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/

Comments

[kansan_entrails]

Yeah this is really annoying. Not much else to say about it than that.

[gryphonsegg]

If you ever catch me doing this, please stop me. I don't think I've done it in any of my ongoing projects so far. In my stories that have a single viewpoint character, the supporting cast tends to be biased toward whichever sex the viewpoint character is.

[kansan_entrails]

Okay. -pat pat-

[tigerpetals]

This bothers me too. I think it didn't used to, but I noticed sometime in the past year or so that all the important characters in a series that was one of my favorites are male except for the lead.

[gryphonsegg]

I think my frustration with that kind of situation is exacerbated by the fact that most of the discussion I've seen about female representation in fiction has been centered around whether each separate female character, taken in isolation from the rest of the cast, does or does not qualify as "strong" or "a good role model." There is some value in that kind of critique, but it seems to me that too many people stop there and assume that the job is done and there's nothing more that girls/women could want from fiction than a list of strong female characters who get the role model seal of approval-- not relationships between mothers and daughters, sisters, best friends, or other f-f combinations that reflect RL relationships, not visions of possible futures where women are truly free to play any role in society, not situations where it's okay for a female character to mess up and fail to be a strong, empowered, positive role model because her failures aren't all there is to her as an individual and don't represent the limits of women as

[tigerpetals]

Exactly! It's like - generally - there's a checklist, and if 'badass' can be checked on it for any reason, that's good enough. Or at least really close to good enough.

Those are the same as the problems I see with all the old stereotypes - that positive female relations were absent or not important, or otherwise restricted, and female characters exist as specific models.

[gryphonsegg]

And then sometimes you find the opposite of that first thing you mentioned-- fans go through the checklist, and if they decide that they can't check off "badass" or if they end up checking something that someone deems "too girly," that must mean the character is a disaster. So we end up with fans who bash a female character for not being perfect, for not being expert at everything, for not being right all the time, or for making any choice the fans disagree with-- all in the name of "feminism," even though it bears a strong resemblance to the old "pedestal or gutter" dichotomy to which women have been subjected for a long, long time. I think this wouldn't be anywhere near as common as it currently is if audiences weren't prepped by narratives with only one significant female character to view all female characters like Highlander immortals-- there can only be one!