Female Characters
Over at We Got Class, Lindsay Ellis has some interesting ramblings about female characters in popular fiction and the impossible standards we hold them to. For one thing, because female characters (and in particular female protagonists) are comparatively rare in popular fiction, we want them to not only be well-rounded and complex characters, but to also stand for everything that's awesome and stay far far away from every female cliché that's ever been used. That's not a tall order or anything, is it?
Readers, women especially, judge the hell out of female characters. I may hate the Twilight um… saga is not a good word for this thing… the Twilight fantasies of a repressed housewife that got published as much as the next guy, but it makes me kinda ill to see how much hate the main character gets when similar male mains may not. Take the main character for Dan Brown’s books. Langdon, I think. If possible, he has even less personality than Bella, but nowhere near as much vitriol. I dunno, maybe those are targeted towards an older audience. But then you look at The Hunger Games, which is much better thought out and better written, and people, mostly female, still cry out “Mary Sue!” We just can’t win.
The same is actually true of any minority, whether it be people of colour, LGBT characters, or anyone else who gets routinely ignored or diminished by standard depictions in fiction and pop culture. It certainly doesn't help any efforts to diversify if we're too afraid to tackle these characters because of the inevitable backlash.
Of course it helps if we see them as characters first and [insert minority here] second, but that doesn't necessarily stop it from being a herculean task. Why is it every female character have to stand for every woman in the world when a male character can just be his own self? Do you think having complex female protagonists more frequently would help, or will people always be tougher on the chicks than on the dudes?
Readers, women especially, judge the hell out of female characters. I may hate the Twilight um… saga is not a good word for this thing… the Twilight fantasies of a repressed housewife that got published as much as the next guy, but it makes me kinda ill to see how much hate the main character gets when similar male mains may not. Take the main character for Dan Brown’s books. Langdon, I think. If possible, he has even less personality than Bella, but nowhere near as much vitriol. I dunno, maybe those are targeted towards an older audience. But then you look at The Hunger Games, which is much better thought out and better written, and people, mostly female, still cry out “Mary Sue!” We just can’t win.
The same is actually true of any minority, whether it be people of colour, LGBT characters, or anyone else who gets routinely ignored or diminished by standard depictions in fiction and pop culture. It certainly doesn't help any efforts to diversify if we're too afraid to tackle these characters because of the inevitable backlash.
Of course it helps if we see them as characters first and [insert minority here] second, but that doesn't necessarily stop it from being a herculean task. Why is it every female character have to stand for every woman in the world when a male character can just be his own self? Do you think having complex female protagonists more frequently would help, or will people always be tougher on the chicks than on the dudes?