30 Day Fandom Meme Day 6

[leethet]

Day 06 – When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?
I prefer writing the main characters in most fanfic – they’re all men. That says something about our culture and the difficulty in finding heroines (outside of romance novels, and don't get me started on those). I looked for them growing up – I was a bookworm – but the girls were always timidly saying “We should tell mom and dad about this” while the boys were shouting “Let’s go have adventures!” Is it any wonder I identified with the guys? I have to assume that that’s changed a little in kids’ books – at least, I hope it has. But I notice Hermione’s still a bit of a wienie sometimes.

Comments

[elmey.livejournal.com]

My favorite heroine growing up was Joan of Arc. Because she got to wear armour and fight. The religious stuff never registered :) I find it difficult to write women though--partly because I'm uncomfortable giving them as much angst as I'd give a man--and I love angst. I have no trouble reading it for women, but find it hard to write.

[leethet.livejournal.com]

To be fair, this is only my assumption about why I write men, you know. I've given it quite a bit of thought, but I'm no shrink. :-) (I could never admire Jean d'Arc precisely because of the religious stuff - that put me right off!). As a reader, I wanted girls who did adventure, but they didn't exist. So I followed the action; that obviously led me to the "belief" that guys did action and girls fell in love, and I was an adult before I stopped just enjoying writing guys and thought about why I rarely wrote girls (not never, just less often). Admittedly some of the fascination is simply that of "other," but I don't think it's wrong to factor in the examples I was given. Girls were all about boys and fashion, things that I either (in the first case) was excluded from by being unattractive or (in the second) could not possibly have been more bored by. I wanted swords and sorcery and horses and castles and space ships and aliens and adventures (without any real injury, of course!)... and that was guys.

[franciskerst.livejournal.com]

Well, I spent my entire childhood prowling streets and woods, climbing trees and roofs, fighting with boys sometimes older than me, which I managed to lead, more or less, because I was the stories-teller and the one who was able to imagine for them the spies / detectives / corsairs / cossaks / musketeers / templars adventures we used to play together in our very free free-time. There were one or two other girls of the same ilk but I am now aware that for us the female part of mankind was just...inexistent. My readings was made only of boys books (with a lot of classic literature, though) and I don't think I ever indentified myself with a female character (or only with very boyish ones). When I started to write fiction (it wasn't a success; I'm decidedly not a writer), for the first time, I tried to insert myself in a female body and mind; it was awkward and un-natural to me but I realised that the feeling was the same with men characters. Seems now I'm not more male than female. Not very helpful to create fiction characters!

[leethet.livejournal.com]

I was an adult before I saw articulated the problem for girls like us - we had no role models in fiction (books or TV or movies) and that forced us to identify with boys. Girls didn't do anything. They never led, they never achieved. All they did was sigh after boys and want to be pretty. The thing is, when we (my sister and my girl friends) played as kids, we were all the spies and the superheroes and the cowboys and the Indians. I didn't know one little girl who wanted to play the "girl" - because the "girls" were all crap. So, you know, who were these adults writing for? It wasn't me and my girlfriends (not, at least, when we were 10 - I think as we got older a lot of my girlfriends "learned" that they were supposed to be skinny and made-up and fashionable and boy obsessed).


At least today there are a few adventurous girl role models for young girls.