What do Disney princesses and urban fantasy girls have in common?

The urban fantasy I am limpingly writing has two heroines--twin sisters who are going to have to work together when one hates the other and considers herself far more badass tyvm. They're going to be friends, or they're going to get eaten alive.

This is what destroyed the Hamilton books for me many years ago. Ronnie and Anita didn't stay friends.

I can see the changes being too much for Ronnie. I can't see Anita never making a second female friend.

At the risk of being clobbered, the america girl books not the dolls(heaven forbid) really helped to first get my daughter to read that manga, she is alittle warped. Just saying there might be some redeeming value to the stories from their point of view becasue somewhere between Ranma 1 1/2 and Kayla the little native american heroine to her favorite american girl book she emerge a pretty cool kid.

I agree about Anita and Ronnie that really disappointed me, but honestly till October I dont remember a heroine with friends at all other then male counterparts or bartenders. Or maybe its just so obvious that she has lots of friends that its the first time i made a mental note of it.

In Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels series, Kate has a friend named Andrea and they both kick ass. And in Kelley Armstrong's books there are female friendships. (Elena and Paige, for instance.)

I forgot about the Armstrong series!

Seriously, now I feel the need to start figuring out which of the urban fantasy heroines have female friends, and start recommending them more.

'Cause it's a trend I hope sticks around.

Very well said.

I also find it interesting that all of the Disney heroines are princesses (at least by the end of the movies), but all of the Disney heroes prior to the 90s were either boys or animals. It's a very odd dichotomy.

(And despite the fact that Aladdin had his own movie, you didn't get a whole lot of real character development for those guys until Eugene in Tangled. Hercules—sort of erased itself from my brain right after I watched it. Not that it was bad, more that it was weirdly unmemorable. And the Emperor's New Groove was more of a caricature than anything.)

As a mom of girls, I found early on that the sparkling triumvirate of Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty princesses weren't heroes at all, but oft-passive recipients of rescuers. Bummer, that. Nice dresses, fun parties, but all poor role models (the massively successful merchandizing of same still mystifies me ...). Then, something changed. Belle rescued the Beast. Mulan saw the sexism in her own universe and rebelled against same (though having the general as her cool new buddy didn't hurt ...). And now (SPOILER ALERT!) Merida (sp - the Brave heroine) saves the day for the whole clan, forges the sort of truce with her mom that other moms of tweens, teens fantasize about.

At last the fact that Katie (11) prefers to have a sword fight with a tree (trees seem to be patient and understanding that way ...) than discuss the Bieber/Gomez romance isn't considered as unusual by her friends as it was only a few years ago ...

We were surprised, however, by the fact that a couple of movies we'd initially hesitated to rent (on saccharine value alone in some cases) turned out to be female hero/buddy movies. I'm ducking here as I say Tinkerbell and Barbie. I know, I know, Barbie = bad image modeling, and the movies sport equally bad animation. But Abby (now 7) loved Tink, and we rented one movie, only to be pleasantly taken aback by the fact that she's a decent role model (in her own movies that is - let's just put that whole Peter/Wendy thing behind us ...) She makes occasional bad choices, or sees a problem that needs fixing, then gathers her community of other (mostly female) (often fairy) friends and fixes the problem. Ditto for Barbie.

And amazingly enough, in one of the Shrek movies, the various princesses did meet, work together successfully to come up with an escape plan. Go figure.

So my hopes remain high that the no-longer-nascent idea of girl heroines will continue to evolve, trend into buddy movies and books where the lead characters use teamwork (like the Avengers, minus the not-very-well-hidden misogyny) that aren't necessarily marketed exclusively for girls, but attract and retain a wider audience, that in its own right with the power of the economy, further encourages the trend to continue.

Like I've heard said (was it by Tinkerbell?), recognizing there's a problem is the first step towards making a solution.

Hmm. Counter argument for a moment:

I think it might be more of a Hero Genre thing instead of a gender thing. A 'proper' Heroic Journey follows one character who is the protagonist, chief problem solver, and has to go it alone. To have a strong partner in there would open up the possibility of the author having to loadshare the problems -- and it takes out the Only You Can Succeed Here onus of a hero(ine), and the possibility of having the partner outshine the 'main character'. The Nemesis is specifically tooled up to match-plus-one rank the protagonist, so the protagonist has to level a bit to be able to win at the end, but even in buddy pictures, one person is the strong character that winds up facing the Nemesis alone at the end. Everyone else gets subtracted by obstacles along the way until it is a mano-a-mano duel. Otherwise you wind up with a B-movie martial arts battle royale, having to write separate miniature fights in the same scene when you only have one camera to work with, because the viewpoint can only follow one action sequence at a time. (Think about swordfighting movies for a moment; wide shots are brief and chaotic 'everyone's fighting' action, but the Big Action is when you narrow focus one very close duel between a main character and a main villain. Until we get multi-threaded books with multi-threaded heads that can perceive and appreciate simultaneous multi-threaded action sequences, this is what we're capable of handling.)

When we write a heroic tale, it is easier to write from (and the reader to follow) the perspective of one character, single path, single goal, beat the Monster of the Week. Everyone else is Support, Comic Relief, or Spunky Girl/Guy Sidekick. At -best-, they get a scene where they solo a sub-boss, solve a problem, or rescue the hero - once. Perhaps it's because the goal is to get the reader to identify with the narrator's view/character, which is why we get so many self-insertion fantasy novels, and some of us were trained 'Pick a viewpoint and stick with it.'

Sure, there are heroic ensemble pieces. But even the Avengers movie had to have each one of them have their own separate movie first, and one of the best screengrabs from the trailer? Has them looking in separate directions.

I know, I know, I'm missing the point here, you're thinking. What you're seeing is that when you have X > 1 hero(ines) in a matchup, they don't see the others as equals, and heroic female protagonists don't seem to have equals either. What I'm saying is that there aren't a lot of heroic male equals-starring tales either - it's a hero dynamics thing. It's why it took so long to have Jet Li and Jackie Chan in a movie together, and even then they kinda did their own thing rather than work together. Heroes and heroines work their best buttkicking awesomeness when they don't have any help. Buddy pictures are an uneven dynamic -- good cop/bad cop, good/crazy, inhuman/moral compass, ubercompetent/chronicler, teacher/student, demon/human, serious/comic, smart/action (aka brain/jock), responsible/screwup, and the list goes on.

I actually have a novel in the works (that I'll probably never finish -- it was a NaNoWriMo novel) that has two competent female characters using the smart/action dynamic; I took the British Detective genre and mashed it up with Spaghetti Western in Weird Steampunk World. But even I wound up splitting them up into their own separate side adventures, with the British Detective getting into trouble from creepy killers and the Ranger Gal in a Prophecy situation after being overpowered and left behind. It was way easier from an action flow perspective to write back and forth between one character and the other, with the intention to reunite them later.

"Now I know why Superman works alone." - Batman


-Trav

"...collection of boiled sugar girls in sparkly dresses..."
What's boiled? The princess or the sugar?

Always liked that Kelley Armstrong's series allowed for multiple strong female characters. Jes Battis' OSI series has a strong female lead who learns to trust & lean on some of the other women in her life, too.

And this is one of the things (apart from the fixation on sex) that always bothered me about the Anita Blake/ Merry Gentry series. Ridiculously powerful female leads, surrounded only by strong male counterparts. Any females as friends are too weak to keep up the friendships. Lost interest & haven't even read the last few books.

It can be easy, as an author, to smooth and sand the story until all the unnecessary characters are gone.

This is absolutely beside the point, but that's one of the reasons I'm a Tom Bombadil supporter. He may not need to be there, but he just is. :)

How do you feel about the show Rizzoli and Isles, Angie Harmon's political views aside? I think the two female leads keep each other from becoming the female loners that they otherwise would be, had the show been a more typical "male-female cop and consultant" type show.

The best way I've heard of for dealing with character isolation in storytelling is from Francesca Coppa's essay in _Chicks Dig Time Lords_: make each character special, but not unique. Basically, as I mentally frame it, any two characters should generally have at least one trait -- age, race, gender, class, favorite game, planet of origin -- in common with each other, and at least one of the shared traits between any two characters should be something that they do *not* have in common with any other single character. No one gets to be, or has to be, The Princess -- at least, not without calling out the specific characteristics of Princessery in the story, e.g. being nobility, and female, and not actually in charge -- nor can a group just all be Princesses without other things connecting and differentiating them as individuals. That guideline has really changed the way I read and evaluate characters and stories.

This is an aside... but it was also that essay that finally helped me realize just why Nyssa has always been so important to me. She was, more than any other character who's ever been on the show, or pretty much any show, the kind of person I wanted to be. But even though gender was irrelevant to what I loved about her, I couldn't see beyond the character's gender, and my own, well enough to believe that I *could* legitimately be like her. Until recently. So, now, after all these years, I can finally say it: I WANT TO BE LIKE NYSSA. NYSSA IS MY ROLE MODEL.

And she is in fact a princess. So, even relevant. Sorta. With effort.

Do you have a link to that essay? Because I'd love to read it in full.

It drives me crazy when the main UF character is one of the only female characters in her book . . . especially, when the other female characters are villains/competitors. It jsut perpetuates the "females are evil" stereotype . . . or the "men make better friends". :::sigh:::

In other words, what you're saying is Disney Princesses and urban fantasy girls are all transgender boys.

Hey, Seanan. Unrelated to this post, but I have a couple of fey questions (not your mythos specifically, just in general), and I was wondering if you could help me out since you seem to a know shit-load about them. What's the best way to contact you?

It gets everywhere, doesn't it?

I was just reading Choices of One, a Star Wars Rebellion-era novel, and admittedly it's a bit world-limited (the Imperial military being 99.999% male), but the story has a major cast of about twenty, of which the two female characters are Princess Leia and Mara Jade, and of course they never so much as lay eyes on one another. It even got lampshaded, Mara being aware that she didn't have any friends.

I was like, couldn't the warlord or the Rebel commander or some of the alien soldiers be female?

The very wrong thing that is stuck in my head while reading all these comments and the original post is "but they made Pez dispensers out of them!!", and then I ate three packs of cola Pez.

Independent of nothing whatsoever, I would love to see a Princess Klatch where they all get together and kvetch about the trials of being a pretty pretty princess. And compare tiaras.

OMFG I love tiaras. It makes me want to win the same award you won a few-odd years back JUST SO I COULD WEAR THE TIARA AND HAVE A REASON FOR DOING IT.

Well, even Thor had more than one woman. (And I'm glad it did, because Darcy was hilarious.)
I don't mind the story having no women, or few women, as long as I can think of a reason why. Like in Toy Story, most of the toys were male, because they're a boy's toys. And the one female doesn't go on the adventure . . . because she's china and would break. (Though they do introduce Jessie in the next movie to counteract that.) Its when there's no reason why there shouldn't be a woman in that situation--and yet there isn't one--that it becomes a problem.