wherein Liz rambles about writing and gender and stuff like that

[edenfalling]

There are a couple posts on metafandom about gender roles and writing, in which people lament the impossibility of writing female characters, or lament the persistence of stereotypes and wonder why there aren't more useful gender role-models or such-like.

I have a weird feeling reading those posts, because I had that issue back when I was, oh, fifteen or so? I had an idea for a fantasy quest story with a girl as the questing heroine, and then I thought to myself, "No, wait, I can't do that; Tamora Pierce already did that." And about five seconds after that, I wanted to smack myself, because seriously, how many thousands of stories are there about boys going on heroic quests, and I thought I couldn't write a girl on a heroic quest because I'd read one other version of that story?

Oy. But that moment was in-your-face enough that I became aware of the issue. And while I continue to be aware of it as a reader, it's very much in the background for me as a writer.

This is because I write a lot of women. My original stories tend to have a roughly 50-50 gender ratio or to actively focus on women. My fanfiction also tends to focus on female characters.

I don't do this for political reasons. It's just that we're 50% percent of the human race and we're the half I'm more familiar with (for obvious reasons), so I represent the world as I experience it. And because I write so many women, I don't have the issue of one or two female characters representing our entire gender. That means I write women as people and don't worry about trying to make anyone perfect -- not that I'd worry about that anyway, because it is a complete waste of time (you can never please everyone), but still. The more female characters you have, the more normative we become. This is not rocket science.

So I really don't think ignoring female characters is the way to go. When canon gives you horrible stereotypes, dig in and find a real person who includes but transcends the bad writing and/or bad acting she's trapped in. When people bitch at you, ignore them; they're idiots.

I like reading male-centric stories, too, whether gen or slash. But I am always uncomfortable to some degree with slash stories that sideline important canon female characters and their relationships to the male characters in question. Just because Guy 1 and Guy 2 have a super amazing love story doesn't mean that Gal A is evil for having once slept with Guy 1, or that Gal B's deep friendship and working partnership with Guy 2 suddenly don't matter.

Or, okay, let me be a little more specific. Take Highlander, for example. If you want to write Duncan/Methos, that's wonderful. (Seriously, it is. Give me links.) But it is canon that Duncan loved Tessa, that he arranged his life around hers, and that he was distraught at her death. It is canon that Methos loved Alexa, that he dropped everything to be with her, and that he risked his cover with the Watchers trying to find the Methuselah Stone to save her. And Duncan loves Amanda; that's canon too. They may or may not be in love, but she definitely matters.

So write Methos and Duncan falling in love and having sex. That's great. You can even make this somehow deeper than any love they've felt before. But don't say that they suddenly realize they've never truly loved anyone until now. Because that is a lie, and that is why people say slash is misogynistic.

As for female story roles, I dunno, is that really such an issue? Then again, I don't write with archetypes in mind. I start with a situation and some characters, and then the characters pretty much drive the plot (within a loose overarching plan). So what a character does is determined by who she is, not by some 'story role' she has to fulfill. And I find passive characters boring, so I tend not to write them. This is not to say that I write amazing ass-kicking women all the time, but I do try to write people making choices and to have those choices matter, even if they seem small and personal.

For example, the plot of "The Way of the Apartment Manager" is basically 'Yukiko examines her life, realizes she's in a self-defeating rut, and goes out and does something about it.' This is not great action-adventure (hence the secondary plot, wherein the first part of 'goes out and does something about it' is defined as 'retakes the chuunin exam') but it's a story about a female character taking charge of her life and shaping it the way she wants.

Someday I may get around to writing a fantasy quest story in which the main character is an archetypal hero who just happens to be female. (I actually do have an outline for one of those, but it's also a post-apocalyptic tragedy with skeevy incestual subtext, so I don't think it's the best example.) But until then, I'm just going to keep writing women doing whatever they damn well want to.

I think that's all that really matters in the end.

*scurries off to bed*

Comments

[edenfalling]

Yeah. I went through a phase where I said to myself, hey, I'm writing an awful lot of female characters -- what if I get pegged as someone who can't write men? And so I deliberately wrote some male-POV fics, just to make sure I could write men and boys, and then I said, okay, it's not a technical issue, so screw it, there is NOTHING WRONG with writing women. If those are the stories that come to me, those are the stories I'll write.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Good for you.

I used to ALWAYS write from the female pov, to the point where I wondered if I could write male at all, and then I discovered that Zuko (and later Kakashi) where characters whose heads I could get into as easily as walking through a door, and got worried about become one of those fangirls who focused on the male.

Now, I'm pretty much at a half and half place with my pov characters and as someone pointed out (and I was incredibly flattered) even when it's not girl pov, it's usually girl-centric, which I think is very true, and only partially due to the fact that I write a lot of het.