Remember Guybrush Threepwood?

[hobnail]

Here's an interesting essay about the unrealized Galbrush Threepwood.

[gmw]

Thanks for the link. It seemed to me that the article is most interesting for the implicit assumptions that it makes.

Are there certain character traits that have become common in recent fiction? Sure; I suspect partly because that's where the money is at the moment, and partly because, by being popular, it sparks inspiration to write some variation on that theme. But such traits often follow particular genres, largely because that's the sort of thing that is popular in that genre, so if you only read in those genres you might start thinking that no one else is writing anything else, when in fact there is quite a lot of diversity about.

It does seem as though an artist of any sort that tries to represent someone or something outside their "lived experience" may find themselves subject to particular criticism from those that do have that experience, sometimes justifiably, but sometimes less so (or so it seems to me). This sort of thing reminds me of the old advice to writers to "write what you know", but has potential to extend it even further, asking whether you even have the right to write what you don't know, however much you research.

The trend appears to hit famous works more than others. This could be simply a matter of statistics, but I think it is also that fame attracts those who would normally have passed by and they spot things the more familiar have learned to take for granted.

I think that's why so many writers find refuge in fantasy. If you move what you want to write about into a fantastic setting then there is less room for someone to come in an take it personally and criticise accordingly. But it's still not entirely safe.

I imagine this situation also explains what I read about authors with special "sensitivity readers" that review books before publication. When I first saw that mentioned (on Goodreads) I was quite astounded by the idea ... but I guess it makes sense if you want to protect your reputation from occasional missteps.

[hildea]

Thanks for the link, it was interesting!

After reading it the first time, I regretted going off my medication for my grass pollen allergy - there were a lot of straw men. Rereading it, I find I halfway agree with some his points, although I also think he has some spectacular blind spots.

Originally Posted by gmw

But such traits often follow particular genres, largely because that's the sort of thing that is popular in that genre, so if you only read in those genres you might start thinking that no one else is writing anything else, when in fact there is quite a lot of diversity about.

That seems like a good explanation for Fisher's blind spots. Except: Looking at his books, it seems he writes romance, erotica, fantasy, and suspense/thrillers, and those have a lot of the character types that he claims don't exist. For instance:

Remember that character who was vulnerable and had a one-night stand? Well, guess what? You’re also a horrible, misogynistic monster because you overtly sexualized the female character in a way that propagates the idea that women are sexual objects to be used by men.

One night stands are so much of a staple that it's one of the themes you can search for in the book finder in one of my favourite book review sites. And while some one night stands only involve men, most of the books I checked on that list were about a man and a woman who had a one night stand with each other.

Remember that cop who suffered a terrible injury? Well, if that cop is a female, then you’re a horrible misogynistic monster because you subjected that woman to violence and we can’t tolerate that.

Female characters subjected to gruesome violence is so usual that a trope about it was named more than twenty years ago, and is still widely used (see fridging).

I could go on for almost every example he gives -- fish in a barrel -- but life's too short.


At the same time, I do agree with him that male characters tend to be given a wider range of types and backgrounds than female characters in culture. I just don't agree about where those problems are, and I don't agree that it's radical feminists who are the main culprits in narrowing women's roles.

Sarah Rees Brennan wrote about this issue, but a lot more thoughtful, here: Ladies, Please. Jim C. Hines tackled the difference between portrayals of men and women in fiction in his cover pose articles.


On the other hand, I read Fisher's A (Distressing) Thought Experiment On Gender Double Standards, and I think there he identifies a real issue (although with some blind spots). In fiction, women abusing men are too often shown as cool, or comic relief, and I do think that's part of a culture that harms men and contributes to making it difficult for male victims of abuse to speak out and get support.

[Quoth]

" I do agree with him that male characters tend to be given a wider range of types and backgrounds than female characters in culture. "

But it's not because women are any less flexible on the roles that can be written. Good writers have written many sorts of different women characters. Also most of his arguments or examples are irrelevant to writing good novels.
Stan Lee? What deep character development compared to a good novel. The US Comic books are like story boards for movies. They are a particular art form. They are not novels.
Star Wars? Not a about writing. Whether Rey is a "Mary Sue" or not is irrelevant to writing characters in novels.
Harrison Ford had something to say 40 years ago about Lucas's ability to write dialogue and dialogue is a major part of a character.

Also actual novels may have narration and what the character is thinking, quite commonly, the Graphic Novels/US Comics less so and movies hardly at all.

The article is almost pointless drivel:

In doing so, I have noticed something that’s both distinct and frustrating. It’s something I think every writer, including the Stan Lees and J.K. Rowlings of the world, have noticed at some point. When it comes to creating great characters, there’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to male characters. With female characters, though, there are too many unwritten rules to keep track of.

This seems to be the central point he's trying to illustrate.
There may be loads of comics, films and books where the implementation of the woman is offensive and thus in his words "rules" where not kept.
But there are plenty of simply offensively written books, which may be otherwise enjoyable (Lead male in Ian Fleming, Clive Cussler's books).

J.K Rowling is successful, but 10s of thousands of writers do characters, plot, story, dialogue better. Did Stan Lee write novels? Not really

American comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business called Timely Publications which would later become Marvel Comics.

He's an irrelevant example, and so is J. Rowlings (the K was invented by publisher!) to writers developing characters in novels.

Men or women can write good female or male characters in novels or bad ones. Any limitation of a fictional woman is imaginary. Of course there are character designs of women that are obnoxious to women. There are also ones that annoy some men. But there are plenty of books just with obnoxious characters, or that are just nasty books.

Having a woman or female MC is no limitation at all to a good writer.

[Hitch]

Meh...

I think it's obvious that yes, there's some--some--truth to what he says. For anyone that is remotely dependent upon social media to survive and thrive, as are authors (as opposed to someone immured in mid-level management in some company, somewhere), making a single, simple misstep can be fatal. We've all seen that. (And if you haven't, then sure, this article will seem hyperbolic and silly.)

I know that long ago--more than 10 years, now, I chucked social media entirely. IF I do post--which is rarer than hen's teeth--it's to say something boringly vanilla. I learnt the hard way what can happen to a business with ONE, repeat, ONE bad thing said about it, whether the speaker knew whereof he spoke or was fake-posting to kill you off.

So, while everything that blogger may be saying appears to be tripe, from one point of view, from another, given the disgusting "power" of social media to kill off people's careers and businesses, it's not as far off the truth beam as some of you are trying to say.

Hitch

[hildea]

Originally Posted by Quoth

"I do agree with him that male characters tend to be given a wider range of types and backgrounds than female characters in culture. "

But it's not because women are any less flexible on the roles that can be written.

...

Men or women can write good female or male characters in novels or bad ones.

I agree with this, and with most of what you posted.

Any limitation of a fictional woman is imaginary.

This part, however, is only true if we're just talking about writing/creating (and even then it's iffy, as the vast majority of us are influenced by the society we live in, for example like this).

And: If an author tries to get others to invest in their work (whether that's a publishing house or a film company), they will meet limitations which are very real, and some of those may be different for male and female characters (and male vs female authors, as well as for characters and authors who are LGBT+, and/or not white).


There's also the topic the linked article wrote about: Criticism. Now, he seems extraordinary fragile -- somehow he feels that feminists are so powerful that any criticism from us, no matter how unfair, will destroy him. But in a stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day sense, he is right that female characters will get criticised in ways that are far more seldom for male characters. He even voices some of that gendered criticism himself, when talking about the Star Wars character Rey.

[Quoth]

In reality people of various factions will look for any excuse to attack a very successful author, no matter if for children in 1950s (Enid Byton) or current authors. Some of the criticism can be valid.

He seems really to be attacking feminists and suggesting it's easier to write male characters.

There are real limitations on what you can get published by the big publishers, but 99% or more of writing won't even be read by them.

Feminists are not a monolithic block of opinions and most criticisms by most "feminists" of most written & filmed depictions of women (and indeed the macho misogynistic men characters) are valid.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Quoth

In reality people of various factions will look for any excuse to attack a very successful author, no matter if for children in 1950s (Enid Byton) or current authors. Some of the criticism can be valid.

He seems really to be attacking feminists and suggesting it's easier to write male characters.

There are real limitations on what you can get published by the big publishers, but 99% or more of writing won't even be read by them.

Feminists are not a monolithic block of opinions and most criticisms by most "feminists" of most written & filmed depictions of women (and indeed the macho misogynistic men characters) are valid.

Well, I can certainly agree that feminists are NOT a monolithic block of opinions. Most of what I see in third wave Feminism today...well, I was going to say "disgusts me," but that would probably manage to piss off and alienate anybody I hadn't already pissed off in another thread today. That's my "pissing off" limit.

Hitch

[gmw]

I had a huge long post but decided I was drivelling as badly as the article so deleted it. I summarised that down to...

I don't think the article presents its argument well, and I think that imprecision is reflected in the discussion here. In the author's (and our) defence, such a subjective, data-poor, topic is probably doomed to suffer this way.

[hobnail]

This is only tangentially related to this topic.

A week or so before I had heard about this Galbrush paradox I'd read an article in a blog. The author didn't say anything about the Galbrush paradox and I don't know if he knew about it but as I remember he was saying more or less the same thing about women characters, that our expectations are that they should be more than mere empty headed wives and secretaries. And he said that as a result women characters are typically androgynous and that writers should give them some acceptable female characteristic, for example, how Ripley cared for the little girl in Aliens. (While Pvt. Vasquez busy being a badass and showing off her muscles.)

It got me thinking, what would happen if you took a book and changed a female character to a male character? Change all of the female pronouns to male pronouns and fix any other gender specific stuff. As a bonus, if there was romance then it would become a gay romance. I tried this with the book Mystery Ranch by Arthur Chapman, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. It looked like there was only one female character so it should be easy. A couple of regular expression replacements and I was nearly done.

But I discovered a quirk in the English language that I'd never noticed before. With the male pronouns we have he, him, and his, with his being possessive. With the female pronouns we have she and her (and hers). Her can be both possessive and not; "I saw her standing there." or "She put on her hat."

(And don't talk to me about trying the pronouns that the non-binary folks use; they, them, their, etc. I've been reading a series that has a non-binary character and those are definitely confusing. I start thinking that the author is talking about some group of people only to subsequently realize he's talking about the non-binary person.)

[Quoth]

But it's a false test simply to swap the gender of a MC or antagonist in many books.
There is a huge overlap of physical characteristics, empathy, skills, emotion.
Some characters may be written more averagely. Some men characters might be under 5' 6", have small feet and hands and rounded soft faces. Some females might be big women.
Some men might be caring and empathic.
Some women might be aggressive, macho and egotistic.

Writing partly relies on stereotypes. But also writers invent quirky characters and in some cases deliberately mislead.
Some books the women & men might be mostly interchangeable, others not.

So IMO the "swap gender of a character in a book" idea is nonsense unless the author is doing it for some reason during the writing/editing.

It looked like there was only one female character so it should be easy. A couple of regular expression replacements and I was nearly done.

Maybe sometimes. But IMO it needs an entire re-write. Depends on the book.

I've just finished reading five of W.E. Johns "Worrels" books. Many of the Biggles books have no women at all. Yet it's not Biggles and Ginger (or Bertie or Algy) in skirts. The female character and her sidekick are in the WAAF in WWII. Surprisingly good adventures and maybe better than many Biggles books. Interestingly Johns makes use of supposed stereotypes about girls and women and attacks them. Or in one case a leader is described as "Victorian". Of course there were really women spies and Nazis did shoot them, but Johns surely can't have known that at least when writing the 1st book. The books all written during WWII. So possibly the lack of women in the earlier Biggles books (or later ones) was deliberate because "books for boys" and not any blindness on Johns part. The Worrels books were of course marketed to girls.
See also Roy Snell series of adventure books with either women or men as MC (most of the characters described as Kids would be regarded as adults today).

But there are other books were the gender could be swapped and it would make no difference. Part is our societal/cultural expectations and the culture we live in. So there are SF & F where the characters could be swapped with re-writing. There are others with Aliens were it would be a major rewrite because the female has a chest pouch for the tiny baby, a bit like our marsupials.

So in short, it's pointless experimenting with swapping gender of a character unless you are the author and experimenting. It doesn't actually prove anything, except writing a novel isn't simple.

Even changing from 1st person to 3rd or vice versa is a lot more than a simple edit. Entire chapters have to be completely re-written.

[Little.Egret]

"swap gender of a character in a book" has apparently been done by at least one plagarist scammer who copied another author's book from Amazon modified it and published on Amazon.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Quoth

[...] So in short, it's pointless experimenting with swapping gender of a character unless you are the author and experimenting. It doesn't actually prove anything, except writing a novel isn't simple. [...]

Well I can't disagree with you there. I got about three chapters into book when one of the main characters mysteriously morphed from a young man into a young woman - and it fitted so much better. Does this mean there are differences between male and female, or it is just my prejudices showing? (I suspect that even that question has no easy answer ... probably Abraham Simpson says it best, "a little from column A and a little from column B". )

I recently put down a book I was reading by a fairly well known author - a middle-aged man - who was trying to write first person perspective for a teenage girl with some emotional difficulties. And it sounded exactly like that. (To be clear: it sounded to me like a middle-man trying to sound like a teenage girl.) I think first person perspective puts a whole new emphasis on how carefully the narrator's character needs to be written - and this is too often overlooked.


I think the idea of gender-swapping also begs the question: should male and female characters be indistinguishable? (Because that's what the idea seems to imply - or have I got that wrong somehow?)

If we want to write something based in contemporary mores then the two genders need some of the common assumptions or they won't be believable. I'd also add that authors take advantage of common stereotypes in order to paint characters in as few words as possible - let the reader fill in the blanks.

Maybe in some (distant?) future we will have no assumed gender-specific traits*, and whether a person is male or female will await announcement - and if it doesn't matter, why announce? (I'm reminded here of the dwarves in the Discworld.) Mind you, this has me wondering where that will leave non-cisgender individuals: does cisgender or otherwise matter in a the society doesn't make any distinction?

And a further point: just as we have-lost/are-losing the culture of many primitive societies even now, will it matter that we might lose this once core distinction? Or to phrase that another way: are there any advantages to gender distinctions that we might lose in such a society?

I fear these questions may be better addressed to the P&R subforum, but at the moment I'm looking at them mostly from the perspective of a writer and what they might mean to characters that I write.


* Not even gender-specific physical traits because these are subject to change by surgery or other therapy, so what you look like need have nothing to do with your sex at conception nor your assumed gender. Even the ability to bear children could eventually not be dependent on the existence of a uterus carried inside a person.

[Pierre Lawrence]

I recently put down a book I was reading by a fairly well known author - a middle-aged man - who was trying to write first person perspective for a teenage girl with some emotional difficulties. And it sounded exactly like that. (To be clear: it sounded to me like a middle-man trying to sound like a teenage girl.)

In my mind one of the most extreme examples in fiction of a middle-aged male writer’s inability to create a relatable characterization of a teenage (preteen actually; she is twelve) girl is Nabokov’s Lolita - he doesn’t even attempt to give her any personality, but presents her solely as the object of the narrator’s pedophilia in wheezy prose that provides cover for his audience to defend its reading of a tale which, when stripped of its literary pretensions, is nothing more than a depiction of child rape.

Pierre Lawrence

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Pierre Lawrence

In my mind one of the most extreme examples in fiction of a middle-aged male writer’s inability to create a relatable characterization of a teenage (preteen actually; she is twelve) girl is Nabokov’s Lolita - he doesn’t even attempt to give her any personality, but presents her solely as the object of the narrator’s pedophilia in wheezy prose that provides cover for his audience to defend its reading of a tale which, when stripped of its literary pretensions, is nothing more than a depiction of child rape.

Pierre Lawrence

I've never read it, but my understanding was that it was written from the perspective of the man and he is considered to be an unreliable narrator (well, according to Wikipedia ) - in which case the (mis)characterisation of the girl is perhaps a deliberate distortion.