Let's Talk about Ladies, shall we?
Ok, so I was lurking around this gal's tumblr the other day, when I came across this fairly depressing (and much responded-to)
post.
Now, as sad as this is, I also found this topic to be fairly interesting because I've got something of the same problem; I tend to default to male characters in my own writing. I find it very interesting that so many women creators seem to have this same issue.
And the weird thing (at least in my personal case) is that it's not that I don't find female characters to be interesting and relatable. I know way too many fascinating lady characters both in fiction and real-life to say that.
Now, I don't feel like going into all the possible whys, or how internalized sexism is probably the main culprit behind all of this (although I do think that)...I'd rather go into possible solutions. One thing that seemed to come up with a lot was the gender-swap story, something that I have made no secret about being a fan of in the past. It really is a fascinating excercise; take any well-known story and, without changing the personalities of the characters involved, swap the genders. What happens? How does it affect things?
For a more focused exercise, grab one or two gender-specific tropes and do it for the opposite gender. How does that affect things? Does it still work?
On a particularly weird side note: I have seriously played with the idea, on multiple occasions, of re-writing Sha-Dache, one of my major go-to characters, as a girl. The irony? Sha-Dache, in many ways, is already a gender swap character. (Among other things, his power development references the normal story arc of a super heroine, his personality takes a lot of cues from female characters, and he is something of a gender swap of The Mad Sceintist's Beautiful Daughter...albeit a heavily played-with and partially deconstructed version of that trope.
Sha has a lot of issues.)
The other thing I want to note are the number of people who talk about the overall lack of interesting female characters. I will admit, men still have the advantage of numbers in this field; this does not mean there are no awesome, relatable female characters out there. To that end, I'm going to give you a partial list of some of my favorites:
The ladies of Terry Pratchett's Discworld deserve a category all their own. To save on space, I'll just list three for now.
Susan, the granddaughter of DEATH
Spiritually related to the Disc's personification, Susan managed to inherit a number of her grandfather's abilities (such as stopping time for just herself, walking through walls, and making it so people can't see if she doesn't want them to.) She is stubborn, down to earth and practical in a crisis ("probably a character flaw" she notes), and manages to be a genuinely good person without being soppy or cloying about it. She also has personally averted at least three major reality threatening events, teaches small children to deal with their fear of the bogeyman by beating the crud out of him with an iron poker, and basically spends her spare time being awesome. Think of her as Mary Poppins (book version) without the excessive vanity meets a very cynical version of Miss Frizzle with an extremely gothic twist.
(Books she is in: Soul Music, The Hogfather, The Thief of Time.)
Lady Sybil Ramkin/Vimes
Lady Sybil may be a more minor character in her books (her husband is the real protagonist), but that does not diminish from her awesome. Sybil is a wealthy noble from a very old family, one of the sort that is so rich that she can afford to look poor (meaning she generally eats a very modest diet most days, and tends to dress like a washerwoman...granted the latter is because her favorite hobbies would mess up her good clothes.), and has a very boisterous personality that is normally reserved for big muscular guys. She raises breed miniature dragons the way some women breed toy poodles. She is also very polite (because that's how she was raised), and very traditionally lady-like. She is middle aged, and built like a Valkyrie...very large, very solid, and comes from a long line of women who, when things get tough, turn into solid steel...metaphorically speaking, of course.
Over the course of the books she's been in, she has attacked an angry mob with a sword (it failed, but she managed to shake them up), calmly responded to an assination attempt (by flame thrower wielding dwarf) by sic'ing her pet dragons on them, out-negotiated the king of the dwarfs on a trade deal, verbally bitch-slapped a werewolf for being RUDE, and proven herself more than equal to the most powerful political figures in Ankh-Morpork. (To the point that when she demands that her workaholic husband be forcibly sent on a family vacation to the country, Lord Vetinari himself...one of the most awesomely manipulative characters in Discworld canon...gives in, describing it as "ceding to a higher authority.")
All this and more from a lady who spends most of her free time fussing over baby dragons, mending socks and doing other little sensible wife-like things, and waiting for her husband to come home from work.
(See: All the City Watch books.)
Granny Weatherwax
Esme Weatherwax is ancient, mean-spirited, haughty, stubborn, and simply cannot abide losing or being wrong. She is extremely set in her ways. She will tell you, in no uncertain terms, exactly what she thinks of you, and never honey coats her opinion. She is openly manipulative, and bullies people into giving her her way. She is also a total badass who is living proof that (to quote 'Into the Woods') 'nice is different than good'. She is not nice. But she is VERY good.
She is arguably the most powerful witch in the world, although she rarely goes in for flashy displays of magic, considering those to be excessive and more in the realm of wizards (who she regards as a bunch of pompous show-offs who never do any REAL work). Her usual job is something between village wisewoman, midwife, and physician to both humans and animals. She helps people by forcing them to help each other. And she accomplishes some of her most amazing feats by shear force of personality. (A notable and spoiler-y instance: She is bitten by a vampire in one book; normally, this would allow the vampires to control her, and maybe turn her something like one of them. Instead, they start turning into something like herself. Imagine, if you will, a whole vampire family going insane because they keep having these irresistible cravings for tea and biscuits.) If I were to list all of her greatest feats, we'd be here for a long time. So let's just leave it that she is awesome, and move on.
(See: All the Witches books, plus cameos in the Tiffany Aching quartet. Tiffany is awesome, too.)
getting away from Discworld, we have:
Keladry of Mindelan
Tamora Pierce has done MULTIPLE amazing females. Kel is just my favorite. She is a badass normal girl who, in the face of large amounts of institutionalized misogyny and people openly trying to discourage or scare her, decides to train to be a knight. She pulls it off after years of brain-breakingly hard work, and proves multiple times that she is not easily intimidated, is extremely intelligent and quick thinking in a tight spot; every time it seems she has a real weakness, she works like hell to either learn to compensate for it or overcome it. (Like her fear of heights, or her initial struggle with some of the weapons.)
She is stubborn and idealist, and there is no one, human or animal, who she deems too unimportant to be worth her time. (She really believes in chivalry in it's purest form.) This leads her to doing quite a few thankless tasks, like taking care of a kidnapped baby griffin until it's parents show up (it spends all of it's time biting her), or working for people who will never be convinced that she has every right to be where she is. She does all of this stoically, and with good grace (for the most part.) She resigns herself from an early age to the fact that she will never be universally loved, and as such she never takes her true supporters for granted.
If you are under her protection, she never abandon you, even if it means getting herself in real trouble. (And she is always prepared to deal with the consequences of her actions.)
That's not to say she never doubts herself, or has moments of real weakness. And she even does fail to look at the big picture a few times, and is a little too idealistic for her own good. This gets her in trouble. But at the same time, she galvanizes more than one person into being better people, be it getting her fellow knights to take their duties more seriously, or teaching her maid self-defense techniques.
(See: the Protector of the Small quartet.)
Dang...I want to list some more, but this entry as gone on too long. Maybe another time?
post.
Now, as sad as this is, I also found this topic to be fairly interesting because I've got something of the same problem; I tend to default to male characters in my own writing. I find it very interesting that so many women creators seem to have this same issue.
And the weird thing (at least in my personal case) is that it's not that I don't find female characters to be interesting and relatable. I know way too many fascinating lady characters both in fiction and real-life to say that.
Now, I don't feel like going into all the possible whys, or how internalized sexism is probably the main culprit behind all of this (although I do think that)...I'd rather go into possible solutions. One thing that seemed to come up with a lot was the gender-swap story, something that I have made no secret about being a fan of in the past. It really is a fascinating excercise; take any well-known story and, without changing the personalities of the characters involved, swap the genders. What happens? How does it affect things?
For a more focused exercise, grab one or two gender-specific tropes and do it for the opposite gender. How does that affect things? Does it still work?
On a particularly weird side note: I have seriously played with the idea, on multiple occasions, of re-writing Sha-Dache, one of my major go-to characters, as a girl. The irony? Sha-Dache, in many ways, is already a gender swap character. (Among other things, his power development references the normal story arc of a super heroine, his personality takes a lot of cues from female characters, and he is something of a gender swap of The Mad Sceintist's Beautiful Daughter...albeit a heavily played-with and partially deconstructed version of that trope.
Sha has a lot of issues.)
The other thing I want to note are the number of people who talk about the overall lack of interesting female characters. I will admit, men still have the advantage of numbers in this field; this does not mean there are no awesome, relatable female characters out there. To that end, I'm going to give you a partial list of some of my favorites:
The ladies of Terry Pratchett's Discworld deserve a category all their own. To save on space, I'll just list three for now.
Susan, the granddaughter of DEATH
Spiritually related to the Disc's personification, Susan managed to inherit a number of her grandfather's abilities (such as stopping time for just herself, walking through walls, and making it so people can't see if she doesn't want them to.) She is stubborn, down to earth and practical in a crisis ("probably a character flaw" she notes), and manages to be a genuinely good person without being soppy or cloying about it. She also has personally averted at least three major reality threatening events, teaches small children to deal with their fear of the bogeyman by beating the crud out of him with an iron poker, and basically spends her spare time being awesome. Think of her as Mary Poppins (book version) without the excessive vanity meets a very cynical version of Miss Frizzle with an extremely gothic twist.
(Books she is in: Soul Music, The Hogfather, The Thief of Time.)
Lady Sybil Ramkin/Vimes
Lady Sybil may be a more minor character in her books (her husband is the real protagonist), but that does not diminish from her awesome. Sybil is a wealthy noble from a very old family, one of the sort that is so rich that she can afford to look poor (meaning she generally eats a very modest diet most days, and tends to dress like a washerwoman...granted the latter is because her favorite hobbies would mess up her good clothes.), and has a very boisterous personality that is normally reserved for big muscular guys. She raises breed miniature dragons the way some women breed toy poodles. She is also very polite (because that's how she was raised), and very traditionally lady-like. She is middle aged, and built like a Valkyrie...very large, very solid, and comes from a long line of women who, when things get tough, turn into solid steel...metaphorically speaking, of course.
Over the course of the books she's been in, she has attacked an angry mob with a sword (it failed, but she managed to shake them up), calmly responded to an assination attempt (by flame thrower wielding dwarf) by sic'ing her pet dragons on them, out-negotiated the king of the dwarfs on a trade deal, verbally bitch-slapped a werewolf for being RUDE, and proven herself more than equal to the most powerful political figures in Ankh-Morpork. (To the point that when she demands that her workaholic husband be forcibly sent on a family vacation to the country, Lord Vetinari himself...one of the most awesomely manipulative characters in Discworld canon...gives in, describing it as "ceding to a higher authority.")
All this and more from a lady who spends most of her free time fussing over baby dragons, mending socks and doing other little sensible wife-like things, and waiting for her husband to come home from work.
(See: All the City Watch books.)
Granny Weatherwax
Esme Weatherwax is ancient, mean-spirited, haughty, stubborn, and simply cannot abide losing or being wrong. She is extremely set in her ways. She will tell you, in no uncertain terms, exactly what she thinks of you, and never honey coats her opinion. She is openly manipulative, and bullies people into giving her her way. She is also a total badass who is living proof that (to quote 'Into the Woods') 'nice is different than good'. She is not nice. But she is VERY good.
She is arguably the most powerful witch in the world, although she rarely goes in for flashy displays of magic, considering those to be excessive and more in the realm of wizards (who she regards as a bunch of pompous show-offs who never do any REAL work). Her usual job is something between village wisewoman, midwife, and physician to both humans and animals. She helps people by forcing them to help each other. And she accomplishes some of her most amazing feats by shear force of personality. (A notable and spoiler-y instance: She is bitten by a vampire in one book; normally, this would allow the vampires to control her, and maybe turn her something like one of them. Instead, they start turning into something like herself. Imagine, if you will, a whole vampire family going insane because they keep having these irresistible cravings for tea and biscuits.) If I were to list all of her greatest feats, we'd be here for a long time. So let's just leave it that she is awesome, and move on.
(See: All the Witches books, plus cameos in the Tiffany Aching quartet. Tiffany is awesome, too.)
getting away from Discworld, we have:
Keladry of Mindelan
Tamora Pierce has done MULTIPLE amazing females. Kel is just my favorite. She is a badass normal girl who, in the face of large amounts of institutionalized misogyny and people openly trying to discourage or scare her, decides to train to be a knight. She pulls it off after years of brain-breakingly hard work, and proves multiple times that she is not easily intimidated, is extremely intelligent and quick thinking in a tight spot; every time it seems she has a real weakness, she works like hell to either learn to compensate for it or overcome it. (Like her fear of heights, or her initial struggle with some of the weapons.)
She is stubborn and idealist, and there is no one, human or animal, who she deems too unimportant to be worth her time. (She really believes in chivalry in it's purest form.) This leads her to doing quite a few thankless tasks, like taking care of a kidnapped baby griffin until it's parents show up (it spends all of it's time biting her), or working for people who will never be convinced that she has every right to be where she is. She does all of this stoically, and with good grace (for the most part.) She resigns herself from an early age to the fact that she will never be universally loved, and as such she never takes her true supporters for granted.
If you are under her protection, she never abandon you, even if it means getting herself in real trouble. (And she is always prepared to deal with the consequences of her actions.)
That's not to say she never doubts herself, or has moments of real weakness. And she even does fail to look at the big picture a few times, and is a little too idealistic for her own good. This gets her in trouble. But at the same time, she galvanizes more than one person into being better people, be it getting her fellow knights to take their duties more seriously, or teaching her maid self-defense techniques.
(See: the Protector of the Small quartet.)
Dang...I want to list some more, but this entry as gone on too long. Maybe another time?