Meta -- Female Characters; Male Writers
May. 6th, 2005 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflyIn two of the shows that I actually bother to watch regularly these days, the female characters are not well-written (and while this bugs the hell out of me, the guys are written interestingly enough that I don't want to give up on the shows in question). And I think that a lot of the bad female writing comes not from having male writers, per se, but from having male writers who love their female characters too shallowly.
Because the problem is not in loving your characters -- I can't write a character that I don't adore. And if I do write a character that I don't like? I'll love them while I'm writing the story. When I'm writing (and I always write from a character's pov, never omniscient), I'm in the character's head. And that means that I absolutely must explain their actions to myself, in a way that makes sense and is sympathetic. Because, as Tom Ripley once said, "It all makes sense, in your head. Nobody thinks that they're a bad person." Even people who assume the worst of themselves don't make themselves villains, they make themselves victims.
But that love comes from living inside that character's head. This is the kind of love that makes Joss Whedon remark on a dvd commentary that the moment he loves Buffy the most is when she's shooting that rocket launcher at the Judge in Innocence. This is not at all the same as the love that inspires the writers of Lana Lang on Smallville or Sam on Stargate SG-1.
Infatuation is dangerously easy to confuse with love -- you see it all the time in fiction (and in real life, but we aren't talking about that). Lust is easier to recognise, being body-based. When someone is drooling over a beauty, it's a simple matter to figure out that they're feeling lust, not love.
Infatuation, though, is harder to tell from love. Similar to lust, it can strike at first sight, but because it's not always about the physical, it's easy to think that it's an overpowering bolt from the blue, a sign from the divine that you've found your one true love (in fact, I'd actually put lust down as a subset under infatuation if it weren't such a huge part of it all).
Lust blinds the afflicted to all but the most base qualities of the admired. Infatuation can appear to be focused on a healthier and more lasting bond.
If I were speaking of characters, I would go on to talk about how to turn lust or infatuation into love, but right now, I'm talking about writers and that is a whole different ball game.
Because in real life, relationships either falter after the initial flush of attraction or they grow into something more. But with writers, there's a new element -- they are the ones in control of their object of affection. Because of this, there's no reason for the writers to move beyond the state of infatuation. There's no reason to change their beloved out of the mold that they adore them in.
Sam cannot change, because if she did, she would no longer be the Sam that the writers adore. Lana can't grow, because to make her a real girl would mean giving her real faults and that would push her off that pedestal.
And so, with House, I'm wondering just how self-aware the writers are. Because this is something that I do, truly, admire about Joss Whedon -- his tremendous awareness of women as people and not objects. Buffy was a real woman, with faults and virtues and contradiction. Willow, for all that I don't like her that much, also rings very real to me. And Joss is, of course, smart enough to realise that having strong female writers helps you write strong female characters.
But I love Joss' writing style over all -- his pattern is to take a stereotype and slowly break it down to reveal a real person behind it.
Because there's another key element, too -- for all their love of Lana, I don't get the feeling that the Smallville writers care all that much for women in general. And if you don't care for an entire subset of people while taking a couple of individuals from that subset and raising them up on a pedestal, you end up with a couple of 'too perfect' characters and a whole bunch of extremely ignored ones.
And Joss likes people, very much including women. He likes people in the same way that I like people, which is quite possibly another reason that I always end up adoring his work so much -- we share a very similar worldview.
People are fascinating, so much so that even when I don't like someone, I find them interesting. I truly believe that there is no such thing as a dull person (dull characters? yes. people? no.). Even someone who lives a dull life is a whole world entire, with unseen currents and hidden waterfalls. We live in a world that is both enormous and tiny, partly so because there are billions upon billions of separate lives, bumping together and drifting apart again, captive universes huddled inside a small town or racing down narrow streets.
People do not exist for us to interact with -- that is the cardinal sin that bad writers make, creating characters that only exist to impact the main character. All characters should impact the main character(s), but each one is unique, never to be seen again. Each traveling down its own road, crossing the main character's path, but they are separate roads, not stops along the way.
There are many writers who are otherwise good but who can't write women. Their men are complex, but their women are so simple by comparison. And it's because they cannot make the connection that women are people. They separate women out, make them special.
This is the question playing out on House right now -- do the writers view women as people?
We'll see.
Because the problem is not in loving your characters -- I can't write a character that I don't adore. And if I do write a character that I don't like? I'll love them while I'm writing the story. When I'm writing (and I always write from a character's pov, never omniscient), I'm in the character's head. And that means that I absolutely must explain their actions to myself, in a way that makes sense and is sympathetic. Because, as Tom Ripley once said, "It all makes sense, in your head. Nobody thinks that they're a bad person." Even people who assume the worst of themselves don't make themselves villains, they make themselves victims.
But that love comes from living inside that character's head. This is the kind of love that makes Joss Whedon remark on a dvd commentary that the moment he loves Buffy the most is when she's shooting that rocket launcher at the Judge in Innocence. This is not at all the same as the love that inspires the writers of Lana Lang on Smallville or Sam on Stargate SG-1.
Infatuation is dangerously easy to confuse with love -- you see it all the time in fiction (and in real life, but we aren't talking about that). Lust is easier to recognise, being body-based. When someone is drooling over a beauty, it's a simple matter to figure out that they're feeling lust, not love.
Infatuation, though, is harder to tell from love. Similar to lust, it can strike at first sight, but because it's not always about the physical, it's easy to think that it's an overpowering bolt from the blue, a sign from the divine that you've found your one true love (in fact, I'd actually put lust down as a subset under infatuation if it weren't such a huge part of it all).
Lust blinds the afflicted to all but the most base qualities of the admired. Infatuation can appear to be focused on a healthier and more lasting bond.
If I were speaking of characters, I would go on to talk about how to turn lust or infatuation into love, but right now, I'm talking about writers and that is a whole different ball game.
Because in real life, relationships either falter after the initial flush of attraction or they grow into something more. But with writers, there's a new element -- they are the ones in control of their object of affection. Because of this, there's no reason for the writers to move beyond the state of infatuation. There's no reason to change their beloved out of the mold that they adore them in.
Sam cannot change, because if she did, she would no longer be the Sam that the writers adore. Lana can't grow, because to make her a real girl would mean giving her real faults and that would push her off that pedestal.
And so, with House, I'm wondering just how self-aware the writers are. Because this is something that I do, truly, admire about Joss Whedon -- his tremendous awareness of women as people and not objects. Buffy was a real woman, with faults and virtues and contradiction. Willow, for all that I don't like her that much, also rings very real to me. And Joss is, of course, smart enough to realise that having strong female writers helps you write strong female characters.
But I love Joss' writing style over all -- his pattern is to take a stereotype and slowly break it down to reveal a real person behind it.
Because there's another key element, too -- for all their love of Lana, I don't get the feeling that the Smallville writers care all that much for women in general. And if you don't care for an entire subset of people while taking a couple of individuals from that subset and raising them up on a pedestal, you end up with a couple of 'too perfect' characters and a whole bunch of extremely ignored ones.
And Joss likes people, very much including women. He likes people in the same way that I like people, which is quite possibly another reason that I always end up adoring his work so much -- we share a very similar worldview.
People are fascinating, so much so that even when I don't like someone, I find them interesting. I truly believe that there is no such thing as a dull person (dull characters? yes. people? no.). Even someone who lives a dull life is a whole world entire, with unseen currents and hidden waterfalls. We live in a world that is both enormous and tiny, partly so because there are billions upon billions of separate lives, bumping together and drifting apart again, captive universes huddled inside a small town or racing down narrow streets.
People do not exist for us to interact with -- that is the cardinal sin that bad writers make, creating characters that only exist to impact the main character. All characters should impact the main character(s), but each one is unique, never to be seen again. Each traveling down its own road, crossing the main character's path, but they are separate roads, not stops along the way.
There are many writers who are otherwise good but who can't write women. Their men are complex, but their women are so simple by comparison. And it's because they cannot make the connection that women are people. They separate women out, make them special.
This is the question playing out on House right now -- do the writers view women as people?
We'll see.
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Date: 2005-05-11 05:45 am (UTC)Me, too (neither?). I wonder if back in the days when WoT was supposed to be eight books, he knew that someday he'd have to show events from so many points of view.
My theory, fwiw, is that while Rand's trying to create his "Hundred Companions" with the Asha'man, the actual "Hundred Companions" are going to be the supporting characters we've seen all along -- Mat, Perrin, Egwene, Nynaeve, . . . . That's why it's taking so long to tell the story; he has to get everyone to do what they have to do before they all have a date with destiny at Shayol Ghul.
Of course, I also think that "the blood of the Dragon" refers not to Rand's physical blood, but his family (Elayne, the twins, Galad, etc.), so what do I know? 8-)