Step 5: Let female characters be funny.

In my third post in this series, I posited that nobody’s favorite Toy Story character is Bo Peep. I pointed to her passivity (a boring quality by its very nature) as a reason why audiences aren’t likely to get very attached to this character and why she wasn’t missed when she was dropped from the third film. Yet passivity is only part of her problem. Despite voice actress Annie Potts’ best efforts to imbue her with some spark of personality, she’s the only one of the gang of Andy’s toys who has no quotable lines of dialogue — the only one who isn’t funny.

The female character who has to play it straight while the male characters around her have the freedom to cut loose shows up in more than one otherwise great story. In another of my favorite films, The Princess Bride, every character is funny (even those with no more than five lines or so! “Oh, you mean this gate key”) with one conspicuous exception: the heroine, Buttercup. She may get to deliver a few noble romantic speeches, but she never makes us laugh. She’s written, and Robin Wright plays her, as a type rather than a personality. Some girls who saw the movie when it was first released might have wanted to be Buttercup because she wears pretty dresses, but as for me, I wanted to be Inigo Montoya. As much as I adore the movie, I wish its approach to the heroine had followed William Goldman’s source novel, in which Buttercup, while still a passive damsel, is written with some humor and given a few noteworthy personality quirks.

Can any writer populate his or her story with a multitude of funny characters and expect the sole un-funny one to engage our imaginations? And why does that one character comparatively lacking in humor end up being, far too often, a girl or woman?

Part of the problem might actually lie in the rise of the “strong female character” type. It began with the best of intentions. To create heroines capable of overcoming a wide range of obstacles is a worthy goal for any writer. Unfortunately, too many of us end up equating “strong” with “humorless,” so that the characters come across as less engaging despite their manifold butt-kicking abilities. Writers wishing to create “strong female characters” may be squeamish when it comes to giving those characters flaws, and without flaws, a character can’t be funny.

Yet we can, if we know where to look, find examples of fictional girls and women in which “strength” (competence, courage) and humor happily coexist, and these are the girls and women who may be quickest to win an audience’s appreciation. When I look at “favorite characters” lists that do include female names, I notice a lot of those names seem to come from the work of one particular author — Terry Pratchett, the superb British comic fantasist whom I’ve praised here in the past. The dour witch Granny Weatherwax (who, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Captain Holt, has no sense of humor but is screamingly funny precisely because of this lack) and her coven get a good share of love from the list-makers, as do apprentice witch Tiffany Aching and Death’s no-nonsense granddaughter Susan. These women defeat formidable foes and save the day, yet we laugh when we’re in their company. Who among us wouldn’t love a character we can laugh with?

Matters are improving, even in what strikes me as the most conservative of pop culture arenas, the big screen. In comedies we see the token un-funny woman less and less. In Pixar Animation Studios, the bland Smurfette Bo Peep of Toy Story has given way to Joy, Sadness, and Disgust of Inside Out, each of whom is very funny in her own way. The good work Mel Brooks began when he gave Teri Garr and Madeline Kahn their chance to shine in Young Frankenstein has been taken up by Paul Feig, whose Ghostbusters reboot, the source of so much Internet rancor, has been winning hearts of male and female viewers. Then we have TV shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt making the most of their female cast members’ comedic gifts; Kimmy, in particular, is a character almost anyone would love, blessed with a kind heart, prone to mistakes, but unwilling to give up, ever. In graphic novels I’ve found my new favorite superheroine, Doreen Green, the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, who embraces her heroic responsibilities with gusto and enthusiasm and has a boundless capacity for humor. I got to know her thanks to my husband, who erupted into laughter every five minutes as he was reading the first volume and passed it on to me saying, “Honey, you’ve got to read this.” All in all, it’s not a half bad time for fictional women in comedy.

But what about those books, movies, and shows that aren’t comedies? In largely serious works, say, the majority of epic fantasies, protagonists grapple with potentially deadly threats and deal with weighty issues and aren’t called upon to be funny (at least not very often). Yet the stories still need leavening with the occasional smile or laugh, and the responsibility for providing those moments of humor falls to supporting characters. These “comic relief” characters are usually fan favorites whose appearance on the page is greeted with enthusiasm — and they’re still overwhelmingly male, even when gender has no effect on their positions within the stories. The “male is the default” curse strikes again. As writers, we could be a little more aware of it, and try to make a change.

*

Since the thrust of this series has been the need for more female characters that all audiences would identify with and many would name as favorites, I figured a little field research would not go amiss. I asked my guy friends on Facebook to give me the names of female characters they think are cool and a brief explanation of why they’re cool. Here are some of the responses:

“Isabelle Dalhausie who solves problems by being as philosophically perfect as she can.”

“Harriet Vane. Education and fierce independence.”

“Veronica Mars. Calm under pressure and quick w/her mouth.”

“Jessica Pearson, the character played by Gina Torres on the TV show “Suits.” Competent, decisive, loyal and more.”

“Peggy Olson from Mad Men. She figures out how to be a successful career woman on her own terms at a time when it wasn’t fashionable to do so.”

“Per my husband… Katniss Everdeen- followed her own instincts, Black Widow – honorable, follows her instincts.”

“Nancy Drew. Because she ignores the rules and solves murders.”

Step 4: Broaden female characters’ sphere of activity.

Two years ago, a discussion thread on Reddit Fantasy raised the question of whether the men in the group would read works by women, and if so, did they notice any difference in style, tone, and/or subject matter from male authored-works. Plenty of posters expressed no problem with female authors or female protagonists, but as I read the responses from those who openly preferred male authors or actively avoided female authors and protagonists, I noticed the same complaint coming up again and again: fantasy by and about women is “too focused on romance.”

More than one issue is at work here. Some posters have suggested that the hostility toward romance is a matter of faulty perception, and point out that romantic plots and subplots appear just as often in books by men as they do in books by women. This may be true, but I wonder where the root of that faulty perception might lie. Some readers who profess hatred for romance can read books by Jim Butcher, Scott Lynch, or Joe Abercrombie and not be bothered by the romantic subplots therein. Do such readers simply expect the worst from a book by a female author? After all, if we don’t think we’ll enjoy a book, we probably won’t.

In previous blog posts I’ve addressed the prejudice against romance and pondered what might be done to rehabilitate its reputation. I’m still convinced that love plots aren’t really the problem; bad love plots are. I acquired a taste for romance early on, partly from growing up watching classic films like It Happened One Night, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, That Hamilton Woman, Random Harvest, and Now Voyager, all of which feature romances in which the characters discover strengths in themselves as a result of their relationships. Even if their endings prove tragic, the lovers in my favorite romantic classic films bring out the best in each other, and I can see clearly why they need each other. This is the kind of romance I love, and the kind I try to write.

Yet I’ve also seen the many ways in which a romantic plot can be botched into eye-rolling unendurability. Too often, particularly in recent fiction and film, such plots seem to have been written on the principle that “love makes you stupid.” Characters become weaker, not stronger, as they fall in love. One, the other, or both lovers involved are such colorless individuals that it’s impossible to fathom what they see in each other. If I’d grown up seeing or reading too many love plots like this, I don’t doubt I would have developed a strong prejudice against romance in general.

We need to look for better and fresher ways to write romance. We need consciously to subvert, or abandon altogether, the genre’s most tired cliches. (The “ordinary girl/ extraordinary guy” trope, particularly when it involves an average high school girl and some type of male supernatural creature, can take a permanent vacation as far as I’m concerned, along with the male hero who is more a paragon of wish-fulfillment perfection than a believable person.) We need to cover the ground with more thoughtful, more credible, and more surprising romantic plots and subplots so that, over time, the hostility toward romance will wear away and both male and female readers will enjoy such stories.

But writing better love plots is only part, and not even the biggest part, of the solution. It won’t alter perceptions if falling in love remains the main thing, or the only thing, that around 80% of female protagonists in fantasy fiction get to do. What’s needed, more than anything else, is a radical expansion of our ideas of what a female protagonist can be and do, and what kinds of stories may be told about her. The possibilities for male leads still range far, far wider than the possibilities for female leads, and writers must work to change this.

Female characters in fantasy fiction tend to fall too often into one of two sharply divided categories. The first is the Damsel whose hopes, plans, and entire being are bound up in her connection with a male character. The second is the Action Girl, the warrior with beaucoup survival and combat skills, whose hopes, plans, and entire being can still end up tied to her connection with a male character or a choice between two suitors. (Suzanne Collins, author of the popular Hunger Games series, apparently had no plans to incorporate a love triangle into her plot, but she was strong-armed into manufacturing one for purposes of sales. That makes me seethe when I think about it, and I wish I could read the series Collins wanted to write.) So, if you’re a woman in fantasy, you can be either the traditional maiden/mother or the non-traditional warrior woman. If your writer is keen to show that female characters’ strength doesn’t have to equate to combat skills, you may get to be a healer (e.g. Sorcha in Juliet Marillier’s Daughter of the Forest, Snake in Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake), or maybe even a sympathetic mage.

Yet this still leaves a multitude of callings we see all too rarely. Where are the female artisans — blacksmiths, carpenters, weavers, etc.? Where are the female players and circus performers, tricksters and good-hearted rogues? Where are the female teachers, scholars, and librarians? Where are the female engineers and inventors? (We have seen a few more of these lately, thanks to the rise of steampunk, but still more would be welcome.) Where are the female artists, bards, and storytellers? Surely if we broadened the scope of female characters’ activities, we’d find ways to broaden the range of storylines in which they might be central.

One or two or even thirty exceptional stories aren’t going to turn the tide of perception that “female author + female protagonist = all romance, all the time.” We need both quality and quantity — to do better, and more.

Step 3: Rethink “feminine” characteristics.

A revealing, though quite long, discussion on Reddit Fantasy, initiated by author Krista D. Ball, addresses the gap in success and notoriety between male and female fantasy authors — as in, while fans of the genre lick their chops in anticipation of the next release by Mark Lawrence, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, and Joe Abercrombie, far fewer seem aware of the works of Barbara Hambly, Kate Forsyth, Juliet Marillier, and any number of my own favorite female authors. While the picture may be slowly changing as female-authored works win prestigious awards (e.g. Naomi Novik’s Uprooted claiming the Nebula Award for Best Novel), the readership and awareness gap lingers, thanks in part to the kind of thinking Brandon Sanderson describes as publishing’s conventional (ahem) wisdom:

“Boys don’t want to read ‘girl’ books…being seen as ‘feminine’ is a big deal for a boy’s identity. However, being seen as ‘masculine’ for a female youth is not nearly as big a deal. Women can wear male clothing, but not the reverse. Tomboys get an eye-roll, while sissy boys are beat up and derided. That kind of thing. Anyway, I’m not saying any of this is true–but there is a sense that it is in publishing.”

If girls are often encouraged to see themselves as boyish while boys are ridiculed for exhibiting “girly” qualities, then what is “girly” must somehow be painted as bad, or at least worse. It’s impossible not to notice that if we tell someone he/she does anything “like a girl,” that means he/she does it badly. Two problems are at work here, both at the core of gender essentialism: first, qualities coded as “feminine” are shown to be weaker, smaller, less valuable, and second, if a female character is to appeal to a general readership, she must somehow lay claim to “masculine” traits.

We need to start reworking our definitions of “feminine.” Unappealing stereotypes of “femininity” are legion, but I’ll focus on two of them, one obvious, one a bit less so, both pet peeves of mine:

The Damsel.

We all love Toy Story, the first animated feature released by the now-revered Pixar Studios. We smile when we think of cowboy leader Woody, brash upstart Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear, nervous dinosaur Rex, misanthropic Mr. Potato Head. We can probably quote substantial portions of their dialogue. But hey… whose favorite character is Bo Peep? Answer: nobody’s.

Bo Peep, the Smurfette among Andy’s toys in the first film, has a very talented and appealing voice actress in Annie Potts, but the character gives Potts nothing at all into which to sink her teeth. She plays the distressed damsel role in the little dramas Andy enacts with his toys, and while she’s never in actual distress in the story itself, she’s still very much the damsel, because she never takes any crucial action. She’s there to flirt with Woody and to deliver a few Mom-type words of wisdom when the conflict starts to heat up, none of which are funny and quotable like the dialogue of her male co-stars. No wonder she all but vanishes from the memory when the movie is done.

I chose Bo Peep as my example, rather than more obvious damsels like Spider-Man‘s Mary Jane or The Princess Bride‘s Buttercup, because I want to highlight what’s most annoying about passive female characters in fiction, besides the implied dependence on men and the use of women’s peril to give male heroes the chance to display their courage and resourcefulness: passivity is boring. However much plain common sense a female character may speak, if she never actually steps up and takes a risk, she’s not likely to engage an audience’s imagination. Toy Story‘s writers eventually realized any opportunity to give Bo Peep a vivid personality was lost, and they wrote her out of the third movie.

Damselhood isn’t really about needing rescue, since some of our most active and clever heroes have on occasion needed rescue. Damselhood is about hanging back while other characters make all the decisions that move the plot, serving at best as a “motivator,” a star shining on others from a fixed point. Still, at least the damsel is usually presented to us in a fairly positive (though boring!) light, unlike…

The Killjoy.

You’ve seen her before. She’s the one with the permanent frown, the one whose function is to disapprove whenever anything fun and/or adventurous is going on. She is born from gender-essentialist assumptions that men are risk-takers, while women value safety above all else; men are voyagers and explorers, while women are homebodies. Sometimes the narrative may put us on the killjoy’s side, e.g. we’re usually meant to sympathize with poor, harried Marge Simpson’s frustrations with Homer’s hare-brained schemes. Yet the truth is without the hare-brained schemes, the risks, the ventures, we have no story. The risk-taker’s job is to act, the killjoy’s to react. Once again, the male character has control of the tale.

Here we find the common ground between damsel and killjoy. The male hero makes a challenging decision — say, to take on an unpopular court case or to pursue a crime investigation that will earn him dangerous enemies. How does the woman in his life respond? If she smiles and offers encouragement, she’s the damsel, and while we may like her (as, for instance, I like Bonnie Hunt’s loving-wife character in The Green Mile), she isn’t likely to take firm hold of our consciousness or carve out a place among our favorite fictional personalities. If she frowns and criticizes, or worst of all threatens to leave the hero unless he abandons his righteous but dangerous path, she’s the killjoy, limited by her inability to comprehend the magnitude of what her man is doing. I’ve never seen JFK, since Oliver Stone isn’t exactly my favorite big screen director (has he ever made a film that depicts women in a notably positive light?), but Sissy Spacek’s shrill whining in the trailers and commercials cements her in my mind as a solid example of the killjoy. The shallow, timorous spouse in A Time to Kill, played in the movie by Ashley Judd, is another one. Something’s not right if we catch ourselves rooting for our married hero to have an affair.

The Damsel and the Killjoy might make effective secondary or tertiary characters in certain stories, but I’m beyond tired of seeing these types as the female leads, the ones who have or win the active male heroes’ love and loyalty, or worse, the only significant female presence in the story. This we cannot move away from fast enough. If we’re ready to start breaking our traditional assumptions of what constitutes “feminine” behavior, let’s begin here.

Or, the ongoing task of crafting female characters a general readership will find engaging and “relate-able”.

Step 2: Stop casting women and girls as “the Other.”

Not long ago, my husband and I watched the screen adaptation of Andy Weir’s popular sci-fi novel The Martian. I’d resisted watching it for some time, because I have never been fond of one-character dramas (Cast Away, etc.) and I’d always assumed The Martian to be just such a story. Yet when I finally watched it, I was pleasantly surprised to find the action pretty evenly divided between the astronaut struggling to survive alone on Mars and the team trying to rescue him. It did rankle me a bit that all the scientists on said team, all the real problem-solvers, were (with one briefly seen exception) men, but nonetheless I was enjoying the film. Until one scene.

The group of scientists is devising a new solution to the problem of bringing the abandoned astronaut home, and the foremost among them comes up with a name for it: Project Elrond, a reference to the half-elven King in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The other men all approve of the name, one of them topping the leader with an even more obscure reference to Tolkien’s work. One person in the room, however, is baffled by their general amusement and unable to recognize the name “Elrond” — the room’s only woman, the PR bureaucrat played by Kristin Wiig. Her lack of comprehension adds to the men’s amusement, and the scene concludes with the frustrated Wiig proclaiming, “I hate you all,” while the menfolk enjoy a good chuckle at her expense. Girls, right? They just don’t get it.

At this point I wondered just how and why a good movie should suddenly morph into a weaker-than-usual episode of The Big Bang Theory. The worst thing about this little joke is that it’s completely unnecessary. It doesn’t advance the plot. It doesn’t tell us anything we absolutely needed to know about the characters. It’s just one more chance to affirm the already bothersome stereotype that interest in and knowledge about speculative fiction is a “guy thing.” When guys speak Klingon or quote Yoda, gals roll their eyes. Guys bond together over their special geek-related interests, but gals aren’t allowed into the club because geek stuff isn’t “for them.”

The scene is just one little symptom of a much larger problem, a tendency to create characters along the lines of what’s called “gender essentialism,” that is, the idea that while men and women might appear diverse, at their core they share the same basic traits. Men like to explore; women prefer to play it safe. Men have trouble expressing emotion; women (good women, that is) are warm, empathetic nurturers. Men are direct; women are indirect. (“Deception’s the curse of my whimsical gender,” sings Leela of Futurama, in an episode I otherwise adore.) Gender essentialist thinking lies behind accusations that warrior-women characters are just “men with boobs.” Since physical strength and aggression are presented to us as essentially masculine qualities, any woman who displays such qualities must be acting like a man — which, for some readers, may be the only way she can prove herself worthy of identification or a spot on a Favorite Characters list.

Like the Smurfette Principle, this kind of characterization sets the female character(s) apart from the pack based on gender, which of course limits the invitation to identification. In her book Brave Dames and Wimpettes, Susan Isaacs explains the effect of creating characters along gender-essentialist lines, which tends to result in “wimpettes”: “Everything they do proceeds from a single premise: They are women. As a result, they are one-dimensional characters” (17). Readers, whether male or female, aren’t likely to find them “cool.” If you’re a young male reader, honestly, how keen would you be to step into the shoes of a character whose package of defining traits is labeled “Not Like You,” and even worse, “Not Like You Should Want to Be”?

I should mention that I came back around to enjoying The Martian thanks to the character played by Jessica Chastain, whose moment to shine I won’t Spoil with too much detail. Unlike Wiig, Chastain plays a character whose gender doesn’t set her apart from those who surround her. Her role may be small, yet she’s a character any viewer might admire and even want to be.

Coming soon: Part 3: Rethinking “feminine” traits

One thing I can’t help noticing as I browse websites like Reddit Fantasy or Fantasy Faction: when the sites’ users are asked to name their very favorite characters from fantasy novels, male characters will dominate the lists. On lists of ten, maybe two female characters will sneak in. Lists of five, say, one out of three may name a female character. Most lists of three won’t name any women at all. Nor does the gender of the poster make much difference; both male and female posters tend to prefer male characters. Just why is this? It’s tempting to cry, “Sexism!” and leave it at that. But I’m afraid the problem is more complicated.

More evidence of the same problem can be found in the number of Reddit posters who claim, in the tone of confession, that they don’t enjoy reading about female protagonists because they “can’t relate” to them. These same posters have no problem identifying with protagonists from imaginary kingdoms with alien customs and beliefs. They can identify just fine with characters whose race is different from their own, or who may not even be human. But female, somehow, is a deal-breaker. Female authors are all right as long as they’re writing about male leads, as Robin Hobb does in her “FitzChivalry” novels and Naomi Novik does in her Temeraire series.

Why do so many (too many) readers find it such a struggle to relate to female characters, to enjoy walking in their shoes? Some of it, I admit, may boil down to good old-fashioned sexism, the idea that a girl or woman, real or fictional, just isn’t as good (as brave, as clever, as capable) as a boy or man, and training and experience can never make her so. This sexism manifests itself in the persistent notion that stories about girls are for a specifically female audience while stories about boys are for everyone, a notion that influences which books our youngest readers are directed toward. Too many boys, and a fair number of girls, are trained to think female characters and their stories are “lame.” We see plenty of discussions of the lack of teen boy readers and the strategies needed to encourage boys to read. The number of female leads in YA fiction is nearly always blamed, and the same solution is nearly always proposed — not that more boys should be encouraged to see that stories about girls can be fun and rewarding, but that more YA authors should write books about boys. And so the problem goes merrily on.

But does the problem lie just with the readers? I’m one of those YA authors, and I want to create stories with something to offer as many different readers as possible. Yet I am my first audience, and I write the kinds of stories my thirteen-year-old self would have been thrilled to read. That means female characters occupy central or at least significant roles. One day I may write a story with a male protagonist, but even in that one, girls and women will feature prominently. I will not and will never push female characters into the background to please any reader (boy or girl) who thinks “girls have cooties.” What I can do, what we can all do, is work to create the kinds of female leads that both girls and boys will enjoy identifying with. And I need to think about what that means.

How can we be part of the solution?

Step 1: Abandon the Smurfette Principle.

I’m far from the only one who feels the practice of including a token female character in a cast full of menfolk severely undercuts said female character’s chances of being memorable in any good way. (“I Hate Strong Female Characters” by Sophia McDougall, for instance, offers insight into its effects.) Consider the show the trope name comes from. The male Smurfs are identified by position within the community (Papa), a personality trait (e.g. Vanity), or a special skill or interest (e.g. Poet, Painter, Handy). These features distinguish them from each other. Then there’s Smurfette. What does she bring to the table? What sets her apart? That little “ette” — her gender. The others are special because of something they do. She is special because she’s a girl. Why would any boy, or girl for that matter, latch onto such a character or name her as a favorite?

The spirit of tokenism pervades this trope. The person whose distinguishing characteristic is gender (and who, as such, is called upon to represent the entire gender) gets thrown into an all-male mix often solely to appeal to an imagined demographic, rather than because the author really wants her there. Authors may feel they have to add a girl, and if they’re not genuinely invested in her, they take as little time and trouble with her characterization as they can get away with. The inclusion of such sketchily drawn girl characters does readers no favors, and once again, those characters aren’t likely to turn up on anyone’s Favorites list.

We need to stop expecting a single female to stand in for Womanhood in total and stop imagining that a character whose central defining feature is her gender has any hope of being the sort of complex and intriguing individual that readers will want to engage with. Maybe we should try taking a couple or three supporting characters whose gender is not dictated by the plot and writing them as female, and see what happens.

I have no trouble at all choosing what’s making me happiest. My new novel Nightmare Lullaby is now available in print as well as on Kindle, so all those who have yet to join the E-Book Revolution, including my own parents, have a chance to read it. I’m very proud of my first novel, Atterwald, and I’m firmly convinced everyone with a taste for fantasy should read it. But Nightmare Lullaby, dare I say it, is an even better book, a step forward, and its existence delights me beyond expression.

Among other things making me smile this month:

The Mary Sue.

I spend more time rifling through favorite websites like Goodreads, LibraryThing, and TV Tropes than is good for me, but this site is special to me because it cares about what I care about, namely cool women doing cool stuff in the areas of speculative-fiction print, film, and television as well as real-life science, technology, and the arts. I single it out this month because of a post last week from author Rachel Dunne, in which she expresses a yearning for more “nontriarchies” — that is, worlds that lack prescribed gender roles — in science fiction and fantasy. As I read it, I saw my own preferences and desires in her words and felt a little less alone (as, ideally, all good reading makes us feel). So glad more than one of us wants to see both male and female characters freed from the constraints of oft-repeated gender-based conflict! No more battles of the sexes, please, or at least fewer such battles! Now, if only other writers would heed our pleas.

Updraft.

Fran Wilde’s debut novel offers just such a “nontriarchy,” a world in which both men and women occupy various roles in society and no one’s competence is questioned because of his/her gender. I moved this new YA fantasy to the top rung of my To-Read ladder after I read an review on Tor.com that described it as an ideal book for fans of legendary anime film director Hayao Miyazaki.The description is dead-on, as I found in it interesting and pleasing echoes of one of my favorites of his films, Nausicaa and the Valley of Wind. First, it’s set in a society in which people are divided into “towers” and navigate the skies on manufactured wings, and this world is regularly threatened by monstrous creatures nobody quite understands. Second, its heroine, Kirit, who like the titular Nausicaa knows how to read the wind, discovers the true nature of the threat and takes responsibility for doing something about it. Kirit is that rare YA fantasy heroine whose story does not revolve around romance, and in fact does not even include it; she has too many vital things on her mind to worry about whether this or that or the other cute boy likes her. The YA fantasy genre could do with a few more like her.

Children of Earth and Sky.

I first discovered Guy Gavriel Kay when I stumbled across A Song for Arbonne among the bargain books at Books-a-Million. I was just getting into fantasy at the time but I was already an avid reader of historical fiction, so I happily entered a world clearly modeled after medieval France, with its troubadours and courtly customs — only it wasn’t quite France. I got my first taste of historical fantasy, in which the past is not quite our past but the magical and supernatural elements are muted, if present at all. Since then I’ve read some of Kay’s more overtly fantastical works, The Fionavar Tapestry, in which a quartet of college students are transported into a world that includes unicorns, vampires, gryphons, and King Arthur, and Tigana, in which freedom fighters are pitted against invading sorcerers in a country that looks a little like the fragmented Italy of yore. But my favorite work of his, thus far, has been The Lions of Al-Rassan, which like A Song for Arbonne discards supernatural elements as it tells a story of the bond forged by three protagonists of different faiths in a quasi-medieval Spain.

Imagine my glee when I learned his new book, Children of Earth and Sky, would be set in the same pseudo-Europe as Lions, with the same religious conflicts, only on a grander scale. I’m only halfway into it, so I can’t say too much in terms of plot, but so far I’m relishing the political wheeling and dealing and the efforts of basically decent characters to retain their basic decency as they’re caught up in the underhanded goings-on. Sometimes fantasy that reads like historical fiction is just what I’m hungry for, and Kay delivers.

The Tony Awards.

It occurs to me that since I started this blog, I’ve not yet had occasion to express my love for Broadway musicals. I grew up listening to my parents’ Original Broadway Cast albums of everything from Rodgers & Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim to Bock & Harnick. I still have strong memories of hearing Damn Yankees and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and A Little Night Music when I went down for naps. Every year I take advantage of YouTube and iTunes to learn as much as possible about the new musicals. Is it any wonder that the Tony Awards are appointment television each year, far more anticipated than the Oscars?

This year, Tony Award evening, 6/12, followed a very bleak day, which began with a brutal hate crime in Orlando, FL. There was talk of postponing the ceremony, and when it proceeded as usual, we all tuned in with Orlando very much on our minds. Yet as it turned out, we could have found no better or more satisfying contrast to the bigotry-motivated nightmare of that morning than the joyous, open-hearted diversity of the Broadway community, on full display at the Tonys — nominees of color in every category, women as creative forces behind two of the year’s Best Musical nominees (Waitress and Bright Star), and an unmistakable aura of love throughout. Plus, there wasn’t a single musical moment I didn’t enjoy. The singing and dancing of the marvelous diva Audra McDonald makes everything just a little better; I liked seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber nominated for a fun project (School of Rock) rather than a super-serious one; and I learned how effectively the Battle of Yorktown might be fought without the use of prop guns. (Skeptical of the use of very contemporary musical styles to tell a historical story, and not a fan of rap or hip-hop, I was taken by surprise by Hamilton, as I imagine a lot of people were.) That night, I feel, Broadway represented the best of America.

I’ll let Broadway have the last word.

Since Tom Holland’s Spider-Man (Peter Parker, cinema version 3) made his first engaging appearance in Captain America: Civil War, everyone, it seems, is stoked for his forthcoming solo film, Spider-Man: Homecoming. Even those who didn’t see why we needed a third go-around with the Peter Parker incarnation of Spider-Man seem to have been won over. In my lack of excitement I feel conspicuously alone, because even though I did appreciate the first two Spider-Man films starring Tobey Maguire and directed by Sam Raimi, I have never been happy with the characterization of women in any of the Peter Parker movies. Mary Jane exists to charm and bewilder Peter and get captured and need rescuing. As for Gwen, the love interest of Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker — Gwen Stacy, party of one, your refrigerator is ready.

I have little hope for anything better from this new reboot, because while active and useful heroines may be part of the Spider-verse, none of them exist on the same plane as Peter Parker. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s choice of Peter as their Spider-Man makes it all but inevitable that any important female character will be relegated to the role of love interest/distressed damsel. To give her more to do, the writers would have to diverge sharply from the comic-book source material, which I doubt they will.

Truthfully, comic books and graphic novels in general have lately been far more generous to female characters, and female readers, than their cinematic counterparts have been. In recent days, readers of comics have been treated to the exploits of a number of interesting female heroes, including the dashing soldier Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel, the awkward and brainy adolescent Kamala Khan, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, and the courageous though often befuddled legal eagle Jennifer Walters, a.k.a. She-Hulk. (I can’t speak as much about the DC side of things, because I admit that where graphic novels are concerned, I’m more of a Marvel girl.) But while women and girls may be saving the day on the page, on the screen they continue to be cast as sidekicks if they’re lucky, damsels if they’re not.

As sidekicks, or as Sky High dubs them, “hero support,” the ladies get to be somewhat useful and get in a few strong punches for Team Good, even if they’re not the difference-makers at the climax. My favorite of these is Peggy Carter, as she appears in Captain America: The First Avenger, but since I’ve already devoted an entire blog post to her, I’ll move on to other examples. I haven’t watched Deadpool yet, but I have it on authority that Negasonic Teenage Warhead is an effective sidekick who inflicts her share of damage on the bad guys. Characters like Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Widow in the Avengers films also qualify as sidekicks even though they’re ostensibly members of hero teams, because male heroes lead those teams even though the women have their awesome moments. (Interestingly, I find Black Widow to be her most badass in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which she’s clearly hero support for the title character yet still comes across as a powerful force; I still smile when I remember Scarlett Johannson’s delivery of the line, “Did I step on your moment?”)

What distinguishes the sidekick from the damsel isn’t really the need to be rescued; although my girl Peggy miraculously evades the cliche, both Gamora and Black Widow end up in need of rescue at different points in their stories. But those scenes are not all we remember about them. Those instances don’t define them. We see that if they were only given the chance, they could be the heroes of their own stories. That’s why Peggy Carter got her own TV series (let us observe a moment of regretful silence for the Season 3 that will never be), and why fans have been clamoring for a solo movie for Black Widow.

Nobody will ever cry out for a movie or a TV show with Spider Man‘s Mary Jane Watson or Superman‘s Lois Lane as protagonists, because these characters could not exist apart from the superheroes to whom they’re attached. One is an actress and the other is a reporter, so we must assume they lead somewhat full lives when we’re not watching — but when we are watching, what they’re doing is getting into trouble they can’t get out of and relying on their men to save them. Lois, to be fair, often gets to uncover vital information before she’s rendered helpless, and then gets to deliver that information to those who need to know it once she’s been rescued; I do like Margot Kidder’s version of Lois, as well as the one voiced by Dana Delany in Superman: the Animated Series, both of whom are quite fearless in pursuit of a by-line. Yet still, when we think of the character, we think first and foremost of someone repeatedly in need of rescue. Mary Jane is a far worse case, since at least Lois usually gets captured while trying to get a story, whereas the villains capture Mary Jane not because of anything she does but because it will make Spider Man unhappy. And what, after all, does anyone remember about Peter Parker’s other major love interest, Gwen Stacy? Spoiler Alert! (Unless, of course, we’re dealing with the alternate universe in which Gwen is “Spider-Gwen” — but the new movie can’t go there.)

Yet whether the women in superhero movies are useful, competent sidekicks or ineffectual damsels, there is one thing they never get to be: the heroes who lead the way. No matter how capable the women may be, men are always the difference-makers at the climax. Marvel’s Ant-Man even uses this as a plot point: hero-ing is men’s work, and women who long to enter the fray just have to pack their patience. (Female fans eager to see a female hero are told the same thing, though not in so many words, as the planned big-screen adaptation of Captain Marvel is pushed back to make room for the new Spider-Man films.) I remember all too clearly watching the animated superhero comedy Mega-Mind, in which the titular villain is desperate to create a hero because he’s bored without opposition, and wondering why it never occurred to him, or apparently to anyone else, to bestow superpowers on the plucky girl reporter Roxanne, whose heart was obviously in the right place whereas his eventual choice’s was not. What quality essential to super-heroism did Roxanne lack? A Y chromosome.

One superhero film stands out as a possible exception, one without a pre-existing comic book incarnation: Pixar’s 2004 hit The Incredibles. In the movie’s first half, Mr. Incredible, a.k.a. Bob Parr, a superhero forced by our litigious society to do time as an insurance salesman, is the clear protagonist, but the second half opens up to include his wife, daughter, and oldest son. They might seem like sidekicks at first glance, but no. For me, the movie is really the story of Violet Parr, a painfully insecure tween whose ability to turn invisible is symbolic of her longing to hide from the world, but who, despite major failures early on, evolves into a force (and force-field builder) to be reckoned with. All four heroes are essential to the action at the climax, but who gets the final moment of awesome near the end, shielding her family from certain death? Violet. That’s my girl.

Twelve years after The Incredibles, I’m still holding out for a big-screen superheroine. If Spider-Man: Homecoming should prove me wrong and not follow its predecessors’ examples when it comes to female characters, I will be lavish in my apologies. But for now, I say — new Peter Parker movie? No, thanks; I’ll be over here reading my Captain Marvel graphic novel.

In my previous post I wrote of two big character types to which I keep returning, and I chose them deliberately as types I have no intention of abandoning anytime soon, intending to look for variety within the types. But the question that naturally follows is, “What haven’t I done yet, that I want to do? That I feel I should do?” I have, I hope, quite a lot of writing left to do, and I’m looking ahead to things and people I hope/plan to include in my future work.

A nonwhite protagonist.

Some white writers may hold themselves back from trying their hands at nonwhite lead characters out of fear of “getting it wrong.” But if we’re writing fantasy, should that really hold us back? Fantasy does not demand we be true to the social constructs of the real world, only that we be true to the worlds we create and hold to the rules we set for them. Why, then, should we hesitate to fashion worlds with diverse racial make-up, and within those worlds create lead characters outside the white Anglo-Saxon medieval-Europe model? I already have concrete, immediate plans in this direction. When those characters appear, I may after all have some critics here and there accuse me of “getting it wrong.” I’ll fight that battle when the time comes. In the meantime, my characters will be what their story demands.

An optimistic hero.

In both Atterwald and Nightmare Lullaby, my male leads are in bad situations when we meet them, and neither holds out much hope that matters will improve. Both are given to brooding, perhaps an inevitable side effect of my younger-days enthusiasm for sullen romantic heroes like Pride and Prejudice‘s Mr. Darcy and Jane Eyre‘s Mr. Rochester. Yet even though I’ve enjoyed their company as I’ve followed them through their stories, as I look ahead to my next major project I’m planning to try a different kind of hero, one who is driven early on by his enthusiasm for something (in his case, dragons, one of which has saved him from drowning) and who, despite a few problems in his situation, basically enjoys his life. His easygoing equanimity will of course be disrupted later on, but he will meet the challenges that rise to block his path with a sense of hope. Can I make this character as compelling as my brooding sad souls? I look forward to finding out.

An “action girl” heroine.

I adore my bardic introverts, but so far, neither of the heroines of my novels has been very action-oriented (though Nightmare Lullaby‘s Meliroc, given her size, could have managed to hold her own in a fight). They may save the day, but not through combat. A girl doesn’t have to kick butt physically in order to be a badass, but all the same, at some point I might like to try my hand at a more rough-and-tumble tomboy who can wield a sword or staff or bow and arrow with the best of them. Need she be a warrior? I don’t have a war story anywhere near my head right now, and I may have to accept that such stories really aren’t, as the saying goes, “in my wheelhouse.” Yet my “action girl” heroine could be a bodyguard, or a keeper of the peace. (She’ll probably still be an introvert, though.)

A non-hetero romantic plot.

Because I persistently gravitate toward female leads in my writing, it will likely feature two women falling in love. While I’ve been pleased to see a growing number of happy, healthy male/male relationships in fiction (e.g. Captain Holt and his husband Kevin in my favorite sitcom, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), I’ve noticed that while those couples may get happy endings, romantic relationships between two women tend to end in tragedy, with one or both the women getting killed. (Blindspot, though I will follow it into Season 2, lost major points with me when it killed off its lesbian character, and as I understand it, she’s far from the only such TV character to meet such a fate.) I may be taking a risk — can it really be a Spoiler if the story isn’t written yet? — but I hereby pledge that when I write my story of two women in love, both of them will survive.

A female protagonist who doesn’t fall in love.

Any female protagonist of mine will of course forge vital relationships with those around her, since I find stories of characters who are essentially islands unto themselves, interacting superficially with those they meet and never coming to care about any of them, quite boring. But do those relationships have to be romantic, and do those romantic relationships have to take over the book? Entirely too often, when writers create female lead characters, they would answer “yes” to both those questions. Readers of fantasy and science fiction pick up on the prevalence and come away with the idea that while a male protagonist may complete his journey without falling in love, a female protagonist can’t. Some readers who dislike romance may automatically turn up their noses at female leads.

Thus far, I’ve been as guilty as any other writer of making romance a central feature of my heroines’ stories, and when I cast my mind ahead to future projects, romantic plots keep cropping up. Yet in time, a story will present itself to me in which romance just isn’t needed. When it’s done well, romance is wonderful. But it does not have to be, as Lord Byron asserts in Don Juan, “woman’s whole existence.”

In just one month I’ll be enjoying one of my favorite times of the year: LibertyCon in Chattanooga, TN. Today I got my first look at my schedule!