thoughtful(As a total aside, if you want to see these girls when they're off-duty, and hence more fun, check out Amy Mebberson's Tumblr for her Pocket Princesses. They're awesome, and they have the spunk, spirit, and personality that the official Princesses sadly often lack.)
It wasn't until I read the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter that I noticed the creepiest thing about the Disney princesses: they never look at each other. Get six of them in a group, and they will all strike independent poses, they will all gaze at independent points off in the distance. They never make eye contact. They never acknowledge each other in any way. Why?
Because if you're going to be the fairest in the land, you can't ever admit that anyone of comparable fairness even exists. To be the prettiest princess, you must also be the only princess. So all you other princesses can just step off; this is my spotlight.
Creepy.
As most of you probably know, I read a lot of urban fantasy, geared both at adults and the YA market. I enjoy it. It makes me happy. It features, as a genre, a lot of strong female characters doing strong female things. Yes, it has its flaws, because all genres have flaws, but on the whole, it's probably my favorite genre right now.
Only. I noticed a thing. This is a thing that I am not immune to. Nor is it a universal thing (so making long lists of exceptions to this thing is not necessarily helpful, although discussion of specific examples is, as always, awesome). But it's a thing I think we should be thinking about, both as creators and consumers. And it's this:
Urban fantasy heroines have a lot in common with Disney princesses.
The standards for "fairest of them all" are different when your kingdom is a city and your ballgown is a pair of leather pants. You need to be the best ass-kicker, the best snarker, the best crime-solver or magic-user, or whatever. But they're still high standards to live up to, and it's easier to do when there's no one else in your sandbox. If no one else is kicking ass in leather pants, you don't have to try as hard to be the best. Consequentially, we keep seeing urban fantasy heroines with no peers. No other women who kick ass. They might have sidekicks, or even other strong female characters in supporting roles, but it feels like a lot of them...well. Like a lot of them just don't have any friends.
In my daily life, I have a lot of friends who are, well, fairer than me in some ways. Vixy is an amazing lead vocalist. Pretty sure if we were auditioning against each other, she'd get the part. Also, cartoon birdies braid her hair. Cat and Bear and I write very different books, but we're all award-winners and best-sellers and Cat raises chickens and Bear climbs mountains, neither of which I do. Kate is witty and snarky and often faster on her feet than I am, as well as being a thousand times more organized. Meg is a natural redhead who makes her own clothes and bounces back after flying over the handlebars of her bike...and these are only a few of the amazing, incredible, bad-ass women who share my life.
It can be easy, as an author, to smooth and sand the story until all the unnecessary characters are gone, and I can see where that might mean you have to lose a few of the members of the Breakfast Club. At the same time, if that process leaves six male characters and one female, and only one of those male characters is Prince Charming, why are the other five all dudes? Can't we balance things a little? For me, female characters are more believable when they have friends. When there are other women around to talk to, trade tips on wearing leather pants without chafing with, and generally enjoy.
And if someone says that a story containing more than three characters "only needed" one woman, I sort of have issues with that. (In my perfect world, no one would say that about two or three character stories, either. But I'm willing to grant that some stories need two males and one female, if you'll grant that the opposite is also true.) Even Magic Mike, a movie about male strippers, managed to have two female characters with distinct and interesting, if brief, speaking roles.
I don't like that the Disney princesses have been frozen in place, never making eye contact with the only people who could really be their peers and understand the trials of the tiara. I'd hate it for that to happen to our urban fantasy girls, too.
July 6 2012, 18:09:24 UTC 5 years ago
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
July 6 2012, 18:59:00 UTC 5 years ago
Has Ash in Pokemon (a "loner hero," oddly enough) ever had two female companions? He's had two male ones. Has any of them ever had an effective "female" Pokemon who didn't belong to a bad guy? I think the last "I am the hero, I am better than you" I saw where it had gender parity to a female "norm" was Sailor Moon. Usagi had friends, but even when Serenity was dominant, she fought, knew, loved, and interacted with other women.
It's not even friends, at the end of the day. It's getting a 50/50 split in those stories which don't allow for friendships.
July 6 2012, 19:15:12 UTC 5 years ago
Some of the James Bond movies also featured Bond versus a lot of Evil Femme Fatales while ignoring his female sidekick, but that's arguably falling into the "because the hero can make them do what he wants because he's more sexy than the villain" trope rather than being really a stellar exception to the rule.
I am going to see about taking this as a personal dare next thing I write. *memory mark for later justice*
-Trav
July 7 2012, 08:07:55 UTC 5 years ago
Moreover, the heroines usually are derogatory towards other women. I have lost track of the number of urban fantasy heroines who snark about women they know that are "sluts", or that deride them for having "girly" interests, and that pride themselves on being "one of the boys." Very often, if there is another female character that doesn't fall into this, she dies. It is so common that I've stopped buying urban fantasy unless I have specific recommendations.
I actually do have a novel in the works (revising! *crossing fingers that it's finished sometime this year*) where the heroine is a loner. Part of her journey is learning to trust people. At the beginning of the book, she's only really close to her best friend, who is a gay guy, but she has acqaintanceships with other women. She just doesn't really trust them deeply... and I would kinda like to see this be the case more often, because it seems unrealistic to me to have so many characters that are so separated from society.
BTW, your novel sounds very cool. The difference between your book and a lot of urban fantasy, though, is that the supporting character is another lady. Something also I see a lot in urban fantasy is that the competent heroine turns TSTL for the hero, and I have honestly seen WAY too many authors admit they do this because they think women won't find the hero sexy if the heroine is smarter/stronger than him (which, really? Why can't the hero and heroine both have their own fields of specialization?).