I wholeheartedly believe in the axiom of critiques, that if
one person mentioned something you might be able to ignore it, if two people
mentioned something you should look at it, and if three people mentioned
something you're in trouble. However in this instance the e-mail start off with
pleasantries, and when I got to the part where he mentions reading the fantasy
novel, I was a little stunned because he said “All of your female characters
are the same.”
This one statement caught my attention, I read the rest of
his e-mail, and basically he liked what he read, there could be a little more
descriptions to develop the world better, mostly things to invite him into the
world. But I couldn't get past the statement that all my female characters are
the same.
There is a three-hour time difference between he and I, so
all I could do was send a reply e-mail asking what he meant by all my female
characters of the same. I got the reply and the answer struck me as odd, he
meant that they were all the same because they were strong female characters. I
had to sit back and think about that, he felt all my female characters of same
because of her strong personalities or they were leader figures.
There has been it had been lately in movies and television
and novels of strong female leads, and I have always believed in strong female
characters. This comes from the fact that my mom and grandmother raised me
while my dad was often on deployment. So I always have had a strong female role
model or figure in my life. I went back and looked at the characters that he
was alluding to, and there are four strong female characters in my fantasy
novel. They are the Queen, the Warped
Witch, and the two warrior women; one is the cousin of the Queen, and the other,
who is a Guardian of the Queen.
There are strong male characters in my novel, and in fact
the main character is male. So I sent another e-mail asking if he could clarify
what he meant by these women are the same after reading his reply and parsing
it so that I understood it, I still have a hard time gathering his meaning. It
seems that he felt that there should be a woman who needed to be saved who was meek
and not at all capable of handling herself. He felt that the main protagonist,
the male hero, did not feel heroic enough because the women were so strong.
I think we have a clash of paradigms where he feels that in
a fantasy novel it's the classic story of the Princess needing to be saved, where
I believe that women are just as strong maybe not physically, but certainly
intellectually and with the force of personality on par with any male character
or any man in real life. I don't plan on changing my female characters because
I envisioned them as strong, forceful individuals, but I do see in my stories my
female characters are not willows that wilt in the harsh light of day. I believe
I'd rather have strong female characters that can project as positive role
models should a young lady pick up my one of my books.
While there are certainly things that differentiates men and
women, such as physical strength; intelligence and force of personality are pretty
much equal, and it makes for much more interesting dialogue and a better story when the characters are seeing each other as intellectual equals.
