Your comments on The Spirit Ring (which I have not read) remind me of why I kept bouncing off of Uprooted (which I now have read) -- it kept feeling a lot like the Female Protagonist fantasy novels of the 1980s-90s, and not that there's anything wrong with that but it was disorienting to be reading it in a book written in the 2010s. Female protagonist who feels/is not traditionally femme and beautiful enough, clumsy, practical, plain speaking, spending most of her narrative time in a man's world proving that she can excel and forcing the initially-dismissive man to respect her. Do you feel like (genre) literature/media has moved on from that trope to others, where female protagonists are concerned? What are the tropes now?
(I was recently reading a complaint making the rounds on the internet about Strong Female Protagonists and how that buys too much into the patriarchy and stifles other ways of being, and yes, I agree that's a valid and important point...but on the other hand, I'm kind of invested in there being room in the culture -- in real life, and represented in stories -- for the idea that maybe men and women aren't so inherently different after all, and for women who yes, get to act in some or all of the ways that are traditionally coded as masculine.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2020-02-23 05:36 pm (UTC)Your comments on The Spirit Ring (which I have not read) remind me of why I kept bouncing off of Uprooted (which I now have read) -- it kept feeling a lot like the Female Protagonist fantasy novels of the 1980s-90s, and not that there's anything wrong with that but it was disorienting to be reading it in a book written in the 2010s. Female protagonist who feels/is not traditionally femme and beautiful enough, clumsy, practical, plain speaking, spending most of her narrative time in a man's world proving that she can excel and forcing the initially-dismissive man to respect her. Do you feel like (genre) literature/media has moved on from that trope to others, where female protagonists are concerned? What are the tropes now?
(I was recently reading a complaint making the rounds on the internet about Strong Female Protagonists and how that buys too much into the patriarchy and stifles other ways of being, and yes, I agree that's a valid and important point...but on the other hand, I'm kind of invested in there being room in the culture -- in real life, and represented in stories -- for the idea that maybe men and women aren't so inherently different after all, and for women who yes, get to act in some or all of the ways that are traditionally coded as masculine.)