All the other girls

[gryphonsegg]

I am just about fed up with books in which the main character is female but all the important supporting characters are male, especially when the setting is one which appears to have equality on the surface (no expressions of surprise to find a woman doing the heroine's job or holding certain titles, no evidence that family law favors husbands/fathers over wives/mothers, girls going to school with boys presented as completely normal and unworthy of comment, some high-ranking women referred to in passing or given walk-on roles) and yet all the people who really matter in Our Heroine's life and career and adventures just happen to be men. This is bothering me so much more than it used to. Maybe it's because I've begun to notice it more, or maybe it's just because I've recently started two different books which I picked up in part because they featured female main characters, and in both cases, after I got into the story, it occurred to me that they were completely surrounded by male characters. One of them looked very promising at first, with women other than the main holding positions of authority and/or jobs that are heavily male-dominated in the real world, but as the plot progressed, they turned out to be very minor characters, whereas there are multiple male characters who are moving the plot as much as or more than the heroine and who have much more character development than any of the other female characters. I don't just want fantasy about a world where one woman is special enough to have a story told from her point of view; I want fantasy about a world where women are half the population and the story reflects that.

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