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baru cormorant ii
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snowflake_challenge because my body has apparently decided that, now that it's being shoehorned into a 9-5 again, Shut Down time is approximately 9pm.
Baru Cormorant continuing to be an exceptionally good read. Calculating empire, and not calculating it right sits so well on my palate: at first I was afraid Baru was going to just... do up all the numbers and succeed. Instead I'm somewhere neck-deep in politics and surrounded by female characters that I don't automatically find myself internally fridging away, the way my reading-brain has been trained to do. Awful but real is the gut instinct to distrust or disregard anything woman: I'm struggling, this year, to make sure I read more books by women, read more books with women. Why am I having to teach myself not to look down upon something I am – well, I know why. And it's frightening.
In other news:
snowflake_challenge because my body has apparently decided that, now that it's being shoehorned into a 9-5 again, Shut Down time is approximately 9pm. Baru Cormorant continuing to be an exceptionally good read. Calculating empire, and not calculating it right sits so well on my palate: at first I was afraid Baru was going to just... do up all the numbers and succeed. Instead I'm somewhere neck-deep in politics and surrounded by female characters that I don't automatically find myself internally fridging away, the way my reading-brain has been trained to do. Awful but real is the gut instinct to distrust or disregard anything woman: I'm struggling, this year, to make sure I read more books by women, read more books with women. Why am I having to teach myself not to look down upon something I am – well, I know why. And it's frightening.
In other news:
- Gym membership! All the money in the world but by god am I going to get back on the bike. It has squash courts! Squash courts.
- The world's most adorable fountain pen, which I need to review
- The Lies of Locke Lamora, also going well, and in audiobook format, oddly for me
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HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO CHOOSE AMONG ALL THESE COLORS
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I GOT THE BABY BLUE SO GET SOMETHING ELSE? 8D
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Do you think your distrust/disregard of female characters has to do with how poorly and trope-laden they are often portrayed? (Or is it something else?)
For me, I often feel myself NOPING female characters, especially in popular media, because I am so tired/bored/insulted by the tropes that are used to depict them or because the female character just plain represents an aspect of femaleness that I have thought about and soundly rejected for myself, rejecting it not because I have "issues" with "femaleness" but because that specific aspect has nothing to do with who I am, which makes it foreign, which makes it not terribly interesting unless the writing and characterization is downright earth-shattering and illuminating/literary.
For instance, despite Dragon Age's flaws, I find the female characters 10000 times more interesting than the male characters in that world.
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Re: distrust/dislike – I don't know. That's what scares me, is that there are so many pieces to it I'm actually not sure. I have this great memory of being 7 and getting my first computer, and until I found the internet around 9 I wrote exclusively female original fic. Then I wrote Mary Sues (oh and we can talk all day about that). Then I found slash and never looked back, so...
And now there's so much good stuff - or has there always been good stuff? - in genres I like, like Ann Leckie and so on and so forth...
Somewhere, somewhere when I was 9-12, I started actively avoiding reading Girl Things.. Then there's the whole thing where I used fic as a way of getting through stuff I wanted to deal with in real life, a lot of which was bi/homophobia and biculturalism, and the fandoms I was in (FFVII? Batman?) didn't really lend to multiple female characters that I liked enough to throw together for long periods. And so it perpetuated, probably. And then it was too late, and the male view felt generic and safe where writing a woman always felt like I had to Prove Something.
Now I have to retrain. And it's been pretty great. Iain M. Banks' main big characters are almost evenly split, with Sma and Ledjeje being two of my absolute favourites (and yet I still write nothing for them), for example.
ARGH BRAIN IS SO HARD.
Re: Dragon Age – ♥ Cassandra and all the others.
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I once got stuck writing someone else's Mary Sue, but that is a long strange story and that Sue was the lead character in a video game (the creative/executive director's very own personal Sue, OHMY!).
Something that may or may not be a tangent: Whenever a metafandom post claims that just women need to unlearn their inner misogyny and do a better job of embracing female characters in fic/art/meta rather than just write piles and piles of slash or create pic sets of their fave male characters, I end up taking a long deep breath and tuning out of the conversation. Like, sure, I have seen ample instances of women who are unaware of how society has created little misogynists in their head, but there are so many other valid reasons why female-bodied people do fandom activities with a mostly male cast.
When I first started writing fanfic (FFXII), I mostly wrote Het pairings and unless I wrote fluff or lady-empowering H/C, someone would inevitably concern troll my fic and attempt to talk me into writing "a better story." Yet, whenever I wrote the same emotionally honest/difficult/direct/unpleasant/(much less TRIGGERWARNINGSEVERYWHERE) themes as M/M fic, people were all "Bring it on! WRITE MOAR NYEOWOWOWOWOWOW." I remember having discussions with some M/M writers back then about how fandom itself places a double standard on female writers writing female characters. You can write anything with M/M pairings but god forbid you write *anything* with an M/F pairing.
Or, as you said, ...and the male view felt generic and safe where writing a woman always felt like I had to Prove Something.
And that is before we even get to looking at which gender receives more varied and more interesting, agentful roles in various canons.
...As for disliking/distrusting female characters in media, I've pretty much given up on popular media and much of genre fiction. "Given up" in the sense that even if I watch or read it, my expectations are so low I literally walk into a theatre saying "this will probably be 2 hours of my life I'm never getting back." Most of what I have read for the past 8-10 years would be classified as "contemporary fiction: literature (published 1975-present date)." I'm certainly not saying all of that is filled with female characters I trust but because almost none of it follows a genre plot with genre expectations, and, instead, it tends to be some sort of character exploration (plot usually secondary), i tend to take it all at face value as "These characters are people+psychologies+situations that this author wanted to explore." Talking about it in terms of tropes sort of misses the point for why I even bother reading this stuff so, idk, in the "worst" cases of no-thanks female representation I walk away with a sense of "this female author wrote an honestly interesting trainwreck about a trainwreck!female character, which twisted my gut and made me headdesk" or "this male author was channeling his gross misogyny when writing the minds of these people, and they were so yucky yet so real, and just yuck. but real. really yucky. kind of interesting, but I need a shower."
As for popular media that is commercially successful, I've been fascinated by the good and the bad of how Bioware has female characters in the Dragon Age series. DAO and its DLCs recycled quite a few tired old gender tropes for an RPG but, despite that, I could sense that their writing staff was at least 50-50 women vs men. Even so, it is a game where I actually enjoy playing as a female character. Once they started becoming aware of what they were doing, their handling of gender in DA2 was actually refreshing for the most part. I am hoping that this means the tide is changing and that I will find more female characters who intrigue me in popular media and genre fiction.
Although ... over the past year or so, whenever fandom has become super excited about a new fannish series or movie (etc.) that features a strongly-written, interesting, independent female character in a leading role, I have ended up disappointed. I can see why fandom is so excited but it isn't a female character that I personally care about or relate to. Sometimes I feel nothing, other times I anti-relate. It's always a sense of "this character was written for a certain demographic and I am not in it."