RFSS

Back for a proper post! Hopefully a concise one, because thoughts on this subject have been bubbling around in my head since I got back from Germany and read the article, but I’m within spitting distance of the end of the revision of book 2 I’m currently on, so I also want to polish that off before the weekend’s out.

So in reading a friend’s blog on my return, I found this article. It’s from a few years ago, but I think still very much applies. I won’t repeat the points, just add a few of my own I’ve noticed from years of con panel discussions about female characters.

RFSS

You may be wondering what the RFSS in the title is about. That’s for a related issue, which is that female characters never seem to have enough female friends. (See Bechdel Test) That’s not a new idea, and I won’t beat it to death, I’ll just add something I’ve noticed for urban fantasy in specific: Rare Female Supernatural Syndrome. That’s where the lack of female supporting characters around the female protagonist is excused through world-building. “There are no female Gargoyles” or “Female biology doesn’t accept the vampire virus”. Don’t get me wrong, several of my very favorite series seem to have this on the surface, but the mark of quality is that they rise above it. Where it makes me angry is when the excuse is used to bolster up a Mary Sue and her harem of male characters, because she’s so speshal. Bleh.

The Cheese Stands Alone

So in speculative fiction in general, there’s plenty of background for the idea that the hero can have a team with him. Narratively, he needs to make a inner journey or accomplish the last little bit himself, but he can have friends help him along the way. This can get tough when you have a heroine–the minute a guy kicks an ass for her, she’s giving up and weak. But is she? If it was a hero who was a weak little (male) hobbit, why couldn’t his armored tank slay some stuff for him? I definitely think it’s a gray area, because it all depends on nuances of the woman–is she using the help of a friend as she would any other tool, or is she standing around passively until the problem has solved itself?

In a workshop once, I had a story in which a very quiet nun character was threatened by a demon-possessed monk. She let him get in close, then stabbed him in the gut with a pair of scissors, got out of reach, and screamed her head off until help arrived. One critiquer (a man) was worried that I had a weak heroine because she needed to have men swoop in and save her. To which my response was pretty much STABBED. IN THE GUT.

That leads me to my biggest point:

Method is not Result

In so, so many discussions, I see people lose track of this, to (I think) the detriment of female characters everywhere. So you have a world-dominating evil dude, you say? What’s your desired result? Well, the evil dude being gone. That’s the result.

Say you have a male hero. He kicks evil dude in the face. Evil dude dies! Huzzah! We’ve achieved our result.

But now you want to have a female hero. I’ve seen extremely earnest conversations at con about how good women are at face-kicking. But men, given secondary sex characteristics, tend to be stronger on average. So what does that mean for how well a woman can face-kick? But women can be just as good at using opponents’ strength against them, and they can lean to face-kick just as well, but if you had a face-kicking contest between a man and a woman with the exact same number of years of training–

And now you’re talking about method.

Did you catch that switch? It became so much about face-kicking that everyone forgot that the result they wanted was evil dude to be gone. Why not poison evil? Nuke evil from orbit? Stab evil in the back? Sic your pet dragon on evil? Start public protests and topple evil’s political regime? Hire an assassin to get rid of evil? Not all of these make for exciting reading in the same way that getting up close and face-kicking with evil does, but why rule them out? Why can’t you seduce evil to get into his bedroom to unlock the door to let in the protesters to overwhelm him? That’s some pretty nail-biting tension right there.

I read primarily urban fantasy these days, but it seems to be that we’re stuck primarily with heroines all proving how good at face-kicking they are. I loved the Buffy TV series for many reasons, but I’ll tell you one thing I didn’t feel when I watched Buffy herself as a teen girl.

Empowered.

Know why? Because I didn’t have magical powers of face-kicking, and I didn’t want magical powers of face-kicking particularly, and I never, even as a young girl, saw the logic of doing something so incredibly stupid as taking a bad guy on hand to hand when I could shove my thumb in his eye, run like hell, and accomplish the result of living another day happy, healthy, and unharmed. I liked Willow! Because she used a set of skills that wasn’t face-kicking to get the results she wanted.

And I think we could use more of that.