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We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)
This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.
The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character
In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).
Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":
"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.
Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?
Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.
To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.
The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:
I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)
None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.
At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).
Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.
This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.
Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.
Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.
What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.
As a small public service here are a few excellent shows with extremely flawed female lead characters: Nighty Night, Enlightened, Six Feet Under, Pluribus, Killing Eve, Fleabag. Many more, but these spring to mind.
The more crowd pleasing you go the less flawed they get, so you get The Diplomat on Netflix where the main character is basically a bit disorganised and supposedly not good at manners and fashion. Or Homeland where our character is paranoid but her mental illness feels kind of separate to her (she is fundamentally good but has to deal with her own mania and paranoia).
But dig deeper and there is plenty of entertainment out there that features flawed women by creators with a deeper understanding of character than the person in the above video, and they aren't actually offensive to feminists or feminism at all as far as I can tell.
I don’t recall who it was in science fiction, but it might have been Phillip Jose Farmer; someone who had been criticized for their inability to write female characters. I’ve found it more speaks to the taste of the reader, and it reveals more about their own prejudice and preference for how they want their characters shaped. There’s nothing I can think of in terms of a writer who just writes objectively bad characters when demarcated by gender; but me not being TM’s biggest fiction reader, I wouldn’t be the one to know. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
There have been many.
Isaac Asimov did kind of write women as basically alien creatures who exist only as sexual distractions for men (Susan Calvin being a notable exception), but, he was an uber-nerd who got started writing in the 1930s. Women probably were distracting alien creatures to him. And to be honest, I always thought Asimov just sucked at characterization in general. His characters are mostly hooks to hang a plot on.
Heinlein, of course, wrote uber-competent characters of both sexes, but his women were usually sexual libertines, and coincidentally, hot, young, nubile, and inexplicably attracted to potato-shaped older men who might happen to resemble a middle-aged SF author.
Those two archetypes, in various forms, are what you find in most early SF, and that's what grinds most feminist readers' gears: women are, in one form or another, basically male fantasies and sex objects. But most of those early SF writers were writing women in the roles that actually existed for women at the time. Some created women who could be smart and brave and actually do things, many just put women in the "wife/sister/girlfriend" role.
(Edgar Rice Burroughs' women were almost exclusively damsels in distress and/or objects of veneration. Robert E. Howard actually wrote female warriors like Belit and Red Nails. H.P. Lovecraft was probably more scared of women than he was of brown people and Shoggoths.)
Modern feminist critique mostly strikes me as bad faith (they will go through a book, analyzing an assortment of characters, and conclude that an author is misogynistic because his female characters have too much romantic attention put on them, or don't have enough to do, or have to be rescued by a man, or fulfill a "gendered role" or whatever). In some cases the observations are actually correct (yes, all the women are romantic interests and are not the action heroes the men are), but that is not necessarily a bad (or unrealistic) thing unless, well, you're a feminist reader who demands all stories give "equal representation" no matter how it distorts the story. But I can see how it would be kind of annoying to read book after book where men are the interesting characters and heroes who do things while women are just their love interests; better authors, even ones who aren't trying to be "feminist," can still make the female characters interesting. Less good authors just make them decoration. But you are not wrong that bad female characterization is usually reflective of an author who's just bad at characterization in general. (A lot of early, and contemporary(!), authors write great ideas, great plots, but cardboard characters.)
Ironically, one popular author often praised highly for his female characters is Brandon Sanderson. It's true his female characters are usually interesting, smart, brave bad-asses who still remain feminine. (Don't forget, Sando is still a Mormon and that always shows around the edges.) But his female characters are also all the same character. He basically can only write one. (Okay, maybe two or three.)
So anyway, yes, the woman in the OP is fairly typical of feminist critics: it's not that any of the women are unrealistic or "bad" characters. It's that they aren't checking her boxes and measuring up against men in the way she thinks they should. I don't know how often women actually note "perky tits" on themselves or other women, but the meme on the Internet is "breasting boobily," which is basically about male authors who spend too much time emphasizing a woman's appearance (and especially her breasts) in every scene, having her examine herself in a mirror (so the author can describe her perky tits), etc. This sometimes happens, and sometimes you do get the impression the author is infatuated with his own character, but now it's like a lot of writing memes, where it's a pattern you sometimes see but the mere existence of it in a scene is not, contrary to lots of bad writing advice, "bad writing."
(I mean, if you start the book with your character waking up from a dream, or the first thing the female character does is check herself out in the mirror, I probably am going to roll my eyes hard.)
I worry that all this discourse has broken my brain, because I've found myself doing the opposite in a current series I'm reading. It's called Years of the Apocalypse. It's a time-loop webfic, and the best I've read since Mother of Learning. But I just couldn't help but notice that the author wanted you to treat a character sympathetically or not based on their gender. The main character and 95% of the people moving the plot forward are female, with no good reason for it. It's really bad if you analyze the irredeemable villains; out of dozens, it took until book two before there was a SINGLE female one.
I wish I could just ignore it, because if I were to suddenly become unable to distinguish pronouns, it'd become a book filled with varied, believable, and interesting characters. But I've become tuned to Notice these things, largely by feminists complaining about the converse. It hurts the story either way.
After all, the Big Lie so many feminists told was that they just wanted equality. That's why "feminism" has such positive connotations in most people's minds, despite literally being an -ism. But the moral people who believed in equality have largely gone their own way; the feminists who are left over actually just think that sexism is only wrong when it's done TO them, not BY them.
Huh, I actually hadn't noticed that; I did enjoy (most of) the characters. Was it really so blatant?
No, what turned me off Years of the Apocalypse (somewhere around the end of book 2; haven't touched it since) was the author's near-total incuriosity towards economics, which was becoming an increasingly large part of the story. There was a line -- and I'm still floored someone could actually write this -- claiming that industrialization increases the cost of household goods. Like, you show the natural land being stripped bare for resources -- where do you think it all goes? Where do the cartoonishly evil (naturally) industrialists get all their money if not by selling the massive quantities of stuff they produce? It's not like people were limiting their consumption out of ecological consciousness before (lol), they just couldn't afford it. So... who's buying all this stuff, then?
I just don't see how you can design a functional world with such a broken perspective on how society functions-- Well, you can't, actually, and that becomes obvious once you start paying attention. It's not like this is some background detail, the on-going industrial revolution is central to the plot, and the author apparently has done no research into how industrial revolutions affect society or even seriously thought about it. It's just the laziest sort of anti-capitalist screed about how greed is destroying the world -- any proper Marxist would be embarrassed to write something so uninspired and thoughtless.
It is otherwise pretty good -- if it weren't I wouldn't have suffered through that as long as I did. The best time-loop fic since Mother of Learning (at least in the fantasy-progression genre)... Well, I'll reluctantly admit that's true, but MoL was a lot better. That particular niche-within-a-niche is just sadly under explored. (Though I'm liking Throne of TIme a lot so far!) Still, it's enjoyable on its own merits when it keeps the focus on anything else.
What is Mother of Learning and what makes it good? I skimmed the internet and it is about a young wizard on a wizard school (inspired by HP?)
(I'm going to try to keep this more or less spoiler free, so sorry if anything's too vague.)
The school actually doesn't play that big a role in the story after the first several chapters; perhaps in a broad sense it's inspired by Harry Potter, in that most people writing in English today have probably read it and it is about a young man learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up, but it's a tenuous connection. It certainly feels nothing alike. Way, way more focus on world building and a world that (more or less) makes sense, a much more developed magic system (the story is reasonably restrained about when it decides we need to know all those details, but they certainly exist), and it is really primarily about learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up (mentally, at least). (And not petty social drama, poorly designed fake sports, or school life -- even as a kid I got frustrated at how bad Harry Potter was at keeping the focus on the things I wanted to hear about.)
The main conceit is the time loop; every month, time resets. Everything and everyone go back where they were before and (almost) everyone loses their memories of the intervening time, but not our protagonist. So, fantasy Groundhog
DayMonth. But while Groundhog Day is primarily concerned with the time loop itself (it was a much more novel idea back then, granted), MoL uses it as a vehicle to exhibit an intricately designed world, to section off a short stretch of time to explore how everything fit together in that moment. At first it all feels pretty painfully generic: run-of-the-mill D&D style fantasy world, one-note characters (of whom our protagonist likes roughly zero, so you only see them when they decide to come annoy him), disconnected and uninteresting events, and a very straightforward goal. But by going through that month again and again, we slowly uncover the rich detail that was hiding under the surface of all of those things, how many of them were just reflections of our protagonist's limited perspective and immaturity, and how he grows as a result.The character work is... actually just good, without qualification. So with the qualification that almost every character is literally incapable of learning or growing in any durable way because they're reset every month, it's impressive. All the more so because of how hard it is to find any decent characters at all in stories quite so autistically obsessed with detailing an intricate magic system. Part of that is just focusing on the protagonist, who can learn and grow, but it accomplishes a surprising amount through evolution of our understanding of characters that can't undergo actual evolution inside the time loop. I don't want to oversell it, nothing here is groundbreaking, but it's a plus instead of the minus it really should have been by all rights.
The overarching plot is fine-to-good, I'd say. It keeps the pressure up, which isn't easy given the premise, and there are enough twists and turns to keep you engaged. And, like everything else, there's a lot more going on with it than it seems at first. Still, it feels pretty distant most of the time, and for the vast majority of the word count it's just motivation to accumulate ever more knowledge and power. Which is fine by me, that's what I'm here for. It has the standard progression/incremental game hook of number-go-up and getting to do bigger, cooler things as the story progresses, finding shortcuts and new avenues to explore in the time loop -- all pretty basic, but fun. Like, a big goal early on is learning the teleport spell, because that allows us to reach places we couldn't before and to get to critical areas sooner in the loop. And with that power we can save the life of someone recommended as a mentor for another sort of magic we need to do something else, and so on.
Pacing is... eh, let's say 'deliberate.' The whole story is around three thousand pages. I wouldn't call any of it filler -- and in fact I enjoyed it enough I wish there was more; I've re-read it twice -- but it definitely takes its time and you've got to be ready to meet it on its own terms. I don't mind it, but I can certainly understand why someone would. I think it would be relatively easy to put down and pick back up later when you're in the mood, but I read it straight through all three times.
And, like I've said, the best part is the world building and magic, with satisfying mechanics and connections and almost fractal complexity.
On the whole... maybe this is an out-there take, but it kind of feels like Project Hail Mary to me (the book much more than the movie), in that it's focused on learning about and interacting with complex systems, understanding how they fit together and how they might be re-combined to accomplish a new objective. It's lonely in the same way at first, and less lonely later on in the same way too (though that is a bit of spoiler). And they both have an element of piecing together past events from limited clues, though of course that's handled very differently. Otherwise... Outer Wilds? For reasons that should be obvious if you've played it (which everyone should).
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