Strength, gender, brats and falsehood.

[midnight_hawk]

The thread about "strong female Revans" got me thinking about how people perceive strength and weakness in a character. Yesterday I was disturbed to read this article, which suggests to me that Austen's characters would not be valued by modern press and publishers. And this morning I stumbled across this rather good discussion of about the

Comments

[midnight_hawk]

Oh I didn't mean to imply that characters have to be strong or strong in every situation, just that there is more than one kind of strength and that what is commonly perceived as strength often isn't. All characters should have a point where they cannot cope or extract themselves from a certain situation. They certainly shouldn't be able to deal with each and every kind of situation all by themselves.

Reducing a male character to a passive or dependent role to glorify a female character "strength" is just as bad as reducing a female character to a sex object (goo optional). The whole uke and semi thing in yaoi stereotypes also pisses me off because it's generally reinforcing the same demeaning attitudes towards both women and gay men. The idea that there has to be a dominant and submissive is really unimaginative, even before people assign "girly" traits to submissive males. There's nothing inherently wrong with dom-sub relationships, but two men can have sex without one of them having to "assume" a "feminine aspect".

[athenaprime]

The article's not clear, but the main problem I see with Lassman's experiment is that he didn't specify which divisions of what publishers he sent his manuscripts to. Or whether his query letters identified the fiction as a genre piece or not. If he simply chose the largest publishers, he was bound to get rejected without being read, simply because he sent them something they don't publish (ie, period fiction when they publish SF or nonfiction cooking manuals). Editors are swamped enough reading the slush piles of types of writing they're looking for, they're not going to waste any brain power on something out of their range

[athenaprime]

PS - sorry for the novel on your LJ. You'd think I could be shorter.

[midnight_hawk]

I only really put the article in there because it made me think about what makes a lasting impression. Austen definitely still has a strong influence over romance and chick-lit. However you can argue that Elizabeth Bennett is much more of an assertive character than her often named "modern counterpart" Bridget Jones, I suppose that's the whole point of the book though. Since Elizabeth was uncomfortable with what society expected of her and Bridget feels the same pressure in a different way.

I was at a workshop with Jennifer Crusie last weekend, and she remarked that there aren't enough women writing romantic fiction with a strong adventure element rather than the other way around.

That's the kind of balance that interests me. Too often I find fantasy has last-minute romances that are shoe-horned in at the end of the four-book saga, rather than developing slowly and changing over time.