

I have read excerpts from later Throne of Glass books and the way female characters are described is. disgusting?? like one thing in particular that’s branded into my brain is a teenager being described as looking like she would have been “barely past her first bleed, if not for the size of her breasts” or something like that.

And the smut scenes aren’t even sexy.

The upside to this is that the YA category seems to have collapsed quite a bit overall and doesn’t enjoy anywhere near the popularity that it did even just 3 years ago.

Hopefully when it all settles we’ll have new areas of growth in the places all the readers have cleaved off to.

sjbattleangel:

All of it is just beautiful.

 Sejic gives the women of DC the proper respect they deserve by writing them with humor, fun and agency. He seems to be respectfully aware of the progressive comic fans’ (myself included) popular wishes such as making Cass Batgirl/Batman/The Black Bat or having Ivy and Harley’s bisexuality be recognized. Along with LGTBQ+ characters (like Batwoman) getting their happy endings.  

His designs for the women of DC are awesome yet practical with taste. It is great that rather then going full-on “sexy”, their costumes are feminine but eye-catching and suitable for combat. For example, Starfire is longer designed as pin-up girl (cough*Red Hood* cough*) but as true warrior princess.

With all the chaotic management DC has been through, The heads of Times Warner need to wake up and do what should have been done a long time ago, put Stjepan Šejić in charge of DC. Period.

paigereiring:

First of all, this character is a she. There are nearly no exceptions. She lives in middle-class America (or its equivalent), and she’s the extreme version of the girl next door. She knows nothing about sex, and if she’s ever kissed someone, it was a sweet peck and nothing more. When the people around her make sex jokes, she’s completely lost or maybe only has a vague inkling of what they’re talking about. She’s never bothered to google anything, and the extent of her knowledge is anatomical and medical at best.

Why this is bad: Sure, there are people in the world who don’t know anything about sex, but the chances of those people being matched up with this background are slim to none. Have you seen public school? Or private school, for that matter? Kids talk, and even the most virginal of people learn a lot from their friends. The odds that this girl knows nothing is about one in none. Whether it’s kids being curious about their own (or others’) bodies or a poor choice of google searching, they figure these things out on their own. And once you’ve hit 23, you’ve at least learned some stuff secondhand. Even asexual people are not excluded from this, as many have either had sexual encounters before or have heard the same chatter around the lunchroom table as everyone else.

But where this trope gets especially gross is that these characters, after being shown to be naive about sex, are then highly sexualized and even infantilized. Not only does this give off some bad porn vibes, it boils the character down to this single trope. The character’s sexual awakening is either used for laughs (”Now that she got her first boyfriend, we keep finding them making out in the kitchen! Ha ha, young love!”) or to make fetishistic sex scenes (a la 50 Shades). Either way, nothing good comes of it.

How you can fix it: As always, I’m going to tell you to think of your character as an actual human being. Do you know people in your life who live up to this trope in some ways? I know I do, but those people still understand sex and dirty jokes. Just because they’ve never done anything themselves doesn’t mean they don’t get the innuendos. It doesn’t mean when they walk in on their roommate and her boyfriend snuggling naked underneath the covers that she doesn’t know what might have just happened. She’s had 23 years to learn this stuff. While these people might not know as much as others, they’re still going to have a basic grasp on what sex is and what it involves. And as for the sexualization and infantilization of these people? It’s gross. Stop.

Bottom Line: By this age, everyone’s going to have some inkling of sex and have heard some stuff. Keep it realistic, and don’t make it porny.

phoenix-ace:

There’s this idea in femslash that “exotic” features are the domain of “interesting” white women who are supposed to stand out of a group of “traditionally white” characters.  At the most everyone is a “tan”, but she’s going to have almond eyes, or a certain build, or a darker skin tone that makes her different (but not enough for them to admit she’s probably not white).  

They use terms that they know exclude many WoC (they usually assume we can’t be blond, brunette, or redhead…and the “black” hair they think we have doesn’t get the poetic treatment that the “jet black hair” characters they decide are white get).  So they can have their “blond + brunette, light vs. “dark”, feminine vs. masculine” without having to deal with any real nuance.  

I’m tired of fiction that treats WoC poorly, especially when its femslash.  We’re women too, but you wouldn’t know it from how overwhelming white femslash circles can be.  Like, why is it that people who can find any justification to pair two white women (who often hate each other) suddenly can’t figure out what to do if one of those women becomes black?  Suddenly writing her features out leaves a bad taste in their mouth and the relationship just isn’t viable anymore. But they don’t want to admit this is because they’re writing for a certain gaze.  They’re too invested in seeing themselves as morally superior to sexists who only write for the male gaze that they fail to address how their writing reflects the white gaze in very problematic ways that wind up erasing (and/or fetishizing) a lot of women.  I HATE that.  

I swear, if I find another femslash story where the brunette has my skin tone and my features but is written as white I’m going to flip.  Don’t erase me but then use my features so that a white character can “contrast” with their significant other in a way that allows you to still feel comfortable.  I’ve had enough of that crap used against me offline in LGBTQ circles, I don’t want to deal with it in my fantasy or my sci-fi or any of the fanworks that derive from it. 

Queer women DO exist, and no we aren’t all a part of cisgender, pale skinned, “traditionally white blond” and “exotically white” brunette combinations.  Write what you want, and yeah, part of this can be blamed on the lack of WoC in these shows and movies (especially in regards to Black, Indigenous, and Asian women, though this can be applied to WoC as a whole).  But fanfic (or even original fiction) doesn’t require you to accept the same limitations that the source material has, you CHOOSE to write things this way, and its your responsibility to unpack that if you want to fix it.