It's interesting how many men have chimed in to helpfully point out the dragons in the audience won't write reviews about bad portrayal.
You are telling on yourselves. So we both recognize it's not about knowledge, it's about accountability over about staying clueless about inner lives of women.
I just saw an interview with a male fantasy author where he said "I guess I haven't really written female protagonists because it's not really something I feel like I can write from a place of knowledge."
Reader, this man wrote a series with a whole ass ancient dragon as their protagonist. 🙄
I'd have a lot more respect if a cis guy just straight-up told me he was writing and selling fantasy lit *entirely* as his own self-fulfillment fantasy writing project that also happened to be somewhat profitable and writing a girl main character would give him gender dysphoria.
That's basically why I don't read harem lit but generally avoid giving those authors shit. It's clearly labeled and identified as what it is, and if it makes them happy and they find an audience... 🤷🏾♂️
it's also really fucking weird to act like women are just this unknowable monolith. And that their gender is the sole defining aspect of their character. Weird shit.
This is a really fascinating and important conversation. I'm so glad to see it here.
I've written a novella (unpublished, alas) and I'm 3/4 through a draft of a novel, both with female protagonists. I know these characters extremely well, and I am doing my absolute best to portray them...
not as men with long hair, not as non-gendered, but as women living in a world with a lot of the same sexism as ours. I can employ compassionate imagination, and I can research, and I can bounce ideas off women alpha readers, but I fear it'll always ring a little hollow.
I saw an Asian woman writer once say she was sick of white men profiting off of her identity, and it *shook* me. I've heard the advice to seek diversity in side characters more and make my main protagonist a white man who actively thinks about systemic prejudice and tries to act against it.
I want to do that! It's a great idea! But then I'm not going diverse leads, and my question is always: does the world need yet another story starring a white man?
I just don't know anymore what the best choice is.
If women in sci-fi could spend decades showing up to conventions and being doubted because they wrote under their initials and men couldn't believe they wrote those male characters, you can learn to write women convincingly too. Writing is a progressive skill. You don't have to be perfect today.
See, that's how I see it! It's all an illusion anyway, so I just need to pull off a convincing enough illusion for the context. Nobody is going to expect me to write from a woman's POV and really *get* it...
so if is shift gears and focus on a part of their characters that I *can* portray, I think I'm good, right? And I'll take my lumps in the comments, of course, but that's so much more interesting, to me, than yet more white male leads.
Sure, do that and show respect to the people you're portraying by really thinking about whatever criticism you're given and how you can use it to improve your craft and the stories you tell.
Jesus H... I did appreciate that one of those accounts was tagged by bsky mods as "rude" tho. Like any creative muscle, you only get better by doing. If you always avoid the thing, you'll never get better at it, and when that thing is "women"... Misogyny excusing itself is still misogyny.
The name of the genre is FANTASY, it is inherently cringe and there’s probably no honest way to write it or read it without revealing embarrassing and suspect things about one’s self. This is in no way intended as a defense.
