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schneefinkI'm not sure I can make this post make sense, but I'm trying. Have some ramblings about female characters in my fandoms.
The first books I can remember (atm) being seriously fannish about were by Karl May. I don't know how well he's known outside of German-speaking Europe, probably not very well, but I loved his books: the Westerns, the ones set in Arab countries, the miscellaneous others. All of them shameless self-inserts preaching Christian morality and white European superiority, but I didn't care: adventure, brothers in arms, daring feats of bravery, heck yeah. That was the time when I started constructing my own self-inserts (Mary Sues, all of them, and I'm not at all ashamed of them.) All female, of course. The lack of female awesome characters bothered me, for some reason. I remember reading the Old Surehand books and falling in love with Kolma Puschi - I think that was the first time I was annoyed by Old Shatterhand swooping in and single-handedly saving the day. (Let's not even talk about Nscho-tschi.)
My next love was Science Fiction, which had a bit more female characters. So much love for Susan Calvin! For everyone who has only seen the film "I, Robot" and not read the books, first, what are you waiting for, second, she is so much more awesome. Susan Calvin is the smartest person around, all the men call her whenever they have problems, and she solves them while being sarcastic, closed-off, and still human. I loved "Feminine Intuition".
Next came a period of reading everything, a lot of it fantasy. Some female main characters! I read a lot of Marion Zimmer Bradley (mostly because it was available in my library and I liked the worldbuilding. I never fell in love with her characters.)
Star Wars: Leia! I also read Lord of the Rings and later the Silmarillion about twenty times: I had high hopes for Aredhel, but then she went and got abducted. And all the other Elven women either didn't get mentioned or fell in love with humans. Meh. Harry Potter: Well, there was Hermione, who is smart, but I never got the sense that the author liked her much, and somehow we didn't click. I had a brief manga interlude, and my favorite characters were Nami, Robin, and C-18. No good female characters in Beyblade, so I concentrated on my own. And none of those were main characters.
Tl;dr: Looking back it is very obvious to me how I always looked for the female characters to identify with. I also created my own, sometimes several of them (I had my own crew of Mary Sues for One Piece, and it was glorious.)
Sooo then I discovered internet fandom! Mostly through SGA. At first I read a lot of gen teamfic, when I ran out I read all the AUs, including McShep, and later I read everything/anything. I fell in love with the fandom, not canon. Fanon!Teyla is awesome, and sometimes, fanon!Elizabeth and fanon!Jennifer are, too. They are occasionally awesome in canon! But not main characters, and I wasn't satisfied with the way they were presented on screen. Teyla and Elizabeth and Jennifer are interesting, but we have to work on it, and there is not enough consistent fanon (especially for Elizabeth and Jennifer) so it means having to start all over again each time.
I think SGA was the first or one of the first fandoms where I didn't create a self insert for a long time. Hmm.
Hmmm, what was next? Probably One Piece again. Wow, I've been following this one for a long time. At the moment I'm in one of my "meh" phases, mainly because I am really, really annoyed by how little Nami and Robin and get to do and do not particularly care for Shirahoshi. Every crew member except the women gets a fight to show off their new powers? Really, Oda? And they wear even less clothes for more curves than before. I'm disappointed.
Firefly! Where we have River, Inara, Kaylee, and Zoe. All of them interesting premises that need fanon (or a few more seasons...) to make them really great, but I didn't get into the fandom so I don't know if it exists.
For a short time I followed Sherlock fanfic. The stories I enjoyed most were a) magic AUs, because the fandom has some amazing ones, and b) stories fleshing out Sally Donovan and Molly. I recently rewatched Sherlock: it's a great mini-series, and maybe I could even love it if it had some better minor (female) characters. But Sherlock is kind of a dick; John Watson is awesome, but most Sherlock/John stories don't have a character dynamic I enjoy.
White Collar: This is how you do female side characters well! I love Elizabeth and Diana. (Also Neal is very pretty and Mozzie is fun.)
And then (or was it before?) I discovered Homestuck, and Homestuck has Rose, Jade, Kanaya, Terezi, Vriska... female main characters! We have female characters being kind of screwed up, having their own adventures, lots of girl-girl interactions (some of those interactions involve almost or permanently killing each other), girls interested in girly things and also being badass (Rose and her knitting needles! Kanaya's lipstick/chainsaw!) It is glorious. How did I never know how much I missed this? Female characters that don't need fanon! Love. And they didn't get killed off any faster than the rest of the cast, either! How much do I love Rose <3 especially in the most recent updates.
Claymore has all the ladies as main characters! At first as lone warriors, which I didn't find that fascinating because I love teamwork and friendship, but then they formed a group and it was wonderful. I'm not very fannish about this manga, but I enjoy the female warrior friendship very much. (Also the female crystal-tentacle-monsters.)
Tower of God has the princesses! So much love for the princesses. Lahel and Hwan are probably going to be interesting, too. And Anak and Androssi definitely count as main characters.
Gunnerkrigg Court: female main characters again! And we even got make-up scene, and they are so adorable together, and just *flails* awww.
Noblesse is the unfortunate exception among the webcomics I'm following. I want all the Seira&Yuna friendship stories! (At first I thought Ik-shan and Tao were women, I'd have liked that.) They are the least "main" of the "main" cast, and as much as I love M-21 and the others I regret that.
Tl,dr again. I think what I want to express is that in all the fandoms/canons/books/comics/movies I follow/encounter I still look towards the female characters first to identify with. It's the female characters that I can relate to much easier and whose stories interest me first. My favorite part of PotC is Elizabeth Swann, and I get annoyed when reviews of Thor only mention Thor and Loki, dismiss Jane and Darcy, and then call it a general movie primer. Occasionally I still make up my own female self-insert Mary Sues, and I love it.
This turned out to be - actually, I'm not sure, a look at female characters in my fandoms? I've been thinking of checking out Buffy, but I promised a friend that Doctor Who would come first, and who knows what I'll discover until then. I'm not even sure what I wanted to say, but hopefully this will one day help me organize my thoughts. Also it is the middle of the night which is another reason why I might not make any sense.
Oh who am I kidding, this is totally me procrastinating on studying for my next exam tomorrow. In a few days LB will come and hopefully force me to do more and be online less because I have no self-control whatsoever at all. *facepalm*
ETA:printfogey reminded me of A:tla - how could I forget that! Katara, Toph, Mai, Ty Lee, Azula <3 and soon Korra!
The first books I can remember (atm) being seriously fannish about were by Karl May. I don't know how well he's known outside of German-speaking Europe, probably not very well, but I loved his books: the Westerns, the ones set in Arab countries, the miscellaneous others. All of them shameless self-inserts preaching Christian morality and white European superiority, but I didn't care: adventure, brothers in arms, daring feats of bravery, heck yeah. That was the time when I started constructing my own self-inserts (Mary Sues, all of them, and I'm not at all ashamed of them.) All female, of course. The lack of female awesome characters bothered me, for some reason. I remember reading the Old Surehand books and falling in love with Kolma Puschi - I think that was the first time I was annoyed by Old Shatterhand swooping in and single-handedly saving the day. (Let's not even talk about Nscho-tschi.)
My next love was Science Fiction, which had a bit more female characters. So much love for Susan Calvin! For everyone who has only seen the film "I, Robot" and not read the books, first, what are you waiting for, second, she is so much more awesome. Susan Calvin is the smartest person around, all the men call her whenever they have problems, and she solves them while being sarcastic, closed-off, and still human. I loved "Feminine Intuition".
Next came a period of reading everything, a lot of it fantasy. Some female main characters! I read a lot of Marion Zimmer Bradley (mostly because it was available in my library and I liked the worldbuilding. I never fell in love with her characters.)
Star Wars: Leia! I also read Lord of the Rings and later the Silmarillion about twenty times: I had high hopes for Aredhel, but then she went and got abducted. And all the other Elven women either didn't get mentioned or fell in love with humans. Meh. Harry Potter: Well, there was Hermione, who is smart, but I never got the sense that the author liked her much, and somehow we didn't click. I had a brief manga interlude, and my favorite characters were Nami, Robin, and C-18. No good female characters in Beyblade, so I concentrated on my own. And none of those were main characters.
Tl;dr: Looking back it is very obvious to me how I always looked for the female characters to identify with. I also created my own, sometimes several of them (I had my own crew of Mary Sues for One Piece, and it was glorious.)
Sooo then I discovered internet fandom! Mostly through SGA. At first I read a lot of gen teamfic, when I ran out I read all the AUs, including McShep, and later I read everything/anything. I fell in love with the fandom, not canon. Fanon!Teyla is awesome, and sometimes, fanon!Elizabeth and fanon!Jennifer are, too. They are occasionally awesome in canon! But not main characters, and I wasn't satisfied with the way they were presented on screen. Teyla and Elizabeth and Jennifer are interesting, but we have to work on it, and there is not enough consistent fanon (especially for Elizabeth and Jennifer) so it means having to start all over again each time.
I think SGA was the first or one of the first fandoms where I didn't create a self insert for a long time. Hmm.
Hmmm, what was next? Probably One Piece again. Wow, I've been following this one for a long time. At the moment I'm in one of my "meh" phases, mainly because I am really, really annoyed by how little Nami and Robin and get to do and do not particularly care for Shirahoshi. Every crew member except the women gets a fight to show off their new powers? Really, Oda? And they wear even less clothes for more curves than before. I'm disappointed.
Firefly! Where we have River, Inara, Kaylee, and Zoe. All of them interesting premises that need fanon (or a few more seasons...) to make them really great, but I didn't get into the fandom so I don't know if it exists.
For a short time I followed Sherlock fanfic. The stories I enjoyed most were a) magic AUs, because the fandom has some amazing ones, and b) stories fleshing out Sally Donovan and Molly. I recently rewatched Sherlock: it's a great mini-series, and maybe I could even love it if it had some better minor (female) characters. But Sherlock is kind of a dick; John Watson is awesome, but most Sherlock/John stories don't have a character dynamic I enjoy.
White Collar: This is how you do female side characters well! I love Elizabeth and Diana. (Also Neal is very pretty and Mozzie is fun.)
And then (or was it before?) I discovered Homestuck, and Homestuck has Rose, Jade, Kanaya, Terezi, Vriska... female main characters! We have female characters being kind of screwed up, having their own adventures, lots of girl-girl interactions (some of those interactions involve almost or permanently killing each other), girls interested in girly things and also being badass (Rose and her knitting needles! Kanaya's lipstick/chainsaw!) It is glorious. How did I never know how much I missed this? Female characters that don't need fanon! Love. And they didn't get killed off any faster than the rest of the cast, either! How much do I love Rose <3 especially in the most recent updates.
Claymore has all the ladies as main characters! At first as lone warriors, which I didn't find that fascinating because I love teamwork and friendship, but then they formed a group and it was wonderful. I'm not very fannish about this manga, but I enjoy the female warrior friendship very much. (Also the female crystal-tentacle-monsters.)
Tower of God has the princesses! So much love for the princesses. Lahel and Hwan are probably going to be interesting, too. And Anak and Androssi definitely count as main characters.
Gunnerkrigg Court: female main characters again! And we even got make-up scene, and they are so adorable together, and just *flails* awww.
Noblesse is the unfortunate exception among the webcomics I'm following. I want all the Seira&Yuna friendship stories! (At first I thought Ik-shan and Tao were women, I'd have liked that.) They are the least "main" of the "main" cast, and as much as I love M-21 and the others I regret that.
Tl,dr again. I think what I want to express is that in all the fandoms/canons/books/comics/movies I follow/encounter I still look towards the female characters first to identify with. It's the female characters that I can relate to much easier and whose stories interest me first. My favorite part of PotC is Elizabeth Swann, and I get annoyed when reviews of Thor only mention Thor and Loki, dismiss Jane and Darcy, and then call it a general movie primer. Occasionally I still make up my own female self-insert Mary Sues, and I love it.
This turned out to be - actually, I'm not sure, a look at female characters in my fandoms? I've been thinking of checking out Buffy, but I promised a friend that Doctor Who would come first, and who knows what I'll discover until then. I'm not even sure what I wanted to say, but hopefully this will one day help me organize my thoughts. Also it is the middle of the night which is another reason why I might not make any sense.
Oh who am I kidding, this is totally me procrastinating on studying for my next exam tomorrow. In a few days LB will come and hopefully force me to do more and be online less because I have no self-control whatsoever at all. *facepalm*
ETA:
printfogey reminded me of A:tla - how could I forget that! Katara, Toph, Mai, Ty Lee, Azula <3 and soon Korra!
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-25 11:53 pm (UTC)And Buffy, absolutely, can't recommend it highly enough! Not just because of the wealth of interesting female characters but because the storytelling is fantastic. One of the best series of tv I've ever watched. I still rewatch it every once in a while and it holds up. (Just beware that season 1 is, while not bad, not up to full strength yet due to low budget and the show still finding its feet.)
I found for myself that what I like best in a fandom is one male and one female character to latch onto; not necessarily in a shippy way. But I've started to stay away from all-guy canons, also because in my experience fandom tends to treat supporting female characters in those kinds of fandoms not too well... so that way lies frustration. My friends tried to push Sherlock on me but I just couldn't be bothered to watch the pilot.
Re: White Collar, there was one episode where the show really clicked for me, 'Burke's Seven'. If the entire show was like that, dude, I'd so be on board. Because yeah, the side characters have so much potential, it would be a cool ensemble show! I find the side characters at least as interesting as the two main guys.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-26 12:13 am (UTC)I'm skeptical about Buffy because of some critical meta I read, but I'm willing to give it a try. I can probably get the episodes in a month or two.
Yes, Sherlock is a bit frustrating. It has good dialogue, characters, and if the worldbuilding/surroundings/other characters were better it could be great. White Collar also has two white guys as main characters, but does everything else better. I loved 'Burke's Seven' and the supporting cast in general. (Strangely I might have read more Sherlock fic about Sally Donovan than WC fic about Diana, but I'm almost sure this is because of my strange selection of where to look for fic.)
no subject
Date: 2011-12-26 12:27 am (UTC)Nooo. The main character (Nate) gets bashed a bit by a certain faction of the fandom and I went into the show fully expecting to dislike him... he actually turned out one of my favorites. :P I find him totally intriguing, and Timothy Hutton is a great actor. (They all are!) He can be kind of an asshole, he's a control freak and an alcoholic on top of it, but who wants flawless characters! Plus he's perfectly self-aware of his flaws. Besides one of the other guys has hurt and killed plenty of people (not all of them deserving it) and fandom loves him best, so... well, I've learned not to pay a lot of heed to fandom consensus because more often than not I find myself ending up on the opposite side.
Same with the Angel comics I'm reading right now. People tell others not to read them 'cause they suck... they're so good! I was reading one last night and downright squeeing, it was like having the show back.
Eh, I've read some critical meta of Buffy and mostly disagreed. Not that the show is above critique, it's just that it got so much stuff right that I have a problem with meta that narrows the show down to things it got (arguably) wrong. I'd say check it out, make up your own mind. It's quite a ride.
Let me know if you want links for downloading or streaming, I could probably hook you up. :)
no subject
Date: 2011-12-26 12:34 am (UTC)Thanks, I might take you up on that in one or two months :) At the moment my internet connection is so slow that eagerly waiting for new episodes would probably kill me with frustration. It's hard to watch youtube videos, even *grumbles*
no subject
Date: 2011-12-26 01:11 am (UTC)-J
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Date: 2011-12-26 01:17 am (UTC)*adds to pile*
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Date: 2011-12-26 01:18 am (UTC)-J
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Date: 2011-12-26 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-25 11:51 pm (UTC)The new series on the US network ABC, "Once Upon a Time", is also interesting for its strong characters.
And The Wind-Witch (http://www.amazon.com%2FWind-Witch-Susan-Dexter%2Fdp%2FB000OVON58&ei=hrb3Tpu7Eqnk0QHxtJTMAg&usg=AFQjCNEkP3KXOJyV8bjHEo7IIRggCIq3TQ) is a book I have an irrational fondness for ....
no subject
Date: 2011-12-25 11:57 pm (UTC)The Wind-Witch looks interesting, will look for it!
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Date: 2011-12-26 12:00 am (UTC)I think I too always look at the presence of female characters and how they're treated, and while I may sometimes love a canon with few girls and women in them (like LOTR - maybe because the hobbits aren't very "manly"?), the odds tend to get significantly better if there are sympathetic and important female characters around. I didn't click with One Piece until I felt satisfied Nami wasn't going to be looked down on. (In fact, for a long time I even had a strong feeling Nami was an authorial favourite in the comic...) But I agree that the post-timeskip manga has been very disappointing in that regard - there was Otohime, but that's flashback-only.
Of the more recent canons you mention, Claymore is the only one I follow myself: I agree it's terrific! I also think that Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist are great when it comes to female characters, in number and variedness as well as depth and nuance - though the protagonists of both are still guys, admittedly. And then there's things like Haibane Renmei, where most of the cast, the protagonist and the second most important person in the series are all girls/young women.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-26 12:06 am (UTC)Regarding Hermione, I agree that mostly she was portrayed positively, but then there were also things like S.P.E.W. were she was portrayed as unreasonable for some reason iirc. To be honest it's been a while since I've read the books, I might not remember them too clearly. I do know that Ginny in the books > Ginny in the last movies. She was a resistance fighter, dammit!
Claymore! Why such a slow update schedule? And why so few Seven Ghosts friendship stories? :(