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I have two daughters, and one is old enough to be into the decade's crop of vampire-ish books and movies. I don't have any huge problem with these things. A lot of things about them are cool. I've noticed a pattern about their characters that I find kind of annoying, though. It's not as though things were better in the past, but I'd hoped we'd moved further by now.

 

Pattern is: seemingly ordinary teenage girl discovers she has great supernatural powers, and meets an extremely handsome twenty-something man who already has a long badass backstory with his equally great supernatural powers. He knows everything and she knows nothing, but nonetheless he falls in love with her because she has comparable supernatural powers, and is otherwise fairly but not extremely pretty, brave and intelligent.

 

Exemplars that struck me are: Twilight; City of Bones; and this German trilogy, of which the books have been translated into English but the first movie has not yet been dubbed (Rubinrot, Ruby Red) and may well not be. How many others are there, that fit the same pattern?

 

On the one hand, we're doing a heck of a lot better than Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. At least there are female characters that do things, instead of just standing there. The female character is the main protagonist, in fact, and her gradual growth in competence is the main plot arc. These stories are Bildungsromane: she winds up pulling her weight.

 

But she needs the amazing male's help to get there. it's still disappointing that such a large imbalance in initial competence between male and female characters seems to be de rigeur. She-is-a-child-in-his-world is the teenage theme of the decade, it seems.

 

And, as the trope says, that's terrible. It says that young women shouldn't expect to be good at things themselves, but should expect amazing men who can take care of them to fall at their feet for no particular reason — and if that doesn't happen, they must be no good at all. And it says that a man has to be a superman for even ordinary women to like him.

 

I'm not freaked out about this. Movies have never been a good guide to life. But I'm planning to have a talk with my daughter about it. And I'm also interested because I'm writing a novel with a young female protagonist who is anything but an ingenue.

 

I'd appreciate any comments on the topic.

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Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series tried to balance out male and female characters, but in the end it still came down to the male characters having the major roles and directing most of the female characters. At the end it's Rand that figures out how to win and makes the sacrifice.

 

Robert Asprin in his Myth Adventure series added some women with major roles, but since the series started off with Aahz and Skeeve, except for a few short stories, it still is a male dominated multi-dimensional universe. The imbalance was moderated with Bunny, Tanda, and Pookie having larger roles in the later books.

 

There have been some attempts to have female protagonists in some books. But some were the typical Robert A. Heinlein heroine who saves the world and is home by 5 to cook dinner as one of my friends put it. Or there were other undesirable things in the writing like subtle racism that detract from the attempts.

 

Too much of literature requires a woman to have a man in some way whereas a man can get through the whole book without women.

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I think Randomizer may have missed the point of the topic.

 

What SoT described is not terribly different from the plot of Buffy, though Buffy herself had some backstory and knowledge of her powers even before Angel (and Giles & co.) got involved.

 

Then again, there's a semi-similar pattern with genders reversed in the Monkey Island series, though Guybrush has no particular powers, and the Voodoo Lady isn't his lover (and Elaine is just a lot more competent, though she has no real powers either).

 

I think the "other person with powers and more backstory" is just a convenient plot device, and like any convenient plot device, it's sort of lazily applied.

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Pattern is: seemingly ordinary teenage girl discovers she has great supernatural powers, and meets an extremely handsome twenty-something man who already has a long badass backstory with his equally great supernatural powers. He knows everything and she knows nothing, but nonetheless he falls in love with her because she has comparable supernatural powers, and is otherwise fairly but not extremely pretty, brave and intelligent.

Well, part of the problem is that some (most?) of the books in that vein (eg, Twilight) are romance novels/films, so of course they're going to be full of problematic tropes.

 

Tamora Pierce's Tortall novels are good young adult novels with girl or woman protagonists. Their quality varies, but they are usually pretty good. It's fairly typical fantasy, though, not contemporary speculative fiction.

 

Dikiyoba.

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Most books where a male hero has powers the teacher is also male. The Myth Adventures books have Skeeve learning how to use magic from Aahz. Very little training comes from female characters even though they know more of the dimensions than he does. Maasha, established magic user, comes to Skeeve for training.

 

There the trope is a buddy relationship instead of romantic.

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I'd say there's a couple intersecting issues here. The first is that mentor figures in popular media tend to be male, period, regardless of protagonist gender. You don't really see female Ben Kenobis or Yodas around. Note this is for current stuff -- I can think of fairy tales or mythological stories where this isn't the case.

 

(*show new posts* Randomizer is sniping me here.)

 

The other trend I've noticed is that the love interests for female protagonists tend to be essential for the plot. Love interests for male characters can be too, of course, but it's much more rare. You can imagine Superman without Lois Lane or Indiana Jones without Marion, but someone like Edward is essential for Twilight to work.

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Like Kelandon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer springs to mind. She definitely falls into that pattern to some extent and her depicted relationships are problematic in many ways. At the very least, though, she is ultimately more powerful than any of the male protagonists; the show deals with a lot more than romance. It's uses and subversions of tropes are numerous (the site TvTropes spawned from a Buffy forum).

 

I'm not familiar with Twilight. It's a romance novel, so I'm not interested, but people's descriptions make it sound like an abusive relationship. I don't know if that's a fair assessment, but I couldn't really know without reading it.

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people's descriptions make it sound like an abusive relationship. I don't know if that's a fair assessment, but I couldn't really know without reading it.

 

http://io9.com/5413428/official-twilights-bella--edward-are-in-an-abusive-relationship

 

(not the most robust of sources, but eh. immediately sprang to mind)

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There is a lot of fiction where a key element of the conflict is a female character overcoming the limitations of a patriarchal society. Based on that, it would be somewhat unrealistic to have a female mentor unless going for an amazon approach. There is more opportunity for a female lead with a female mentor in science fiction since the society portrayed is often more egalitarian than the often deliberately "old" societies of fantasy books. David Webber's Honor Harrington series stars a female who had a male mentor who then proceeds to mentor both males and females. His War God series has several strong female characters, though do to the nature of society most have been mentored by females.

 

The Darkover series and a lot of Anne McCafferty's works do feature female characters, often as the lead, with MZB's work tending to focus on overcoming the male dominated society.

 

For tween/teen fiction, the Percy Jackson series and its various off-shoots do not have the "lesser" female falling in love with her male "mentor" but have a lot more of a relationship of equals, despite the inherent male domination of the Greek and Roman gods.

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There is a lot of fiction where a key element of the conflict is a female character overcoming the limitations of a patriarchal society. Based on that, it would be somewhat unrealistic to have a female mentor unless going for an amazon approach.

Or, you know, the older woman is a good mentor to the protagonist because she also overcame the limitations of a patriarchal society?

 

Dikiyoba.

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Or, you know, the older woman is a good mentor to the protagonist because she also overcame the limitations of a patriarchal society?

 

Dikiyoba.

 

Certainly, but that reduces the impact of the protagonist overcoming the limitations. Being first is more dramatic.

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All this Buffy talk is way out of context. I have a hard time thinking of any show that has a more consistent theme of smashing the

patriarchy, especially given (season 7 spoilers). And while she at first appears to fit the pattern regarding her male lover, then (seasons 2, 3, and 5 spoilers).

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While Buffy spent a lot on ending the patriarchy of the Watchers. Even at the end of season 7 it still came down to women with power are idiots and need men to save them:

 

Willow goes insane with using dark magic and is redeemed by Xander to save the world.

Angel comes to help Buffy against Caleb to give her time to recover and the amulet.

Spike uses the amulet to seal the Hellmouth because even with all the Slayers they are losing the battle to attrition.

Voting to throw Buffy out of her home and put Faith in charge.

 

There are other examples through out the series where without the men there would be trouble later on because women make wrong decisions.

 

Giles killing Glory's human form to ensure that Glory never returns.

Xander stopping O'Toole and his zombie friends from setting off a bomb as Buffy fights the Hellmouth opening and never telling anyone.

Xander lying to Buffy about ensouling Angel in order to make sure the world doesn't get sucked down to Hell because she held back. Also Spike striking a deal with her to prevent it.

 

Then there is Buffy's whole dating all the wrong guys ending with Spike who takes this as a vacation after a hundred years with Drusilla's insanity.

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I've never watched Buffy. I've been off TV for many years now. I can imagine how there could be arguments either way for the series, though. At some point this kind of discussion becomes futile. With a flawed female protagonist, the flaws can call the protagonist status into question. You wonder if she's an affirmative action protagonist who can't earn her trip to the podium, but has simply been posed on a pedestal by the author; a flawed male hero merely has feet of clay. I think the only thing to do at that point is give everyone the benefit of the doubt and leave it, even though there may seem to be lots more room for argument. If the perceived flaws in a character are ones you wouldn't bother discussing in a male character, then the discussion probably isn't worthwhile.

 

I like Harry Potter, but in some ways there are a lot of things wrong with the series, and this is certainly one. Harry isn't supposed to be a genius; his main strength is courage. So Hermione supplies a lot of understanding. But it's not Hermione Granger and the Magic of Time. If she actually did much in the books, as opposed to just standing around supplying tips, she'd eclipse Harry. So she's safely tamped down. As Rowling herself has publicly acknowledged, she wimped out of writing the story of Harry and Hermione. That would have been much harder to write. It could easily have imploded completely; Rowling's YA fantasy world is robust as those things go, but it's not clear it could really stand the strain of a really serious relationship. If Harry and Hermione got too real, Hogwarts would probably have cracked. So maybe Rowling is just a good enough artist to know the limits of her material.

 

It remains true that Harry Potter has several impressive and original and memorable characters, and they're all male. Rowling's female characters are passive and stereotypical. Only one of the eight Harry Potter movies passes the Bechdel test; the books apparently all do, but the movies aren't really getting this wrong. They're just compressing the books, which are long enough to squeeze in a couple of trivial bits of female-to-female dialog that don't mention men. No interactions among women are important in any of the books, except insofar as they concern men. Yet the Harry Potter series does at least have a lot of female characters. They don't make any plays, but they sit on the benches. I suppose that's progress.

 

Like Harry Potter, the three book/movie examples that twigged me to this pattern are all Young Adult novels written by women. Female authors write to sell books, the same as male authors, not to strike blows for womankind. And it can be harder than you'd think to write a book within political constraints. At some point you need some personal fascination with your characters, to pull you through the long slog of writing — especially in your first book, when you have to expect that your own fascination may be the only reward you'll ever get. So okay, every doggone vampire/shadowhunter/time traveler martial-arts badass — every one of the three of them — has to also be a piano virtuoso. It gets lonely writing late at night.

 

Maybe I'm just doing the same thing with my female protagonist (though at least she's tone deaf); she's certainly not just declared to be heroic by the author. Her exploits are most of the plot. I can imagine debate over whether she's really female, however. As I even have one of my villains say at one point, "She's got balls like millstones. Somewhere inside." Have I just got it wrong, or is that the inevitable reaction to a really active female protagonist? I hope it's not true you can't win, but it isn't easy.

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While Buffy spent a lot on ending the patriarchy of the Watchers. Even at the end of season 7 it still came down to women with power are idiots and need men to save them:

Then there is Buffy's whole dating all the wrong guys ending with Spike who takes this as a vacation after a hundred years with Drusilla's insanity.

 

Another perspective on Buffy is that men with power are evil and need a woman to stop them. You can run through the episode guide and find a lot more evidence of a bias this way, if you are looking for biases than you can for women with power are idiots. By season 7, Buffy was suffering from a pretty severe (and realistic) case of battle fatigue, and JW also was giving the rest of the ensemble their chances to shine before ending the show. Buffy still remains their inspiration. While there are indeed examples in the show where men are in trouble because the female characters made the wrong decisions, there are also examples where the female characters are in trouble because of the male characters decisions. If we tell authors that only their male characters can make mistakes, then their female characters become more boring.

 

As to Buffy's series of awful boyfriends, yes, she could have had the eye candy boy friend instead who just sits around and waits to be rescued. That would have been a major reversal on a trope, but not as interesting as what was actually written. So should a bunch of great stories have been thrown out just so we could have a trope reversal.

 

I agree with SoT that the YA vampire romance line is creepy (200 year old person dating 15 year old person is statutory rape even if he looks like a teenager) and the whole fall in love with your teacher/mentor/person with power over you situation is bad as well. I kept this paragraph gender neutral, because it is bad either way. Writing a novel where 15 year old female falls in love with her 200 year old female mentor is no better. Writing a novel where strong female mentors strong female protagonist who then goes off to have good and bad relationships with strong characters is a lot better writing, though I am not sure about it being better selling.

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Randomizer, you just cherry-picked 7 plot points from a show with 144 episodes that overwhelmingly and constantly depict the opposite of what you claim. And even those cherries you picked aren't looking too ripe.

 

"women with power are idiots and need men to save them"

"Willow goes insane with using dark magic and is redeemed by Xander to save the world"

When Willow is overwhelmed by dark power, it's true that Xander saves the day -- but he does that on the basis of his platonic friendship with her going back to when they were kids. And you mentioned that, yet left out a related point, the show's most direct tie-in to real life: the spell Willow casts that shares Buffy's power with oppressed women all over the world.

 

"Angel comes to help Buffy against Caleb to give her time to recover and the amulet.

Spike uses the amulet to seal the Hellmouth because even with all the Slayers they are losing the battle to attrition."

Angel's "help" is essentially as a courier from TPTB. A guest star courier, that's it. Spike has a bigger role: but the two biggest players are undoubtedly Buffy and Willow. And let's not leave out that this is a season whose cast was literally flooded with a constant stream of new female characters (the potentials).

 

"Voting to throw Buffy out of her home and put Faith in charge."

Um, Faith is also a woman, so this doesn't fit your "need men to save them" story at all.

 

"women make wrong decisions."

"Giles killing Glory's human form to ensure that Glory never returns."

Man, TALK about cherry-picking and leaving out context. Giles gives a speech, when he does that, about how Buffy is a hero and doesn't kill people. Meanwhile, the only reason Giles is even able to do that is because Glory was defeated; the primary contributions there come from Buffy and Willow, and the final act that seals away Glory's dimension of hell? Buffy sacrificing her own life!

 

"Xander lying to Buffy about ensouling Angel in order to make sure the world doesn't get sucked down to Hell because she held back. Also Spike striking a deal with her to prevent it."

Xander had it out for Angel for literally all of the show up until that point; his lie of omission was as likely the result of his general jealousy as anything else. As far as Spike goes: he was still the secondary player in that fight, and he cut out and left halfway through.

 

You're interpreting any situation in which a man is involved at all as somehow meaning that the women -- despite being stronger and having more screen time and being the center of the stories and more critical to victory -- are weak or need men. I really don't understand how you're managing to do this.

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Okay, if we're blowing this topic up into the awful portrayal of women in media, one of the more depressing examples for me is Marvel movies, particularly the X-Men movies. Look at Chris Claremont-era X-Men comics, and then look at what's been done with them in film. Claremont was very careful about diversity along a whole bunch of different lines (immigrants, racial minorities, etc.). His female character were strong, but the "strong" thing is overplayed; they were interesting and complex, which is far more important. Then look at the movies, and despair at Hollywood. (Rogue in the first X-Men movie is actually sort of an example of what the first post was originally talking about.)

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A couple of things come to mind here for me. I read the Twilight series and *braces for judgment* loved it. I read City of Bones and loved it. The Hunger Games, Iron Fey, Green Rider, Matched, My daughters bring these books home from school and we read them together, and we all enjoy them. The whole damsel in distress (who starts somewhat vulnerably ignorant and grows in knowledge and strength) thing works for me and a lot of other people or it wouldn't be a popular theme. I like male characters to be 'physically' strong and protective. I like female characters to be 'emotionally' strong and loyal. Personal preference perhaps but if the populace hated the idea, they wouldn't be buying the books en mass. I think the pattern gives people hope. Because we can relate. I am surely very ignorant in a lot of things that could be useful to know if I ever needed to survive, but I'd like to be reassured that it is possible to learn what I don't know and become competent where I am currently not.

 

Plus the emotional connection made when boy helps girl is easier to swallow, I think, than when girl helps boy. There's a pride issue that must be overcome. Maybe there shouldn't be a pride issue, but it does exist.

 

On a totally different note, I just realized how my main RP characters in From the Ashes are, like, almost the opposite. Female Fiora is young, powerful, and fairly knowledgeable while male Civyl is twice as old, fairly ignorant, and had his power stripped from him. Huzzah for breaking the mold without realizing it was there.

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The whole damsel in distress (who starts somewhat vulnerably ignorant and grows in knowledge and strength) thing works for me and a lot of other people or it wouldn't be a popular theme.

Most novels begin with a vulnerable and ignorant character who develops over time. It has nothing to do with any sort of distressed damsel trope. In fact, damsels in distress are less likely to grow because they are always relying on men to do things for them instead of learning and doing things on their own.

 

Dikiyoba.

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I just remember one of the Harry Potter movies where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are falling to their deaths, and Potter is all like "[censored], I don't know the spell to stop us from smashing our bodies onto the rocks"; but Hermione is all like "well, damn Potter, I actually payed attention in class." And she saves them all.

 

It's just so obvious (to me) that without her, Potter wouldn't have gone, or done anything of value in that series.

 

BTW: At my university we had a Quidditch tournament—with Snitch, broom sticks, and all that. lol. Was pretty cool. :)

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Pattern is: seemingly ordinary teenage girl discovers she has great supernatural powers, and meets an extremely handsome twenty-something man who already has a long badass backstory with his equally great supernatural powers. He knows everything and she knows nothing, but nonetheless he falls in love with her because she has comparable supernatural powers, and is otherwise fairly but not extremely pretty, brave and intelligent.

 

How about the story with a badass dragon-language shouting Nord guy who meets up a century-old vampire lady (who also has some badass powers by pelting sharp ice and raising the undead)? And then they travel to dimensions where you don't even know if you're still in Tamriel, hoping to stop her father from fulfilling the prophecy that 'the vampires will no longer fear the tyranny of the sun'. And at the end of the quest, the Nord guy wears an amulet of Mara and asks the vampire lady if she could marry him. She will only say she knows the Nord guy is a great man, but he just can't stand the sight of Riften's temple and stuff. How about we become just friends?

 

I hate you Serana :(

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Uh... what about Hermione, Ginny, Mrs. Weasley, Professor McGonagall, Luna Lovegood, Bellatrix Lestrange, Professor Umbridge, Moaning Myrtle, and more besides?

They're there, but by 'original and memorable', I'm talking about Harry, Snape, Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Hagrid. Who's going to go to a dress-up party as Mrs. Weasley? I did Harry Potter once with nothing but a marker, and everyone recognized him.

 

(Actually, I also used some kind of spray to darken my hair.)

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There are a lot of female mentors in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books.

Hmm, I've read some Lackey, but only a collection of short stories. But yeah, the odd counterexample is great, but I'd say the trend is there. There are some character archetypes where women are not just underrepresented, but more so than usual. Another one we've talked about before on these forums is the female Trickster. I can think of female thieves, I guess, but no Anansi/Loki/Br'er Rabbit/Bugs Bunny/whatever. Mythology or pop culture. In fact, the shape-shifting Loki is probably the closest we get.

 

Re: Harry Potter and the Bechdel Test: Since the series is consistently told from Harry's limited perspective, every conversation has him either as a participant or an eavesdropper. Thus, kinda hard for it to pass the test. Which is fine! The test functions great for some works, like films with ensembles casts, or ongoing series, or whatever. It works poorly for other works, like ones with a cast you can count on one hand, or the aforementioned male PoV. The test should function as one of many indicators for feminist thought, and not a perfect one at that. Something like Harry Potter or Gravity (to pick a small cast film) can fail the test and still have feminist themes or good female characters or whatever. It's just Type II error. Likewise, Twilight passes the Bechdel Test with ease and still has a lot of issues regarding feminism. That's just Type I error.

 

Re: Memorable: Hermione, at the very least, belongs in a list alongside Snape, Hagrid, and the rest. You may not like her, or see her appeal. That's fine. But the character, along with a bunch of the other women listed, definitely has a devoted following and is considered to be well-crafted.

 

EDIT: When I think about it, if someone made a film explicitly about feminism, it could quite conceivably fail the Bechdel Test. :p

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It's just so obvious (to me) that without her, Potter wouldn't have gone, or done anything of value in that series.

The feeling is that this wasn't obvious enough to Rowling. It would seem as though Hermione ought to have been able to do more than she did. Apparently Rowling twigged to this somewhere around book 7, and by then it was too late.

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Re: Memorable: Hermione, at the very least, belongs in a list alongside Snape, Hagrid, and the rest. You may not like her, or see her appeal. That's fine. But the character, along with a bunch of the other women listed, definitely has a devoted following and is considered to be well-crafted.

Yeah, I might concede Hermione. My main complaint about her is that she doesn't seem to live up to her potential, which seems really high. She's a brilliant witch, in a world of magic, where the poles of the world are two famously gifted wizards. Why isn't Hermione's talent worth a lot more than it is?

 

The other thing about Hermione is that although she's a good character, as a person she's ordinary. The memorable male characters all have something about them that's really bizarre and over-the-top; they're slightly cartoonish. That makes them memorable. Maybe authors are just reluctant to make a girl that stands out?

 

About the Bechdel test for Harry Potter: the books do pass the test, essentially by virtue of length. It's a good point that Harry's viewpoint is almost as consistent as it would be in first-person narration; but is this is an excuse? The Bechdel test result is a fact, yes or no. A work that fails the test isn't necessarily just Bad, but the fact is the fact. The fact that it doesn't even seem all that disturbing is part of the point. The animated Barbie movies pass the gender-reversed Bechdel test.

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They're there, but by 'original and memorable', I'm talking about Harry, Snape, Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Hagrid. Who's going to go to a dress-up party as Mrs. Weasley? I did Harry Potter once with nothing but a marker, and everyone recognized him.

 

http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/07/12/top-25-harry-potter-characters?page=1

 

http://www.collegehumor.com/toplist/6955792/the-best-characters-in-the-harry-potter-universe

 

http://www.empireonline.com/features/greatest-harry-potter-characters/default.asp

 

Dikiyoba.

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maybe hermione just wasn't some ego-stuffed ass who just had to be a main character. just because someone isnt a main character doesn't mean that the author is a horrible person or something. maybe it just means they didn't need twenty billion main characters floating around.

 

Maybe authors are just reluctant to make a girl that stands out?

or, more likely, they had already filled their quota of over-the-top. i don't see how a character being not-the-main-character makes them somehow second-class?

 

i might be going off on a tangent but i doubt very many worthwhile authors have a checklist of characteristics they need to include. I doubt many editors go "This is a great story, but aww shucks, you came short on your minority quota!"

 

my parting thought is, if you take a character in a story and get rid of any and all references to gender, however you want to awkwardly go about that, does the character stand as a good character.

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i might be going off on a tangent but i doubt very many worthwhile authors have a checklist of characteristics they need to include. I doubt many editors go "This is a great story, but aww shucks, you came short on your minority quota!"

I don't know about editors saying that for books, but focus testing is definitely done for movies. Though whether this solves more problems than it causes is up for debate. And, of course, there's the usual Hollywood mentality that women have an easier time relating to male characters than men do to female characters.

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In the first list, of 25, the bottom sixteen are equally male and female; the top nine are eight to one male. The second list of ten is seven to three, with Harry himself being forbidden as a selection (and a strong hint given that one should avoid obvious choices in general). The third list of 25 was loading too slowly for me, but it began with Hedwig the owl, who is apparently female. That's just disgraceful tokenism, because I know owlish, and I can tell you that Hedwig only ever hoots about male owls.

 

Hermione is of course the one female who does make the top few, and she's not really memorable in the way that I mean. She's memorable for being in the Harry Potter saga, but she herself isn't one of its striking features. Apart from supplying some convenient magical plot devices, her role in the saga is mainly to be a healthy and normal person with a clear view of the mad magical world. That's absolutely a fine role to have, and a character like this is probably necessary in a story like hers. The fact remains, I think, that she's more a Watson than a Holmes.

 

This is the way that Harry Potter is relevant to my original post in this thread. I'm not particularly complaining that there are no important female characters, although in Harry Potter women are still distinctly under-represented in important roles. In the three other series I mentioned, the young women are the main protagonists. But my concern is rather that the women are ordinary while the men are extraordinary. Hermione's talent goes a long way to making up for her mudblood background, and Harry's own non-magical childhood softens his legendary status; but the basic pattern is still there, albeit smudged.

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Or, more likely, they had already filled their quota of over-the-top. i don't see how a character being not-the-main-character makes them somehow second-class?

As I said, women write to sell books, the same as men do. We bought Rowling in hardcover, and when my daughter demands that I transfer more of her saved-up allowance hoard into Amazon credit, I do the website password shuffle, and watch as my inbox fills up with notes from Amazon about the Kindle books she's bought. These writers are not evil people committing crimes against nature. Not ticking all the right boxes doesn't make you bad. Not every character has to be the face on the cover.

 

Characters come out as they do, stories tell themselves, stuff happens.

 

It's just, as I said, that this is a pattern: ordinary women and extraordinary men. One or two books are a fluke. Three separate series, that all got made into films, that are all so similar in this respect? That's a pattern. That's not just chance. You could say it's just all the fault of Twilight, but then you have to explain why Twilight took off.

 

A somewhat creepy minor character is one thing; but sometimes there's a big reveal, and they're not so minor. As a fluke I can shrug this pattern off, but I'm a little more concerned, if it's really an archetype.

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i can't speak for jkr but i find it's easier for me to write cartoonishly over-the-top male characters than to do the same for female characters because i can think of a man in the abstract as a set of physical and mental moving parts without considering what he's like as a fully realised human being and it's harder for me to do that with a woman

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You could say it's just all the fault of Twilight, but then you have to explain why Twilight took off.

 

I blame that on teenage hormones mostly.

 

I don't know how it works with the vampire side of things, but I've noticed that women have bigger or better roles in Sci-Fi. Samantha Carter and possibly Aeryn Sun for example.

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I'm not sure whether this issue of cartoonishness is really exactly the thing I care about, but it's at least a bit different from the somewhat tired topic of 'strength' in characters, so I'd like to explore it. It's probably a more subjective topic, but oh well.

 

I don't happen to be all that interested in mundane realism. Virginia Woolf said, "Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough." I buy that. In fiction, I want to see the extraordinary. Extraordinary places and events are great, but people are especially interested in people, so extraordinary people are what people like me want to see. Ordinary people then make good foils, to show off the extraordinary ones.

 

My impression is that extraordinary characters in fiction are preponderantly male, with female characters more often being the ordinary foils. I can think of exceptions. Frozen, for a recent instance, has an ordinary female heroine and a couple of perfectly decent male characters, but the only really extraordinary character is the ice queen Elsa, and she works great. Maybe recent TV supplies more exceptions — I haven't watched much TV at all in the last fifteen years. I'd be happy to be informed that my impression of male preponderance is totally wrong, but if we agree that it's basically true, then I'm not really interested in nitpicking about whether a handful of exceptions count, or not.

 

Even leaving the gender bias issue aside, the idea of extraordinary characters is interesting in itself. The 'cartoonish' idea seems to get at the way that extraordinary characteristics tend to simplify a character. They have one or just a few really unusual features, and you focus on those; they tend to define the character. Fictional characters can carry an awful lot of ordinary qualities, and it doesn't take a vast data dump to explain them, because everybody already knows about them. A few hints and cues are enough to get the idea across. I think a couple of extraordinary aspects are all a character can manage, without needing chapter-long footnotes all the time. The time you spend presenting those few extraordinary aspects tends to use up much of the character's allotment of minutes or pages, so they really are defined mainly by their exceptional qualities. I'm not sure it's possible to have a 'fully realized' extraordinary character, unless you have a really long book.

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but it began with Hedwig the owl' date=' who is apparently female. That's just disgraceful tokenism, because I know owlish, and I can tell you that Hedwig only ever hoots about male owls.[/quote']

What. No, seriously, what.

 

Anyway, your contention is that there were no memorable and original characters in Harry Potter. You're wrong. There are plenty of them. Now your complaint is that none of them are weird enough. You're wrong again. Luna Lovegood (seriously, it's right there in the name), Nymphadora Tonks, Professor Trelawney, Rita Skeeter, Professor Umbridge, and Bellatrix Lestrange (again, look at the name) are all extraordinary. Even Hermione, the insufferable know-it-all with buck teeth and bushy hair who prefers books and academia so strongly that she quits the nebulous, unpredictable Divination course mid-term, is larger-than-life. We are just less likely to notice it because extraordinarily intelligent characters (men and women, maybe even a non-binary or ambiguously-gendered character or two) is such a common trope. Now please stop moving the goalpost and move on. Sheesh.

 

Dikiyoba.

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Hermione is of course the one female who does make the top few, and she's not really memorable in the way that I mean... That's absolutely a fine role to have, and a character like this is probably necessary in a story like hers. The fact remains, I think, that she's more a Watson than a Holmes... Hermione's talent goes a long way to making up for her mudblood background, and Harry's own non-magical childhood softens his legendary status; but the basic pattern is still there, albeit smudged.

Hmm. I'm not sure I follow why Hermione doesn't count. I feel like you're being much harder on her than on some of the male characters you gave a pass to, like Voldemort, who for almost all of the series is an extremely generic Big Bad.

 

I don't know if it's worth arguing this; but I'd find it helpful if you'd articulate what criteria you're using to make the lists in a way that does not depend on the enumerated characters for definition. Then we can easily debate the suitability of the criteria, and we can also easily debate which characters we think best fit it. As is it's kind of all in a soup, and since each of those two debates affects the other, it's hard to argue about either one in soup-form.

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Most novels begin with a vulnerable and ignorant character who develops over time. It has nothing to do with any sort of distressed damsel trope. In fact, damsels in distress are less likely to grow because they are always relying on men to do things for them instead of learning and doing things on their own.

 

So with the proof of humanity responding positively to the theme by spending money on it, the postulated hope such characters may give readers, and a proposed issue of male pride that could be discussed, you instead choose to quibble over the type of character you assume is meant by 'damsel in distress'? Why make the brash and untrue statement that a damsel in distress ALWAYS relies on a man? There are different levels of damsel characters and I can assure you that the type of character you are portraying is barely similar to what I would picture. Rapunzel in Tangled? Damsel in distress who could still hold her own.

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Oh, Diki. So strict about semantics. So I'm not allowed to qualify my use of the phrase to angle its meaning towards a character that would learn and grow? How is anything to be discussed if we can't add to the meaning of given concepts?

 

If the Rapunzel in Tangled is not a damsel in distress character, what is she?

 

Really Diki all I want is an honest discussion. There are so many other good things to debate here besides a perceived misuse of language.

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As a redneck male living in a family full of redneck women, let me assure you I have no problem with the idea of a strong female character that can hold her own in almost any circumstance. And any circumstance she cannot handle alone would be equally insurmountable by the male character as well. But together, they complement each other and form a team that is greater than the sum of their strengths.

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