My First Favourite Female Fantasy Heroes

[cassiphone]

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

There’s been some talk around the internets in recent days about how rare it is for women to declare and own their awesomeness, without apologising for it, or putting conditions on it, or basically explaining it away until it doesn’t exist any more.

This reminded me of a

Comments

[julietvalcouer]

I think "Mary Sue" has wandered WAY too far from its original definition. The original Mary Sue ('trope namer') was in a Star Trek fanfic and she was doing something like commanding the Enterprise at age 11 and by the end of the stories was Picard's adopted daughter, youngest Admiral ever, a literal *Princess*...just TOO MUCH. The entire universe revolved around her, every single canon character adored her, she solved everyone's problems...A Mary Sue is a character who's TOO MUCH. (I would say Bella Swan absolutely qualifies. Her flaws are all informed, she upsets the balance of the entire supernatural world, characters who start out hating her either end up dead or thinking she's the most wonderful creature ever. Bonus points for being a physical author avatar

[cassiphone]

I'm uncomfortable with the term being used at all outside fanfic, and it's becoming more and more widely used to put down any female character who is remotely awesome. I think readers (sadly and this includes many female readers) are simply more able to accept a male character who is special and important than a female one

[julietvalcouer]

If publishers write stuff that reads like fanfic then they SHOULD wear the Mary Sue, or the Gary Stu as the case may be

[julietvalcouer]

blah, strike publishers, insert authors.

[anonymous]

I love Mara

[cassiphone]

I shipped Mara with EVERYBODY. Though I did appreciate that in fact most of her more important relationships did not involve sex and in retrospect that is a good and awesome thing. But I was fifteen and loved Arakasi so much, and loathed the woman that he fell for :D

And yes I had the same experience of trying the authors' individual books and being left cold. There was just some glorious chemistry in the working together.

I would love to interview them both and find out how they did it, as it's not one of those books where you can see the seams between authors, and co-writing fascinates me.

[godiyeva]

I liked the Raymond Feist novels, but they wer almost the first fantasy I read, in grade 6. Haven't revisited much. I read the Daughter of the Empire books as they came out, and loved them much more...

[anonymous]

I was talking about Alix just last wednesday with my friend. Apparently the series is a bit uncomfortable to read these days

[callistra]

That was me!
Darn LJ
:-(
No wonder my friends list was so short this morning!

[godiyeva]

I would have to agree with Mara, who was the first I thought of