To begin, when you think of women in fantasy, what images spring to mind? To many of you, I presume, this will be very close to that image in your head:
Women in fantasy. What a buzz word topic for this day and age. So much progress has been made over the past few years, and yet still here we are, coming back to the same old issues again and again. Why? Because the problem hasn't been solved yet.
Now, some of you will point to various examples of novels that break the trend and have well-rounded, complex female characters and, dare I even say it, a strong female protagonist, and say "Look at all the progress we're making, well done us." But that is exactly the problem: until these examples are no longer heralded as special, then the issue still stands.
This may sound like a backwards step or a bizarre thing to say, but bear with me. The basic point that I am trying to put across is this: I wish that posts like this one didn't need to exist. It should not be special that a new fantasy book/film/comic has strong and plentiful female characters. It should be normal. This is 2016! Why is it special that the new Star Wars and Mad Max films (which, by the way, are both amazing) have strong female protagonists? It is, in today's society, but in an ideal world, it shouldn't be.
This issue affects many genres across the board, but fantasy more than most. This has never made sense to me, because fantasy of all genres, should be able to work this issue the most. Fantasy is just that: fantastical. If we can read books that present worlds with magical all-powerful rings, dragons that become statues then become dragons again, flying ships, talking ships, walking cities etc. etc. etc., is it really too far-fetched to have strong female characters? You can write ANYTHING and yet we are still stuck to pre-existing real world rules like 'men are strong, women are not' and 'men can fight, women can't'.
And this leads on to a misunderstanding that people seem to have around this topic. When I say 'strong' female characters, I don't mean 'strong' in the physical sense, although from time to time that can be important too. In a fantasy world where you decide the rules, why can't women be members of the Town Guard, or the elite fighting squad of the Grand Empress, or the all powerful, complicated villain that serves as the primary antagonist of your story? There are no rules to say they can't, other than the ones you write for yourselves. As long as it fits with the world you have set up, then then the audience will be willing to accept it. The problem comes with the 'Trinity Syndrome', named after the so-called badass woman in 'The Matrix', who ends up serving no purpose to the plot beyond being a 'strong female character'. (see more on this fascinating article from The Dissolve: https://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/ )
Instead, when I say 'strong' I mean complex, interesting, well-rounded characters that feel like real people and not stereotypes. Examples of these I would give are: Arya and Catelyn Stark, and Cersei Lannister in 'A Song of Ice and Fire', Patience and Kettricken in 'The Farseer Trilogy', are to name a few from some of my favourite books. These are not all physically strong characters (although some are at times), but have interesting character arcs, are written as people who have real issues, problems and feelings and also serve a purpose to the plot.
Another problem can be encountered by going too far the other way, writing a female character that denies everything that it is to be female to avoid causing offence. In my opinion, making a good female character should not always be to make them basically male apart from what they have beneath their britches. This then leads to the prickly path of thorns of writing women as you think they are, deciding what their 'feminine touchstones' should be. As a not-woman myself, I have nowhere near enough knowledge of what it means to be a woman, which is where difficulties can arise. But who says we male authors can't actually go out and speak to a member of that other sex and find out what they think of what you are writing. We spend so much time researching how economies work, how weapons work and all that to make a realistic world, why can't we research this? I'm not saying it's the only way, or even the best way, but surely it is a way.
In my own writing, I try to fill the world of Aethtea with interesting, dynamic and varied female characters both as principle characters and side characters in the world itself. There's no use having a female protagonist if everyone around them is male, even the no-named characters in the background. I have tried my best to have equal female and male protagonists in 'The Shadows Dance' and the subsequent books in 'The Shieldlaw Trilogy'. This is not because I'm trying to take some political point, but because that's the way a lot of the real world is (or at least should be) and how I want my world to be. There is a time and a place for taking these feminist stances. They are very important to moving our society forward. But wouldn't it be great if these things were seen as the way things were. Just normal. Oh, this book has three female protagonists, I don't notice anything strange about this. Because it's not strange, or at least it shouldn't be.
If I said that I was reading a fantasy novel where 90% of the characters were female, eyebrows would be raised, monocles would be dropped into glasses of brandy. However, on the other side of this crazy gender coin, if I said I was reading Lord of the Rings, one of the tent poles of fantasy literature, no one bats an eyelid. Yet, if we look at the Wikipedia page (I know, my sources are incredible) you can see that of the 20 protagonists, 3 are female: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Main_characters. And of the villains, there is only one female character, and that's a huge flipping spider!
I'm no way near saying I'm perfect, not even close, but I'm trying and will continue to try, with a hope that I can one day look back and see I've done something positive towards this cause.
So next time you are coming up with a character, whether it be protagonist, side character or background character, just think. Is there any reason for them to be male, other than your own immediate assumption influenced by today's still twisted society? It is not an easy issue to tackle by any stretch of the imagination, but let's try our damnedest to tackle it. Let's start making a new normal in fantasy.
