Student of Trinity

Benjamin Schumacher, the theoretical physicist who is best known for coining the term 'qubit' for a quantum bit, once suggested to me that some people are story thinkers, and others are game thinkers. Ben is hardly anyone to take a simplistic dichotomy too seriously; his work is about blurring the line between zero and one, after all. But I think he had a point, that "What does happen?" and "What could happen?" are different enough as ways of thinking that it's hard to follow one seriously without losing all sight of the other, at least at the time. How much would it take to turn one of Jeff's games into a decent novel? I think that practically anything could serve as a mere idea for a good novel to be based upon, but I'm wondering whether one could really translate quite a lot of a game into a book, directly. Could it go as far as taking fight scenes straight from game battles, for instance, and work without having to add masses more dialog that isn't present in the game? What are the chances of producing a really good story from a game? Do any of Jeff's games somehow contain the essential ingredients for making a fine story, or are they all doomed to mediocrity as stories, because of basic features they have, from being games? Are there any good stories that could be made into a good Spiderweb game (in precisely the way that won't ever happen because Jeff can't afford to pay royalties)? I have a vague feeling that I may have started a thread like this once before, but if so I think it must have been a while ago, so maybe it can have a second round, if indeed this is that. I've been losing touch with things here like that a bit over the past year or two. Not because anything has particularly gone downhill here, as far as I can tell, but rather for the good reason that some big things I've always wanted to do have begun to seem possible, with enough more work. I'm going for it, so I have less time to spare than I used to have. I doubt I'll disappear completely. For one thing, there is a lot of collective wisdom here about how games and stories work, and my interest in such topics seems to be an obsession that isn't going away.

I worked on my novel for about a year and half using Apple's Pages app. It gave me no problems even as the story stretched well past 100,000 words. Pages is a general-purpose word processor and doesn't claim to be optimized for writing novels in particular, but it's robust and easy to use. I liked that it wasn't anything more than that. I knew about fancy-pants apps like Ulysses or Scrivener, that offered all kinds of corkboard views and index cards and stuff. I was afraid of them. I thought they would be great tools for someone who wanted to be writing a novel — as opposed to someone who actually wanted to get one written. They would give you endless things to fiddle with, sustaining an illusion of production. The reality is, of course, that the only thing that really counts as progress is the bare text of your book itself. No matter how nice all your index cards look on your corkboard, no readers will ever buy and read your background notes about your world and your characters and your themes and your blah blah blah. Writing in Pages kept me honest. Every word in the file was a word of the book. If I needed to make notes to myself, I wrote a separate Pages file for notes. I had one big file for my book, and I couldn't kid myself that anything else counted. But a couple of months ago I decided that I had actually done pretty well in bringing a draft to a conclusion, and maybe I wasn't at such a high risk of getting bogged down forever in navel-gazing. I really didn't just want to be writing. I wanted to finish, and I would. The task of re-writing the third quarter of the book was just difficult. I knew how the story would end and I knew its first half, so I was painted into a corner in a lot of ways. It was a jigsaw puzzle, to fit everything into the existing frame. I knew I needed to cut some fresh pieces, but I wasn't sure exactly what holes I needed to fill. I decided to give Scrivener a try. Its killer feature is that it lets you carve up your text into little pieces, give them little titles and summaries and comments, and move them around or see them all together. It makes it easy to do all that, with just a few clicks or keystrokes. It makes moving between big picture and small pieces fast and easy. That's pretty good, in fact. There's definitely an opportunity to spill your effort into character notes and stuff, which are all part of your Scrivener document and so feel like they're part of your book even though they're not. But the app really does something, with its carving up text into chunks, that is hard to do with a general purpose word processor. Maybe for a first draft you're better to just pour everything into something like Pages until you've got the story told, baldly and badly; but for revisions, I think Scrivener may be a really useful tool. I've even started using Scrivener for scientific papers now. Scrivener doesn't do equations properly, so I'll have to export into LaTeX for the final version, but for getting the text itself right, the outlining feature of Scrivener may be even more useful for scientific papers than it is for fiction.

"The environment" makes me think of the planet as a whole. Things can certainly also go wrong locally, and smaller scale problems naturally have shorter time scales, both for going bad and for being fixed, and for the window within which they can be fixed. For local things, though, I only know my own immediate environment. In the places I personally know, nothing seems to be going especially wrong, above the background of general problems. The general impression that the planet is going rapidly downhill has been a media staple for my entire life, which is now nearly fifty years. The end has always been nigh, but in fact it hasn't come. I've heard jawboning about how pressing the problems are for decades. My impression is that this energetic consciousness-raising has mainly been a way for people who don't have any more useful ideas than anyone else to let themselves feel as though they've done their bit, by spreading the word. In fact that's the easy part, and isn't worth much. Serious efforts are something else. They do exist; for instance, the enormously expensive Energiewende underway for a decade in Germany. These interest me a lot. This season's episode of earnest public handwringing, not so much.

There has been an environmental crisis for fifty years or so now; so if it's really a crisis, it's a slow one. I think that's really important to recognize, because there's almost nothing we can do to change the world quickly, because the world is really big. I think there are things we can do that will help slowly. Since they're slow, we need to get going on them, but an atmosphere of unrealistic urgency may make us waste effort on the pursuit of quick fixes that would better be put into long-term plans. Materials science is making major advances these days. Soon things will all be made of pretty exotic materials. We've been smelting ore and baking ceramics for millennia, but soon the story of how a product was shaped and put together will be far shorter and simpler than the story of how the stuff that composes it was formed. In effect the working parts of our things will be molecules. This will surely offer the opportunity to just make things that cost enormously more energy to produce than ever before, and whose production produces more hazardous waste; but I'm hoping that expanding technology down to microscopic scales will also let us find new tricks and shortcuts for making things much more efficiently, with lower energetic costs and less harmful waste. Everything is going to cost energy, and producing energy is not going to be easy. It's not just because oil companies are evil that the world is hooked on fossil fuels. Nothing else packs anywhere near the enormous energetic punch of combustion; it's just ridiculous how much energy gasoline delivers. If a car didn't have a gas tank, but instead drove along by sucking up a stream of fuel from the road as it rolled, that line of fuel would only have to have the thickness and width of a spaghettini. That's why the industrial revolution changed the world. It wasn't just some kind of social consciousness shift. It was that when humans learned to tap fossil fuel energy, that was like picking up a +100 sword. Wind and sun and water power are all great, but they are horribly, horribly weak compared to combustion. It will probably take a century or so to harness enough renewable energy to let the whole planet's population live modern lives. We may end up covering much of the planet with artificial lakes from power dams, and wind farms, and solar panels. And I expect we'll have to make our peace with nuclear power as well. Fission sources are non-renewable, but fusion can work with some extremely abundant elements. The problem is that the easiest fusion reactions are not at all the wonderful kind of fusion. The beginner-level fusion reactions with tritium and ordinary hydrogen need exotic elements and they produce a lot of radiation, including neutrons that make the surroundings radioactive. Harnessing even these simple fusion reactions has been thirty years in the future for about sixty years now, but even if they finally do come online sometime in the next century, fusion power will still seem a lot like the fission-based nuclear industry we know today, until we can reach very much higher temperatures and pressures still, to attain the first low-neutron fusion reactions, with boron. I think the total human footprint on the planet is going to remain enormous no matter what. We need too much energy. An angel with a fiery sword bars the way back to Eden: his name is entropy. I think we can achieve sustainability, however, over the next century or two. The world will survive that long; it might be a few degrees warmer on average, and have different climate patterns, but it won't be unlivable. And we should be able to preserve a few protected patches, for the reasons Dikiyoba describes. Personally I try not to live extravagantly, but we fly several times a year. We live in Europe while most of our families live in North America, and I have a brother in Africa. I'd like my children to know their grandparents and their cousins. On the positive side, much of my research is about the ultimate limits of efficiency in power technology. It's very theoretical and fundamental, not something that is going to help at all, directly, in the foreseeable future. But it might someday turn out to be a link in a long chain that goes somewhere good.

Ergativity is my personal proof text for how linguistics is a real discipline. I'm a theoretical physicist who can wrap my head around quite a lot of things, thanks; but somehow ergativity just keeps slipping out of my brain. My wife explained it to me once, but without fail I've had to ask her again what it is, every few years. She doesn't see why this arbitrary example is such a big deal, when it's really trivial, but that's exactly my point. To me, somehow, it's very counter-intuitive. And once again, I've lost it. What is it, again?

I work on stuff related to this, and I have to say I don't know. Classical physics is deterministic in principle, but the prevalence of dynamical chaos means that everything is incredibly sensitive to small details. In particular, tiny details can remain without significant effect for arbitrarily long periods of time, and then suddenly make a dramatic difference. So I see no reason in principle why a certain tiny subset of the initial conditions of the universe might not effectively constitute my free will. This would still be determinism, but of the character-is-fate kind, where I decide what to do, but my decisions are inevitable, given my character. Quantum mechanics is fully deterministic for the time evolution of quantum states, despite the (in English) so-called Uncertainty Principle, except when a measurement occurs. Then suddenly it's random. Quantum mechanics doesn't say at all clearly exactly what something has to be, to count as a measurement. My feeling, as one professional in the field, is that there's something huge about all this that we still don't understand at all. Randomness isn't really free will, either. Rather than have important things decided for me by die rolls, I think I'd prefer to suffer the determinism of character-as-fate, where I determine what happens but my choices are all fixed by the kind of person I really am.

It is. I lecture in German. This is now payback for my post-doc years when native German speakers thought I was brilliant because we worked in English. Now I'm the one with the extra cognitive overhead. It's still a lot easier for me because English is the language in which everyone has to write papers and proposals. The passive voice is very useful for keeping attention focused where it should be. I think that may be the only good use it has, so it should never be used by default. But guiding attention is really important, so the passive voice is important to use at times. Lately i've been trying to avoid ending sentences with prepositions, and feeling that the alternative constructions are a bit longer and slower, but easier to understand. I'd much rather ask for whom the bell tolls than ask who the bell tolls for. It seems more clear and forceful to me, not just more grammatical. (And I'll just ask, thanks. I ain't gonna send to know for whom anything.)

Never say anything to anyone that you wouldn't want them to not feel bad about telling someone else about if they said it to someone they cared about as much as they care about you not knowing who they are, because at the end of the first day of the rest of your life, you're going to have to look twice at yourself in the mirror and still be able to sleep through the alarm in the morning after. Just keep that clearly in mind and you'll do fine, fine. Not grand, mind you. For the grand advice, I have a paywall.

Well, not necessarily a vampire, exactly. This isn’t really about sucking blood at all, nor is it specifically about Twilight. But if you have enough of the following qualities, then you might be a fictional character like Edward from Twilight: an over-the-top all-round awesome secondary protagonist who initiates the ordinary young main protagonist into an extraordinary world. Score one point for each trait that you have, plus extra bonus points as described. The extra points are there, in part, to make it easier to assign points. If a character seems pretty darn good in some way, but maybe not totally over the top, you shouldn’t have to hum and haw too much. Just give them the main point in that category, but not the extra one. In some cases it is possible for a character to get the extra point but not the main point, but this should be rare. You might be a vampire if: 1. You’ve got a backstory. Explaining how you got where you are today needs an extended flashback. It’s quite a story in itself.
 Extra point if: You are famous (at least within your special world).
 2. You’ve got experience. Apart from your backstory highlights, you’ve been in the trenches for years, fighting things of which no normal person dreams. You know all the ropes.
 You've tied some of the knots. Extra point if: You are already an acknowledged leader at the beginning of the story.
 3. You are a fighting machine. This particular aspect of experience and education gets its own points, because what else is there to talk about but Fight Club?
 Extra point if: Your extraordinary combat ability is an actual plot issue, not just chrome on you.
 4. You wear the One Ring in your navel. Or something. You have some special superpower that can save the world, maybe not all by itself, but as a vital part in a small package. This is one point that even the ‘ordinary’ main protagonist who is still in high school can usually pick up, in the kind of story to which all this is typically relevant. Extra point if: Your special power is already fully useful at the beginning of the story. 5. You are gorgeous. The fact that you’re so physically attractive is made much of in the story. 
Extra point if: You dress really well. Regrettably, this is to be judged in such a way that you are much more likely to win this point if you are also gorgeous, and much less likely if you are not. Conceivably, however, your superlative style might be what lifts you over the gorgeous threshold. 6. You are highly educated. Being widely traveled can count towards this. Being a very good student in high school does not, but being an astonishing prodigy might.
 Extra point if: You speak multiple languages fluently.
 7. You are rich. Material resources are not a significant limitation for you.
 Extra point if: You own some especially impressive big-ticket item (a cool car, for example).
 8. You transcend morality. You get all the coolness of being bad while somehow not counting as evil, because traditional moral categories don’t apply to you, because you have to break some eggs to fight demons, or the Fenris Wolf ate your homework, or something.
 Extra point if: Underneath all that, you’re a Care Bear.
 9. You are a talented artist or skilled technician. You have a cherry on top.
 Extra point if: You are specifically an expert pianist. This is just stupid, I know. But it just seems as though every doggone vampire can play the piano.
 10. You are a master of all trades. You have seven or more of the above 9 basic points.
 Extra point if: You have seven or more of the above extra points. You are covered in cherries. (Note that this tenth category does mess up the statistics a bit. It provides three ways of scoring 18, and only two ways to get 17. But every score from 0 to 20 is still achievable, and the tenth category serves a purpose. Vampirism is about having it all, so we need a bit of nonlinearity to emphasize this.) Evaluation 0-5 Points: You are not a vampire. 6-9 Points: You are probably not a vampire. 10-15 Points: You might well be a vampire. 16-20 Points: You are a vampire. This list is subject to correction, but only in a certain way. It’s my list; if you really don’t like it, make your own. Please don’t say that the list is bad because its criteria have nothing to do with whether a character is great or strong or likable or whatever. The list criteria are not supposed to be about those things. This is the vampire list. Literary greatness is a different one. And, just to say it again: 'vampire' is just a cute label. It's not really about literally being a vampire at all. It's about the things on the list, except insofar as it really shouldn't be, because: The list may still in principle be improved, however. I have in mind a kind of archetype, that I label ‘vampire’ because I think it’s instantiated at least to some degree in Twilight’s Edward. I’m trying to characterize this hypothetical Platonic form. I’m hypothesizing that this vampire character archetype is a coherent concept, and that it is frequently realized to a significant degree in current YA fiction. But I’m not sure I’ve really seen the archetype clearly. If someone else can get a sharper vision of the Platonic realm and convince me that I’ve missed something or gotten something wrong, I’ll be delighted. If it seems to me that whatever you’ve seen is just not my archetype at all, though, but some other one instead, then I’ll blow you off. Feel free to make your own list. One of the trickier parts of my concept is that it conflates two different ways of being extraordinary. There’s having an extraordinary number of unusual features, each of which is in themselves merely in the high end of the normal range. And there’s having features that are total outliers from the human range — world-beating talents or unique supernatural powers. These are different cases, but I nonetheless feel that these two kinds of things go together, because these ‘vampire’ characters tend to figure in sci-fi or fantasy stories where special powers are plot requirements. One key point of the ‘vampire’ archetype that I’m hypothesizing is that, for these characters, the superpowers are not flukes. These characters are to the manor born. Anyone can have a cool car, but this guy’s immortal; and not just any old immortal, but the good kind, that comes with having a cool car. That’s what vampires are all about. It's what's different from the basic dude-has-a-destiny motif, which goes back to King Arthur or something. It's that destiny is highly accessorized, at least for these characters. A potentially falsifying test of my hypothesis would be to collect a representative sample of recognizable fictional characters and see whether there was any clustering of vampires — a clump of characters around the high end of the vampire scale. Insofar as the list categories are not all obviously strongly correlated by definition, then clustering would show they were correlated by contemporary writing. Clustering would mean that, in effect, the Zeitgeist of contemporary fiction was not separately deciding about whether characters would be rich or gorgeous or whatever, but was at least some of the time buying the vampire bundle as a whole (and then maybe haggling over a few options). In concrete terms, that is what it would mean for my vampire archetype to be a real thing. Admittedly there's still some fuzziness here, but gimme a break. Life is fuzzy. Art is verisimilitudinously fuzzy. My second hypothesis, if the hypothesis of vampires being a thing were to pan out, would be that male leads in current YA fiction are much more likely to be vampires (in this sense) than female leads are. “Hitherto ordinary teenage girl (with an undeveloped superpower) meets vampire” is the pattern I tried to present in my previous thread. For what it’s worth, the female and male protagonists of my own book currently both score 17. They lack looks and pianos. I may mock vampires, but I don’t actually object to them in escapist fiction. The only thing that bothers me is a strong gender imbalance among vampiric main characters.

It's not actually a good idea to think that any idea is so simply wrong. Ideas aren't like that. Being wrong isn't even like that.

No, I take your point, Slarty. From the amount of confusion about whether I'm just saying some characters are bad, it's clear that the pattern I'm seeing isn't actually that obvious. I'll try to work out a little list, along the lines of 'you might be a redneck if'. What are the extraordinary-versus-ordinary things in which male and female major characters seem to differ, in all these books I'm noticing? I'm on vacation this week, though, and internet access may be a bit spotty. It may take me a week or so. I'm not trying to say any characters or authors are bad, any more than someone who is concerned about a corporate glass ceiling is saying that secretaries don't contribute or that any particular male executive is no good or that any particular female employee has somehow either failed or been shafted, just because she doesn't have the corner office. <p>I'm going to have to bow out of the Harry Potter discussion. I'm still not convinced that Hermione or Bellatrix or Luna are really peers to Harry or Dumbledore or Hagrid, but I do admit that all three characters are pretty decent, in one way or another, so I don't really consider it a point worth much more argument. I haven't read the books for years,%2

No, I take your point, Slarty. From the amount of confusion about whether I'm just saying some characters are bad, it's clear that the pattern I'm seeing isn't actually that obvious. I'll try to work out a little list, along the lines of 'you might be a redneck if'. What are the extraordinary-versus-ordinary things in which male and female major characters seem to differ, in all these books I'm noticing? I'm on vacation this week, though, and internet access may be a bit spotty. It may take me a week or so. I'm not trying to say any characters or authors are bad, any more than someone who is concerned about a corporate glass ceiling is saying that secretaries don't contribute or that any particular male executive is no good or that any particular female employee has somehow either failed or been shafted, just because she doesn't have the corner office. I'm going to have to bow out of the Harry Potter discussion. I'm still not convinced that Hermione or Bellatrix or Luna are really peers to Harry or Dumbledore or Hagrid, but I do admit that all three characters are pretty decent, in one way or another, so I don't really consider it a point worth much more argument. I haven't read the books for years, now, either. I would like to respond to the mention of C.J. Cherryh. She used to be a favorite author of mine, until the things I liked least about her work (plots that seemed to meander aimlessly until a sudden violent ending that could apparently just as easily have happened two hundred pages earlier, or never) began to seem more and more salient. An awful lot of her stories followed the perspective of a male ingenue who had to deal with a powerful and enigmatic female. One (The Paladin) had the perspective of a powerful male mentor figure with a tragic backstory, and yet the female ingenue was somehow the powerful one in the relationship, and the focus of the book; the abrupt shift to her point of view, at the very end, was very effective despite being easy to miss. For all her faults as a writer — and they eventually exasperated me — Cherryh did seem to know how to avoid the pattern I'm describing. Morgaine counts, in my thinking, as extraordinary.

I haven't tried to generate any debates, or knowingly participated in any for years. I can't help it if other people react to my posts by debating. I always wondered why you seemed to be so adversarial. If it helps, I can add a 'please don't consider this a debate' to any threads I start from now on. Debates have their place, in legislatures at least, but otherwise the idea that discussion should by default be a contest between defined and fixed propositions seems strange to me. It is so rare for any idea to be precisely defined. Once an idea is clearly defined, there is rarely much left to discuss.

Yes; I've read it and liked it quite a lot. It's been a few years, but a few things still stick out about it, including a really unusual bit in one book where the climactic confrontation with the long-pursued bad guy is abruptly short-circuited. The good guy has an overpowered tactic that should just end the fight in a second, but I was expecting the author to write around this awkwardness somehow, and drag things out for drama. Nope: he ends the fight in a second, and the story deals with the aftermath. It's a series with two major characters. An ordinary young woman, who seems to be distinctive in generally being nice, and in being peculiarly attractive to the older male protagonist, who has supernatural powers and a long tragic backstory of heroic struggle against ghastly evil. I hadn't thought of this series before as part of my pattern, but it clearly is.

I'm not condemning her to prison. I'm saying she's ordinary, where the male characters are extraordinary. I think this is partly Rowling's failure, because Hermione's intelligence and talent seem as though they could have been made much more extraordinary. She could for instance have precociously mastered some really advanced magic, something that really shifted the plot. Instead she's mainly a convenient source of footnotes, filling the reader in on background info that Ron and Harry haven't bothered to learn. So in a sense I'll concede a sort of phantom extraordinary character, the Hermione Granger that Could Have Been. The one we actually got is a pretty normal person, in a world of much wilder characters. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying that. That's a fair point about Voldemort; or so I thought, when I first read your post. I realized that most if not all of the depth of his character only comes from how he got to be the Big Bad — namely, that he deliberately made himself that way. But then I also realized, that starts to come out already in Book 2. And even in Book 1, Voldemort is a face on the back of somebody else's head. That's not exactly ho-hum, you know. It's pretty memorable and extraordinary. I don't want to stop anyone from ranking Harry Potter characters if they want, but my own interest is in the hypothesis that there's a pattern in popular books for young adults, that male characters are extraordinary while female characters are ordinary. So far I'm not feeling it very necessary to define 'extraordinary' very precisely, because there seem to be so many extreme examples in which the application is obvious.

Maybe this is the problem, Dikiyoba. I hate debates, and have no interest in them. I haven't much interest in any ideas that are really well defined, because by the time they really are well defined, there's not much left to say. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool ivory tower academic with very few strong opinions about anything, and even fewer opinions that I believe every reasonable person should share. The constant battle, however, is to clarify vague ideas, and I'm interested in discussions that do this. Trading extreme statements back and forth is one good way to do this, and I can see how it can be mistaken for the 'clash' of debate; but that's not at all the point. Offer a bold hypothesis; start 'er up, and see why she don't go. If something pops, then rejigger things, and try again. This isn't devious goalpost shifting as an underhanded tactic for winning debates. It's not a debate, and there's nothing to win. It's exploring ideas. Debating is futile — I've literally never seen it accomplish anything — but this kind of violent discussion is often extremely fruitful. By all means shoot down my proposals, but 'goalpost shifting' is an irrelevant charge. I am trying to pin down some vague ideas. Shifting the goalposts is the goal. Concerning Harry Potter characters, though, I really don't see your complaint even in debating terms. I said there were no memorable and original female characters; I later clarified this to mean, memorable and original to the degree that Snape and Dumbledore and so on are. That's hardly a devious shift. Every character is memorable to some degree, but there are only a handful of characters that can hang out with Sherlock Holmes and Long John Silver. It's a fuzzy line, but it clearly exists. You cited a bunch of online lists that beautifully demonstrated my point: plenty of female also-rans, and an overwhelmingly male top end. In making this out to be some kind of devious shiftiness on my part, it is you who seem to me to be deviously shifting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Sure, but in my book the line is spoken by a quasi-medieval lord, who has no idea ovaries exist. It's mainly characterizing him, not her, but in his language, it's a fair statement.

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.

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.