Thoughts on Women in Fantasy

Recently I have been reading a long, not particularly well written Fantasy novel called The Baker's Boy. It's utterly generic fantasy fare, with an eeeevil sorcerer, and a disgraced knight, and an unlikely hero, and of course a spunky noblewoman who certainly doesn't want to be forced into an arranged marriage.

It's this spunky young noblewoman that disturbs me the most. Because she seems to exist solely to get molested, whipped, beaten, forced into prostitution, nearly raped, and generally have a rotten time of it. Now it's the easiest thing in the world to accuse a Fantasy writer of mysoginy, and normally I wouldn't even bother, but it's got me thinking.

The Baker's Boy, like the vast majority of the Fantasy genre is set in a world that looks almost but not quite like medieval Europe. Because it's (I suppose) "low" fantasy rather than "high" fantasy[1] the world is quite dark[2]. As a result, part of me says "give the guy a break, this is a medieval society, and being a woman in a medieval society sucked."

Then I realised two things.

Firstly, if you're going to write a book set in a society where being a woman sucks, for pity's sake don't have a spunky princess as one of your main characters. Because all she can do is fail at stuff, and that's not particularly compelling reading (at least, not unless you're George R.R. Martin).

But... you know... I can ignore this point. It's the second thing that really got me thinking.

Yes, women in the middle ages had no rights, no power, and basically no chance. But neither did anybody else. If you didn't have either a title or a sword, you were basically screwed. What bothers me about The Baker's Boy, and a lot of other things like it, is that it's only women whosuffer as a result of this "historical realism."

To take an example from the book in question, fairly early on Jack (the Baker's Boy who - guess what - has unexplained and uncontrollable mystical powers) and Melliandra (the spunky princess) run away into the woods, where they get accosted by mercenaries working for Baralis, the eeeeeevil sorcerer.

Melliandra is caught, beaten, nearly raped, escapes at the last minute because the mercenaries are interrupted by another group of armed men, runs away to a nearby village, gets tricked into being a prostitute, is nearly raped again, gets convicted for assault and theft, is pelted with rotten vegetables in a dark pit, then gets stripped, whipped, saved from whipping by being captured again by the same mercenaries who nearly raped her the first time. This time they are under strict orders not to nearly rape her, so they instead just leave her to die.

Jack meanwhile escapes from the Mercenaries unharmed. Then he wanders around the woods, gets lost, passes out under a tree, and gets rescued by a kindly druid. The kindly druid treats him really really well for no good reason, and tells him that he is all important and special and that he should go and have adventures. Then he leaves the kindly druid and runs around being happy and carefree. He is eventually captured by the same Mercenaries that have taken Melliandra, they do not hurt him in any way, and indeed admire his spirit. At no point is he nearly raped by anybody.

Now maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's a double standard here. The Spunky Princess gets whores, whips and historically accurate rape gangs, while the Unlikely Hero gets a pep talk from a mysterious old man. Maybe I'm wrong about the guy, maybe JV Jones has no issues whatsoever, and in no way gets off of having his heroine tied up and whipped (hell he might even be a woman, I haven't checked what "JV" actually stands for), I'd be more inclined to believe that if it wasn't for one thing: the repeated near rapes.

If you are a conscientious writer, who genuinely admires and respects women, and sincerely wants to write a scathing portrayal of the disempowerment of womankind throughout the centuries, then you might well have your heroine raped. What I don't think you would do is have her almost raped, so that you can write enthusiastic descriptions about rough hands and young breasts, and then ... for want of a better term ... pull out at the last minute so as to avoid having to actually deal with any of the consequences. It's that which I think I find most distasteful, the idea that sexual assault, so long as there is no actual penetration, is basically just a standard bit of high adventure, like hanging onto a broken rope bridge or fighting a two headed lizard.

Sometimes I wonder why I still read this genre.


[1] For the uninitiated, the difference between "low" and "high" fantasy is that low fantasy contains far more mud.

[2] "Dark" in this case meaning "people talk about sex, and there's mud"

Insert "Allegory" Pun Here

Something interesting has occurred to me.

Contrary to popular belief, the Chronicles of Narnia are not technically "allegories". Aslan doesn't "represent" Jesus, rather he literally is the Son of God. However, if you wanted to build an allegory out of Aslan's death and resurrection on the Stone Table, you could probably do it. Aslan is Jesus, Edmund is Man, and so on.

However it occurs to me that actually, a slightly better "allegory" casts Aslan not as Jesus, but as God. In this interpretation, Edmund is you, the reader, personally. The role of Jesus in this interpretation of events is filled by Narnia itself. When Aslan dies, he takes the last hope of beating the Witch with him, so essentially he sacrifices the whole of Narnia for Edmund.

But that's not what really interested me.

What really interested me was the fact that although the books aren't, technically speaking, allegory, the movie actually is. Aslan in the film isn't particularly significant in and of himself. He is essentially representative of wider themes - Love, Sacrifice, and all that jazz. Indeed, when the Witch kills Aslan on the stone table, she actually says "so much for love". It's almost as if the film-makers knew Aslan had to be important, but couldn't stomach the idea of his being personally more important than the Pevensies, so they made a clumsy attempt to have him represent the cosy secular virtues that formed the moral centre of the film. So Movie Aslan, the embodiment of Cosy Family Niceness, sacrifices himself not for Edmund, but for Narnia - saving the fourth of the Prophesied Kings, in order that his "Family" can have their protectors.

... the Witch and the Wardrobe

I have not updated this log in some time, and naturally the thing that has shaken me out of my doldrums is a desire to rant about something.

I've just come back from seeing the new film: The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe. It's a pretty good adventure movie, and of course it makes a certain number of concessions to the cinematic medium - there's a lot more action in the film than in the book, and that's no bad thing. After all the Pevensies hiking across the snow for two hours wouldn't be a terribly entertaining film.

One of the major decisions the directors and producers made was to downplay the Christian elements of the stories. This seems a rather strange choice, since most films are positively falling over themselves to include Christian and messianic imagery since the runaway success of the Matrix.

Of course taking the Christian symbolism out of Narnia would seem to be impossible. Aslan is ritually sacrificed and then reborn, bringing with him conquest over death and salvation for Narnia. The only way one could possibly take the Christian symbolism out of Narnia is by removing Aslan from it.

Which is, in fact, precisely what the film does.

Oh he's in the film, of course. There is a lion by the name of Aslan who is, apparently, extremely important. But he's not got any real presence. This is partly down to Liam Neeson's voice, which is alright, but lacking the sheer impact that the Great Lion should have. It is mostly down to the fact that the writers scrupulously removed anything that might imply that Aslan, in and of himself, is important.

When Aslan is first mentioned in the Film, the Pevensies are told "Aslan is at the Stone Table, where he has gathered an army for you." And that's more or less it. He isn't God, or the Word or the Son of God. He's just the guy that has the Army that the Pevensies need to fight the Witch and rescue Edmund.

It goes on in this vein. The power of the Witch does not weaken because "Aslan is on the move", it weakens because (according to Father Christmas) of "the hope which [the Pevensies] have brought to Narnia." It is Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy who are destined to overthrow the White Witch, the big old lion is just there to give them some pointers.

This, of course, changes the character of Aslan's death on the Stone Table completely. In the BBC adaptation, the impression given is that if Aslan dies, Narnia loses its last hope - victory is handed to the witch. It's actually that as much as the sacrifice of his life, which gives the event its impact. Aslan not only lays down his own life, but with it the very hope of Narnia, all for one little boy. In the film, Aslan isn't important, and by sacrificing himself he essentially protects one of the Four Mystical Kings - it becomes in fact a sensible utilitarian decision. Aslan dies, Edmund is saved, and Peter has to learn to Trust In Himself.

Essentially, Aslan winds up turning into Obi Wan Kenobi. He provides the heroes with their weapons (or, in this case, their army), spouts some vanilla waffle about being true to yourself and looking after your family, and then gets killed at an appropriate juncture.

Post In Which I May Be Casually Rude About Roleplayers

[Post may contain spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire]

Worst. Review. Evar.

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9661.phtml

Well, actually, it isn't. It's more than two lines long, and has proper spelling, but it completely misses the damned point. And utterly contradicts its self.

For those who can't be bothered to read it, the review basically goes "Game of Thrones is a rubbish book. It's really cliche, and it doesn't make sense. There's characters in it are supposed to be evil, but if you think about it using critical thinking that I learned from David Brin at his website, their actions are actually justifiable from their point of view. How stupid is that? And the Good King, he's not even a particularly good king!"

The cliches he points out are:

1) Barbarians.
2) A Lord from the north, out of his depth amongst politically savvy southerners.
3) Zombies.

Point one doesn't even bear answering. It's medieval fantasy, you might as well say it's cliche because it's got knights and kings.

Point two similarly. "A stranger comes to town? That's so cliche"

Point three particularly bothers me, because it always makes me furious when roleplayers assume that everything works like D&D. The Others in A Song of Ice and Fire are not zombies. And before anybody says anything about walking like ducks (a) there are such things as geese and (b) "duck" isn't an overused bit of terminology, that has been propogated through second rate fiction and third rate RPGs, to the extent that it has rendered a really fucking scary idea completely risible.

The Others are a damned good stab at making "the undead" (another sodding awful piece of terminology) cool again. They're sinister, and they do bad shit with corpses. Unfortunately somewhere deep in the brain of the geek the auto-categoriser immediately says "walking corpse = zombie = 1HD monster/brain-eating plague victim," robbing the image of any power whatsoever.

What annoys me the most, however, is the guy's obsession with "critical thinking."

There are some people who Pride Themselves On Their Critical Thinking. These sorts of people will routinely dismiss any book that doesn't have a drug addict in it as "morally simplistic." (Brin's article on LotR is awful - he seems to think it is somehow controversial to say "in Tolkein's world, there is an objective standard of good and evil, but real life isn't like that"). It's a common geek fallacy - the idea that once you have identified a Fact, that any conclusion you draw from that Fact must be the result of sound critical analysis, because it is based on Facts. The reviewer observes that there are elements in ASoIaF which have appeared in other sources, and so it becomes "cliche" - and this conclusion is the result of critical thinking.

Another thing that depresses me is that he does have some good points, sarcastically delievered as they are. Martin's characterisations can sometimes be unsubtle - Circe isn't just a bit dubious, she's an incestuous, adulterous, baby-killing, altar-shagging bitch. Jaime Lannister's first on-screen action is to throw a small child out of a window, and when his reasons for betraying the old king are revealed, it's not that he was insane and the Kingdom was better off without him, but that he was completely screamingly insane and going to blow up the entire freaking city. The moral complexity of the story is sometimes undermined by such easy options. "Would you kill the man who you were sworn to protect, if he descended into madness" is a morally difficult question, "would you kill the man who you were sworn to protect, if you knew for a fact it was the only way to stop him blowing up hundreds of thousands of innocent people" isn't particularly.

It occurs to me, that this leads neatly back to the subject of the Met and their Shoot-to-Kill policy, but I'll leave that one alone for now.

Dungeons and Stations

Recently, on some masochistic impulse, I read Raymond E Feist's seminal work, Magician. It was a whole load of sub-D&D tat, but it didn't really pretend to be anything else. And of course, I use the term "sub D&D" advisedly - Feist is famously a ex-roleplayer, and the influences in his work are obvious.

More recently, I have been reading Perdido Street Station. Its author, China Mieville, is another famous ex-roleplayer. The book is about four hundred and twelve times better than Magician, and it certainly doesn't fall back on the elves-n-dwarves cliches of Feist. On the other hand, I've heard terms like "genius" thrown about, and I don't think they're particularly applicable either.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think Perdido Street Station is a brilliant book, it presents a weird world with compelling characters and an only-slightly-cliched plot. It's a bit overlong of course, but this is fantasy, brevity went out of style in the fifties and never came back. But it still all feels far more familiar than it should.

It's true that the nonhuman races are khepri and vodyanoi, instead of elves and orcs, but they're still ultimately just hyphen-people (insect-people, frog-people, cactus-people, bird-people). It's not quite as overdone as Orcs and Elves, but neither is it quite the startling breath of fresh air that it seems to be being billed as. New Crozubon is a far cry from the pseudo-europe of most fantasy worlds, but it's closer than it seems at first. Things like "bio-thaumaturges" and "the Torque" are really just wizards and wild magic, just like you'd see anywhere.

Mieville has a boundless imagination, within certain boundaries. The spectacle of New Crozubon is genuinely amazing, and the Gormenghastian grotesquery really does take your breath away for a while. After the first three hundred pages, however, it begins to get a little wearing. Yes, the Remade are cool, but when you're having dog-legged whores thrust their pudendas in my face, you're trying a little bit too hard.

Indeed there's a sense in which New Crozubon, even more than Feist's world of Crydee, feels like a D&D setting. Indeed it even has "adventurers" (although these are almost certainly a throwaway gag on Mieville's part, they're described as "glorfied tomb robbers" who will do "anything for gold and experience."). It has a multitude of playable races, various sorts of magic (all of which seem to boil down to doing incantations and making gestures, just like every other spellcaster you've seen), a large variety of weapons in use at once (machetes, rapiers, longbows and flintlocks all crop up in the book, as do the obligatory exotic weapons, like the Khepri stingbox, and the Cacati reive-bow).

I absolutely don't mean to disparage Mieville's achievement. It's a great book, and the setting really is unlike anything you've ever seen. The closer you look, however, the more familiar it all starts to seem.

Ten Minutes Hate

The number of hate crimes against Muslims is up 600% following the bombings.

Personally, I'm waiting for Ken Livingstone to announce that these people who are being assaulted, insulted, and having their property destroyed are "more innocent victims of the terrorists."

Our anti-terror measures are costing 500,000 a day. I'm also waiting for people to start saying this is too much money. We'll surrender all the civil liberties you want, but perish the thought that we might actually have to pay taxes.

Still Harping on about Menezes

Joseph Stalin observed that "one death is a tragedy, one thousand deaths is a statistic." Even he, however, failed to realise that this relationship could be extrapolated in both directions. Recent events, however, have demonstrated that many people consider "no deaths at all" to be an insurmountable catastrophe.

Nobody died as a result of Jean Charles de Menezes' actions. He wasn't a terrorist, and he didn't have a bomb. This means that we are free to speculate all we like about the amount of damage he could have done if he had been a terrorist. The Brazilian electrician has - in the minds of the public - become the most deadly potential killer there ever was. He could have had a bomb, he could have killed hundreds of people (of course, I'm not sure how many people actually would have been on the tube at Stokenchurh at that time on a Friday).

Since the real damage was nil, the potential damage was therefore unlimited, and therefore any measures taken to prevent such horrific potential damage are justified.

Isn't It Illegal Already

Government is talking about "strong new anti terror legislation." One of the more common responses to this (although depressingly less common than "good idea, and deport all the arabs while you're at it") is "hang on - surely things like 'conspiracy to commit murder,' 'possession of explosives' and the like are all illegal anyway - why do you need new legislation?"

Of course the answer is that new legislation would create new crimes, for which the normal complications that stand in the way of justice - evidence, trials, that sort of thing - are conveniently dispensed with. A lot of people seem to be fully behind this, and I'm doing my best to understand why.

A few months ago, I was arguing with somebody online, and I found myself having to use the phrase "but the fact is, some accusaitions of rape are false." Typing it, I felt rather like a mysoginistic bastard. I couldn't shake the feeling that, somewhere out there, there was a poor traumatised woman who I was indirectly calling a liar. Actually, of course, I was just making a totally non-controversial statement about crime. If somebody is accused of a crime, they might still be innocent of it. This is, after all, why we have trials. However there is some part of me that, when somebody is found not guilty of rape immediatley thinks "the bastard got away with it" instead of "oh good, British justice has once again freed an innocent man, that he can go about his life with narry a stain on his character." Essentially, there is some part of my psyche that considers rape to be so unspeakably bad that failure to secure a conviction will always qualify as an injustice, despite the real possibility that the accused was innocent.

It strikes me that this is much the attitude that many people have towards terrorism.

Essentially, it's a basic human reaction: the more serious the crime, the less likely we are to give a suspect the benefit of the doubt. I suspect that this is because, with serious crimes, it is the crime its self that occupies the mind, and the suspect is merely an adjunct to that. If you only know of somebody as "suspected terrorist" then it's hard to think of them as innocent - their entire identity is defined by the crime of which they are accused. If they're not guilty, then what are they for?

This is a perfectly understandable way for people, who are after all finite, emotional beings, to react to serious crimes and stressful situations. When it starts to become enshrined in law, it starts to become worrying. The idea that we should make "being a suspected terrorist" a crime in and of its self is a deeply sinister one.