Women In Fantasy - An Expansion
As a continuation to the video I made recently, I wanted to expand with so more points. However, this will involve spoilers, so maybe skip this if you haven’t finished Lord of the Rings or the Throne of Glass series if you care about spoilers for any of those.
Also, I want to add again, and I will continue to do so, that my two tropes doesn’t mean that women can’t be homeworkers/wives/caretakers, and it also doesn’t mean they can be warriors. The claims I’m making are about breaking down how those tropes are used, the first being used as this exclusive blankets in some settings, and the latter being a defense to cover up an overpowered and unbelievable character for the sake of corporate “feminism” and female leads.
Tolkien’s Women
Of course we have to talk about Tolkien. Love him or hate him, he’s central to the development of fantasy as a genre. And that means we have to talk about the ladies in his books. And looking at his most well known works, that’s not a lot to work with. Rosie, Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn. That means this section will go quickly, right? Fortunately and unfortunately, yes.
In my video I talked about two major tropes that writers like to use for women; either they are home workers, politicians, and wives, or they are supreme badasses of all badassery as warriors. And that’s it. There’s no room for inbetween. That isn’t to say that being a mother isn’t badass in its own right, but these two boxes are an over simplification of what women are and who they can be. But take a guess which Tolkien favored in his books (we’re not talking movie adaptations).
Both Rosie and Arwen never get any experience in combat, both are handwaved of their actions to be wives, and both are largely maternal figures when they are put into serious situations (Rosie during the retaking of the Shire and Arwen returning for her child). And then there’s Eowyn. You’d think that maybe Tolkien was going to try something different, what with a woman coming along to slay the Witch King (cough cough Macbeth). But immediately after her moment of bravery, Eowyn throws in the towel to go all doe-eyed with Faramir. No more adventurers for her. Further, Eowyn partnering with Faramir is presented as her growing up, like her fighting the Witch King was some kind of thing that a young woman would do, but not a grown one. Clearly as an adult her place is at a man’s side.
Galadriel is another story, a good one though. She’s immensely powerful as a magic user and as a wielder as one of the Three. While married, Galadriel has powers of her own right, and a legend separate of her husband. Honestly, Celebrimbor is super overshadowed by his wife, and that’s awesome. While I could say we don’t really know Galadriel well enough to justify her powers, we also don’t really experience much of her in the books where her powers are used. Most of what we know about her comes from the mythos around her. Not to mention, she’s a flawed character. She feels the pull of the Ring. She overpowers it, but she was drawn by it and the idea of its power.
Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with women being homemakers. But when there are only one out of four major female characters has any kind of serious agency or identity outside of her husband by the end of the book. The default for women shouldn’t be homemakers. And if they are, then what else do they do? How are they involved in their communities? Why do they have to be in your setting? Assuming cultural gender roles without explaining why your setting has gender roles doesn’t value the house work and it also perpetuates dangerous gender roles in real life.
Sarah J. Maas & the Chosen Woman
I think a lot of people know what I’m about to say about Throne of Glass as series. Yay, female leads. Woah, chosen female leads. Yeah, overpowered magic. Hold up, how overpowered. Hey, Aelin— Hey AeLIN SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!
I have serious issues with Aelin as a character. At the beginning it was awesome to see this above average firebender with crazy cool powers. And I could get behind that. Sure, she had the Fae twist, but she was still at a believably level of overpowered. But after Heir of Fire the stakes started to get too high. Admittedly, this was also Maas just raising the stakes way too high to be believable but Aelin repeatedly find deeper and deeper levels to her powers became harder and harder to get behind. Aelin continues to be the best of the best at everything and she never really suffers a defeat. Yes, the ending of Empire of Storms has her dragged off to prison, but Aelin wins at the end of the series. Aelin always finds a solution. She suffers no real losses. She ends up with her whole family at the end, her kingdom, still some of her magic, and the guy of her dreams. This is a problem I think Maas has in a lot of her works of not letting meaningful characters make sacrifices since I felt the same about A Court of Thorns & Roses’ series ending and the cop out death there. Aelin made a sacrifice to destroy the Wyrdgate, but arguably she’s just back at the beginning of the story, but with a kingdom. Same magic abilities as she had to start with (minus the shifting) and all of her assassin skill set. Her sacrifice means nothing. And means even less because of Yrene.
Look, I thought Yrene was a fine character. What I did not think was ok was that she, not Aelin, is the real hero in the end. Aelin doesn’t get the final blow on the quest she’s been on this entire time. Yes, Aelin is overpowered. But to take away her success at the very end of the series to a character we’ve known for a fraction of the time is like a gut punch. It’s not satisfying, because even if Aelin wins, she wasn’t the hero and her quest built up to being outside her actions. It’s not cathartic because we don’t know Yrene well enough to root for her like the reader would be with Aelin. And it totally undermines any and all growth Aelin’s character was supposed to have, any and all training she went through, because it doesn’t even matter in the end. It’s not her who finishes the fight. Whether Aelin had magic or nothing doesn’t matter in the end because it was apparently never her destiny to win. It’s like Maas decided on this AU she wanted to write about Yrene who was a more interesting character to her now than the main character of the series.
And how could we talk about Maas’s writing if we didn’t talk about the rampant “mating.” I’ll try to be fair. I get why this appeals to some people. The idea of mates rings pretty close to soul mates for a lot of people, and for some romantics the idea of having a “one true love” is pretty appealing. Hell, I’m married and still like this idea with my partner. But if my partner ever started growling or threatening people who just looked at me with the slightest hint of flirting, I’d call him out on that shit in an instant. Maas’s mates are possessive and it borderlines, if not crosses, into viewing mates as objects in need of protection over people. To add further, one (?) major named character in all of her books isn’t straight or single at the end of their series. Which comes back to this obsessive pairing thing Maas does a lot, and that perpetuates this idea that in order for fantasy books to sell to women, they need a romance. On top of that, they need unhealthy romances with poor mutilations of the “one true love” trope.
We need more badass women in media, yes. And arguably we could do with a few more Superman-esque female characters. However, neither are well written. Throne of Glass is a case of a good thing gone too far, and other things that need to be unpaired. And I think that brings me around to my last point.
Women In Fantasy
The problem with these tropes isn’t that they have to do with women. They’re bad tropes. Any case where characters are limited in roles for arbitrary reasons or given powers beyond what’s reasonable in the setting it’s a case of bad writing, plain and simple. Rosie isn’t a bad character because she’s a wife, it’s because she’s underwritten. Aelin isn’t a bad character because she’s a Chosen One, it’s because she’s overpowered, in a toxic relationship, and unrelatable. But that wouldn’t change if the genders were reversed. An underwritten male character is just as dull as a female one. Overpowered male characters are just as boring as female ones.
Instead, the problem is that these tropes are heavy handed in being applied to women. And when they are, we’re trained as a society to see them as more problematic than if the main character was a man. Something as simple as Rey and Luke in the Star Wars franchise, where, even though the characters’ powers and arcs are largely identical in their premier films, radically different approaches are taken. If both are overpowered unfairly, then both are poorly written. And if we’re going to call out women who have these tropes applied to them, then we need to takes doing it to male characters too.
While I talked about how we need better representation for women in my video, we need that for men too. Men deserve to have real stories told about them, or at least relatable ones. Writers, we need to do better about having unfounded characters. Readers, we need to fairly see the cracks in characters’ building. When we can start doing that, then we can start telling better stories.
Happy (Be-lated) International Women’s Day.