Ladies, You Are Awesome (Just Admit It, Quit Fronting)

[sarahtales]

I know it has been a while since I started waggling my arms around yelling 'Ladies in books! Let us SPEAK of them!' but today that time has rolled around again

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Your comment about Animal Farm reduced me to helpless giggles.

[ghd_iv_styler]

Brilliantly put.

[lots42]

Even G.I.Joe, of all fandoms, managed awesome female characters. Just don't get me started on how they dropped the ball with the black dudes.

[hermes_bags]

I need to share this on my facebook.

[archangelbeth]

Boy-centered book with pretty awesome girls -- the Lightning Thief and sequels (Percy Jackson series) by Rick Riordan.

Oh, and there's that Harry Potter thing.

*beth makes notes to take her book giftcard to the store along with a note saying "Brennan"*

[insane_duckfish]

Boy-centered book with pretty awesome girls -- the Lightning Thief and sequels (Percy Jackson series) by Rick Riordan.

I'll second that - I nicked this off my brother when I was desperate for things to read and missing the YA genre, and I loved it a lot. With guy-centred anything, I usually spend the entire time holding my breath, waiting for the girls to get sidelined or vilified, and for once I was pleasantly surprised. :D

[harborshore]

Yes, yes, yes. Too awesome? What? Or too serious, or too sexy, or too violent, or too tough (or not tough enough). What bothers me the most is the tendency to write women not as people but as archetypes, like The Mother or The Girlfriend, which, ugh. They often tend to react to instead of act themselves, which makes their characterizations so inconsistent. But sometimes it seems like people find them easier to read that way, and end up bothered when the girl is too much like a real person who reacts and acts. Does that make sense? I get angry about this a lot, and sometimes I end up incoherent.

One of my favorite ladies in fiction in a girl-centric book is Ronia, from Astrid Lindgren's Ronia, the Robber's Daughter. (You might recognize Lindgren's name from that other very famous girl-centric book Pippi Longstocking.) Ronia's trying to figure out how to be herself in a world that contains mostly men (the robbers and her father) and her deeply, deeply wonderful and non-stereotypical mother. When she starts to venture into the forest

[sarahtales]

It does, though I hasten to say that this is another one - a woman can be archetypal - like, a devoted mother, and still be awesome. One such woman is the heroine of Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, in which the heroine Briar's sole motivation is to save her child (from a zombie-infested steampunk Seattle).

I do keep hearing about Ronia, The Robber's Daughter. Noted!

[harborshore]

True! I was thinking about the retelling of The Three Musketeers with added 80's rock music that I saw a month ago, in which every woman but Milady was both archetypal and completely incoherently characterized--the fact that Milady was not is mostly down to the actress, methinks. But you're right, those two things don't necessarily go together--I'm just tired of there only being certain roles women can play, like in Ocean's 11. (I wanted a female explosives expert or pickpocket or anything, really.)

Briar sounds awesome, though! *adds to list*

[despez06]

On the subject of female pickpockets; have you seen Leverage? It is most excellent!

From one of the writer's blogs responding to some character criticism:

"my hacker's a hip person of color, my sex symbol isn't an anorexic in her 20's, and my badass uber-thief is a blonde we put in a dress precisely once a season."

[kadharonon]

I hope that whenever I actually manage to write down some of these stories that are bouncing around in my head, I manage to make the female characters awesome. So far, I have Lara, who is naive and whiny about the fact that she has no magical talents, and her aunt Nima, who has crazy-awesome accounting magic, and makes her living by putting peoples accounts in order and occasional blackmail. Lara wants very much to live inside social norms and marry a nice man and use her non-existent magic to make his life and business easier. Nima lives outside the social norms and is having a rocking time doing it, and keeps trying to convince her niece that she should too. So far, though, all I have is essentially this

[blamebrampton]

Excuse the interruption, but I had to mention that, aside from the fancying the boys, you seem to be psychically attuned to what it is to take tea with my mother. Experience has dispelled the awkwardness by now ...

[kadharonon]

I think the reason I do not just give up completely on ever writing this story is because I want to grow up to be Nima too, and just can't stand to abandon her in a notebook somewhere.