i have no intelligent title, say a lot, and i don't think i ever really come to a conclusion

[meganbmoore]

 I've been thinking about something I said in my post yesterday on Shana Abe's The Truelove Bride.  Since I doubt most here will bother with reading under the cut of a post about a romance novel unless given a powerful incentive to, here's the part I'm referring to:

I love heroines who are struggling their hardest in the only way they know how

Comments

i have some ARCs of Shana Abe..

[calledinvain]

in her dream thief, smoke thief series - and I know that I'm not going to get around to reading them. Would you like them, if you haven't read them already? I have smoke thief in paperback, and dream thief in hardcover.

Re: i have some ARCs of Shana Abe..

[meganbmoore]

Those are actually the only 2 other Abe books that I have(but haven't read yet...I understand it's a trilogy, so I may wait until I have them all.) Thanks, though.

Re: i have some ARCs of Shana Abe..

[calledinvain]

No problem, then! :)

[amandioka]

"they die and become martyrs or they whomp the bad guy, achieve all their goals, get the girl and become famous heroes."

Wouldn't it be interesting if the women were the ones that died and become martyrs or whomp the bad guy and all that? Hmm. I'll pay ore attention to what I read/watch and see if this happens.

[meganbmoore]

Most female characters die to inspire the male characters, it seems, and if they win and whomp the bad guy and live, they tend to not get as much acclaim.

[mystyangel]

I definitely understand where you're coming from and can agree with it--I've been reading a lot of 'feminist' art history arguments lately (Griselda Pollock's Differencing the Canon, for one) and it's really affected how I read what I read (especially in the fantasy genre) and what I watch (a friend dragged me to Good Luck Chuck and I almost walked out because of the repetitive 'all woman want is marriage' message it threw at the audience). What I noticed most is that a lot of female heroines reject 'proper' female roles in order to pursue more masculine professions--I'm thinking here of Tamora Pierce's Alanna and Lackey's Talia primarily.

That was a ramble.

[meganbmoore]

I think part of it is that most fiction portrays women as somehow being "prisoners" of fate and/or society, and unless she's "rescued"-either by herself or someone else-then if we get attached to female characters, we feel like she's been shafted, especially if she had to give things up for it, or if we somehow feel that she's "settling" somehow...a lot of the time, including with pairings I really like, I end up thinking autonomy and equality are being traded for protection.

[baleanoptera]

Very interesting post!
I completely agree with you in regards to Catelyn Stark - which is why I'm always utterly annoyed when people start talking bad about her. Granted this doesn't happen that much on LJ, but is one of the major reasons why I stopped reading the Ice and Fire Forum Board.

[meganbmoore]

I've seen some of the Cat bashing, both on LJ and elsewhere, and I have to repress an extreme kneejerk reaction to lash out. I just do not get it. She gets bashed for not accepring Jon, but she'd get bashed too if she'd never questioned that and gone "sure, I'm cool with you installing your illegitimate son in my home, and I won't ask a single question about it. She gets bashed for leaving Bran and Rickon, but if she'd stayed with them, she would have been bashed for letting Robb go off alone with no guidance and no one who loved him. Then there's all the stuff about how she was trying to interfere with things she didn't understand when she kept objecting to things people were doing and she didn't know what she was talking about. Did people miss the part where GRRM specifically had people dismiss what she said as her being an overprotective mother/worried woman, and then had EXACTLY what she was worried about happen? I don't think that was exactly accidental on his part.

Sorry, rant.

[peta_andersen]

I've read The Smoke Thief, though I can only say I didn't mind it. Shana Abe has a nice, open style, but I wasn't prepared for the focus on relationships over plot.

Mulan has a kinda-sorta happy ending, depending on what you happen to be reading; something I think is true for many stories.

I think your question about characters like this who, in the end, actually do get what they want without losing as much or more in the process* is a fairly open-ended one. What sort of characters? How are we defining hero or heroine? &c. &c.

On reading your post, Meg Murry from A Wrinkle In Time was the first character to spring to my mind--she and the others go through a lot in the book, but they achieve the ending they want, and are richer for the experiences, both positive and negative. The same is true for several L'Engle books.

*quotes aren't working for me just now.

[meganbmoore]

Based on Truelove Bride, Abe actually does better than most romance authors at having a plot