digital–coffin:elucubrare:darkersolstice:elucubrare:But, you see, James, my dude, Robin Hobb a
digital–coffin:elucubrare:darkersolstice:elucubrare:But, you see, James, my dude, Robin Hobb absolutely gets to say this, because she’s a woman. And I agree with her! I also roll my eyes at “Spunky Fantasy Heroine is the first woman to become a mage,” especially if that’s what the story is about; give me unquestioned gender equality & a badass sword. But a dude saying “that’s why I write mine that way” is 1) tooting his own horn, patting himself on the back, or whatever other self-congratulatory saying you’d like to insert here & 2) inserting himself in a conversation that he doesn’t really need to be a part of. Like, it’s great that he writes female characters with equality! Though, of course, considering that half of James S.A. Corey is Daniel Abraham, and his female characters in The Dagger and the Coin were, well, I was going to say “sucked” but that’s a little harsh – trying very hard to Not Fall Into Stereotypes and/or be Strong Female Characters™ and failing… Anyway, I do appreciate when male writers write universes with equality & I think it’s important for them to do so – my three favorite male fantasy writers (Steven Brust, who gets extra points for writing such a universe starting in 1983, Max Gladstone, and Robert Jackson Bennett) do, but they don’t post about it on twitter for cookies. I don’t think he’s trying to control what women write, but I also think that it’s not his place to have opinions on stories about women fighting the patriarchy. Because “Fantasy Heroine is the first woman to become a mage and struggles against entrenched prejudice” really does resonate with and feel necessary to a lot of women. A dude saying this reads as “I don’t want to read about your struggle;” a woman saying it can definitely be not-like-the-other-girlsing (and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hobb is), but she can also be saying “I have enough Gender Stuff in the real world – I just want escapism.“ And that’s because she has something that she’s escaping – insert the Tolkien quote about it being a prisoner’s duty to escape here – while he doesn’t: he’s evading or ignoring, not escaping. I’ve actually talked to someone about how certain aspects of Hobb’s books feel like metaphors for being marginalized or different within society–how the Wit in the Farseer books seems a lot like being gay in how people react to it and the divide between older generations and younger generations and in-community and out-of-community culture, or how characters like Burrich both seem like they could be autistic (please talk at me about these headcanons if you’ve read the books).Meanwhile, you have queens who rule and are respected (at times more than their husbands), and a female Skillmaster at several points in the series, and a character who I would not feel any shame in calling non-binary, even if that isn’t the word any character in the series would use for them. And you have a main character who struggles beautifully with the question of “my best friend is in love with me, but I’m straight, how do I preserve this friendship?”, and fumbles and it’s written in a way that reads as greatly realistic to me, and sympathetic to both characters and their relationship remains the hub around which the story turns.I dunno, I really respect Robin Hobb, and how she’s grown as a writer since her first book, and especially how well-represented people of all kinds could feel, reading her books.I think I’m thinking of an interview she did at some point, am biased by the fact that she uses the phrase “oppressed females” (it seems not to take the concept seriously – “women” would have been better, but still not great), and also don’t think she handled the Fool’s gender presentation and crush particularly well, though please don’t ask for details, I haven’t read her since high school & stopped after the books started being a little less than 1000 pages each. I also think that, hm – explicitly saying that a secondary world fantasy character is autistic isn’t great, it feels like imposing too much of our world on theirs, but “can be read as, if you want to” representation isn’t really representation. And I hate magic as a metaphor for real world -isms – it never works for me for reasons I can’t quite articulate. I also want to reiterate that I myself don’t particularly like struggle stories & the point of the post isn’t really my disquiet about Hobb’s potential motivations but my annoyance at Corey for butting in where he wasn’t asked.the worst part about corey’s entirely self congratulatory post is that the women he writes are totally Hillary Clinton/Maggie Thatcher type of ~girl power~ figured heads, and it all permeates the expanse which greatly increases my skepticism of the motivations of the characters. Most recently on the TV series another female character was introduced whose motivations didn’t even come up to that standard and were frankly laughably cliche and disrespectful to a certain extent even :/Ugh, I have complained at length (I think on here but I’m not going to find it, so) about Abraham’s female characters in the Dagger and the Coin series – he really does try to do Soft Power and Strong Female Characters Who Aren’t Warriors but he’s…not very good at it. Cithrin, his banker character, could, on reflection, be worse, though she’s supposed to be Very Smart and her actions rarely reflect that, but Clara, who’s basically in Catelyn Stark’s position (upstanding husband executed as a traitor) is not well-handled. Most of her success comes from the fact that people don’t take her, as an older woman, seriously; it’s true that, say, Mrs. Pollifax and other heroines of cosy mysteries do this well, but they’re also mostly written by women, so it feels different. Basically, my feeling is that when it comes to the theory of writing female characters men should be seen and not heard and also show (write decent female characters) not tell (make dumb self-congratulatory tweets like this). -- source link