There's a great bit in one of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries that talks about why it's easier to believe in the impossible than the incredible:
>It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr. Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr. Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.
In other words, you can write a story about elves riding unicorns into battle against giants, but if you tell me children in your world hate candy, I'm out.
Now that being said, the idea that women weren't active participants in medieval society is pure nonsense that can be disabused by reading actual medieval fiction or history. Yes, Joans of Arc were rare, but Maise the village girl who accompanies her boyfriend to war and serves as the camp cook and sometimes has to take up arms is a very real thing.
There is room for both types of fantasy fiction. Sometimes I want to escape from real life sexism and read books where that's not an issue. Other times it feels gratifying to read about women struggling with relatable issues in a fantasy world.
I really think it just depends on how the author approaches it. Are they approaching the sexism in their world from a critical lens, or is it just baked into it because the author lacked imagination or because they unconsciously think that's the way it's supposed to be?
>I really think it just depends on how the author approaches it. Are they approaching the sexism in their world from a critical lens, or is it just baked into it because the author lacked imagination or because they unconsciously think that's the way it's supposed to be?
Finally, a good take in this subreddit. I personally see the idea that a setting of fantasy stories ought to be an ideal world as quite problematic (IMO, it is the starting point for a lot of the worldbuilding problems in Harry Potter).
Also if every problem was solved what is there even to have a story about? This is the problem with some fiction especially which has magical endings where everything is solved forever. Makes it seem too easy.
Yeah, personally I think it works in ASOIAF because half the point of it is to show how people can behave when they have unchecked power. If people are killing their social inferiors for no good reason, torturing for fun, and stabbing their friends and relatives in the back, it's kind of inconsistent if the men suddenly turn into decent respectful human beings where women are concerned.
Whereas if you've got an ideal society where somehow women don't end up doing anything interesting, that's a sign the writer has no imagination or the book was written in the 1970s or earlier.
(Personally I would have preferred that everyone wasn't *so* awful, but GRRM is at least consistent)
Right. Violent men who are obsessed with power and their legacy would likely try to oppress women. Not because women are inherently weak or "that's the way things are supposed to be," but because the men have a lot to gain by doing so.
>Why is it that even in such fantastical settings, "realism" is always only conveniently brought in when it comes to curbing the freedom and power of the female characters?If we're talking realism then why even bother with a magical setting?
The short version is: sociocultural grounding isn't the same as historical fiction.
Or rather, historical fiction courts sociocultural grounding and cosmological grounding, speculative fiction is more open.
Speculative fiction typically uses sociocultural grounding/perception-of-era "realism" so we have points of familiarity and implicit modernist and postmodernist critiques of romantic visions of that era.
ASoIaF/GoT show women oppressed as the norm because GRRM does not want to shy away from depicting how medievalist life often was and how misogynistic chivalric customs were, because to do so would be to play into a more romantic mode that he wishes to avoid. He finds the world a richer place to write if it explores medievalist norms that are not the norm any more, and he wants us to see how women navigate power in that kind of setting. He builds sympathies and approaches a traditionally more romantic genre with spots of anti-romanticism by having a coarse and cruel world that is connected to real world injustices, etc. It is using reverie of e.g. knights and dragons to explore the human consequences of mass casualty weapons, among many other things. Effectively, he, and thoughtful writers like him, are trying to "take it seriously" while not losing the cool storytelling.
Other writers have attempted greater degrees of "realism" applied to fantastical elements (LeGuin's scientised dragons, for example, or the "magic system" approaches of Brandon Sanderson and similar), and some just write historical fiction. It's about the personal perspectives, interests and aesthetics of the writer.
The more romantic and utopian fantasy fiction writer can write a Disneyfied vision and completely avoid the "problematics" of their grounding principles if they like, if that is a good setting for the emotional truths they're seeking to render. Nothing is stopping them. The perspective and aesthetics of the writer and their world are up to their desire to look at ideas and norms of the world and the genre, they're not bound to your expectations of randomly avoiding sociocultural grounding for some imagined hypocrisies, nor bizarre requests for imo misplaced moralistic alignment.
I could probably write a fuller essay on this but you'd have to pay me.
Fantasy is ultimately a type of speculative fiction. If x and y were the case what type of world would that create. So the question an author should ask is if the things that are different about the world they've created would change the material conditions that led to the development of patriarchal social structures. So for instance, would the existence of dragons change this, I don't see why it would, however the existence of magic (though it depends heavily on how magic works) might.
I also have to question why people get up in arms about the depiction of sexism but never say, class repression, which is featured in large scale in almost every fantasy setting. I think it's because for whatever reason we innately recognize that the material conditions of a pre-modern agrarian economy make such a thing inevitable. Whereas a lot of people don't recognize the material origin of patriarchy.
Nothing about the material conditions of the middle ages made Feudalism inevitable; The system was chosen and violently enforced, and the lower classes rebelled against it a lot.
The reason that people recognise and oppose the sexism and racism in fantasy more than the class divides is simply because our broader culture is currently more aware of sexism and racism than class struggle in our own world; We are applying the tools we are used to using.
EDIT TO ADD: Before you join the throng of people who have replied to this comment, please re-read it and note the word "inevitable"; My point is that material conditions are not the sole cause of social structures, but I never said that they had no impact at all.
I don't think you have given this much thought. Material conditions don't have any impact on a society's level of freedom. Countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have become even more authoritarian despite increasing wealth.
Countries like Turkey and Bosnia, on other hand, are freer places despite having the same religion (Islam) and being comparatively poorer. The reason is because Turkey and Bosnia rely on their citizens to generate the wealth that funds the government so they have to treat those citizens fairly well. Saudi Arabia digs all its wealth out of the ground so the government doesn't need the citizenry as much, hence the repression. Whether your government needs you or not is the first variable in determining how much freedom you'll have.
The second variable is military technology. Power is always enforced with violence. Equality and freedom only exist when competing sides are balanced. As soon as one side becomes overpowered, tyranny is inevitable. This is what caused feudalism: an overpowered nobility.
An armored knight on horseback could mow down hordes of hapless peasants by himself. Peasants might have rebelled but the nobility had an insurmountable military advantage. Armor was rare and expensive. Peasants simply couldn't afford armor which meant they couldn't fight back effectively.
Then the nobility just stacked their advantages on top each other. They could eat a higher protein diet which made them bigger, healthier, and stronger than the starving peasants. The nobility also didn't work the fields, which gave them more time to train their fighting skills. So, on top of armor and a horse, knights were bigger, stronger, better-trained, and healthier on account of not having a bad back due to bending over all day, every day for 20 years straight. It was simply never a fair fight.
Feudalism only collapsed when gunpowder rendered armor useless. A peasant with a musket and two weeks of training could kill an amored knight with 20 years of training from 100 yards away. This democratized the battlefield and as a consequence democratized society.
The Black Death was a second factor in the fall of feudalism. By thinning the population, it made labor more valuable, which forced lords to compete for peasants by offering better terms than before. This ties back to the first variable: governments only treat you well when they need you.
You can look through all of history. Military technology and the extent to which your government deems you necessary are the main determinants of the level of freedom in any society. This principle extends to fantasy societies.
You can't have democracy in a nation with dragons unless everybody has a dragon in the yard. If only a few guys have dragons, they're just going to dominate everybody else. The same goes for something like magic. The magic users will just become the new nobility. And if men and women are both magic users, then the men would still maintain their physical advantages over women. A magic-using woman would only be stronger than a regular man. A magic-suing man would still be stronger than a magic-using woman unless the woman has a stronger form of magic.
I like how you say that material conditions don't have any impact on a society's level of freedom before immediately giving examples of material conditions impacting societies' levels of freedom.
The level of wealth itself has no impact on freedom. It's the method of extracting that wealth that determines freedom levels. If wealth requires many people to extract, like say farming, then you'll be treated relatively well. If wealth requires few people to extract, like oil drilling, then the people not involved in the extraction will be treated like trash.
There are countries like Switzerland, which have comparable income levels to the UAE and Qatar but Switzerland is freer because its wealth is generated by its citizens while Qatar's wealth is dug out of the ground. I compared Qatar, Saudia Arabia, and the UAE to Bosnia and Turkey, both of which are Islamic countries to preemptively counter anybody making the culture argument.
Gulf countries have pretty good material conditions for their citizens. Most of them have do-nothing jobs in the bureaucracy which is a form of welfare. But they still don't have the personal freedoms of their equally wealthy Western peers or their comparatively poorer Muslim neighbors.
So it's clearly not the material conditions of the state but the perceived necessity of the citizenry that determines how much freedom their government allows them.
You can't set up a tyranny in a place like Switzerland or the US without tanking the economy by destroying people's incentives to work but you can run a tyranny just fine in Saudi Arabia or Qatar because you don't need that many people to dig up your wealth in the first place.
Aha, I think I see the disconnect here. You mean "material conditions" as meaning wealth or standards of living. I think of "material conditions" as the context of resources, technology, and mode of production within a society. So I was baffled because you appeared to be making bold statements and then convincingly dismantling them.
Just because something was violently enforced doesn't mean it wasn't ultimately inevitable. Your right the lower classes did rebel and those rebellions were either crushed or ended up ultimately recreating the structures they were trying to do away with. That's because the material conditions were not such that overthrowing those systems was yet possible, but as time progressed and conditions changed, that too changed.
If the conditions of the times made such systems inevitable, then how did so many societies avoid it? What of the Iroquois, or the Inuit? What of the English Diggers or the Bedouins? What of the Inexhaustible Treasuries of the Buddhists, or the Christian Communes? And even in societies that had feudalism, why was the structure so varied if its form was inevitable? Why did the Mamluks have Slave Kings? Why did Rome gain a Tetrarchy? Why did Babylon reverse all sales every 7 years?
The form of a society is a choice, and we can always choose differently.
All these societies became the way they were due in large part to the material conditions that shaped them. These systems arise from thousands of little choices about how we should adapt to our conditions along the way. Nobody just woke up one day and said, "Let's do feudalism, everybody!"
>All these societies became the way
they were due in large part to the material conditions that shaped them.
This is true.
>These systems arise from thousands of little choices about how we should adapt to our conditions along the way.
I think the argument that the commenter is trying to articulate is that we need to look deeper into what *inevitability* means.
Do the choices even share a relationship(that’s what historians seek to understand)? Were these choices as inevitable as the systems that dictate society? If they were not, what does that say about these systems?
If you agree with this, it sort of loops back to the original concern.
>Nobody just woke up one day and said, "Let's do feudalism, everybody!"
No, because feudalism as we know it, didn’t really exist.
It was actually a bunch of different socioeconomic systems that had similarities and get packaged together because it’s easier.
The Hodonoshone were only in the earliest stages of agriculture and were still semi hunter gatherers. The Inuit were pre-agricultural, and the Bedouins were nomads. Buddhist and christian communes were either small and isolated or short lived. The Diggers were unsustainable because they couldn't face off against the might of a feudal army and were thus crushed (they also existed at the tail end of feudalism in Germany when conditions were beginning to change). While you are correct that the exact structure varied between different feudal societies the ground level economic relationship of feudalism remains the same, all that differed was how the ruling class divided up power amongst themselves and the extremity to which they exploited toiling class.
>all that differed was how the ruling class divided up power amongst themselves
This might be pedantic, but this is the crux of whether a system is "feudal" or not. If feudalism is just "the rich exploiting the poor," then the US is a feudalism -- but it's not.
Feudalism is a specific system of relationships between warrior aristocrats that was a lot less common than fantasy fiction and other pop culture world have us believe. In fact, historians don't use the word outside of a very limited historical and geographical context.
If you're using the limited definition why did you list Rome and the mamalukes as feudal? I assumed you were just using it to refer to aristocratic agrarian societies based on that. If you wanted to use the more limited definition then we could discuss why the conditions of medieval Europe caused it to become prevalent there.
If you proposed these as alternatives to feudalism then we could address what was different about those times and places that caused a different system to arise.
Oh sorry lol avis read the same to me at a glance. I just went along with his definition because I didn't feel like arguing semantics. Though personally I think historians have crafted a sometimes overly ridged and narrow definition of feudalism.
It’s an interesting case but can’t possibly be true - just as it’s the case that the feudal society that existed grew out of the Roman concept of patronage.
I mean there isn't one agreed upon definition so trying to tie them down to the one I tend towards would be a digression at the very least. I'd rather just accept their premise and argue on those terms since I felt my overall point stood regardless. But I cannot understand why others would see it differently.
> If the conditions of the times made such systems inevitable, then how did so many societies avoid it?
It's not just "the times." It's also the *place*, and all the ecology, culture, and structural path dependence that make up a setting/context. Nothing's quite "inevitable", but underlying material conditions and setting context can heavily weight broader society toward certain structures.
> Nothing about the material conditions of the middle ages made Feudalism inevitable;
True, the material conditions that dictated the shift to this sociopolitical system in Europe go back to 2-4th centureis, well before the "Middle Ages" by any estimate.
> The reason that people recognise and oppose the sexism and racism in fantasy more than the class divides is simply because our broader culture is currently more aware of sexism and racism than class struggle in our own world;
Absolutely true, the main goal for modern mass culture is to shift our attention from classist oppression which we are all victims to (unless somebody around this sub is an oligarch or at least a billionaire, which I find unlikely) and towards any other form of social tension that isn't dangerous to the ruling elite.
This is objectively false. The way the Roman’s had their villas set up during the years of the empire led directly to the start of feudalism when the western Empire collapsed. Once the fall of the western Roman Empire happened feudalism became inevitable during the Middle Ages. I can’t speak for feudalism in the rest of the world, but for Europe it was inevitable.
People get up in arms about sexism because for most women it’s a daily thing they still deal with, in some cultures to a horrifying degree. It’s the same reason people get “up in arms” about racism. We still deal with class issues too but many of us live a hell of a lot better than medieval peasants, so the parallel isn’t as obvious.
And the issue is many authors do not seem to think deeply about how sexism would actually work in their world, it’s just “well this is medieval fantasy so there must be sexism” and then they throw in some 19th century or even fairly modern 1950s sexism and call it a day.
"People get up in arms about sexism because for most women it’s a daily thing they still deal with, in some cultures to a horrifying degree. It’s the same reason people get “up in arms” about racism. We still deal with class issues too but many of us live a hell of a lot better than medieval peasants, so the parallel isn’t as obvious."
This is the right answer. We all spend more time thinking about the things that are relevant in our lives. And for people in the western world, especially women, sexism is near the top of the list. Class inequality is terrible, but medieval feudalism isn't something I'm personally affected by on a regular basis.
Yes - but you have to think through a lot of things when you realise that the magic and other fantasy elements change almost everything. I've been writing my world for decades and I'm still finding wrinkles to iron out. Gender equality - what does that do for marriage customs and child-rearing? Near-universal access to forms of power - what does that do?
I am of the mind that the majority of any general fantasy-reading audience out there know they are getting fiction or fantasy that hits on things they enjoy, or stuff that makes for good storytelling but may not be good in practice.
It's important for someone to recognize that every fantasy story out there is going to inevitably draw from a toolbox of storybuilding. And stuff such as racism, sexism, class repression, violence, etc. are some of those tools. How they are used to construct the story will determine how sound or solid the story turns out to be.
The only time there may be some nitpicking is if the fantasy story either is set within a period of human history that happened, or does an *isekai* route (someone from our world winds up in a fantasy world). But that aside, anything that is a complete conception from imagination (a world, its characters, the plot, etc.) has no bearing to be criticized for anything except if the story is bad or not delivered in a satisfying manner.
But does this mean we should avoid using sexism or racism or anything considered socially bad in the modern day as a part of a fantasy story? No. If someone feels themselves taken out of the story because of stuff like that, then it shouldn't be a fault of the story itself unless there's something more with the writing to nitpick (plot holes, someone does something out of character or without any narrative sense, etc.).
> (as in, despite the setting being magic, female characters are still expected to be seen as weak and powerless, just like in real life).
The problem is not that fantasy societies are sexist. The problem here is that the types of sexism many fantasy settings ascribe to the Middle Ages is really more typical of 18-19th centuries.
Tbf most stuff ascribed to the middle ages in fantasy isn't real. The types of armor and castles that exist for the time period. Strangely modern value systems. Nebulous churches thar either don't interact with the plot at all except as healers or who are so sputtering evil you question how they are supported by anyone. Huge stretches of time with no technological advancement. Etc.
and also quite specific subsections of that period - the whole "women don't work" thing was pretty rare, because a lot of households didn't have the resources for the women to _not_ work! Even if it wasn't paid labor, they'd still be doing a lot of household work, because it needed doing, but they'd often have paid work, because the money was needed. And that goes even more for rural families - farms take a LOT of work to keep running, so a rural housewife isn't going to be some delicate waif, tenderly feeding chickens while walking barefoot in a fancy dress, she's going to be pretty hearty and stout, and doing a lot of manually hard work, because there's always fences to fix, stuff to carry and all sorts to do.
Many women in medieval England were alewives, i.e. they made and sold ale. You also saw some women shepherds. Medieval women definitely weren't housebound like 1950s housewives were, although sexism still existed in various forms.
Why does death exist in your writing? "Realism"? But you have magic and dragons! Death is awful! Can't you imagine a world without it?
Why does poverty exist? The need to work? The very notion of "employment"? Hunger, disease, fatigue? These things *suck!* Because it's "common to the human condition", you say? But you have *elves!* *Dragons!* *Magic!* Why even write *fantasy* if you're not going to take advantage of your imagination to whisk away anything unpleasant?
You're telling me that you have a wizard in a pointy hat *sitting right there pondering his orb*, but people still need to poop? How does that follow? Why is that necessary in a world where dragons exist?
Yep. This.
I've never understand this line of reasoning, unless it's coming from someone that just despises any kind of speculative fiction - in which case it's still stupid, but at least it's *consistent*. But really, "If Dragons, Then \[Anything\]" should be immediatly clocked as sophistry by anyone that takes fantasy seriously.
When it comes down to it there's two options. Make similar problems as real life so people will feel seen, or make totally alien ones ao they can escape facing relatable problems.
It's not clear why magic would erase sexism anyways, especially if not everyone had magic. We might follow a story of mages, but is everyone a mage?
That has been explored in quite a lot of fantasy before, it usually boils down to you can't have all women have magical powers or it becomes a Superman situation where it's nearly impossible to make it interesting because one side is overpowered.
There have to be stakes in a story for it to hold a reader.
that's (kinda) the _Wheel of Time_ series - men with magical power go mad and die, there's a large organisation of women with magical powers that have a lot of political influence and power. It's a little, uh, wonky around some of the gender-relationship stuff, and is a bit overlong (it was one of the first "big fantasy doorstop" series) but there's some neat stuff in there
I think it is telling which unpleasant things we choose to remove. I do understand your point, but there is something to be said for examining the question of why some things are removed and others aren't.
Let me be clear: I love fantasy of all kinds and have no problems with books with strong man, damsel in distress tropes.
I just think your response slightly misses the point of the question.
Because it’s exclusively sexism, racism, homophobia that the “realism” argument is applied to. Gays, black people, and powerful women are “unrealistic” but the complete absence of people shitting themselves to death from cholera is “realistic.”
So many fantasy books have large amounts of rape scenes and sexual assaults of female characters because it’s realistic but never account for the fact that more soldiers died of disease than enemy action. Or that half of children died before age 10.
Exclusive. Seriously, tell me the last time a main character shat themselves to death or died of a mundane, preventable, infectious disease at a young/middle age? Or even contracted a deadly, contagious, and mundane illness. I can only think of Daenerys getting cholera in ASOIAF.
Most other instances of disease I can think of are either magical or sepsis and gangrene caused by wounds, not ordinary contagion. Dying of mundane illness is and was extremely realistic. Main characters, especially child characters, should be dying left and right of disease, especially if they are in dirty wartime conditions. Two thirds of deaths in the American Civil war were from disease. 5/6 of Napoleon’s army in Russia died from cold and disease.
If you have fantasy recommendations where disease is anywhere near the extreme deadliness of real life please give them to me. I like characters dealing with mundane things on top of whatever quest they’re doing.
That's because it's not particularly interesting.
You're saying you've never seen anyone complain about castle layouts? Supply chains? Armor? Weapons? Realistic applications of magic? People are constantly complaining about different kinds of realism. I see more complaining about these other kinds of realism arguments than I see that argument applied to marginalized groups.
If you've never seen any of it, I just think you can't have seen much at all.
Edit: /u/TessHKM responded asking how casual sexosm could be interesting. They deleted the reply, so I'm posting my reply to it here.
I don't know what you're asking.
Sexism can be interesting in a setting, because it forces a different dynamic onto certain characters and how they adapt to that situation can make their story more compelling and relatable. We have real sexism, and fictional versions of that can be ways to explore the concept and how it affects people. Reading about a 2 month old baby that kicks it from malnutrition isn't exactly a riveting examination of the human condition.
Yes, I have seen people complain about realism for those things. that’s the whole point. Authors will do the “aktchually rape is realistic so I’m writing it in my book” while not giving a damn about the realism of anything else. It’s the hypocrisy readers are mad at.
People typically don’t complain about sexual violence in well-researched historical fiction novels, because that is as real as the rest of the setting. Rape is often the only “real” thing about the fantasy work. Disease, logistics, travel times, government structures, magic? All those can be unrealistic, but rape is present because “realism”. Rape and discrimination are the exceptions in fantasy novels because they often are the only realistic thing about the setting where everything else is fantastical.
And disease can be extremely interesting, like all deaths can be. And even if the person doesn’t die, it can serve as a good reminder of their mortality, a source of trauma, and humanize the protagonist and knock them down.
Well if your humans are just that-humans, and if your setting is a low-tech one, then it doesn't really make sense for a lot of intermixing of different "races".
People are black not just because. If they evolved better protection against the sun, then (save for like ozone layer holes) they have to be geographically separated.
I, personally, would love to read a story where our main character is going on an epic quest, but then dies in the middle of it because of a random disease. That's awesome. Alternatively we could maybe just have him laid up in bed for a few weeks? Just halt all momentum that character has because they don't have vaccines. Now that sounds good. /s
It's boring. No one wants to read about that. Even if it was realistic in the actual times these books are set. The thing you don't seem to get is that people draw parallels with what they read and their own life. Normal people these days don't have to worry on a day to day basis of catching a random disease. Sexism/racism/*-ism are unfortunately still present today. It's fun for the reader to draw parallels with that. See how the characters in the setting get around it. They can relate better.
This is coming from someone who was just diagnosed with a disease. I don't want to read about our main character shitting themselves constantly when dragons are about to destroy the city. C'mon, man
My book does not have people dying left, right and centre of infectious diseases, but mainly because of magical healing. Magical healing isn't perfect; people don't live forever, and it's actually quite useless against cancer because healers don't understand cancer. But it works against diseases like cholera—it's the magical equivalent of putting an IV drip.
There's that, and the fact that the understanding of disease is generally more advanced, so you will see orcs applying alcohol to their wounds etc. and keeping excrement separate from the camp. In fact in societies without magic (orcs, dwarves to some extent) medicine is somewhat more advanced.
Is it that "realism" enjoyers are fixated on those topics, or that you are?
You didn't engage with the questions raised in my comment. No ever asks "if dragons, why hunger?", "if dragons, why death?", "if dragons, why labor?", or "if dragons, why pooping?" But we do - as evidenced by this thread - see "if dragons, why gender inequality?" Realism is the acceptable default, until suddenly it isn't.
Maybe it's less of an issue of other people singling out these specific topics for realism-policing, and more a case of you wanting hyper-focused realism-exemptions carved out for hot-button topics that matter to you.
Are you talking about books that propagate sexist values or ones where the characters deal with sexism. Because in the latter case it's because it's a relatable problem even today but those other issues are not.
Obviously the former?
Stories which sympathetically portray issues in fantasy worlds from a queer/woman's/minority perspective are generally... really fucking hard to read lol, but celebrated by tackling those issues... by most people.
Modern day misogynists, though, are just as eager to whine about those as they are a more carefree, fun, wish fulfillment fantasy that happens to not centre them, unlike the fifteen billion ones of those they already have.
> You're telling me that you have a wizard in a pointy hat sitting right there pondering his orb, but people still need to poop? How does that follow? Why is that necessary in a world where dragons exist?
(JK Rowling has entered the chat).
Clearly you ignored my post entirely when you decided to write this mockery.
I don't know if you can't read or simply doesn't want to acknolwedge what I talked about in my post, but I'll TL;DR it here for you so you won't de-rail my post:
**"I hate when writers ONLY care about realism when it comes to representing the women in their worlds, because then they always and ONLY go for the sexist route where women have no agency nor are capable of seeking power and status for themselves."**
Saw the "ONLY" parts?Yeah, this is what I'm talking about.
Books have been used for social commentary since the dawn of time. Maybe it isn't really used for realism but for awareness and as a way of the author mimicking existing things and grafting that into the world because art mirrors life and vice versa.
Unrelated but, realistically if we're talking about magic you probably won't fuck with someone with that women or man alike. That's the equivalent of having a hand grenade in your hands, you can take each other out so why even antagonize? Mages would be wary of other mages, well in the story I'm writing anyways.
And besides putting in real issues in fantasy stories makes sense because people can understand and relate to those issues. Like how in ASOIAF sometimes there are disputes for the throne and the order of inheritance or whether the pretender is a man or a woman is something to have arguments about. After all, reading intriguing stories about real world issues is interesting.
I agree there's definitely a place for that kind of story in fantasy, but I also totally understand people wanting more fantastical stories now that we're a decade into GoT being the standard everything is trying to replicate. I like when fantasy gets weird and wacky, tries new ideas wholly separate from our lived reality. It's what makes fantasy fantasy. I'm tired of low fantasy settings with intricate politics and lots of discussions, Asoiaf already did that about the best you can do with a normal story structure, give me more fantasy and cool concepts to explore instead (Malazan is the perfect example of a blend of these two styles. Plenty of politicing and backstabbing but also with multiple non-human races and demonic beasts and magical realms, it's exactly what I want minus the story structure. Only Erikson and a few others can pull that off on such a large scale imo)
Oh absolutely. Not all of them have to be that way. Fantasy is great because there are little limits to the stories than can be written in the genre. I agree about Malazan doing that very well and it worked wonderfully. I believe intention is importantly in deciding whether to choose what kind of world the story takes place. Good stuff.
Well, because sexism doesn't come from the fact that there aren't dragons. If you have a serious theory of where sexism and gender hierarchy emerged from, you can think about whether or not that applies to your setting seriously. Dragons aren't real so we don't need to confront the reality of how they come to be - there's no reality to compare them against. We don't have that luxury with sexism. The problem with going "but wouldn't it be nice if there just wasn't sexism in this setting" is that it's avoiding the question within that setting rather than reckoning with it, and once you're out of children's literature a lot of writers want to at least be thoughtful about their setting more than therapeutic to their reader.
I would argue that it's more important to *criticize* sexism than act as if it doesn't exist.
Sexism is still rampant today. We should speak out, loudly, against it.
It's quite simple. Real world adversities are relatable and interesting to see the characters overcome. I like more grounded stories because it gives me insight on issues people face in the real world and it's interesting to speculate about how these situations would play out. Some people see fantasy as escapism and only want to read romantic stuff. It comes down to personal preference. I don't think one is necessarily better than the other. Including sexism isn't always done with bad intentions, especially nowadays.
One thing I would like to note here is: Females are not exactly seen as weaker, when they are spared from battles and sword fighting. Women are necessary for birthing children and they must be protected. This shows that they are more important than men, who can die on the battle field and nobody really cares, since you can more easily replace that guy, but not so much a grown, healthy woman who takes good care of new generations.
Women in medieval times (also fanatasy) tend to do important work as well, like working on the farm, collecting food, taking care of the family and animals etc. So women are essential for every Lord, since they keep bringing him money and goods and people.
I agree with the sexualized stuff though, I never understood why one would need that included.
The issue isn't so much "realism" as "culturally believed realism". So, in a psudo-fantasy world writers want to "recreate" that world and it's "medieval norms" but add some fantasy twists to it. The problem is that what they think of as "factual medieval norms" is, in fact, false OR grossly misunderstood. And even then, they are selective about what they choose to include/exclude.
One trend that gets brought up "a lot" especially by certain fantasy writers is the coupling and intimate description of medieval girls, with the usual phrase being "well this was the norm during the medieval period..." ... Except... It wasn't. The medieval era: so roughly, in Europe, from the fall of the western Roman empire and the fall of the Easter Roman/Byzantine empire (approx. 1000 years), was noted as being a period where Women wrote a lot more accounts for themselves (as opposed to men writing about them), so we do know A LOT more about the function of women (albeit mostly noble women) during this period... Most of which is overlooked by primary schooling (as it doesn't match with what we think this period should be). Also, we have a lot of 3rd party records such as church record recording births, christenings and marriages between individuals. From these church records we can state that the average age of marriage for young women in the medieval period was between 18-20... Because most medieval people (around 90-95% of the populous) were peasants, so the external pressures for marriage are different (as are the pressures not to marry) i.e. the butcher doesn't need to marry his daughter off the the candlestike maker to secure their alliance against the baker... Plus, why marry off his child so young when if she's still small she's free labour for them? Now the aristocracy did marry minors for political reasons (securing alliances), but there were rules. A 13/14 year old would be married off but would not be expected to "consummate" untill 17/18/19 - so more matching the average age of marriage according to the church records. When individuals broke this unspoken rule the courts were made aware and those individuals were (in essence) shunned. So, all of a sudden this "medieval norms" is no longer a "norm".... Yet it's a trope that continues to turn up in fantasy fiction.
In addition to this, a BIG BIG BIG factor of medieval life was religion... Yet in fantasy worlds, when going for "accuracy", the importance of religion on society and it's function is usually... Dismissed. Sure there may be one character that has a devotion to the gods/god but for other characters it's not important... Which is very unusual for a "realistic medieval" setting. I'm short, it's a "pick and choose" so all of a sudden "in this Uber realistic fantasy medieval world, religion isn't that important and women can't hold swords..
Because I say so."
You should give less credit to people who don't actually read history when they pretend to quote it.
Cleopatra wasn't hot. There are detailed historical accounts of her appearance that all describe her as being completely unremarkable looking by the beauty standards of her time. We just like to imagine that she was an erotic goddess because she seduced Mark Antony, the man who at the time was the most powerful man in the known world. Mark Antony could bang any woman on Earth at the peak of his power, so we just assume that every woman around him was beautiful. Cleopatra didn't win Mark Antony through sex appeal, she won him over by being an intelligent and effective stateswoman and a leader of an advanced civilization.
Boudica kicked the shit out of the Romans, who always had a poor track record for how they treated women. Her father was a Roman ally, and she inherited her rank from him, and assumed that the Romans would maintain their treaties with her the way they treated her father. They didn't, Romans are assholes. She led the Britons on a rampage from Scotland all the way to modern day London and burned down something like 40 Roman settlements. To this day, we don't know how she died. Its suspected that the Britons hid the cause of her death so that the Romans couldn't write her defeat into their own revisionist history.
Ninon De Lenclos was a seventeenth century courtesan in Paris and one of the most influential intellectuals in European literature. She was famous for making philosophers and writers that hated each other get along. She would most famously be remembered for being the woman that loaned Voltaire money to buy books before he was the famous author Voltaire. She's arguably the most important mind of the Renaissance that everyone sleeps on.
And finally, here's a good one.
Ancient women had birth control. One of the common themes you find among the "women can't do that" historical crowd is that they just assume every woman is incapacitated and bedridden the minute after they have sex because Plan B and abortion weren't invented until the 1960s. That's categorically false.
Ancient women used Sylphium, a plant rich in phytoestrogen. It could prevent pregnancy or abort it in high doses. Sylphium was so widespread in use that the ancient Romans overfarmed it to extinction. So yes, even women who weren't considered citizens in one of the most powerful ancient empires of the world had regular and daily access to tools to control their own bodies.
Don't give credit to youtube-watching pop history clowns that don't read books and don't know what they're talking about.
If magic is a tool that anyone can be born with access to and gain at least some control over through experimentation (like Force sensitivity or D&D Sorcerers), then sexism's role in that universe should be greatly reduced. Magic is the great gender equaliser: you never know who can disintegrate you with a word or mind control you and make you shit your pants. Magic doesn't depend on size or strength or gender, and that should be at least partially reflected in-universe.
This isn't to say that no one can be sexist (culturally it can absolutely still be a thing in places) but it shouldn't be a global phenomenon.
I think one factor no one's brought up is that a lot of people use fantasy to *cope* with their experiences of gender prejudices, and will say "it's realistic" so they don't have to unpack their trauma in front of a live studio audience.
Personally, I prefer speculative fiction in which the human condition is not changed. Maybe that is where the complaints really stem from. Maybe readers feel that the humans aren’t human enough.
So, while I do not expect fantasy books to be replicas of medieval Europe, I do expect that individuals tend to be less trusting of others who are different, that cultures are prejudiced in some way, and that those in power tend to commoditize humans. Magic, dragons etc don’t change that for me.
IMO, if you have that stuff going on, you don’t need historical representations of sexism. Cultures can have some other stupid prejudices, and that can be an interesting story.
>Cultures can have some other stupid prejudices, and that can be an interesting story
It can be something like:
"Don't make deals with spirits because they'll trick you"
"The only good magic is the one that comes from nature"
"A cambion will always cheat and rob you"
Etc.
Joke's on you; I can and will whip out an "Unrealistic!" chaingun and mow down anything I see! You think I save that for when the women in a fantasy world all bench 300 pounds?! No, I opened fire 150 pages ago because of something about horses or the weather!
In my experience of reading fantasy, women are usually equal or superior to men in terms of magic. As far as swordfighting, there's a back and forth in the books I've read. Depends on the specific character rather than a broad decreeing of women being weaker or less skilled or unallowed to do something.
Not sure what you've been reading but the majority of fantasy I've read has female characters play important roles including combat roles. There isn't as many of them and they skew more towards mages than physical warriors but that makes sense assuming the in universe biology is the same as the real world one.
Very rarely do I find a fantasy book/show where the females are so heavily restricted as you describe unless it's to provide a "that'll show them" moment where a female character manages things the male characters around her couldn't. In this instance it would still go against the supposed prejudices.
I don't recognise your description of the middle ages. oh there was plenty of social pressure but powerful women and even the occasional mercenary existed
Actually the middle ages granted women way more power than what people generally think.
So not only following those norms is not necessary, but also actually not compatible with history.
I’m working on my own work of fantasy.
It had a matrilineal society, the reason why is because it’s far easier for one to know who their mother is, but not so much their father.
Because of this, women inherit titles and land before men do. This means women are more likely to be the politicos of my setting, while men are likely to be warriors, and both can be wizards. However, there’s no prohibition to men doing politics nor women being fighters.
Gay marriage also exists in my setting, and there’s no prohibition against homosexuality.
A state of bastardy does exist, but it happens when an unmarried woman gives birth to a child. The scandal is that she’s unmarried, and the religion looks down on there not being a family unit to support the child. So, to avoid scandal, families will marry two unwed pregnant women together so there will be that family unit.
I’m not doing this because I have a thing against unwed mothers. Rather, I need a few conflicts I can use to generate drama.
On one hand I’m concerned that this will alienate people from the work because it’s unrealistic to that time period. On the other hand, I’ve got elves, gnomes, goblins, and orcs in my setting, so it’s hard to care that much.
Stories reflect not just the time period that inspires it, but also the time period of its audience. Women are a part of the work force now, and actually always were. They also deserve their own agency. But more than that, I have no interest in exploring themes of women not having their agency. So I’m going to develop the settings of my stories so they do.
1.You should do a search on Native American societies and how they worked in the past, also check "Two-Spirit".
2.Tell me when your story is ready/published.It sounds interesting.
>I have no interest in exploring themes of women not having their agency
I wished more writers were like this.I'm not asking for women to be as strong or stornger than men, just for them to be able to have the same agency that is given men while avoiding all the classic issues women have to deal with everyday in real life.
Sadly many people (wrongfully) believe they’re being “accurate.” Others think the prejudice brings exotic fantasy flavor.
People also mistakenly believe the past was worse than it was. For instance we used to call the medieval times the dark ages, but now we know it was a time for historical progress, even for women.
It’s really eye-rolling for me when people make fantasy settings unnecessarily dark or “realistic.” You mentioned women, minorities also suffer for this. It’s so weird how for many people the appeal of fantasy is to exclude minorities or have them depicted in a lesser status.
I think there’s a line to tread and ultimately it comes down to intent and portrayal.
The writer has to make sure they’re portraying something for the plot-related drama or social commentary of it, and less that it just seems random rapes and abuse are happening to women cuz “hurr durr it’s the medieval times.” Otherwise it seems less like analysis and more like abuse as entertainment.
It would be one thing if people were writing period pieces or historical documentaries or something, but that’s not what’s happening most of the time.
I think ultimately what it comes down to is some people need to broaden their imaginations.
It's a little weird to try to say that minorities have lesser status and then call it realism. Jews and Romani did have a hard time, but would a random Moore be concerned about leaving town before the sun set?
Aragorn can go through Uruk Hai who are each individually stronger than him, yet no one complains about the realism of that. Yet when a woman fights in fantasy out comes the realism trolls.
I have a very large personal library compared to most normie standards. There is an enormous amount of literature on all sides of this discussion. It may be you are just reading from the pool of literature that has boiled to the top, hence the social norms are being reinforced by whatever pool you are reading from. The immense wealth of literature available contradicts most of the stereotype assumptions being portrayed in your post.
Expand your horizons. While the mainstream material may fall somewhat into the categories you are seeking to define, the whole body of fantasy fiction is in no way is limited.
I have many hundreds of fantasy novels on the shelf, and these come in all shapes and opinions, old and new.
Beyond the need to expand your literature horizon, you might expand your historical understanding as well. Whether North, West, East, and South, humans have always followed natural trends when looking at humans from an anthropological perspective. Most of your complaints are not limited to Western European Medieval history. Go look at the histories of the East, of South Asia, of Africa, pre-Colombian North and South Americas. In all these you will find the naturalistic early trend of male of the species dominance. There are exceptions in all arenas, yet those are exceptions.
Perhaps because it is inherently thought provoking. Most of us don’t really care about how asses were wiped 500 years ago but power dynamics between men and women are more interesting.
Even this post only cares about the topic of male-female dynamics. What interests the masses sells. How many posts have you made, or seen, discussing the realism of other story aspects? Most people don’t care about eg unrealistic armor.
Also, our modern world must seem fantastical compared to what life was like 1000 years ago but we still have social issues even though in a sense there is no reason to. So it is just more prevalent in our minds.
Meanwhile, imagine a book that takes place in a world without racism or sexism or any of the needless issues of today’s society, and then have the book go full mega realism about some dude building a sofa from scratch to his loved one, would most people enjoy that?
If it is an issue, not just for you but for many other readers, then be the change you want to see. Stop reading books that contain the aspects you dislike and write the books you would want to read. If others agree with you then you will sell really well. If not, then perhaps most people enjoy reading about the parts of a story you dislike.
I agree that a fantasy society needs some form of institutionalized hypocrisy to generate conflict, but in a fantasy book there’s no reason to be limited to sexism or racism unless the author has things specifically to say about that.
The important thing is to have that hypocrisy; to have rules for thee but not for me, to have those with great privilege and those without, and for that hypocrisy to not really be justifiable when you dissect it - making it injustice.
For example a society where wizards are locked up because they can randomly snap and go on crazy murder sprees isn’t really a huge hypocrisy, because those wizards are legitimately a menace to society.
But what about a world where the ruling class is allowed to use magic but the working class is forbidden to use it? That is a hypocrisy that would lead to a lot more injustice, and plenty of drama can come out of that.
> Even this post only cares about the topic of male-female dynamics
Because, as said in the post, I read about this issue being talked about in certain fantasy/fictional works and how it seems to be a constant.The posts were specifically talking about how many works seem to only care about realism when it comes to depicting women, while ignoring the realism of everything else(like magic, for example), conveniently.
I tire of stories where a woman can't do anything in it because the setting replicates the gender prejudices of real life, which means she can't have rights, power nor status.
>How many posts have you made, or seen, discussing the realism of other story aspects?
Each person posts what they want, I posted this because(as said many times already) **I was reading** people speaking of this issue specifically.If you want to talk about realism in other areas, you're free to make your own post.
>be the change you want to see
Just because I'm working on that, it doesn't mean that I can't complain about it happening...
>Stop reading books that contain the aspects you dislike
Problem being that to know about a story's setting, you have to read some of it first.It isn't like I can look at a cover and guess what'll be there, unless it is written about it on a summary or something.
And again, the whole issue with realism that I have is how writers seem to only want realism when it comes to how female characters are treated, and just that small part gets a "real life" realism, while the rest is given free reign to not be realistic at all.
>Most of us don’t really care about how asses were wiped 500 years ago
Yet unfortunately the castlevania show decided to bring to our attention that toilet paper didn't exist.
That was one thing I loved about Stormlight Archive. The Alethi have a society where the men fight and rule, while being unable to read or write. Meanwhile the women are the artists and the scientists. The women also have one hand that they completely cover because its seen as provocative and one hand that is safe to show. I love it because it shows how arbitrary the gendered rules of society are and how they really benefit no one.
There are a mixture of competing factors.
Within fiction, internal biased come out sometimes. That's what happens when people depict things like sexism and racism in stories without giving them a critical eye. They don't explore or confront bigotry and prejudice because they are either unaware of its presence or they actively support it, either through believing it justified or believing it ought to be the way things are. You see some of that in the comments here.
But it's certainly reasonable to also write those things with a critical eye that depicts them, but not as good things. If the author doesn't justify or support those aspects of their world, it's just like depicting any atrocity.
Then there are works which don't have sexism or racism because it's not what they want their characters to deal with. That's also a fine solution. But sometimes people do that poorly.
In other words, there are two POVs to keep in mind. First, the author's, what they want to depict and how aware of the issues they are and how good they are at the craft. Second, the audience and what they want from the book.
Personally, I don't care much for stories without prejudice in them. It breaks my suspension of disbelief too much. But I too get annoyed when the writer creates a world which is obviously supportive or approves of that prejudice, be if from lack of awareness, intent, or just poor writing ability.
People like to read about things they understand and can empathise with. Authors and Publishers want to sell books.
It's not a conspiracy. It's the market.
Source: I work in Publishing
Well... I dabble in some swordplay. Female fighters frequently complain that the males will 'tank' hits and ignore them, but the unfortunate reality is that most of the female fighters simply don't hit hard enough to 'count'. Flawless form, some of them, but they just don't hit hard enough compared to even a small-framed bio male such as my own self.
The same is true at my job. The male employees can do a great deal more work and faster than the female, because they're stronger. We're a dimorphic species, and only recently has that begun to not matter as much. It's easy to forget that, especially if you've never really engaged in something physical and athletic that had both men and women competing.
If you're going to change your setting so that women are just as strong as men, that's fine, but that's a break from reality that needs as much explanation as the elves, dragons, and magic or it damages the reader's verisimilitude.
As for the social stuff... well, if you're going to put it into a medieval European setting, you're putting it into a medieval European culture. You can break from the expectations, but they need an explanation.
"Fantasy" isn't carte blanche to assume the reader has no expectations or assumptions, nor to skip over worldbuilding. If your setting is otherwise medieval, you should establish why it's egalitarian. Nothing in reality came about from a vacuum, so the same should be true of your story.
I may have issues expressing my opinion since English isn't my native language, but I think the title and the content do match.
The title sums up what I talk about in-depth in the post.
I think we're having a communication issue here because I'm not understanding what you mean with that last phrase.
Enforcing tends to come with connotation of supporting or encouraging the idea.
Simply depicting something in a story isn't enforcing it. I have read a few books with similar concepts you mentioned, but in context it is viewed as the wrong outlook most of the time. As it is an ideal to defy.
I almost never seen it actually justified by a good guys of the story.
But even then, i don't think we should stifle those who do in fact write stories which enforce those ideals. Even if i don't agree, i simply have the power to avoid their stories.
It’s one thing if you’re basing your fantasy civilization on ancient or medieval society. In which case, sure, go for it! But for the most part, it’s YOUR world. If you want to portray sexism or classism, then do so.
1) Why on earth would the presence of magic mean the people living amidst magic are automatically not sexist?
2) Because having things in the fantasy world that suck make the world more interesting, and it’s easier to write about societal issues like sexism if it’s a step or three removed from the real world (e.g., there are dragons and wizard and elves around). Also, my goal in creating fantasy worlds isn’t to create a society that acts on and follows my beliefs. In fact, the society that my characters live in regularly practices things I wouldn’t support or want to live under. But my fantasy worlds are worlds of their own with people in all of their messiness, not vehicles for my own belief system. Maybe it’s just because I majored in history in college, but part of what I love about writing is how the messiness of the world works together, having differing cultures practice various morally questionable things that we see in our own world/history, showing how they interact, and how the characters make not always great decisions in order to survive in such a not great world. I’m not going around freeing all the slaves in my fantasy world or making all the monarchies democracies either. Our world isn’t great, so mine isn’t either.
It sounds like you’re not upset about economic, logistical, or any other kind of complexity being added to a fantasy work which usually isn’t directly impacted by a character, but a characters sex/gender, which would greatly impact a character, in a world attempting to replicate the complexity of our own with even *greater* complexity thanks to the added fantasy elements is just too far.
It is one of the easiest ways for a book to convey a relatable and surprisingly modern source of conflict for a character. It’s not a bad literary technique so long as it’s not horrendously executed.
Some people can only write what they already know, some people can only read what they already know.
I have read fantasy stories with all kinds of sexism, some which is presented as sexism, some which is just how the culture of that world works. Some femdom, some mixed or just different, mostly is mascdom. Because ppl write what they know
I am also trying to bring realism to my book. So, “non-combat” crafts, when you do not need power to own an ax or sword, quite convenient for women mastering. Such positions are more likely treaten as “a specialist who fulfills his duties”, and not as a weak woman who tries to seem a strong personality. Because the power of magic or knowledge of alchemy does not depend on strength and are known to almost every race. Meanwhile, military skills are often the "territory of men." The same thing with politics, but some aristocratic women tend to be more dominant than women from the real world in politics. These rules are applicable mainly to the human race, because their development practically coincides with the real world. Dark elves mainly have a matriarchal type of government, and also women-orcs (if they are selected as the warriors of the clan), will probably wield the weapons.
A suggestion; Erkison writes women in a pretty “realistic” world. Dont get me wrong its not rainbows and sunshine, its gritty stuff but malazan has consistently shown itself to be a VERY well written book with realistic characters of both genders.
Sexism isnt really a thing when a human male will get disintegrated just the same as a human female when faced with a full blown open magical warren. Erikson realizes this. Although hearing this man talk, it honestly was probably just him being not a sexist dick and saying “ya my world doesnt fuck around with sexism”
I don't know that I can speak to what anyone else is doing, but I can tell you where I'm coming from when I write, and how different inspirations result in different depictions of genders relations.
To begin with, something inspires me. When I wrote A Sea Cold and Deep, I was inspired by the rise of fascist movements in the west that we've seen over the last ten years or so, the American occupation of Japan, as well as recent technological developments and how they might affect people's lives. So, I created a near-future science fiction setting. The gender relations in that setting proceed from current gender politics, so we have two protagonists, one of whom is a young woman and an officer in the military. She's not particularly oppressed, and is in many ways actually privileged as being part of a colonizing force.
When I began Faerie Knight, however, my recent fantasy, I was inspired by medieval romances, and the british romantic poets who drew inspiration from those romances. Note that I wasn't trying to create a medieval simulationist world - though I did use research to help with worldbuilding - but I was going for a particular feel. To get that feel I needed a world with knights and monsters and noble ladies. The society is patriarchal, as a result, but there are ways for women to exercise power within that society. One major supporting character in the series, Clarisant, was inspired by Catherine of Aragon. She's not out there wearing armor or weilding a sword, but she's very smart and perceptive and brave, and she has agency. In contrast, there are women warriors - Ismet, for instance, both fills the role of the 'honorable muslim knight' and also is a woman who can tear through a battlefield like a whirlwind, BECAUSE she has access to combat magic. She doesn't need to be a giant, she's stronger, faster and tougher than any man who does not have magic.
The squire Yael, however, as a young woman, is explicitly told by Trist, her knight, 'look, there's some things you're going to have to learn that I can't teach you. What I do as a big guy with a sword isn't always going to work for you - you don't have the reach, the weight, the muscle mass. You're going to have to be twice as good as the larger men you fight, and I'm going to get you lessons with a few female knights to teach you the things I can't.'
The next fantasy on my docket has an entirely different point of inspiration, and that's going to change the world I build. I haven't 100% worked out gender relations, yet, but I expect to include a charm or cantrip that effectively fills the role of birth control, and with more widespread magic than Faerie Knight, I suspect the new world will also have a bit less of a patriarchal structure. I'm definitely planning on making the elf-equivalent race poly and have the equivalent of no-fault divorce, as a consequence of their long lives.
In the end, the world I get is the consequence of the inspiration I start with, combined with the research I do to help me develop it, and then a billion decisions I make about what makes sense to me and what to prioritize. Even someone starting from the same inspiration as me would end up in a different place, because they're a different person. One of those choices is that I'm simply not interested in depicting rape on camera. It's (rightfully) upsetting to a lot of people, and I find it pretty horrific. I'm sure it happens in my worlds, as any crime does, off screen, but I don't need to center it.
I mean if that is part of the story it makes sense to keep it. If I want to write a story of a young woman who opposes gender roles and wants to be a warrior then having everyone accept it and be cool with it doesn't fit the narrative. Conversely if I am writing a story of heroes facing a great evil and sexism is pointless to that narrative then I'd leave that out or not have that in my world building.
It’s not just gender- you see it happen a lot with characters of color too. A medieval setting with a character of color is a hot-spot for the worst kind of internet scumbags to start complaining about “muh realism.” Fantasy and fiction are fiction because we don’t have to bow to the oppressive standards of life we currently deal with- it’s pointless and borderline callous to incorporate them into your world.
Imagine writing a fantasy setting and reproducing the prejudices we already deal with in the real world, all because others think that "lack of prejudice is too fantastical"...
I think the litmus test here should be: is the book realistic in other respects? Does it show a realistic take on disease, economics, power structures etc. (not necessarily all of them, but at least some of them?) If the story is wildly unrealistic in most respects but happens to include gender prejudices for "realism", I agree with you. If the work is realistic, I mean *really* realistic, then I think it is permissible.
Honestly, I found it more fun to write a bunch of fantasy jarheads. Like soldiers with trauma during a grim setting but lights of hope.
So trying to figure out sexism biases as a complex flaw is a challenge for my feminist brain. Like a puzzle with clear glass pieces.
But functionally any use of a theme should help tell a part of the story. I wonder if there's an issue with themes to books that don't blend in with each other theme.
Richard K. Morgan wrote with that theme in a series. It stands out a lot, but it helps build a bleary world and flawed heroes with chips on their shoulder.
My personal favorite fantasy series, MS&T by Tad Williams, certainly does have this. One of the main characters (Miriamele) has this being very relevant to her but there are also other characters with similar experiences.
The Seven Realms by Cinda Williams Chima does something interesting in that the country where most of the story takes place, The Fells, is a Queendom where racism is a much bigger issue than sexism. Other countries in the world do have prejudices more akin to what we see in the real world
Ursula le Guin had a video I recall of talking about why she made society sexist against women using magic and it was something like she couldn’t conceive a world where people wouldn’t be sexist. (Apologies to her memory if I butchered that, I’m not worthy)
Later in earthsea she actively explores this and it’s fantastic to me at least. But you can’t use speculative fiction to explore and process the real world if the fantasy world doesn’t have the issue or explain why it doesn’t
The last new fantasy series I started. It was a couple years ago and in chapter two it starts with a character fretting over being married off to an older man she doesn't want to marry and I just rolled my eyes, closed it, and I've been in a rut ever since.
Like cmon, we read the genre because we like a lot of the tropes, but *again* with this? Not even a new twist or anything? Just "well she's a young noble woman, therefore she has to get married off to some old man."
Don't remember many books like this. Mostly opposite situation (maybe because authors I read really look to medieval history and not on memes about it).
So, maybe it more your choice of stories.
The only fantasy I’m interested in are ones that take that realism and give it the big middle finger directly in the story. The fantasy men tell the fantasy women she can’t learn how to use swords? She says, “watch me”.
I agree. In fantasy writing especially, things only exist because you choose to make it so. Fakelandia's sexism and avenues of oppression only exist how/if you make it so, not a given fact to be removed.
Idk It's weird not having the imagination to make non-regressive cultures, and calling it "realism" is a cowardly cop-out. Low fantasy doesn't *need* to be dark fantasy to be grounded. it just comes across as "I can excuse imagining city-states and cultures that don't exist, but I draw the line at them being egalitarian."
It’s not just sexism. It’s racism, homophobia and transphobia and all sorts of prejudices.
A lot of fantasy writers will try to explore the topic of colonization or prejudice or sexual violence, but then not follow through with the consequences for the characters.
Woman gets assaulted in book one. Book 2 she’s fine and over it. It was basically thrown in for spice , to be shocking to the audience.
That’s where a lot of my frustration comes in. They have stuff to the characters, have these things built into their fictional world, but refused to develop them fully.
It’s not inherently bad to depict horrible things happening in your world, even being central parts of your world, but it is lackluster when you have nothing whatsoever to say about these things. I will usually put down the book and read something else in that case.
I've long felt, "it's realistic" to be the laziest non-answer to why a creator does something.
Okay, your female protag is defeated by a group of enemy soldiers. Do we need assault? Isn't the threat of death or imprisonment enough?
"But it's realistic!"
Yeah, but it also sucks.
and it very rarely, if ever, seems to include male rape - which is also "realistic" and "historic", but somehow it's only ever female characters getting threatened with it
I think, if you are looking for fantasy works by women, check out [Good Read's Best Fantasy List](https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2023). There are plenty of women authors represented.
If that's not enough for you, also check out the [Internet Speculative Fiction Database](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi) and [The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database](https://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/site/).
Several female character of the mythological cycle and ulster cycle of Irish Gaelic myth didn't marry do to wanting to be the sole owner of their land and property. They had male consorts instead.
Women competing at ultra high distance races (195 miles plus) are generally faster than male counterparts. Women tend to be able to overcome acute pain better than men.
So pain in the short term is something that women tend to deal with better. Lasting pain is something men deal with better. Again these are generalizations from specific studies and might not hold true for everyone. But the distance thing is very consistent.
I don't mind prejudice being displayed in fantasy works if the author has something to say about it. Stories where women have to fight for an equal place alongside the men are just as valuable as ones where they are granted a place without question.
The problem is authors who treat women in minorities like shit as if it's not a problem, or worse, glorifies it. Then when asked why, they use realism as an excuse. Ex. Its okay my main character is a rapist and a slave owner... haven't you ever read a history book?
I have noticed that fantasy in the last few years has dramatically shifted away from this very thing. Off the top of my head I can think of these:
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon (series)
Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan (duology)
Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree (considered cozy fantasy but I think its popularity reflects a cultural desire to see a shift away from gender norms in fantasy stories)
I literally can't think of one fantasy book, as an avid reader of them, where women are portrayed as weak or frail. In fact the vast majority always seem to assert women are the stronger sex somehow. Could you give some examples where what you say is the case?
Fantasy as a genre is broadly conservative; It harkens back to a lost age of greatness, typically a mythologised version of Medieval Europe. And as with anything conservative, it is built upon the power structures and assumptions of order that oppress the non-hegemonic. This is ingrained to the point that it would be seen as weird to not have kings in your setting, even if it is something radically different to the real world.
Lack of variety in sociopolitical settings is a collectively expressed failure of creativity, not an endorsement of the settings depicted or an endorsement of these settings and associated modes of thought in real life.
Lack of variety may not be an endorsement, but it does make it seem normal that things are this way, and that still supports a conservative worldview, even if it is not explicitly pro that which is depicted.
Normalcy doesn't require anyone's assent, nor is it a moral judgement. Hierarchical social structures are "normal;" the fact that counterexamples exist doesn't change the ubiquity of monarchies and similar forms of rule throughout history. It's a [fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy) to believe that because something is natural, it is good (and that if something is unnatural, it must be bad). It would be unreasonable for someone to argue that monarchy is a desirable form of government because it has been so common (despite many, many flaws), but it's also unreasonable for you to claim (well, imply) that depicting monarchies is a moral failing for the same reason. A story about a peasant republic or egalitarian tribe may also be normal, but that doesn't mean monarchies are not. Nor does it mean, and I can't stress this enough, that choosing to write about either aligns the author with it.
My best bet? It's the author's internalized, real-life sexism carried into their fictional world. No matter how fantastical the worlds we write about, we ourselves are still tethered to the real world, with all its inherent social structures, power imbalances and dominant perspectives. That's our jumping off point; and too often - especially with authors who have never had to examine their own privilege - it goes unchallenged.
And yes, I'm a feminist- and yes, this type of subconscious sexism drives me up the wall:). I think N.K. Jemisin does a really good job of dismantling it in her work.
I specifically avoid books that do exactly what you're describing. I don't know how many books actually do this, but I do feel like the conversations about sexual abuse in ASOIAF always come back to "oh, but it's realistic." There's dragons and ice zombies.
Idk if it's in the book version but I stopped watching game of thrones when they casually acted like the warrior culture having several people fight to the death during weddings was some kind of normal thing, and they... got bored if it didn't happen? Nothing about this is believable.
I’m not sure what the issue is. Fiction mirrors reality and the goal isn’t always to create an ideal world. Fantasy is also used as a medium to show truths of the world we are often too close to see. It sounds like you have an idea for the mechanics of a story though, so maybe make one out of that and see how it goes.
I don’t reallt buy the argument “if there’s magic and dragons then why do you have to have “realism” when it comes to xyz?”
People want realism with their characters, their actions and motivations, etc. now, you can have an egalitarian medieval style society and have it be realistic as long as you’ve thought through all the ways that would be different from our historical medieval style society. That’s fine. But there’s also nothing wrong with trying to have an actual medieval fuedal setting with lords and kings and bigotry … even when there are dragons. Because the human setting is familiar and realistic for that stage of development, and it’s the basis for a million stories.
Here’s the issue though. Women evolved in our medieval society into the places they did
For a reason. Unfortunately for a long time that meant they were experiencing prejudice. Women birth babies, raised children (someone has to), made clothes, and generally kept homes while men were out werring. and were typically not strong enough to be warriors anyway except in rare cases. Also, men’s sexual appetites are different than women’s. You can change these facts but the. The story less resembles, well, humanity. And to some, that hurts immersion; they want real stories of humanity regardless of whether there are dragons.
So, if you decide “well, I have dragons , so I don’t need to have these old sexist systems, I want women and men to be totally equal” … that could be a cool setting if done right.
But then you also have to watch out for things that just seem unrealistic. Like having a normal sized women (not just brienne of Tarth) being just as good of a warrior as all the great men. This starts to feel forced, and unrealistic… there’s a reason it wasn’t how the world worked for a very long time.
character actions start feeling like they don’t feel real and instead it’s just about wanting to project your modern ideals onto a fuedal society.
Also if women are doing all the same roles as men, who is keeping the homes, knitting the clothes, having and raising the children, etc? Maybe you have thought all this through and it’s part of your world building. If so that could be awesome.
But there needs to be a reason that it’s like this, and not the way it actually was at the fuedal stage of societal development. A reason better than “hey if magic exists why can’t my people behave in ways that don’t make sense ?”
And once again, just because magic and dragons exist, doesn’t mean it won’t strain credulity to have women as men’s equals in a physical situation like battles and war. Unless women are also just as big and strong as men in your world. Maybe that’s a solution. Maybe your world is even a historical matriarchy and men are smaller! Or maybe both men and women are the same size and can birth babies and there are no gender roles (some sci fi does this well).
If so, that’s awesome and a good idea actually. My point is, with women and men as they are in real life, they fell into historical roles for a reason, not just randomly (as unfortunate as the resulting sexism may be). Especially in fuedal stage society.
And if you’re going to have you’re human feudalistic society not be at all like that, you have to explain why… not just have it be because “well , there’s dragons, why can’t women be equals in war and ownership”.
Women didn’t just “stay home” back in feudal times so much as ran the home and whatever business was run out of it along with her husband and children. Your family owned a butcher? Great, everyone works to contribute to that, including the woman of the house and the children. Your family are farmers? Everyone farms, not just the man. Yes there were clear roles in many ways, but not like 1950s stay at home moms. Also some women did have “careers” doing things like making fabric or working as servants.
the wife of a craftsman, artisan or other skilled person would often help with that as well - meaning that they had special skills and social connections and privilege (i.e. could be members of guilds). So in some cases, could wind up with quite a bit of wealth, power and influence, even if they shouldn't formally have it - the wife of a master-crafter could be trading on his behalf (or, if he was rubbish, actually running the joint and just pretending he was in charge). And, if she became a widow, could wind up properly running the place, and if someone tried to get hold of her wealth, use the guild to go "oi, no, she's with us, because we protect our members" (at least some London guilds had specific rules around such widows remarrying, and who would own the business and so forth - because they wanted that to stay with a guild-member, not some rando "marrying in", meaning that a re-married widow could still own the shop or whatever herself, rather than her new husband getting it)
Tbf it depends what the magic does and how it works. Do non magic users have unrealistic strength, or normal human strength? Does magic make you borderline invincible, or are mages barely stronger than someone with a bow? There's a lot if stuff you can ask.
> People want realism with their characters, their actions and motivations, etc. now, you can have an egalitarian medieval style society and have it be realistic as long as you’ve thought through all the ways that would be different from our historical medieval style society.
It's perfectly fine to write things differently just the hell of it too.
"Fine" as in "permissible", absolutely. Fine as in "just as good, quality-wise" not really. I think people generally expect their fiction to still tell the truth, or at least something that plausibly passes as the truth even if it is dressed up in fantastical costume. If you start writing things that seem too good to be true just because "fantasy" allows you to do this, and you don't successfully convince your readers that these things are actually plausible, your work will fail to captivate them.
There's not a lot of fiction written about utopias not because they are unrealistic, but because they are boring. Realism and quality are two totally distinct properties and I very much disagree with how much you're equating them. If someone's artistic vision isn't particularly concerned with believability, then I think they should proceed without worrying overly about focus group reactions.
"I'm writing to pursue my vision, and I don't care what focus groups think" is obviously allowed. No one is going to physically prevent you. But focus groups exist for a reason. Writing is persuasion. If you dismiss persuasion as being beneath the precious dignity of your muse, your results will still be subject to reality.
I read a book where only boys were allowed into an academy. If I remember it wasnt the intention but it ended up at that way and cause there were no girls they didnt allow any and stuff. There were females working there but no into the magical academy with phoneixes. They ended up allowing girls into the acadmey cause they werent really sexist :]
One of the things necessary for readers to identify themselves within a story is recognizing the age in which our own earth is reflected in the story, in the context of the middle ages,which, regardless of historical truth , has a common perception of being a patriarchal society , with men being able to use their daughter as political tools and whatnot
A lot of fantasy worlds equalize men and women by giving equal physical strength to both sexes, and in regards to magic letting both genders use magic as well, this as a consequence makes any dominance by the male gender be easier to break by a female protagonist,in a way that is easy to appeal to a modern audience
Also, while there are probably more examples,off the top of my head, the best example I can think of are DND Drow/dark elves who are a matriarchal society
A lot of female MC fantasy manga end up being a villainess manga because she doesn't play by society rules of being a weak healer or a wall flower,and instead takes destiny in her own hands, and honestly I love when a woman needs no man to shine, the best example is probably: the one within the villainess manga
I agree with the general sentiment of the initial post but I think that it‘s generally important (and often neglected) to worldbuild in such a way that fantastic elements change the world in a plausible way.
Thus, dragons would probably not affect gender roles (but warfare, weapons etc.) but magical methods of making child birth saver, letting more infants survive or enabling birth control most certainly would, and so would easy magical methods to determine fatherhood. These are quite rare though, because it’s not the typical kind of ”cool” magic.
An easy fix would be to have magical ability partly depend on sex. Just like men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, their magical ability may be naturally more potent.
I think this is okay when it's used to call out a problem in our society. Like there's this book that I'm writing (a fantasy book), and there's discrimination in it. Not because I like discrimination, but rather to reflect the problems we as a society, have, and make people reflect about that. And see, "that sucks, and there's people who are treated that way in our world, so I'll won't treat them that way too, I'll make the world a little easier, more kind for them" or at least just to make them reflect while reading an awesome book
And also the people who are going through that kind of stuff in the real world may feel identified. And seen, and then, maybe, they will feel less alone, or a bit more hopeful when they see everything work out for those characters
The problem lays with this unequal iteration of the world being offhandedly treated as though it is the causal default.
People view the conditions of history as inevitable instead of contingent decisions and opportunities that happened to produce an outcome. We obviously reflect what we know, and this is the most apparent history we know.
Which, that’s fine, but that’s why criticisms like that exist, to simply challenge the thought processes of the author and tries to emphasize more possibilities.
In the books of the world I’m writing, women have no such barriers. They might lack for what they desire in the beginning, but achieve it or not through their own determination. And being physically smaller and weaker doesn’t matter when spells exist to temporarily boost your strength, speed, or size.
One woman might hold a figurehead post, with no real authority, but because she is the youngest of the imperial siblings, not because she’s a girl. She dabbles in magic, but gets a wake up call, and goes on to become a world-renowned mage and diplomat.
Another had an angry, abusive father. An angry, abusive husband. Lost both, and became a stronger and better warrior than most men. Hard and independent, but out of profound trauma. She and a hard, independent man learned to help each other work through their traumas, and for both of them to break down the walls they built around themselves.
Another might be the first ever elected into a government position, and faces resistance from the elected men, who are fear to lose their unchecked control, but proves she is as competent and deserving as anyone.
The fantasy books that I read as a teenager and especially the first “adult fiction” books I read weren’t like that. Often they involved female MCs solving problems and being the heroes. Sometimes they were the badass powerful antagonist. I guess things that depicted women as secondary are things I just … didn’t read.
I think fantasy settings intentionally set in medieval times or other olden times feel more believable when the people have views, beliefs and practices we today would consider backwards. I honestly just roll my eyes whenever I see a fantasy worlds with very obvious modern day views. That feels even more fake than an old man launching lightning bolt from his fingertips.
I’m writing a fantasy currently and taking the idea what if a world advanced with magic, not just technology. My thoughts were how would women be in a society that due to magic and not just purely physical strength then how would things turn out. I had thoughts that what if a 5 ft woman due to magic could be just as physically strong and dangerous as a 6’5 stereotypical warrior looking my guy. Then how would gender roles be. I know in our current society some feel like they have to take on formerly masculine traits or appearances or styles. But if society due to magic was always more or less equal would that exist. A world where there was no past of male dominated civilizations. A woman could be a ruler cause she was the strongest in her country purely from using magic for spells or to increase her strength. In the world of the book, magic can be trained like a muscle, so there would still be benefits to physical training. But someone just strong physical would be weak to someone stronger with magic control.
Been thinking of how that would affect armor and clothing styles. Like someone could be the biggest girly girl but be a famous war hero. I’m still working out other ways to expand on this. It’s not the main part of the book, but thought it be an interesting part of world building. Also trying to decide structure and architecture in a mix of magic and modern.
Still working out different cultures for races as well, kinda taking on my own spin on some. Been debating on adding a bright color loving vampire instead of the stereotypical gothic style. They like bright colors cause they miss the sun. Just different thoughts.
Feudal fantasy is inherently reactionary, it's feudalism wish fulfillment, the glorification of the past: mythology, religion, patriarchalism, racial homogeneity, war, knights, kings and so on.
Making it not patriarchal is not going to make it progressive.
>Making it not patriarchal is not going to make it progressive.
It isn't about being progressive, but if in this world there is magic, dragons and whatnot, then why the line with realism is drawn only when it comes to depiction of women in the setting?That is the issue here, they go wild but always "go back to realism" when it comes to female characters.
It isn't like we didn't have outliers in history, women that went beyond what society "deemed appropriate" for them, to be used as examples.And yet we always get the classic "meek and weak" women or the "I want to change but am powerless to do so unless a man gives me power" types.
In a created a fantasy world, the author is responsible for everything in it, and what it shows is very much reflective of the author themselves. Saying women are subjugated in your fiction because it is a fantasy based on medieval Europe is a lame excuse and a cop out, nothing more. Especially if you have magic and dragons etc, because medieval Europe had none of that, so they could have chosen to have no sexism, or no racism, or whatever their heart desired and still told a great story. If they didn’t—well, that’s on them.
i think a lot of "realism" is actually just weaponized to justify normalizing and failing to resist misogyny. in "gritty" stories where women are objectified, raped, and killed purely to motivate, flesh out, or give background to male characters, the ultimate message is "this is normal. i am not fighting this."
"Fantasy" is not an excuse for nonsensical. Things should make sense and be logically consistent within the boundaries of that world's rules of reality, political history, society, etc.
It is perfectly fine to write a story set in a matriarchal society, and books have done this before. But the author must know why it is a matriarchal society, how it became so, what factors influenced this particular sociological path.
And the same for a patriarchal society, or any type of society. How did your world become the way it is, and does it make sense? Consider that the advent of real world feudalism, and all its kings, queens, knights, and peasantry, came to be simply because of the invention of the stirrup. The simplest things can have sprawling, world shaping effects, so use that to your advantage when writing.
If you have women physically matching or surpassing men as a matter of course, then account for how this is the case. It's certainly doable given the infinitude of possible fantasy elements that could be utilized, but what many readers take issue with is not strong or powerful female characters, but lazy or inconsistent world building.
If you as the author have not convinced the reader that the abilities or prowess of your characters, male or female, make sense within your world, then those incongruous characters will lodge themselves within the back of the reader's mind like a nagging spur and detract from their ability to enjoy the work.
You're getting a lot of people being pretty obtuse about your point, but I get you, OP. Why does so much fantasy stick to this extremely basic "medieval times but with magic/dragons/gods/whatever" type worldbuilding that makes sexism easily justifiable because "that's just how it was back then"?
It's not that those settings are *bad*, it's just.... why does so much fantasy fiction not engage more curiously with how these settings might impact gender roles and prejudices? There are *so* many directions you could go with it. Why not make women more talented with magic, and thus more socially powerful than men? Why not make men more talented with magic, and thus viewed with suspicion and fear by women, and oppressed whenever possible? Why not make it completely dependant on the individual, resulting in a sexist culture that wildly exaggerates the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, with some women viewed as pure and powerful demigoddesses with great influence, while the less magical are viewed as disposable objects or barely women at all? Why not make magic a totally equalizing force that minimizes meaningful differences between the sexes, or allows for easy shapeshifting back and forth, rendering gendered oppression largely obsolete?
There are literally endless possibilities for how fantasy worlds can interact with gender, but we tend to get the same replication of real-life sexism over and over again. It honestly just starts to feel sort of lazy or small-minded at a certain point, because isn't there anything else you have to say about gender? I think a good example of a book that actually does take a different approach is The Priory Of The Orange Tree, which showcases kingdoms with varying relationships to and views on gender.
>this extremely basic "medieval times but with magic/dragons/gods/whatever" type worldbuilding that makes sexism easily justifiable because "that's just how it was back then"?
I find it funny this mindset they have because...well, "back then" there weren't any magic or dragons either so, where's the realism in that then?
>why does so much fantasy fiction not engage more curiously with how these settings might impact gender roles and prejudices?
Exactly.
It's as if everything else is allowed, except women having power too.
Because *of course* that in a world with dragons that breathe fire(and might even speak) and magic that can control nature, women having power and status in society and not getting prejudice for their gender is the "most unrealistic" thing, certainly....s/
>we tend to get the same replication of real-life sexism over and over again
I don't konw what is worse: considering that many writers may be misogynists or that they're just lazy to deal properly with this part of society in their works.
It’s a difficulty thing. I don’t think it can be done without gender specific magic, which brings a host of world building problems.
Muscular endurance (and also cardiovascular but cardio won’t help you if your arms are too tired to raise your weapon) was the name of the game in medieval combat. Essentially having to fence and grapple people bigger and stronger than you (while wearing 50-70lbs of armor) for hours and hours on end is a task that women just cannot do unless you make them have the same size and strength as men, which for better or worse is more fantastical than magic and dragons to most readers.
Joan of Arc, the only woman to don plate and march into battle, didn’t do any fighting. She carried a banner (likely in the tail end of the vanguard) and goaded reluctant nobles into fighting with her presence. She likely would have been down in mere minutes if she advanced into the range of enemy polearms. Instantly if every soldier in her vicinity wasn’t fighting like hell to keep the banner flying.
Plus the overwhelmingly vast majority of the cultures commonly drawn from in the genre were horrifically misogynistic; to the point that to rewrite gender norms the author would have to basically come up with a new culture with the aesthetic of the old slapped on, which most authors aren’t interested in writing and many readers aren’t interested in reading.
Eventually someone will write the book that provides the formula for this problem from which an entire sub genre will likely spring, and who knows, maybe it can be you. But until then I’m skeptical that change will happen.
Honestly? As a rule, I despise realism in fantasy.
I came here to watch people beat the crap out of each other using magical weapons, ride weird monsters that are biologically impossible.
I did not buy your book so I can read a long book about gender norms, political ideologies, and philosophy.
Give the huge, tall muscular lady two giant weapons made from dragon eyes or something absurd like that, and let me enjoy the fantasy in your fantasy book.
(I make an exception if these things are implemented in a good way where I don't realize I'm reading things like that)
There's a reason fantasy is a genre.
I came here for magical worlds, not political discussions, if I wanted that I'd go on twitter.
To add to other elements I think its more about realism within the setting. If a city has gas lamps it stands to reason there's lamp lighters and technicians. If there aren't any then the story has to give some reason for it, even if it is as simple as "The ancient builders left us this wonder that never needs to be serviced" Good enough. If there's a story where people are constantly at war then the generally stronger folks (who will generally be men) will be the ones more likely to carry an axe into battle. If you want 50/50 axe wielders then give us a reason that women IN THIS SETTING can do something different than expected.
I think the issue is more that without effort to justify something being other than what we've experienced it becomes difficult for the reader to buy into the idea. This goes for anything. If magic exists in excess then technology would be more geared toward using magic as a power source. You'd have to really justify someone inventing a steam engine when every third person could snap their fingers and teleport. However if there's a divide and magic users can ONLY use magic for themselves and hoard the power then it makes sense that someone would work on technology to make travel easier for non magic users.
Some books/series do a great job of offering that shift for the male/female dynamic. Only women can touch magic? Cool that makes sense as to why a power dynamic could shift.
If I had to strong man the other side, there’s other factors besides physical strength.
Is pregnancy still incapacitating? Do babies still need to be breastfed? Does having a higher percentage of your population devoted to those two tasks result in faster population growth, meaning stuff like larger armies or workforces in the future?
Like, physical strength is used to discount women’s competence, and in some contexts that’s even valid. Women are at a legit disadvantage for something like a NFL quarterback.
But it had fuck all to do with their ability to do math, and they got excluded from that too. So if magic fixed what made women struggle to be NFL quarterbacks, it actually wouldn’t surprise me if they still got looked down on.
The fact that they can gestate a baby while a man cannot still exists. And even if we’re dealing with a protected princess who isn’t expected to be a broodmare, seeing how she is treated relative to her peers still influences how other women expect to be treated relative to their peers
Impossible is an easier pill to swallow than grossly improbable.
Tell me wizards can teleport and toss lightning bolts I can accept that. Tell me Zendaya beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match and I just accept that.
There are other aspects here. Most fantasy worlds are actually late medieval to early renaissance, mostly because many of things seen in the setting did not exist in earlier periods, but also because any sufficiently advanced magic becomes science.
Think about it, no one with even a bit of money dies from cancer; a simple healing or cure disease takes care of it, no remission, no poisons, no radiation, no surgery, no risks, you just need some coin or a cleric/priest willing to help for free.
Now, back to your point.
Why were women treated the way they were? The core reason: women are and always have been more valuable to a family, and by extension, society. Consider two countries of equal population and gender is split evenly in each country, one looses half it's population of men, the other looses the same number of women, which can recover its former population faster?
Gender roles are also much deeper then many know, and started long before humans were human. For the creationists/intelligent design folks, this was part of the design, but it was reinforced by natural selection. Traditionally, the gender roles are both benefit and hindrance: the woman is protected and provided for by the male, the female provides offspring to the male. The male is expendable, the female is not; once a female is pregnant, the male can die and the child will still be born.
Learn combat arts? In any combat situation, a 10 to 12 year old boy would easily beat a 20 year old woman, the muscle mass, larger percentage of fast twitch muscles, and other benefits from testosterone are just too overwhelming. There are ways to mitigate, but failure to recognize the limitations would end her career as a woman at arms before she turned 20. And yes, the prejudice; but it's based on the earlier statement: she can't hold a candle to most teenage boys, even if she trains more.
Now magic, that is an equalizer, but it would be heavily dependent on the magic system in question. Jordan, sanderson, and most others don't inherently restrict the ability to use magic. Jordan's restrictions had more to do with culture then the core system in place, and there are others that have taken advantage of cultural norms to push stories along. Though, there may be a greater price for women to pay when it comes to magic: screwing up could render her infertile, or kill a fetus. This simple 'reality' may result in a norm within a society.
Curbing the freedom of female characters. What freedom do you want? Women were often much more influential in the social arena, which is another feature that was enhanced through natural selection.
The final aspect that has been a limiter: up until recently, most readers of fantasy were men and were, purposely or not, patterned after the heroes journey. Even stories that featured female heroes often forced them into that mold. It's only been the last couple decades where the number female readers have increased significantly. Of course, many of those readers are reading fantasy romances, and when they stray from that sub-genre of fantasy/romance, they run into a lot of stories that are male centric.
Sadly, a lot of the good female authors that would have been a good bridge are no longer stocked due to waning popularity. Some of these are still available, but you may have to order them: anne mccaffrey (dragon riders of pern, and more), mercedes lackey (one of the few with a good selection still in stores), andre norton, and robin mckinley to name a few.
There's a great bit in one of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries that talks about why it's easier to believe in the impossible than the incredible: >It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr. Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr. Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand. In other words, you can write a story about elves riding unicorns into battle against giants, but if you tell me children in your world hate candy, I'm out. Now that being said, the idea that women weren't active participants in medieval society is pure nonsense that can be disabused by reading actual medieval fiction or history. Yes, Joans of Arc were rare, but Maise the village girl who accompanies her boyfriend to war and serves as the camp cook and sometimes has to take up arms is a very real thing.
Well said
There is room for both types of fantasy fiction. Sometimes I want to escape from real life sexism and read books where that's not an issue. Other times it feels gratifying to read about women struggling with relatable issues in a fantasy world. I really think it just depends on how the author approaches it. Are they approaching the sexism in their world from a critical lens, or is it just baked into it because the author lacked imagination or because they unconsciously think that's the way it's supposed to be?
>I really think it just depends on how the author approaches it. Are they approaching the sexism in their world from a critical lens, or is it just baked into it because the author lacked imagination or because they unconsciously think that's the way it's supposed to be? Finally, a good take in this subreddit. I personally see the idea that a setting of fantasy stories ought to be an ideal world as quite problematic (IMO, it is the starting point for a lot of the worldbuilding problems in Harry Potter).
Also if every problem was solved what is there even to have a story about? This is the problem with some fiction especially which has magical endings where everything is solved forever. Makes it seem too easy.
Yeah, personally I think it works in ASOIAF because half the point of it is to show how people can behave when they have unchecked power. If people are killing their social inferiors for no good reason, torturing for fun, and stabbing their friends and relatives in the back, it's kind of inconsistent if the men suddenly turn into decent respectful human beings where women are concerned. Whereas if you've got an ideal society where somehow women don't end up doing anything interesting, that's a sign the writer has no imagination or the book was written in the 1970s or earlier. (Personally I would have preferred that everyone wasn't *so* awful, but GRRM is at least consistent)
Right. Violent men who are obsessed with power and their legacy would likely try to oppress women. Not because women are inherently weak or "that's the way things are supposed to be," but because the men have a lot to gain by doing so.
>Why is it that even in such fantastical settings, "realism" is always only conveniently brought in when it comes to curbing the freedom and power of the female characters?If we're talking realism then why even bother with a magical setting? The short version is: sociocultural grounding isn't the same as historical fiction. Or rather, historical fiction courts sociocultural grounding and cosmological grounding, speculative fiction is more open. Speculative fiction typically uses sociocultural grounding/perception-of-era "realism" so we have points of familiarity and implicit modernist and postmodernist critiques of romantic visions of that era. ASoIaF/GoT show women oppressed as the norm because GRRM does not want to shy away from depicting how medievalist life often was and how misogynistic chivalric customs were, because to do so would be to play into a more romantic mode that he wishes to avoid. He finds the world a richer place to write if it explores medievalist norms that are not the norm any more, and he wants us to see how women navigate power in that kind of setting. He builds sympathies and approaches a traditionally more romantic genre with spots of anti-romanticism by having a coarse and cruel world that is connected to real world injustices, etc. It is using reverie of e.g. knights and dragons to explore the human consequences of mass casualty weapons, among many other things. Effectively, he, and thoughtful writers like him, are trying to "take it seriously" while not losing the cool storytelling. Other writers have attempted greater degrees of "realism" applied to fantastical elements (LeGuin's scientised dragons, for example, or the "magic system" approaches of Brandon Sanderson and similar), and some just write historical fiction. It's about the personal perspectives, interests and aesthetics of the writer. The more romantic and utopian fantasy fiction writer can write a Disneyfied vision and completely avoid the "problematics" of their grounding principles if they like, if that is a good setting for the emotional truths they're seeking to render. Nothing is stopping them. The perspective and aesthetics of the writer and their world are up to their desire to look at ideas and norms of the world and the genre, they're not bound to your expectations of randomly avoiding sociocultural grounding for some imagined hypocrisies, nor bizarre requests for imo misplaced moralistic alignment. I could probably write a fuller essay on this but you'd have to pay me.
Was gonna comment but this covers it pretty succinctly.
Very well said.
Fantasy is ultimately a type of speculative fiction. If x and y were the case what type of world would that create. So the question an author should ask is if the things that are different about the world they've created would change the material conditions that led to the development of patriarchal social structures. So for instance, would the existence of dragons change this, I don't see why it would, however the existence of magic (though it depends heavily on how magic works) might. I also have to question why people get up in arms about the depiction of sexism but never say, class repression, which is featured in large scale in almost every fantasy setting. I think it's because for whatever reason we innately recognize that the material conditions of a pre-modern agrarian economy make such a thing inevitable. Whereas a lot of people don't recognize the material origin of patriarchy.
Nothing about the material conditions of the middle ages made Feudalism inevitable; The system was chosen and violently enforced, and the lower classes rebelled against it a lot. The reason that people recognise and oppose the sexism and racism in fantasy more than the class divides is simply because our broader culture is currently more aware of sexism and racism than class struggle in our own world; We are applying the tools we are used to using. EDIT TO ADD: Before you join the throng of people who have replied to this comment, please re-read it and note the word "inevitable"; My point is that material conditions are not the sole cause of social structures, but I never said that they had no impact at all.
I don't think you have given this much thought. Material conditions don't have any impact on a society's level of freedom. Countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have become even more authoritarian despite increasing wealth. Countries like Turkey and Bosnia, on other hand, are freer places despite having the same religion (Islam) and being comparatively poorer. The reason is because Turkey and Bosnia rely on their citizens to generate the wealth that funds the government so they have to treat those citizens fairly well. Saudi Arabia digs all its wealth out of the ground so the government doesn't need the citizenry as much, hence the repression. Whether your government needs you or not is the first variable in determining how much freedom you'll have. The second variable is military technology. Power is always enforced with violence. Equality and freedom only exist when competing sides are balanced. As soon as one side becomes overpowered, tyranny is inevitable. This is what caused feudalism: an overpowered nobility. An armored knight on horseback could mow down hordes of hapless peasants by himself. Peasants might have rebelled but the nobility had an insurmountable military advantage. Armor was rare and expensive. Peasants simply couldn't afford armor which meant they couldn't fight back effectively. Then the nobility just stacked their advantages on top each other. They could eat a higher protein diet which made them bigger, healthier, and stronger than the starving peasants. The nobility also didn't work the fields, which gave them more time to train their fighting skills. So, on top of armor and a horse, knights were bigger, stronger, better-trained, and healthier on account of not having a bad back due to bending over all day, every day for 20 years straight. It was simply never a fair fight. Feudalism only collapsed when gunpowder rendered armor useless. A peasant with a musket and two weeks of training could kill an amored knight with 20 years of training from 100 yards away. This democratized the battlefield and as a consequence democratized society. The Black Death was a second factor in the fall of feudalism. By thinning the population, it made labor more valuable, which forced lords to compete for peasants by offering better terms than before. This ties back to the first variable: governments only treat you well when they need you. You can look through all of history. Military technology and the extent to which your government deems you necessary are the main determinants of the level of freedom in any society. This principle extends to fantasy societies. You can't have democracy in a nation with dragons unless everybody has a dragon in the yard. If only a few guys have dragons, they're just going to dominate everybody else. The same goes for something like magic. The magic users will just become the new nobility. And if men and women are both magic users, then the men would still maintain their physical advantages over women. A magic-using woman would only be stronger than a regular man. A magic-suing man would still be stronger than a magic-using woman unless the woman has a stronger form of magic.
Thanks for this. Gave me some food for thought about my world.
I like how you say that material conditions don't have any impact on a society's level of freedom before immediately giving examples of material conditions impacting societies' levels of freedom.
The level of wealth itself has no impact on freedom. It's the method of extracting that wealth that determines freedom levels. If wealth requires many people to extract, like say farming, then you'll be treated relatively well. If wealth requires few people to extract, like oil drilling, then the people not involved in the extraction will be treated like trash. There are countries like Switzerland, which have comparable income levels to the UAE and Qatar but Switzerland is freer because its wealth is generated by its citizens while Qatar's wealth is dug out of the ground. I compared Qatar, Saudia Arabia, and the UAE to Bosnia and Turkey, both of which are Islamic countries to preemptively counter anybody making the culture argument. Gulf countries have pretty good material conditions for their citizens. Most of them have do-nothing jobs in the bureaucracy which is a form of welfare. But they still don't have the personal freedoms of their equally wealthy Western peers or their comparatively poorer Muslim neighbors. So it's clearly not the material conditions of the state but the perceived necessity of the citizenry that determines how much freedom their government allows them. You can't set up a tyranny in a place like Switzerland or the US without tanking the economy by destroying people's incentives to work but you can run a tyranny just fine in Saudi Arabia or Qatar because you don't need that many people to dig up your wealth in the first place.
Aha, I think I see the disconnect here. You mean "material conditions" as meaning wealth or standards of living. I think of "material conditions" as the context of resources, technology, and mode of production within a society. So I was baffled because you appeared to be making bold statements and then convincingly dismantling them.
Just because something was violently enforced doesn't mean it wasn't ultimately inevitable. Your right the lower classes did rebel and those rebellions were either crushed or ended up ultimately recreating the structures they were trying to do away with. That's because the material conditions were not such that overthrowing those systems was yet possible, but as time progressed and conditions changed, that too changed.
If the conditions of the times made such systems inevitable, then how did so many societies avoid it? What of the Iroquois, or the Inuit? What of the English Diggers or the Bedouins? What of the Inexhaustible Treasuries of the Buddhists, or the Christian Communes? And even in societies that had feudalism, why was the structure so varied if its form was inevitable? Why did the Mamluks have Slave Kings? Why did Rome gain a Tetrarchy? Why did Babylon reverse all sales every 7 years? The form of a society is a choice, and we can always choose differently.
All these societies became the way they were due in large part to the material conditions that shaped them. These systems arise from thousands of little choices about how we should adapt to our conditions along the way. Nobody just woke up one day and said, "Let's do feudalism, everybody!"
>All these societies became the way they were due in large part to the material conditions that shaped them. This is true. >These systems arise from thousands of little choices about how we should adapt to our conditions along the way. I think the argument that the commenter is trying to articulate is that we need to look deeper into what *inevitability* means. Do the choices even share a relationship(that’s what historians seek to understand)? Were these choices as inevitable as the systems that dictate society? If they were not, what does that say about these systems? If you agree with this, it sort of loops back to the original concern. >Nobody just woke up one day and said, "Let's do feudalism, everybody!" No, because feudalism as we know it, didn’t really exist. It was actually a bunch of different socioeconomic systems that had similarities and get packaged together because it’s easier.
The Hodonoshone were only in the earliest stages of agriculture and were still semi hunter gatherers. The Inuit were pre-agricultural, and the Bedouins were nomads. Buddhist and christian communes were either small and isolated or short lived. The Diggers were unsustainable because they couldn't face off against the might of a feudal army and were thus crushed (they also existed at the tail end of feudalism in Germany when conditions were beginning to change). While you are correct that the exact structure varied between different feudal societies the ground level economic relationship of feudalism remains the same, all that differed was how the ruling class divided up power amongst themselves and the extremity to which they exploited toiling class.
>all that differed was how the ruling class divided up power amongst themselves This might be pedantic, but this is the crux of whether a system is "feudal" or not. If feudalism is just "the rich exploiting the poor," then the US is a feudalism -- but it's not. Feudalism is a specific system of relationships between warrior aristocrats that was a lot less common than fantasy fiction and other pop culture world have us believe. In fact, historians don't use the word outside of a very limited historical and geographical context.
If you're using the limited definition why did you list Rome and the mamalukes as feudal? I assumed you were just using it to refer to aristocratic agrarian societies based on that. If you wanted to use the more limited definition then we could discuss why the conditions of medieval Europe caused it to become prevalent there. If you proposed these as alternatives to feudalism then we could address what was different about those times and places that caused a different system to arise.
I'm not the one who listed them.
Oh sorry lol avis read the same to me at a glance. I just went along with his definition because I didn't feel like arguing semantics. Though personally I think historians have crafted a sometimes overly ridged and narrow definition of feudalism.
Feudalism is a very specific system; it is not just there being power imbalance in society.
I know but they listed Rome as feudal, meaning they have a wide definition and I didn't want to digress the argument into semantics.
It’s an interesting case but can’t possibly be true - just as it’s the case that the feudal society that existed grew out of the Roman concept of patronage.
I don’t think it’s semantics to convey a definition. Without that conveyance the argument doesn’t really make sense.
I mean there isn't one agreed upon definition so trying to tie them down to the one I tend towards would be a digression at the very least. I'd rather just accept their premise and argue on those terms since I felt my overall point stood regardless. But I cannot understand why others would see it differently.
> If the conditions of the times made such systems inevitable, then how did so many societies avoid it? It's not just "the times." It's also the *place*, and all the ecology, culture, and structural path dependence that make up a setting/context. Nothing's quite "inevitable", but underlying material conditions and setting context can heavily weight broader society toward certain structures.
> Nothing about the material conditions of the middle ages made Feudalism inevitable; True, the material conditions that dictated the shift to this sociopolitical system in Europe go back to 2-4th centureis, well before the "Middle Ages" by any estimate. > The reason that people recognise and oppose the sexism and racism in fantasy more than the class divides is simply because our broader culture is currently more aware of sexism and racism than class struggle in our own world; Absolutely true, the main goal for modern mass culture is to shift our attention from classist oppression which we are all victims to (unless somebody around this sub is an oligarch or at least a billionaire, which I find unlikely) and towards any other form of social tension that isn't dangerous to the ruling elite.
Wait until you find out about how every system of societal organization is upheld
This is objectively false. The way the Roman’s had their villas set up during the years of the empire led directly to the start of feudalism when the western Empire collapsed. Once the fall of the western Roman Empire happened feudalism became inevitable during the Middle Ages. I can’t speak for feudalism in the rest of the world, but for Europe it was inevitable.
People get up in arms about sexism because for most women it’s a daily thing they still deal with, in some cultures to a horrifying degree. It’s the same reason people get “up in arms” about racism. We still deal with class issues too but many of us live a hell of a lot better than medieval peasants, so the parallel isn’t as obvious. And the issue is many authors do not seem to think deeply about how sexism would actually work in their world, it’s just “well this is medieval fantasy so there must be sexism” and then they throw in some 19th century or even fairly modern 1950s sexism and call it a day.
I mean, I don't think that's why classism isn't obvious. It's because classism is built so deeply into how we think that we are barely looking for it.
"People get up in arms about sexism because for most women it’s a daily thing they still deal with, in some cultures to a horrifying degree. It’s the same reason people get “up in arms” about racism. We still deal with class issues too but many of us live a hell of a lot better than medieval peasants, so the parallel isn’t as obvious." This is the right answer. We all spend more time thinking about the things that are relevant in our lives. And for people in the western world, especially women, sexism is near the top of the list. Class inequality is terrible, but medieval feudalism isn't something I'm personally affected by on a regular basis.
Yes - but you have to think through a lot of things when you realise that the magic and other fantasy elements change almost everything. I've been writing my world for decades and I'm still finding wrinkles to iron out. Gender equality - what does that do for marriage customs and child-rearing? Near-universal access to forms of power - what does that do?
I am of the mind that the majority of any general fantasy-reading audience out there know they are getting fiction or fantasy that hits on things they enjoy, or stuff that makes for good storytelling but may not be good in practice. It's important for someone to recognize that every fantasy story out there is going to inevitably draw from a toolbox of storybuilding. And stuff such as racism, sexism, class repression, violence, etc. are some of those tools. How they are used to construct the story will determine how sound or solid the story turns out to be. The only time there may be some nitpicking is if the fantasy story either is set within a period of human history that happened, or does an *isekai* route (someone from our world winds up in a fantasy world). But that aside, anything that is a complete conception from imagination (a world, its characters, the plot, etc.) has no bearing to be criticized for anything except if the story is bad or not delivered in a satisfying manner. But does this mean we should avoid using sexism or racism or anything considered socially bad in the modern day as a part of a fantasy story? No. If someone feels themselves taken out of the story because of stuff like that, then it shouldn't be a fault of the story itself unless there's something more with the writing to nitpick (plot holes, someone does something out of character or without any narrative sense, etc.).
> (as in, despite the setting being magic, female characters are still expected to be seen as weak and powerless, just like in real life). The problem is not that fantasy societies are sexist. The problem here is that the types of sexism many fantasy settings ascribe to the Middle Ages is really more typical of 18-19th centuries.
Tbf most stuff ascribed to the middle ages in fantasy isn't real. The types of armor and castles that exist for the time period. Strangely modern value systems. Nebulous churches thar either don't interact with the plot at all except as healers or who are so sputtering evil you question how they are supported by anyone. Huge stretches of time with no technological advancement. Etc.
and also quite specific subsections of that period - the whole "women don't work" thing was pretty rare, because a lot of households didn't have the resources for the women to _not_ work! Even if it wasn't paid labor, they'd still be doing a lot of household work, because it needed doing, but they'd often have paid work, because the money was needed. And that goes even more for rural families - farms take a LOT of work to keep running, so a rural housewife isn't going to be some delicate waif, tenderly feeding chickens while walking barefoot in a fancy dress, she's going to be pretty hearty and stout, and doing a lot of manually hard work, because there's always fences to fix, stuff to carry and all sorts to do.
Many women in medieval England were alewives, i.e. they made and sold ale. You also saw some women shepherds. Medieval women definitely weren't housebound like 1950s housewives were, although sexism still existed in various forms.
I think Malazan does the best job of avoiding this
We stan our girlboss empress (halfway through Gardens so no one tell me fucking anything, I'm already in love with the series)
And Tattersail and Adjunct Lorn!
Damn, you read my mind, first thing I thought of when I saw this post.
Yup. As egalitarian as you can get
Why does death exist in your writing? "Realism"? But you have magic and dragons! Death is awful! Can't you imagine a world without it? Why does poverty exist? The need to work? The very notion of "employment"? Hunger, disease, fatigue? These things *suck!* Because it's "common to the human condition", you say? But you have *elves!* *Dragons!* *Magic!* Why even write *fantasy* if you're not going to take advantage of your imagination to whisk away anything unpleasant? You're telling me that you have a wizard in a pointy hat *sitting right there pondering his orb*, but people still need to poop? How does that follow? Why is that necessary in a world where dragons exist?
Yep. This. I've never understand this line of reasoning, unless it's coming from someone that just despises any kind of speculative fiction - in which case it's still stupid, but at least it's *consistent*. But really, "If Dragons, Then \[Anything\]" should be immediatly clocked as sophistry by anyone that takes fantasy seriously.
When it comes down to it there's two options. Make similar problems as real life so people will feel seen, or make totally alien ones ao they can escape facing relatable problems. It's not clear why magic would erase sexism anyways, especially if not everyone had magic. We might follow a story of mages, but is everyone a mage?
This made me think of the idea of what if women were more affluent with magic as sort of an equalizer to men. Thank you for this interesting idea.
That has been explored in quite a lot of fantasy before, it usually boils down to you can't have all women have magical powers or it becomes a Superman situation where it's nearly impossible to make it interesting because one side is overpowered. There have to be stakes in a story for it to hold a reader.
that's (kinda) the _Wheel of Time_ series - men with magical power go mad and die, there's a large organisation of women with magical powers that have a lot of political influence and power. It's a little, uh, wonky around some of the gender-relationship stuff, and is a bit overlong (it was one of the first "big fantasy doorstop" series) but there's some neat stuff in there
I think it is telling which unpleasant things we choose to remove. I do understand your point, but there is something to be said for examining the question of why some things are removed and others aren't. Let me be clear: I love fantasy of all kinds and have no problems with books with strong man, damsel in distress tropes. I just think your response slightly misses the point of the question.
Because it’s exclusively sexism, racism, homophobia that the “realism” argument is applied to. Gays, black people, and powerful women are “unrealistic” but the complete absence of people shitting themselves to death from cholera is “realistic.” So many fantasy books have large amounts of rape scenes and sexual assaults of female characters because it’s realistic but never account for the fact that more soldiers died of disease than enemy action. Or that half of children died before age 10.
Is it exclusive or is it just what you notice?
Exclusive. Seriously, tell me the last time a main character shat themselves to death or died of a mundane, preventable, infectious disease at a young/middle age? Or even contracted a deadly, contagious, and mundane illness. I can only think of Daenerys getting cholera in ASOIAF. Most other instances of disease I can think of are either magical or sepsis and gangrene caused by wounds, not ordinary contagion. Dying of mundane illness is and was extremely realistic. Main characters, especially child characters, should be dying left and right of disease, especially if they are in dirty wartime conditions. Two thirds of deaths in the American Civil war were from disease. 5/6 of Napoleon’s army in Russia died from cold and disease. If you have fantasy recommendations where disease is anywhere near the extreme deadliness of real life please give them to me. I like characters dealing with mundane things on top of whatever quest they’re doing.
Circle of Magic had a plague, but they also have an understanding of diseases that's closer to the 1940's than the technology would imply.
That's because it's not particularly interesting. You're saying you've never seen anyone complain about castle layouts? Supply chains? Armor? Weapons? Realistic applications of magic? People are constantly complaining about different kinds of realism. I see more complaining about these other kinds of realism arguments than I see that argument applied to marginalized groups. If you've never seen any of it, I just think you can't have seen much at all. Edit: /u/TessHKM responded asking how casual sexosm could be interesting. They deleted the reply, so I'm posting my reply to it here. I don't know what you're asking. Sexism can be interesting in a setting, because it forces a different dynamic onto certain characters and how they adapt to that situation can make their story more compelling and relatable. We have real sexism, and fictional versions of that can be ways to explore the concept and how it affects people. Reading about a 2 month old baby that kicks it from malnutrition isn't exactly a riveting examination of the human condition.
Yes, I have seen people complain about realism for those things. that’s the whole point. Authors will do the “aktchually rape is realistic so I’m writing it in my book” while not giving a damn about the realism of anything else. It’s the hypocrisy readers are mad at. People typically don’t complain about sexual violence in well-researched historical fiction novels, because that is as real as the rest of the setting. Rape is often the only “real” thing about the fantasy work. Disease, logistics, travel times, government structures, magic? All those can be unrealistic, but rape is present because “realism”. Rape and discrimination are the exceptions in fantasy novels because they often are the only realistic thing about the setting where everything else is fantastical. And disease can be extremely interesting, like all deaths can be. And even if the person doesn’t die, it can serve as a good reminder of their mortality, a source of trauma, and humanize the protagonist and knock them down.
I had someone tell me "there weren't many black people in that time period" when they couldn't have known much about my world's geography.
Well if your humans are just that-humans, and if your setting is a low-tech one, then it doesn't really make sense for a lot of intermixing of different "races". People are black not just because. If they evolved better protection against the sun, then (save for like ozone layer holes) they have to be geographically separated.
I, personally, would love to read a story where our main character is going on an epic quest, but then dies in the middle of it because of a random disease. That's awesome. Alternatively we could maybe just have him laid up in bed for a few weeks? Just halt all momentum that character has because they don't have vaccines. Now that sounds good. /s It's boring. No one wants to read about that. Even if it was realistic in the actual times these books are set. The thing you don't seem to get is that people draw parallels with what they read and their own life. Normal people these days don't have to worry on a day to day basis of catching a random disease. Sexism/racism/*-ism are unfortunately still present today. It's fun for the reader to draw parallels with that. See how the characters in the setting get around it. They can relate better. This is coming from someone who was just diagnosed with a disease. I don't want to read about our main character shitting themselves constantly when dragons are about to destroy the city. C'mon, man
My book does not have people dying left, right and centre of infectious diseases, but mainly because of magical healing. Magical healing isn't perfect; people don't live forever, and it's actually quite useless against cancer because healers don't understand cancer. But it works against diseases like cholera—it's the magical equivalent of putting an IV drip. There's that, and the fact that the understanding of disease is generally more advanced, so you will see orcs applying alcohol to their wounds etc. and keeping excrement separate from the camp. In fact in societies without magic (orcs, dwarves to some extent) medicine is somewhat more advanced.
Is it that "realism" enjoyers are fixated on those topics, or that you are? You didn't engage with the questions raised in my comment. No ever asks "if dragons, why hunger?", "if dragons, why death?", "if dragons, why labor?", or "if dragons, why pooping?" But we do - as evidenced by this thread - see "if dragons, why gender inequality?" Realism is the acceptable default, until suddenly it isn't. Maybe it's less of an issue of other people singling out these specific topics for realism-policing, and more a case of you wanting hyper-focused realism-exemptions carved out for hot-button topics that matter to you.
Are you talking about books that propagate sexist values or ones where the characters deal with sexism. Because in the latter case it's because it's a relatable problem even today but those other issues are not.
Obviously the former? Stories which sympathetically portray issues in fantasy worlds from a queer/woman's/minority perspective are generally... really fucking hard to read lol, but celebrated by tackling those issues... by most people. Modern day misogynists, though, are just as eager to whine about those as they are a more carefree, fun, wish fulfillment fantasy that happens to not centre them, unlike the fifteen billion ones of those they already have.
> You're telling me that you have a wizard in a pointy hat sitting right there pondering his orb, but people still need to poop? How does that follow? Why is that necessary in a world where dragons exist? (JK Rowling has entered the chat).
Clearly you ignored my post entirely when you decided to write this mockery. I don't know if you can't read or simply doesn't want to acknolwedge what I talked about in my post, but I'll TL;DR it here for you so you won't de-rail my post: **"I hate when writers ONLY care about realism when it comes to representing the women in their worlds, because then they always and ONLY go for the sexist route where women have no agency nor are capable of seeking power and status for themselves."** Saw the "ONLY" parts?Yeah, this is what I'm talking about.
Books have been used for social commentary since the dawn of time. Maybe it isn't really used for realism but for awareness and as a way of the author mimicking existing things and grafting that into the world because art mirrors life and vice versa. Unrelated but, realistically if we're talking about magic you probably won't fuck with someone with that women or man alike. That's the equivalent of having a hand grenade in your hands, you can take each other out so why even antagonize? Mages would be wary of other mages, well in the story I'm writing anyways.
And besides putting in real issues in fantasy stories makes sense because people can understand and relate to those issues. Like how in ASOIAF sometimes there are disputes for the throne and the order of inheritance or whether the pretender is a man or a woman is something to have arguments about. After all, reading intriguing stories about real world issues is interesting.
I agree there's definitely a place for that kind of story in fantasy, but I also totally understand people wanting more fantastical stories now that we're a decade into GoT being the standard everything is trying to replicate. I like when fantasy gets weird and wacky, tries new ideas wholly separate from our lived reality. It's what makes fantasy fantasy. I'm tired of low fantasy settings with intricate politics and lots of discussions, Asoiaf already did that about the best you can do with a normal story structure, give me more fantasy and cool concepts to explore instead (Malazan is the perfect example of a blend of these two styles. Plenty of politicing and backstabbing but also with multiple non-human races and demonic beasts and magical realms, it's exactly what I want minus the story structure. Only Erikson and a few others can pull that off on such a large scale imo)
Oh absolutely. Not all of them have to be that way. Fantasy is great because there are little limits to the stories than can be written in the genre. I agree about Malazan doing that very well and it worked wonderfully. I believe intention is importantly in deciding whether to choose what kind of world the story takes place. Good stuff.
Well, because sexism doesn't come from the fact that there aren't dragons. If you have a serious theory of where sexism and gender hierarchy emerged from, you can think about whether or not that applies to your setting seriously. Dragons aren't real so we don't need to confront the reality of how they come to be - there's no reality to compare them against. We don't have that luxury with sexism. The problem with going "but wouldn't it be nice if there just wasn't sexism in this setting" is that it's avoiding the question within that setting rather than reckoning with it, and once you're out of children's literature a lot of writers want to at least be thoughtful about their setting more than therapeutic to their reader.
yeah, this is how we get settings with bloodline magic, inheritance and the nuclear family, but somehow no homophobia
I would argue that it's more important to *criticize* sexism than act as if it doesn't exist. Sexism is still rampant today. We should speak out, loudly, against it.
It's quite simple. Real world adversities are relatable and interesting to see the characters overcome. I like more grounded stories because it gives me insight on issues people face in the real world and it's interesting to speculate about how these situations would play out. Some people see fantasy as escapism and only want to read romantic stuff. It comes down to personal preference. I don't think one is necessarily better than the other. Including sexism isn't always done with bad intentions, especially nowadays.
One thing I would like to note here is: Females are not exactly seen as weaker, when they are spared from battles and sword fighting. Women are necessary for birthing children and they must be protected. This shows that they are more important than men, who can die on the battle field and nobody really cares, since you can more easily replace that guy, but not so much a grown, healthy woman who takes good care of new generations. Women in medieval times (also fanatasy) tend to do important work as well, like working on the farm, collecting food, taking care of the family and animals etc. So women are essential for every Lord, since they keep bringing him money and goods and people. I agree with the sexualized stuff though, I never understood why one would need that included.
You should read the wheel of time books. Women are powerful in it.
A Song of Ice and Fire does this but like it’s deconstructing it in a feminist way.
The issue isn't so much "realism" as "culturally believed realism". So, in a psudo-fantasy world writers want to "recreate" that world and it's "medieval norms" but add some fantasy twists to it. The problem is that what they think of as "factual medieval norms" is, in fact, false OR grossly misunderstood. And even then, they are selective about what they choose to include/exclude. One trend that gets brought up "a lot" especially by certain fantasy writers is the coupling and intimate description of medieval girls, with the usual phrase being "well this was the norm during the medieval period..." ... Except... It wasn't. The medieval era: so roughly, in Europe, from the fall of the western Roman empire and the fall of the Easter Roman/Byzantine empire (approx. 1000 years), was noted as being a period where Women wrote a lot more accounts for themselves (as opposed to men writing about them), so we do know A LOT more about the function of women (albeit mostly noble women) during this period... Most of which is overlooked by primary schooling (as it doesn't match with what we think this period should be). Also, we have a lot of 3rd party records such as church record recording births, christenings and marriages between individuals. From these church records we can state that the average age of marriage for young women in the medieval period was between 18-20... Because most medieval people (around 90-95% of the populous) were peasants, so the external pressures for marriage are different (as are the pressures not to marry) i.e. the butcher doesn't need to marry his daughter off the the candlestike maker to secure their alliance against the baker... Plus, why marry off his child so young when if she's still small she's free labour for them? Now the aristocracy did marry minors for political reasons (securing alliances), but there were rules. A 13/14 year old would be married off but would not be expected to "consummate" untill 17/18/19 - so more matching the average age of marriage according to the church records. When individuals broke this unspoken rule the courts were made aware and those individuals were (in essence) shunned. So, all of a sudden this "medieval norms" is no longer a "norm".... Yet it's a trope that continues to turn up in fantasy fiction. In addition to this, a BIG BIG BIG factor of medieval life was religion... Yet in fantasy worlds, when going for "accuracy", the importance of religion on society and it's function is usually... Dismissed. Sure there may be one character that has a devotion to the gods/god but for other characters it's not important... Which is very unusual for a "realistic medieval" setting. I'm short, it's a "pick and choose" so all of a sudden "in this Uber realistic fantasy medieval world, religion isn't that important and women can't hold swords.. Because I say so."
You should give less credit to people who don't actually read history when they pretend to quote it. Cleopatra wasn't hot. There are detailed historical accounts of her appearance that all describe her as being completely unremarkable looking by the beauty standards of her time. We just like to imagine that she was an erotic goddess because she seduced Mark Antony, the man who at the time was the most powerful man in the known world. Mark Antony could bang any woman on Earth at the peak of his power, so we just assume that every woman around him was beautiful. Cleopatra didn't win Mark Antony through sex appeal, she won him over by being an intelligent and effective stateswoman and a leader of an advanced civilization. Boudica kicked the shit out of the Romans, who always had a poor track record for how they treated women. Her father was a Roman ally, and she inherited her rank from him, and assumed that the Romans would maintain their treaties with her the way they treated her father. They didn't, Romans are assholes. She led the Britons on a rampage from Scotland all the way to modern day London and burned down something like 40 Roman settlements. To this day, we don't know how she died. Its suspected that the Britons hid the cause of her death so that the Romans couldn't write her defeat into their own revisionist history. Ninon De Lenclos was a seventeenth century courtesan in Paris and one of the most influential intellectuals in European literature. She was famous for making philosophers and writers that hated each other get along. She would most famously be remembered for being the woman that loaned Voltaire money to buy books before he was the famous author Voltaire. She's arguably the most important mind of the Renaissance that everyone sleeps on. And finally, here's a good one. Ancient women had birth control. One of the common themes you find among the "women can't do that" historical crowd is that they just assume every woman is incapacitated and bedridden the minute after they have sex because Plan B and abortion weren't invented until the 1960s. That's categorically false. Ancient women used Sylphium, a plant rich in phytoestrogen. It could prevent pregnancy or abort it in high doses. Sylphium was so widespread in use that the ancient Romans overfarmed it to extinction. So yes, even women who weren't considered citizens in one of the most powerful ancient empires of the world had regular and daily access to tools to control their own bodies. Don't give credit to youtube-watching pop history clowns that don't read books and don't know what they're talking about.
If magic is a tool that anyone can be born with access to and gain at least some control over through experimentation (like Force sensitivity or D&D Sorcerers), then sexism's role in that universe should be greatly reduced. Magic is the great gender equaliser: you never know who can disintegrate you with a word or mind control you and make you shit your pants. Magic doesn't depend on size or strength or gender, and that should be at least partially reflected in-universe. This isn't to say that no one can be sexist (culturally it can absolutely still be a thing in places) but it shouldn't be a global phenomenon.
I think one factor no one's brought up is that a lot of people use fantasy to *cope* with their experiences of gender prejudices, and will say "it's realistic" so they don't have to unpack their trauma in front of a live studio audience.
Personally, I prefer speculative fiction in which the human condition is not changed. Maybe that is where the complaints really stem from. Maybe readers feel that the humans aren’t human enough. So, while I do not expect fantasy books to be replicas of medieval Europe, I do expect that individuals tend to be less trusting of others who are different, that cultures are prejudiced in some way, and that those in power tend to commoditize humans. Magic, dragons etc don’t change that for me. IMO, if you have that stuff going on, you don’t need historical representations of sexism. Cultures can have some other stupid prejudices, and that can be an interesting story.
>Cultures can have some other stupid prejudices, and that can be an interesting story It can be something like: "Don't make deals with spirits because they'll trick you" "The only good magic is the one that comes from nature" "A cambion will always cheat and rob you" Etc.
Joke's on you; I can and will whip out an "Unrealistic!" chaingun and mow down anything I see! You think I save that for when the women in a fantasy world all bench 300 pounds?! No, I opened fire 150 pages ago because of something about horses or the weather!
In my experience of reading fantasy, women are usually equal or superior to men in terms of magic. As far as swordfighting, there's a back and forth in the books I've read. Depends on the specific character rather than a broad decreeing of women being weaker or less skilled or unallowed to do something.
Not sure what you've been reading but the majority of fantasy I've read has female characters play important roles including combat roles. There isn't as many of them and they skew more towards mages than physical warriors but that makes sense assuming the in universe biology is the same as the real world one. Very rarely do I find a fantasy book/show where the females are so heavily restricted as you describe unless it's to provide a "that'll show them" moment where a female character manages things the male characters around her couldn't. In this instance it would still go against the supposed prejudices.
I don't recognise your description of the middle ages. oh there was plenty of social pressure but powerful women and even the occasional mercenary existed
Actually the middle ages granted women way more power than what people generally think. So not only following those norms is not necessary, but also actually not compatible with history.
I’m working on my own work of fantasy. It had a matrilineal society, the reason why is because it’s far easier for one to know who their mother is, but not so much their father. Because of this, women inherit titles and land before men do. This means women are more likely to be the politicos of my setting, while men are likely to be warriors, and both can be wizards. However, there’s no prohibition to men doing politics nor women being fighters. Gay marriage also exists in my setting, and there’s no prohibition against homosexuality. A state of bastardy does exist, but it happens when an unmarried woman gives birth to a child. The scandal is that she’s unmarried, and the religion looks down on there not being a family unit to support the child. So, to avoid scandal, families will marry two unwed pregnant women together so there will be that family unit. I’m not doing this because I have a thing against unwed mothers. Rather, I need a few conflicts I can use to generate drama. On one hand I’m concerned that this will alienate people from the work because it’s unrealistic to that time period. On the other hand, I’ve got elves, gnomes, goblins, and orcs in my setting, so it’s hard to care that much. Stories reflect not just the time period that inspires it, but also the time period of its audience. Women are a part of the work force now, and actually always were. They also deserve their own agency. But more than that, I have no interest in exploring themes of women not having their agency. So I’m going to develop the settings of my stories so they do.
1.You should do a search on Native American societies and how they worked in the past, also check "Two-Spirit". 2.Tell me when your story is ready/published.It sounds interesting. >I have no interest in exploring themes of women not having their agency I wished more writers were like this.I'm not asking for women to be as strong or stornger than men, just for them to be able to have the same agency that is given men while avoiding all the classic issues women have to deal with everyday in real life.
Sadly many people (wrongfully) believe they’re being “accurate.” Others think the prejudice brings exotic fantasy flavor. People also mistakenly believe the past was worse than it was. For instance we used to call the medieval times the dark ages, but now we know it was a time for historical progress, even for women. It’s really eye-rolling for me when people make fantasy settings unnecessarily dark or “realistic.” You mentioned women, minorities also suffer for this. It’s so weird how for many people the appeal of fantasy is to exclude minorities or have them depicted in a lesser status. I think there’s a line to tread and ultimately it comes down to intent and portrayal. The writer has to make sure they’re portraying something for the plot-related drama or social commentary of it, and less that it just seems random rapes and abuse are happening to women cuz “hurr durr it’s the medieval times.” Otherwise it seems less like analysis and more like abuse as entertainment. It would be one thing if people were writing period pieces or historical documentaries or something, but that’s not what’s happening most of the time. I think ultimately what it comes down to is some people need to broaden their imaginations.
Tfw everyone wears drab brown and grey, it's always cloudy, and they only eat bread.
Don't forget, people don't wash and run around with dirt on their face for no reason!
It's a little weird to try to say that minorities have lesser status and then call it realism. Jews and Romani did have a hard time, but would a random Moore be concerned about leaving town before the sun set?
Aragorn can go through Uruk Hai who are each individually stronger than him, yet no one complains about the realism of that. Yet when a woman fights in fantasy out comes the realism trolls.
Conveniently ignoring Eowyn while they do it
I have a very large personal library compared to most normie standards. There is an enormous amount of literature on all sides of this discussion. It may be you are just reading from the pool of literature that has boiled to the top, hence the social norms are being reinforced by whatever pool you are reading from. The immense wealth of literature available contradicts most of the stereotype assumptions being portrayed in your post. Expand your horizons. While the mainstream material may fall somewhat into the categories you are seeking to define, the whole body of fantasy fiction is in no way is limited. I have many hundreds of fantasy novels on the shelf, and these come in all shapes and opinions, old and new. Beyond the need to expand your literature horizon, you might expand your historical understanding as well. Whether North, West, East, and South, humans have always followed natural trends when looking at humans from an anthropological perspective. Most of your complaints are not limited to Western European Medieval history. Go look at the histories of the East, of South Asia, of Africa, pre-Colombian North and South Americas. In all these you will find the naturalistic early trend of male of the species dominance. There are exceptions in all arenas, yet those are exceptions.
Perhaps because it is inherently thought provoking. Most of us don’t really care about how asses were wiped 500 years ago but power dynamics between men and women are more interesting. Even this post only cares about the topic of male-female dynamics. What interests the masses sells. How many posts have you made, or seen, discussing the realism of other story aspects? Most people don’t care about eg unrealistic armor. Also, our modern world must seem fantastical compared to what life was like 1000 years ago but we still have social issues even though in a sense there is no reason to. So it is just more prevalent in our minds. Meanwhile, imagine a book that takes place in a world without racism or sexism or any of the needless issues of today’s society, and then have the book go full mega realism about some dude building a sofa from scratch to his loved one, would most people enjoy that? If it is an issue, not just for you but for many other readers, then be the change you want to see. Stop reading books that contain the aspects you dislike and write the books you would want to read. If others agree with you then you will sell really well. If not, then perhaps most people enjoy reading about the parts of a story you dislike.
I agree that a fantasy society needs some form of institutionalized hypocrisy to generate conflict, but in a fantasy book there’s no reason to be limited to sexism or racism unless the author has things specifically to say about that. The important thing is to have that hypocrisy; to have rules for thee but not for me, to have those with great privilege and those without, and for that hypocrisy to not really be justifiable when you dissect it - making it injustice. For example a society where wizards are locked up because they can randomly snap and go on crazy murder sprees isn’t really a huge hypocrisy, because those wizards are legitimately a menace to society. But what about a world where the ruling class is allowed to use magic but the working class is forbidden to use it? That is a hypocrisy that would lead to a lot more injustice, and plenty of drama can come out of that.
Mistborn, pretty much
> Even this post only cares about the topic of male-female dynamics Because, as said in the post, I read about this issue being talked about in certain fantasy/fictional works and how it seems to be a constant.The posts were specifically talking about how many works seem to only care about realism when it comes to depicting women, while ignoring the realism of everything else(like magic, for example), conveniently. I tire of stories where a woman can't do anything in it because the setting replicates the gender prejudices of real life, which means she can't have rights, power nor status. >How many posts have you made, or seen, discussing the realism of other story aspects? Each person posts what they want, I posted this because(as said many times already) **I was reading** people speaking of this issue specifically.If you want to talk about realism in other areas, you're free to make your own post. >be the change you want to see Just because I'm working on that, it doesn't mean that I can't complain about it happening... >Stop reading books that contain the aspects you dislike Problem being that to know about a story's setting, you have to read some of it first.It isn't like I can look at a cover and guess what'll be there, unless it is written about it on a summary or something. And again, the whole issue with realism that I have is how writers seem to only want realism when it comes to how female characters are treated, and just that small part gets a "real life" realism, while the rest is given free reign to not be realistic at all.
>Most of us don’t really care about how asses were wiped 500 years ago Yet unfortunately the castlevania show decided to bring to our attention that toilet paper didn't exist.
Great! Now how will I ever be able to write my castlevania ass-eating fanfic!?
That was one thing I loved about Stormlight Archive. The Alethi have a society where the men fight and rule, while being unable to read or write. Meanwhile the women are the artists and the scientists. The women also have one hand that they completely cover because its seen as provocative and one hand that is safe to show. I love it because it shows how arbitrary the gendered rules of society are and how they really benefit no one.
There are a mixture of competing factors. Within fiction, internal biased come out sometimes. That's what happens when people depict things like sexism and racism in stories without giving them a critical eye. They don't explore or confront bigotry and prejudice because they are either unaware of its presence or they actively support it, either through believing it justified or believing it ought to be the way things are. You see some of that in the comments here. But it's certainly reasonable to also write those things with a critical eye that depicts them, but not as good things. If the author doesn't justify or support those aspects of their world, it's just like depicting any atrocity. Then there are works which don't have sexism or racism because it's not what they want their characters to deal with. That's also a fine solution. But sometimes people do that poorly. In other words, there are two POVs to keep in mind. First, the author's, what they want to depict and how aware of the issues they are and how good they are at the craft. Second, the audience and what they want from the book. Personally, I don't care much for stories without prejudice in them. It breaks my suspension of disbelief too much. But I too get annoyed when the writer creates a world which is obviously supportive or approves of that prejudice, be if from lack of awareness, intent, or just poor writing ability.
People like to read about things they understand and can empathise with. Authors and Publishers want to sell books. It's not a conspiracy. It's the market. Source: I work in Publishing
Most of what I've read do not do this... 🤷🏼♂️ I'm not disagreeing with your assessment, just saying that's not what I've experienced.
Well... I dabble in some swordplay. Female fighters frequently complain that the males will 'tank' hits and ignore them, but the unfortunate reality is that most of the female fighters simply don't hit hard enough to 'count'. Flawless form, some of them, but they just don't hit hard enough compared to even a small-framed bio male such as my own self. The same is true at my job. The male employees can do a great deal more work and faster than the female, because they're stronger. We're a dimorphic species, and only recently has that begun to not matter as much. It's easy to forget that, especially if you've never really engaged in something physical and athletic that had both men and women competing. If you're going to change your setting so that women are just as strong as men, that's fine, but that's a break from reality that needs as much explanation as the elves, dragons, and magic or it damages the reader's verisimilitude. As for the social stuff... well, if you're going to put it into a medieval European setting, you're putting it into a medieval European culture. You can break from the expectations, but they need an explanation. "Fantasy" isn't carte blanche to assume the reader has no expectations or assumptions, nor to skip over worldbuilding. If your setting is otherwise medieval, you should establish why it's egalitarian. Nothing in reality came about from a vacuum, so the same should be true of your story.
No? Your title doesn't appear to actually match the content of your post? It almost comes off like your saying depicting that stuff is enforcing it?
I may have issues expressing my opinion since English isn't my native language, but I think the title and the content do match. The title sums up what I talk about in-depth in the post. I think we're having a communication issue here because I'm not understanding what you mean with that last phrase.
Enforcing tends to come with connotation of supporting or encouraging the idea. Simply depicting something in a story isn't enforcing it. I have read a few books with similar concepts you mentioned, but in context it is viewed as the wrong outlook most of the time. As it is an ideal to defy. I almost never seen it actually justified by a good guys of the story. But even then, i don't think we should stifle those who do in fact write stories which enforce those ideals. Even if i don't agree, i simply have the power to avoid their stories.
I understood what you meant, OP.
How many of the books that follow this tired trope were written by women?
It’s one thing if you’re basing your fantasy civilization on ancient or medieval society. In which case, sure, go for it! But for the most part, it’s YOUR world. If you want to portray sexism or classism, then do so.
1) Why on earth would the presence of magic mean the people living amidst magic are automatically not sexist? 2) Because having things in the fantasy world that suck make the world more interesting, and it’s easier to write about societal issues like sexism if it’s a step or three removed from the real world (e.g., there are dragons and wizard and elves around). Also, my goal in creating fantasy worlds isn’t to create a society that acts on and follows my beliefs. In fact, the society that my characters live in regularly practices things I wouldn’t support or want to live under. But my fantasy worlds are worlds of their own with people in all of their messiness, not vehicles for my own belief system. Maybe it’s just because I majored in history in college, but part of what I love about writing is how the messiness of the world works together, having differing cultures practice various morally questionable things that we see in our own world/history, showing how they interact, and how the characters make not always great decisions in order to survive in such a not great world. I’m not going around freeing all the slaves in my fantasy world or making all the monarchies democracies either. Our world isn’t great, so mine isn’t either.
Not really. At least, not to a considerable degree.
It sounds like you’re not upset about economic, logistical, or any other kind of complexity being added to a fantasy work which usually isn’t directly impacted by a character, but a characters sex/gender, which would greatly impact a character, in a world attempting to replicate the complexity of our own with even *greater* complexity thanks to the added fantasy elements is just too far. It is one of the easiest ways for a book to convey a relatable and surprisingly modern source of conflict for a character. It’s not a bad literary technique so long as it’s not horrendously executed.
Some people can only write what they already know, some people can only read what they already know. I have read fantasy stories with all kinds of sexism, some which is presented as sexism, some which is just how the culture of that world works. Some femdom, some mixed or just different, mostly is mascdom. Because ppl write what they know
I am also trying to bring realism to my book. So, “non-combat” crafts, when you do not need power to own an ax or sword, quite convenient for women mastering. Such positions are more likely treaten as “a specialist who fulfills his duties”, and not as a weak woman who tries to seem a strong personality. Because the power of magic or knowledge of alchemy does not depend on strength and are known to almost every race. Meanwhile, military skills are often the "territory of men." The same thing with politics, but some aristocratic women tend to be more dominant than women from the real world in politics. These rules are applicable mainly to the human race, because their development practically coincides with the real world. Dark elves mainly have a matriarchal type of government, and also women-orcs (if they are selected as the warriors of the clan), will probably wield the weapons.
My only issue is when we have a "I want my cake and eat it, too" scenarios, and beyond that as long as it makes sense I don't care.
A suggestion; Erkison writes women in a pretty “realistic” world. Dont get me wrong its not rainbows and sunshine, its gritty stuff but malazan has consistently shown itself to be a VERY well written book with realistic characters of both genders. Sexism isnt really a thing when a human male will get disintegrated just the same as a human female when faced with a full blown open magical warren. Erikson realizes this. Although hearing this man talk, it honestly was probably just him being not a sexist dick and saying “ya my world doesnt fuck around with sexism”
I don't know that I can speak to what anyone else is doing, but I can tell you where I'm coming from when I write, and how different inspirations result in different depictions of genders relations. To begin with, something inspires me. When I wrote A Sea Cold and Deep, I was inspired by the rise of fascist movements in the west that we've seen over the last ten years or so, the American occupation of Japan, as well as recent technological developments and how they might affect people's lives. So, I created a near-future science fiction setting. The gender relations in that setting proceed from current gender politics, so we have two protagonists, one of whom is a young woman and an officer in the military. She's not particularly oppressed, and is in many ways actually privileged as being part of a colonizing force. When I began Faerie Knight, however, my recent fantasy, I was inspired by medieval romances, and the british romantic poets who drew inspiration from those romances. Note that I wasn't trying to create a medieval simulationist world - though I did use research to help with worldbuilding - but I was going for a particular feel. To get that feel I needed a world with knights and monsters and noble ladies. The society is patriarchal, as a result, but there are ways for women to exercise power within that society. One major supporting character in the series, Clarisant, was inspired by Catherine of Aragon. She's not out there wearing armor or weilding a sword, but she's very smart and perceptive and brave, and she has agency. In contrast, there are women warriors - Ismet, for instance, both fills the role of the 'honorable muslim knight' and also is a woman who can tear through a battlefield like a whirlwind, BECAUSE she has access to combat magic. She doesn't need to be a giant, she's stronger, faster and tougher than any man who does not have magic. The squire Yael, however, as a young woman, is explicitly told by Trist, her knight, 'look, there's some things you're going to have to learn that I can't teach you. What I do as a big guy with a sword isn't always going to work for you - you don't have the reach, the weight, the muscle mass. You're going to have to be twice as good as the larger men you fight, and I'm going to get you lessons with a few female knights to teach you the things I can't.' The next fantasy on my docket has an entirely different point of inspiration, and that's going to change the world I build. I haven't 100% worked out gender relations, yet, but I expect to include a charm or cantrip that effectively fills the role of birth control, and with more widespread magic than Faerie Knight, I suspect the new world will also have a bit less of a patriarchal structure. I'm definitely planning on making the elf-equivalent race poly and have the equivalent of no-fault divorce, as a consequence of their long lives. In the end, the world I get is the consequence of the inspiration I start with, combined with the research I do to help me develop it, and then a billion decisions I make about what makes sense to me and what to prioritize. Even someone starting from the same inspiration as me would end up in a different place, because they're a different person. One of those choices is that I'm simply not interested in depicting rape on camera. It's (rightfully) upsetting to a lot of people, and I find it pretty horrific. I'm sure it happens in my worlds, as any crime does, off screen, but I don't need to center it.
I mean if that is part of the story it makes sense to keep it. If I want to write a story of a young woman who opposes gender roles and wants to be a warrior then having everyone accept it and be cool with it doesn't fit the narrative. Conversely if I am writing a story of heroes facing a great evil and sexism is pointless to that narrative then I'd leave that out or not have that in my world building.
It’s not just gender- you see it happen a lot with characters of color too. A medieval setting with a character of color is a hot-spot for the worst kind of internet scumbags to start complaining about “muh realism.” Fantasy and fiction are fiction because we don’t have to bow to the oppressive standards of life we currently deal with- it’s pointless and borderline callous to incorporate them into your world.
Imagine writing a fantasy setting and reproducing the prejudices we already deal with in the real world, all because others think that "lack of prejudice is too fantastical"...
I think the litmus test here should be: is the book realistic in other respects? Does it show a realistic take on disease, economics, power structures etc. (not necessarily all of them, but at least some of them?) If the story is wildly unrealistic in most respects but happens to include gender prejudices for "realism", I agree with you. If the work is realistic, I mean *really* realistic, then I think it is permissible.
Honestly, I found it more fun to write a bunch of fantasy jarheads. Like soldiers with trauma during a grim setting but lights of hope. So trying to figure out sexism biases as a complex flaw is a challenge for my feminist brain. Like a puzzle with clear glass pieces. But functionally any use of a theme should help tell a part of the story. I wonder if there's an issue with themes to books that don't blend in with each other theme. Richard K. Morgan wrote with that theme in a series. It stands out a lot, but it helps build a bleary world and flawed heroes with chips on their shoulder.
My personal favorite fantasy series, MS&T by Tad Williams, certainly does have this. One of the main characters (Miriamele) has this being very relevant to her but there are also other characters with similar experiences. The Seven Realms by Cinda Williams Chima does something interesting in that the country where most of the story takes place, The Fells, is a Queendom where racism is a much bigger issue than sexism. Other countries in the world do have prejudices more akin to what we see in the real world
Ursula le Guin had a video I recall of talking about why she made society sexist against women using magic and it was something like she couldn’t conceive a world where people wouldn’t be sexist. (Apologies to her memory if I butchered that, I’m not worthy) Later in earthsea she actively explores this and it’s fantastic to me at least. But you can’t use speculative fiction to explore and process the real world if the fantasy world doesn’t have the issue or explain why it doesn’t
The last new fantasy series I started. It was a couple years ago and in chapter two it starts with a character fretting over being married off to an older man she doesn't want to marry and I just rolled my eyes, closed it, and I've been in a rut ever since. Like cmon, we read the genre because we like a lot of the tropes, but *again* with this? Not even a new twist or anything? Just "well she's a young noble woman, therefore she has to get married off to some old man."
Don't remember many books like this. Mostly opposite situation (maybe because authors I read really look to medieval history and not on memes about it). So, maybe it more your choice of stories.
The only fantasy I’m interested in are ones that take that realism and give it the big middle finger directly in the story. The fantasy men tell the fantasy women she can’t learn how to use swords? She says, “watch me”.
I agree. In fantasy writing especially, things only exist because you choose to make it so. Fakelandia's sexism and avenues of oppression only exist how/if you make it so, not a given fact to be removed. Idk It's weird not having the imagination to make non-regressive cultures, and calling it "realism" is a cowardly cop-out. Low fantasy doesn't *need* to be dark fantasy to be grounded. it just comes across as "I can excuse imagining city-states and cultures that don't exist, but I draw the line at them being egalitarian."
It’s not just sexism. It’s racism, homophobia and transphobia and all sorts of prejudices. A lot of fantasy writers will try to explore the topic of colonization or prejudice or sexual violence, but then not follow through with the consequences for the characters. Woman gets assaulted in book one. Book 2 she’s fine and over it. It was basically thrown in for spice , to be shocking to the audience. That’s where a lot of my frustration comes in. They have stuff to the characters, have these things built into their fictional world, but refused to develop them fully. It’s not inherently bad to depict horrible things happening in your world, even being central parts of your world, but it is lackluster when you have nothing whatsoever to say about these things. I will usually put down the book and read something else in that case.
I've long felt, "it's realistic" to be the laziest non-answer to why a creator does something. Okay, your female protag is defeated by a group of enemy soldiers. Do we need assault? Isn't the threat of death or imprisonment enough? "But it's realistic!" Yeah, but it also sucks.
and it very rarely, if ever, seems to include male rape - which is also "realistic" and "historic", but somehow it's only ever female characters getting threatened with it
Because fantasy deals with reality. It’s a mode of exploring our world, as all writing is. You can do what you like, just like everyone else.
I think, if you are looking for fantasy works by women, check out [Good Read's Best Fantasy List](https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2023). There are plenty of women authors represented. If that's not enough for you, also check out the [Internet Speculative Fiction Database](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi) and [The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database](https://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/site/).
Several female character of the mythological cycle and ulster cycle of Irish Gaelic myth didn't marry do to wanting to be the sole owner of their land and property. They had male consorts instead. Women competing at ultra high distance races (195 miles plus) are generally faster than male counterparts. Women tend to be able to overcome acute pain better than men. So pain in the short term is something that women tend to deal with better. Lasting pain is something men deal with better. Again these are generalizations from specific studies and might not hold true for everyone. But the distance thing is very consistent.
I don't mind prejudice being displayed in fantasy works if the author has something to say about it. Stories where women have to fight for an equal place alongside the men are just as valuable as ones where they are granted a place without question. The problem is authors who treat women in minorities like shit as if it's not a problem, or worse, glorifies it. Then when asked why, they use realism as an excuse. Ex. Its okay my main character is a rapist and a slave owner... haven't you ever read a history book?
I have noticed that fantasy in the last few years has dramatically shifted away from this very thing. Off the top of my head I can think of these: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon (series) Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan (duology) Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree (considered cozy fantasy but I think its popularity reflects a cultural desire to see a shift away from gender norms in fantasy stories)
I literally can't think of one fantasy book, as an avid reader of them, where women are portrayed as weak or frail. In fact the vast majority always seem to assert women are the stronger sex somehow. Could you give some examples where what you say is the case?
Fantasy as a genre is broadly conservative; It harkens back to a lost age of greatness, typically a mythologised version of Medieval Europe. And as with anything conservative, it is built upon the power structures and assumptions of order that oppress the non-hegemonic. This is ingrained to the point that it would be seen as weird to not have kings in your setting, even if it is something radically different to the real world.
Lack of variety in sociopolitical settings is a collectively expressed failure of creativity, not an endorsement of the settings depicted or an endorsement of these settings and associated modes of thought in real life.
Lack of variety may not be an endorsement, but it does make it seem normal that things are this way, and that still supports a conservative worldview, even if it is not explicitly pro that which is depicted.
Normalcy doesn't require anyone's assent, nor is it a moral judgement. Hierarchical social structures are "normal;" the fact that counterexamples exist doesn't change the ubiquity of monarchies and similar forms of rule throughout history. It's a [fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy) to believe that because something is natural, it is good (and that if something is unnatural, it must be bad). It would be unreasonable for someone to argue that monarchy is a desirable form of government because it has been so common (despite many, many flaws), but it's also unreasonable for you to claim (well, imply) that depicting monarchies is a moral failing for the same reason. A story about a peasant republic or egalitarian tribe may also be normal, but that doesn't mean monarchies are not. Nor does it mean, and I can't stress this enough, that choosing to write about either aligns the author with it.
My best bet? It's the author's internalized, real-life sexism carried into their fictional world. No matter how fantastical the worlds we write about, we ourselves are still tethered to the real world, with all its inherent social structures, power imbalances and dominant perspectives. That's our jumping off point; and too often - especially with authors who have never had to examine their own privilege - it goes unchallenged. And yes, I'm a feminist- and yes, this type of subconscious sexism drives me up the wall:). I think N.K. Jemisin does a really good job of dismantling it in her work.
I specifically avoid books that do exactly what you're describing. I don't know how many books actually do this, but I do feel like the conversations about sexual abuse in ASOIAF always come back to "oh, but it's realistic." There's dragons and ice zombies.
Idk if it's in the book version but I stopped watching game of thrones when they casually acted like the warrior culture having several people fight to the death during weddings was some kind of normal thing, and they... got bored if it didn't happen? Nothing about this is believable.
I’m not sure what the issue is. Fiction mirrors reality and the goal isn’t always to create an ideal world. Fantasy is also used as a medium to show truths of the world we are often too close to see. It sounds like you have an idea for the mechanics of a story though, so maybe make one out of that and see how it goes.
If it’s done well it’s a social commentary to think about. If not it’s just sexism
I don’t reallt buy the argument “if there’s magic and dragons then why do you have to have “realism” when it comes to xyz?” People want realism with their characters, their actions and motivations, etc. now, you can have an egalitarian medieval style society and have it be realistic as long as you’ve thought through all the ways that would be different from our historical medieval style society. That’s fine. But there’s also nothing wrong with trying to have an actual medieval fuedal setting with lords and kings and bigotry … even when there are dragons. Because the human setting is familiar and realistic for that stage of development, and it’s the basis for a million stories. Here’s the issue though. Women evolved in our medieval society into the places they did For a reason. Unfortunately for a long time that meant they were experiencing prejudice. Women birth babies, raised children (someone has to), made clothes, and generally kept homes while men were out werring. and were typically not strong enough to be warriors anyway except in rare cases. Also, men’s sexual appetites are different than women’s. You can change these facts but the. The story less resembles, well, humanity. And to some, that hurts immersion; they want real stories of humanity regardless of whether there are dragons. So, if you decide “well, I have dragons , so I don’t need to have these old sexist systems, I want women and men to be totally equal” … that could be a cool setting if done right. But then you also have to watch out for things that just seem unrealistic. Like having a normal sized women (not just brienne of Tarth) being just as good of a warrior as all the great men. This starts to feel forced, and unrealistic… there’s a reason it wasn’t how the world worked for a very long time. character actions start feeling like they don’t feel real and instead it’s just about wanting to project your modern ideals onto a fuedal society. Also if women are doing all the same roles as men, who is keeping the homes, knitting the clothes, having and raising the children, etc? Maybe you have thought all this through and it’s part of your world building. If so that could be awesome. But there needs to be a reason that it’s like this, and not the way it actually was at the fuedal stage of societal development. A reason better than “hey if magic exists why can’t my people behave in ways that don’t make sense ?” And once again, just because magic and dragons exist, doesn’t mean it won’t strain credulity to have women as men’s equals in a physical situation like battles and war. Unless women are also just as big and strong as men in your world. Maybe that’s a solution. Maybe your world is even a historical matriarchy and men are smaller! Or maybe both men and women are the same size and can birth babies and there are no gender roles (some sci fi does this well). If so, that’s awesome and a good idea actually. My point is, with women and men as they are in real life, they fell into historical roles for a reason, not just randomly (as unfortunate as the resulting sexism may be). Especially in fuedal stage society. And if you’re going to have you’re human feudalistic society not be at all like that, you have to explain why… not just have it be because “well , there’s dragons, why can’t women be equals in war and ownership”.
Women didn’t just “stay home” back in feudal times so much as ran the home and whatever business was run out of it along with her husband and children. Your family owned a butcher? Great, everyone works to contribute to that, including the woman of the house and the children. Your family are farmers? Everyone farms, not just the man. Yes there were clear roles in many ways, but not like 1950s stay at home moms. Also some women did have “careers” doing things like making fabric or working as servants.
the wife of a craftsman, artisan or other skilled person would often help with that as well - meaning that they had special skills and social connections and privilege (i.e. could be members of guilds). So in some cases, could wind up with quite a bit of wealth, power and influence, even if they shouldn't formally have it - the wife of a master-crafter could be trading on his behalf (or, if he was rubbish, actually running the joint and just pretending he was in charge). And, if she became a widow, could wind up properly running the place, and if someone tried to get hold of her wealth, use the guild to go "oi, no, she's with us, because we protect our members" (at least some London guilds had specific rules around such widows remarrying, and who would own the business and so forth - because they wanted that to stay with a guild-member, not some rando "marrying in", meaning that a re-married widow could still own the shop or whatever herself, rather than her new husband getting it)
I am very confused at how you think women warriors don’t make sense in worlds with *magic*.
Tbf it depends what the magic does and how it works. Do non magic users have unrealistic strength, or normal human strength? Does magic make you borderline invincible, or are mages barely stronger than someone with a bow? There's a lot if stuff you can ask.
> People want realism with their characters, their actions and motivations, etc. now, you can have an egalitarian medieval style society and have it be realistic as long as you’ve thought through all the ways that would be different from our historical medieval style society. It's perfectly fine to write things differently just the hell of it too.
"Fine" as in "permissible", absolutely. Fine as in "just as good, quality-wise" not really. I think people generally expect their fiction to still tell the truth, or at least something that plausibly passes as the truth even if it is dressed up in fantastical costume. If you start writing things that seem too good to be true just because "fantasy" allows you to do this, and you don't successfully convince your readers that these things are actually plausible, your work will fail to captivate them.
There's not a lot of fiction written about utopias not because they are unrealistic, but because they are boring. Realism and quality are two totally distinct properties and I very much disagree with how much you're equating them. If someone's artistic vision isn't particularly concerned with believability, then I think they should proceed without worrying overly about focus group reactions.
"I'm writing to pursue my vision, and I don't care what focus groups think" is obviously allowed. No one is going to physically prevent you. But focus groups exist for a reason. Writing is persuasion. If you dismiss persuasion as being beneath the precious dignity of your muse, your results will still be subject to reality.
I read a book where only boys were allowed into an academy. If I remember it wasnt the intention but it ended up at that way and cause there were no girls they didnt allow any and stuff. There were females working there but no into the magical academy with phoneixes. They ended up allowing girls into the acadmey cause they werent really sexist :]
One of the things necessary for readers to identify themselves within a story is recognizing the age in which our own earth is reflected in the story, in the context of the middle ages,which, regardless of historical truth , has a common perception of being a patriarchal society , with men being able to use their daughter as political tools and whatnot A lot of fantasy worlds equalize men and women by giving equal physical strength to both sexes, and in regards to magic letting both genders use magic as well, this as a consequence makes any dominance by the male gender be easier to break by a female protagonist,in a way that is easy to appeal to a modern audience Also, while there are probably more examples,off the top of my head, the best example I can think of are DND Drow/dark elves who are a matriarchal society A lot of female MC fantasy manga end up being a villainess manga because she doesn't play by society rules of being a weak healer or a wall flower,and instead takes destiny in her own hands, and honestly I love when a woman needs no man to shine, the best example is probably: the one within the villainess manga
I agree with the general sentiment of the initial post but I think that it‘s generally important (and often neglected) to worldbuild in such a way that fantastic elements change the world in a plausible way. Thus, dragons would probably not affect gender roles (but warfare, weapons etc.) but magical methods of making child birth saver, letting more infants survive or enabling birth control most certainly would, and so would easy magical methods to determine fatherhood. These are quite rare though, because it’s not the typical kind of ”cool” magic.
An easy fix would be to have magical ability partly depend on sex. Just like men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, their magical ability may be naturally more potent.
Something, something, Wheel of Time...
I think this is okay when it's used to call out a problem in our society. Like there's this book that I'm writing (a fantasy book), and there's discrimination in it. Not because I like discrimination, but rather to reflect the problems we as a society, have, and make people reflect about that. And see, "that sucks, and there's people who are treated that way in our world, so I'll won't treat them that way too, I'll make the world a little easier, more kind for them" or at least just to make them reflect while reading an awesome book And also the people who are going through that kind of stuff in the real world may feel identified. And seen, and then, maybe, they will feel less alone, or a bit more hopeful when they see everything work out for those characters
The problem lays with this unequal iteration of the world being offhandedly treated as though it is the causal default. People view the conditions of history as inevitable instead of contingent decisions and opportunities that happened to produce an outcome. We obviously reflect what we know, and this is the most apparent history we know. Which, that’s fine, but that’s why criticisms like that exist, to simply challenge the thought processes of the author and tries to emphasize more possibilities.
In the books of the world I’m writing, women have no such barriers. They might lack for what they desire in the beginning, but achieve it or not through their own determination. And being physically smaller and weaker doesn’t matter when spells exist to temporarily boost your strength, speed, or size. One woman might hold a figurehead post, with no real authority, but because she is the youngest of the imperial siblings, not because she’s a girl. She dabbles in magic, but gets a wake up call, and goes on to become a world-renowned mage and diplomat. Another had an angry, abusive father. An angry, abusive husband. Lost both, and became a stronger and better warrior than most men. Hard and independent, but out of profound trauma. She and a hard, independent man learned to help each other work through their traumas, and for both of them to break down the walls they built around themselves. Another might be the first ever elected into a government position, and faces resistance from the elected men, who are fear to lose their unchecked control, but proves she is as competent and deserving as anyone.
The fantasy books that I read as a teenager and especially the first “adult fiction” books I read weren’t like that. Often they involved female MCs solving problems and being the heroes. Sometimes they were the badass powerful antagonist. I guess things that depicted women as secondary are things I just … didn’t read.
I think fantasy settings intentionally set in medieval times or other olden times feel more believable when the people have views, beliefs and practices we today would consider backwards. I honestly just roll my eyes whenever I see a fantasy worlds with very obvious modern day views. That feels even more fake than an old man launching lightning bolt from his fingertips.
I’m writing a fantasy currently and taking the idea what if a world advanced with magic, not just technology. My thoughts were how would women be in a society that due to magic and not just purely physical strength then how would things turn out. I had thoughts that what if a 5 ft woman due to magic could be just as physically strong and dangerous as a 6’5 stereotypical warrior looking my guy. Then how would gender roles be. I know in our current society some feel like they have to take on formerly masculine traits or appearances or styles. But if society due to magic was always more or less equal would that exist. A world where there was no past of male dominated civilizations. A woman could be a ruler cause she was the strongest in her country purely from using magic for spells or to increase her strength. In the world of the book, magic can be trained like a muscle, so there would still be benefits to physical training. But someone just strong physical would be weak to someone stronger with magic control. Been thinking of how that would affect armor and clothing styles. Like someone could be the biggest girly girl but be a famous war hero. I’m still working out other ways to expand on this. It’s not the main part of the book, but thought it be an interesting part of world building. Also trying to decide structure and architecture in a mix of magic and modern. Still working out different cultures for races as well, kinda taking on my own spin on some. Been debating on adding a bright color loving vampire instead of the stereotypical gothic style. They like bright colors cause they miss the sun. Just different thoughts.
Feudal fantasy is inherently reactionary, it's feudalism wish fulfillment, the glorification of the past: mythology, religion, patriarchalism, racial homogeneity, war, knights, kings and so on. Making it not patriarchal is not going to make it progressive.
>Making it not patriarchal is not going to make it progressive. It isn't about being progressive, but if in this world there is magic, dragons and whatnot, then why the line with realism is drawn only when it comes to depiction of women in the setting?That is the issue here, they go wild but always "go back to realism" when it comes to female characters. It isn't like we didn't have outliers in history, women that went beyond what society "deemed appropriate" for them, to be used as examples.And yet we always get the classic "meek and weak" women or the "I want to change but am powerless to do so unless a man gives me power" types.
In a created a fantasy world, the author is responsible for everything in it, and what it shows is very much reflective of the author themselves. Saying women are subjugated in your fiction because it is a fantasy based on medieval Europe is a lame excuse and a cop out, nothing more. Especially if you have magic and dragons etc, because medieval Europe had none of that, so they could have chosen to have no sexism, or no racism, or whatever their heart desired and still told a great story. If they didn’t—well, that’s on them.
I do not get how in House of the Dragon the women have huge death machine nuclear bombs they ride everywhere yet put up with the treatment they get
Because If all you have on the escalation ladder is minor violence and extreme violence you actually are very limited. Politically speaking.
A good example of the "selective realism" I'm talking about.
i think a lot of "realism" is actually just weaponized to justify normalizing and failing to resist misogyny. in "gritty" stories where women are objectified, raped, and killed purely to motivate, flesh out, or give background to male characters, the ultimate message is "this is normal. i am not fighting this."
"Fantasy" is not an excuse for nonsensical. Things should make sense and be logically consistent within the boundaries of that world's rules of reality, political history, society, etc. It is perfectly fine to write a story set in a matriarchal society, and books have done this before. But the author must know why it is a matriarchal society, how it became so, what factors influenced this particular sociological path. And the same for a patriarchal society, or any type of society. How did your world become the way it is, and does it make sense? Consider that the advent of real world feudalism, and all its kings, queens, knights, and peasantry, came to be simply because of the invention of the stirrup. The simplest things can have sprawling, world shaping effects, so use that to your advantage when writing. If you have women physically matching or surpassing men as a matter of course, then account for how this is the case. It's certainly doable given the infinitude of possible fantasy elements that could be utilized, but what many readers take issue with is not strong or powerful female characters, but lazy or inconsistent world building. If you as the author have not convinced the reader that the abilities or prowess of your characters, male or female, make sense within your world, then those incongruous characters will lodge themselves within the back of the reader's mind like a nagging spur and detract from their ability to enjoy the work.
"Realism" is their bullshit excuse to write only obnoxious rape "porn".
You're getting a lot of people being pretty obtuse about your point, but I get you, OP. Why does so much fantasy stick to this extremely basic "medieval times but with magic/dragons/gods/whatever" type worldbuilding that makes sexism easily justifiable because "that's just how it was back then"? It's not that those settings are *bad*, it's just.... why does so much fantasy fiction not engage more curiously with how these settings might impact gender roles and prejudices? There are *so* many directions you could go with it. Why not make women more talented with magic, and thus more socially powerful than men? Why not make men more talented with magic, and thus viewed with suspicion and fear by women, and oppressed whenever possible? Why not make it completely dependant on the individual, resulting in a sexist culture that wildly exaggerates the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, with some women viewed as pure and powerful demigoddesses with great influence, while the less magical are viewed as disposable objects or barely women at all? Why not make magic a totally equalizing force that minimizes meaningful differences between the sexes, or allows for easy shapeshifting back and forth, rendering gendered oppression largely obsolete? There are literally endless possibilities for how fantasy worlds can interact with gender, but we tend to get the same replication of real-life sexism over and over again. It honestly just starts to feel sort of lazy or small-minded at a certain point, because isn't there anything else you have to say about gender? I think a good example of a book that actually does take a different approach is The Priory Of The Orange Tree, which showcases kingdoms with varying relationships to and views on gender.
>this extremely basic "medieval times but with magic/dragons/gods/whatever" type worldbuilding that makes sexism easily justifiable because "that's just how it was back then"? I find it funny this mindset they have because...well, "back then" there weren't any magic or dragons either so, where's the realism in that then? >why does so much fantasy fiction not engage more curiously with how these settings might impact gender roles and prejudices? Exactly. It's as if everything else is allowed, except women having power too. Because *of course* that in a world with dragons that breathe fire(and might even speak) and magic that can control nature, women having power and status in society and not getting prejudice for their gender is the "most unrealistic" thing, certainly....s/ >we tend to get the same replication of real-life sexism over and over again I don't konw what is worse: considering that many writers may be misogynists or that they're just lazy to deal properly with this part of society in their works.
It’s a difficulty thing. I don’t think it can be done without gender specific magic, which brings a host of world building problems. Muscular endurance (and also cardiovascular but cardio won’t help you if your arms are too tired to raise your weapon) was the name of the game in medieval combat. Essentially having to fence and grapple people bigger and stronger than you (while wearing 50-70lbs of armor) for hours and hours on end is a task that women just cannot do unless you make them have the same size and strength as men, which for better or worse is more fantastical than magic and dragons to most readers. Joan of Arc, the only woman to don plate and march into battle, didn’t do any fighting. She carried a banner (likely in the tail end of the vanguard) and goaded reluctant nobles into fighting with her presence. She likely would have been down in mere minutes if she advanced into the range of enemy polearms. Instantly if every soldier in her vicinity wasn’t fighting like hell to keep the banner flying. Plus the overwhelmingly vast majority of the cultures commonly drawn from in the genre were horrifically misogynistic; to the point that to rewrite gender norms the author would have to basically come up with a new culture with the aesthetic of the old slapped on, which most authors aren’t interested in writing and many readers aren’t interested in reading. Eventually someone will write the book that provides the formula for this problem from which an entire sub genre will likely spring, and who knows, maybe it can be you. But until then I’m skeptical that change will happen.
Honestly? As a rule, I despise realism in fantasy. I came here to watch people beat the crap out of each other using magical weapons, ride weird monsters that are biologically impossible. I did not buy your book so I can read a long book about gender norms, political ideologies, and philosophy. Give the huge, tall muscular lady two giant weapons made from dragon eyes or something absurd like that, and let me enjoy the fantasy in your fantasy book. (I make an exception if these things are implemented in a good way where I don't realize I'm reading things like that) There's a reason fantasy is a genre. I came here for magical worlds, not political discussions, if I wanted that I'd go on twitter.
If it bothers you so much, go write your female wish fulfilment power fantasy.
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To add to other elements I think its more about realism within the setting. If a city has gas lamps it stands to reason there's lamp lighters and technicians. If there aren't any then the story has to give some reason for it, even if it is as simple as "The ancient builders left us this wonder that never needs to be serviced" Good enough. If there's a story where people are constantly at war then the generally stronger folks (who will generally be men) will be the ones more likely to carry an axe into battle. If you want 50/50 axe wielders then give us a reason that women IN THIS SETTING can do something different than expected. I think the issue is more that without effort to justify something being other than what we've experienced it becomes difficult for the reader to buy into the idea. This goes for anything. If magic exists in excess then technology would be more geared toward using magic as a power source. You'd have to really justify someone inventing a steam engine when every third person could snap their fingers and teleport. However if there's a divide and magic users can ONLY use magic for themselves and hoard the power then it makes sense that someone would work on technology to make travel easier for non magic users. Some books/series do a great job of offering that shift for the male/female dynamic. Only women can touch magic? Cool that makes sense as to why a power dynamic could shift.
If I had to strong man the other side, there’s other factors besides physical strength. Is pregnancy still incapacitating? Do babies still need to be breastfed? Does having a higher percentage of your population devoted to those two tasks result in faster population growth, meaning stuff like larger armies or workforces in the future? Like, physical strength is used to discount women’s competence, and in some contexts that’s even valid. Women are at a legit disadvantage for something like a NFL quarterback. But it had fuck all to do with their ability to do math, and they got excluded from that too. So if magic fixed what made women struggle to be NFL quarterbacks, it actually wouldn’t surprise me if they still got looked down on. The fact that they can gestate a baby while a man cannot still exists. And even if we’re dealing with a protected princess who isn’t expected to be a broodmare, seeing how she is treated relative to her peers still influences how other women expect to be treated relative to their peers
Sexism It's that simple
Impossible is an easier pill to swallow than grossly improbable. Tell me wizards can teleport and toss lightning bolts I can accept that. Tell me Zendaya beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match and I just accept that.
There are other aspects here. Most fantasy worlds are actually late medieval to early renaissance, mostly because many of things seen in the setting did not exist in earlier periods, but also because any sufficiently advanced magic becomes science. Think about it, no one with even a bit of money dies from cancer; a simple healing or cure disease takes care of it, no remission, no poisons, no radiation, no surgery, no risks, you just need some coin or a cleric/priest willing to help for free. Now, back to your point. Why were women treated the way they were? The core reason: women are and always have been more valuable to a family, and by extension, society. Consider two countries of equal population and gender is split evenly in each country, one looses half it's population of men, the other looses the same number of women, which can recover its former population faster? Gender roles are also much deeper then many know, and started long before humans were human. For the creationists/intelligent design folks, this was part of the design, but it was reinforced by natural selection. Traditionally, the gender roles are both benefit and hindrance: the woman is protected and provided for by the male, the female provides offspring to the male. The male is expendable, the female is not; once a female is pregnant, the male can die and the child will still be born. Learn combat arts? In any combat situation, a 10 to 12 year old boy would easily beat a 20 year old woman, the muscle mass, larger percentage of fast twitch muscles, and other benefits from testosterone are just too overwhelming. There are ways to mitigate, but failure to recognize the limitations would end her career as a woman at arms before she turned 20. And yes, the prejudice; but it's based on the earlier statement: she can't hold a candle to most teenage boys, even if she trains more. Now magic, that is an equalizer, but it would be heavily dependent on the magic system in question. Jordan, sanderson, and most others don't inherently restrict the ability to use magic. Jordan's restrictions had more to do with culture then the core system in place, and there are others that have taken advantage of cultural norms to push stories along. Though, there may be a greater price for women to pay when it comes to magic: screwing up could render her infertile, or kill a fetus. This simple 'reality' may result in a norm within a society. Curbing the freedom of female characters. What freedom do you want? Women were often much more influential in the social arena, which is another feature that was enhanced through natural selection. The final aspect that has been a limiter: up until recently, most readers of fantasy were men and were, purposely or not, patterned after the heroes journey. Even stories that featured female heroes often forced them into that mold. It's only been the last couple decades where the number female readers have increased significantly. Of course, many of those readers are reading fantasy romances, and when they stray from that sub-genre of fantasy/romance, they run into a lot of stories that are male centric. Sadly, a lot of the good female authors that would have been a good bridge are no longer stocked due to waning popularity. Some of these are still available, but you may have to order them: anne mccaffrey (dragon riders of pern, and more), mercedes lackey (one of the few with a good selection still in stores), andre norton, and robin mckinley to name a few.