I have long talks with my husband wherein I wrestle with the decisions my heroines make, how they think and act and approach their various relationships in life.
I don’t do this with my heroes.
My male characters are fairly straightforward to write. They’re complex, and while many still polarize people, I feel like they’re forgiven fairly easily. Ylir, my God…Ylir sells a potential love interest as a concubine, for God’s sake…yet still remains one of my most popular characters. No, he’s not all evil, people are rooting for him to find his humanity and so on, but…
Why do I feel like this is harder with female characters? Even when I don’t write them out as anti-heroes from the very beginning?
I don’t know. I was a little worried in the beginning what the reception will be towards Sume, who is quiet and unassuming, whose strength relies in how much she has endured before The Agartes Epilogues began…and then later endures as the series goes on. She’s learned to be tough, to put up a brave face. I’ve since found out that this actually endears her to people.
Talyien? Not so much. The proud, warlord’s daughter carries a smug arrogance that came from the way she was raised (by a man who dared go up against the status quo in the first place). When she starts messing up, the whole queen’s facade suddenly works against her…questions are raised about her decisions, her competence, and so on, even when she reaches a point where she is clearly just reacting to a situation that’s already fucked up beyond compare. (It’s fairly exhausting to write from her POV, too, which is partly why I’m taking a break right now.)
The contrast to both reactions is startling to me. It’s startling to me because they’re very similar characters in a way, they just come from different backgrounds.
And since I’m given to overthinking about these things, I talked and talked about it (to anyone who would care to listen, and then to my daugher’s cat when they all got tired…) and came to the conclusion that this may very well be because Sume, in contrast to Talyien, is non-offensive. She’s just as strong and stubborn, she’s just smart enough to be quiet about it.
Which is, you know, worrying on so many different levels.
And you know, this is an issue I don’t think I can really address in one blog post, even if I can try to summarize and hone down the stuff going on in my mind. But there’s gotta be a reason why, when my husband asked me why I’m a lot harder on my daughter than I am towards my son, I found myself scrambling to explain that it’s because being a woman is tough. That was one of the scariest parts about finding out I was having a daughter all those years ago.
I mean, on a certain level, it’s not even that I set out to write about women’s issues or anything like that. I’m just writing about women in an epic fantasy setting, doing their thing, just like the men. People, guys. Characters. But God, this is way more complicated than I ever imagined…
