That's a good point -- she's taken a more normal fantasy world as the backdrop, where the politics and world-history don't matter quite so much beyond 'who's on the same side as our heroes,' and she doesn't have to reestablish exactly how not-physiologically-standardized the heroes are. In other words, she had the brains to design a story that was relatively easy to pick up in the middle!
I just really wanted to play with the differing sides of gender issues in medieval settings -- handing actual physical-equivalent power to women with the Goddess' Temples and the magic, handing the imbalances between untrusted-magical-women's-power and trusted-physical-men's-power to part of the cast and seeing how the difference in power types affected their perceptions of themselves, others' perceptions of them, and things like that. I wanted to set up a world that was parallel to our own, but with enough structural differences that women didn't always come out on the short side of the power equation, to see what effects that had...
*headdesk* the phrase "more than one can chew" keeps suggesting itself, but I'm determined to give it a try!
I just really wanted to play with the differing sides of gender issues in medieval settings -- handing actual physical-equivalent power to women with the Goddess' Temples and the magic, handing the imbalances between untrusted-magical-women's-power and trusted-physical-men's-power to part of the cast and seeing how the difference in power types affected their perceptions of themselves, others' perceptions of them, and things like that. I wanted to set up a world that was parallel to our own, but with enough structural differences that women didn't always come out on the short side of the power equation, to see what effects that had...
*headdesk* the phrase "more than one can chew" keeps suggesting itself, but I'm determined to give it a try!
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