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So Salon.com did article on Phoenix Rising here.
There were two bits in particular that made me think and want to response.
The first quote was this:
I was interested in this common idea that the female characters are cut outs--though basically this author is just having her first experience running into people who don't like her favorite character. Hey, my favorite character gets called a "little cumstain"--I feel your pain. Get used to it.
My feeling on the female characters is that no, they're not cardboard--at least no more than any other character is. JKR writes all her characters basically the same way. I remember someone wonderfully once saying that listen, Snape was cardboard too--he was just very thick cardboard. Rowling seems to generally create characters around a central conflict, and writes them in a way that they can pop off the page right away. (My favorite example of how well she does this will probably always be Amos Diggory in GoF--he gets one scene early on that sets up just how devastated he's going to be hundreds of pages later. I can't read his first scene now without thinking: ouch.)
What I would say about the female characters in general is just that the male characters tend to...drive the story more, somehow, often by being fuck-ups. People have noticed, for instance, how Lily is "better" than James, but that this sort of just leads to Saint Lily saving Harry while James gets to make things happen and be a far more dynamic character even while acting like a dick.
Of the main student girl characters, for instance, Luna is no less developed than Barty Crouch or Neville, but she's a bit self-contained. She's weird, and appears to be comic relief for Harry and get him in the Quibbler. Ginny is one character whose characterization I do have issues with, but leaving that aside as strong a character as she has, she's basically again self-contained and appears to support Harry. Even with her experience with Voldemort in CoS, she doesn't drive things.
Hermione's an even more interesting case. She's a major character, and she's got plenty of issues and drives and flaws and strengths. But still, she's self-contained. For instance, compare her to Sirius. Sirius pulled a stupid Prank on Snape. This Prank is still driving a lot of things in the plot. He and Snape are still bristling at each other, creating tension. Harry himself is affected by this Prank. He circles back to it in OotP and in Snape's Pensieve learns more about the relationship again. It's very personal and still happening.
Hermione, by contrast, is far more efficient but also--I keep using this word self-contained, but I just really mean that if you're looking at the story of the books she's not taking actions that go all over the place, but ones that have limited effects. For instance, while Sirius pulled one bad Prank on Snape with bad results, Hermione has faced a number of female adversaries and taken care of all of them in a way that is so far totally efficient. She and Rita clashed in GoF, and Hermione took care of her--so much that in the next book she controlled Rita to write the article in the Quibbler. So far, at least, her relationship with Rita does not seem to be as messy as Sirius/Snape. Likewise, Hermione hated Umbridge and took care of her with the centaurs (with some luck involved--her planning wasn't so great there). Marietta ratted out the DA and Hermione's curse took effect. These events don't have the same emotional impact as the more dramatic emotional clashes between the Marauders and Snape or Barty and Barty Jr. or whoever.
Also it's Harry who is the one to deal with a lot of these things. Harry is angry to see Umbridge at the funeral, and presumably Hermione still hates her, but it's not making the plot sprawl out or creating ugly emotional fall-out. We've never even heard about Hemrione's reaction to her own hex on Marietta. It's Harry who has a fight with Cho, which partly encourages him to go into the Pensieve, which leads to his learning of Snape's Worst Memory.
So while I do think there is often a troubling dismissal of women in slash fandom, it actually doesn't surprise me that people are more interested in male/male relationships within the story. I remember asking![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jlh once why Sirius/Remus was considered so canon when everyone talked about Sirius/James being best friends, and she said because Sirius/Remus was the relationship with the conflict and the betrayal. I think that perhaps something that draws people to female characters less in terms of stories is that they're just less messy. Their roles in the story often are as helpers to men--which doesn't have to be a bad thing. Ron helps Harry too, and that doesn't make him subservient. (But I think also there's a reason that as much as many people hated the Traitor!Ron trend, Ron's character could support such an ugly personal betrayal in ways I don't think Hermione's does as much.)
I don't hate het. It's just I can see why there's often more to work with with male characters. It's not that there aren't interesting dynamics between any m/f characters. (I love Draco/Pansy, and Pansy is also a character more there for support.) I just wonder if that is more what people mean when they casually say the females are cardboard and the men aren't.
Okay, I was going to go on to the fanfic part next, but maybe it should be two posts. There's tl;dr and then there's wtl;dbf (way too long; died before finishing)
There were two bits in particular that made me think and want to response.
The first quote was this:
At this point, the "prefect" in charge of the room for the night, a writer who calls herself Fyrdrakken and who'd been knitting quietly through the readings and interview, piped up to offer, "Some of the women are cardboard caricatures. A lot of people don't like Hermione at all. She is self-righteous and kind of creepy." Maudlin nodded.
Hermione? A cardboard cutout? The smartest in the class, with the frizzy hair and muggle parents, the responsible girl who maintains friendships with the irresponsible boys, the girl who has the good taste to pine not for our dashing hero but for his red-haired, dunderheaded friend? "A lot of people don't like Hermione at all?" This was heartbreaking.
I was interested in this common idea that the female characters are cut outs--though basically this author is just having her first experience running into people who don't like her favorite character. Hey, my favorite character gets called a "little cumstain"--I feel your pain. Get used to it.
My feeling on the female characters is that no, they're not cardboard--at least no more than any other character is. JKR writes all her characters basically the same way. I remember someone wonderfully once saying that listen, Snape was cardboard too--he was just very thick cardboard. Rowling seems to generally create characters around a central conflict, and writes them in a way that they can pop off the page right away. (My favorite example of how well she does this will probably always be Amos Diggory in GoF--he gets one scene early on that sets up just how devastated he's going to be hundreds of pages later. I can't read his first scene now without thinking: ouch.)
What I would say about the female characters in general is just that the male characters tend to...drive the story more, somehow, often by being fuck-ups. People have noticed, for instance, how Lily is "better" than James, but that this sort of just leads to Saint Lily saving Harry while James gets to make things happen and be a far more dynamic character even while acting like a dick.
Of the main student girl characters, for instance, Luna is no less developed than Barty Crouch or Neville, but she's a bit self-contained. She's weird, and appears to be comic relief for Harry and get him in the Quibbler. Ginny is one character whose characterization I do have issues with, but leaving that aside as strong a character as she has, she's basically again self-contained and appears to support Harry. Even with her experience with Voldemort in CoS, she doesn't drive things.
Hermione's an even more interesting case. She's a major character, and she's got plenty of issues and drives and flaws and strengths. But still, she's self-contained. For instance, compare her to Sirius. Sirius pulled a stupid Prank on Snape. This Prank is still driving a lot of things in the plot. He and Snape are still bristling at each other, creating tension. Harry himself is affected by this Prank. He circles back to it in OotP and in Snape's Pensieve learns more about the relationship again. It's very personal and still happening.
Hermione, by contrast, is far more efficient but also--I keep using this word self-contained, but I just really mean that if you're looking at the story of the books she's not taking actions that go all over the place, but ones that have limited effects. For instance, while Sirius pulled one bad Prank on Snape with bad results, Hermione has faced a number of female adversaries and taken care of all of them in a way that is so far totally efficient. She and Rita clashed in GoF, and Hermione took care of her--so much that in the next book she controlled Rita to write the article in the Quibbler. So far, at least, her relationship with Rita does not seem to be as messy as Sirius/Snape. Likewise, Hermione hated Umbridge and took care of her with the centaurs (with some luck involved--her planning wasn't so great there). Marietta ratted out the DA and Hermione's curse took effect. These events don't have the same emotional impact as the more dramatic emotional clashes between the Marauders and Snape or Barty and Barty Jr. or whoever.
Also it's Harry who is the one to deal with a lot of these things. Harry is angry to see Umbridge at the funeral, and presumably Hermione still hates her, but it's not making the plot sprawl out or creating ugly emotional fall-out. We've never even heard about Hemrione's reaction to her own hex on Marietta. It's Harry who has a fight with Cho, which partly encourages him to go into the Pensieve, which leads to his learning of Snape's Worst Memory.
So while I do think there is often a troubling dismissal of women in slash fandom, it actually doesn't surprise me that people are more interested in male/male relationships within the story. I remember asking
jlh once why Sirius/Remus was considered so canon when everyone talked about Sirius/James being best friends, and she said because Sirius/Remus was the relationship with the conflict and the betrayal. I think that perhaps something that draws people to female characters less in terms of stories is that they're just less messy. Their roles in the story often are as helpers to men--which doesn't have to be a bad thing. Ron helps Harry too, and that doesn't make him subservient. (But I think also there's a reason that as much as many people hated the Traitor!Ron trend, Ron's character could support such an ugly personal betrayal in ways I don't think Hermione's does as much.)I don't hate het. It's just I can see why there's often more to work with with male characters. It's not that there aren't interesting dynamics between any m/f characters. (I love Draco/Pansy, and Pansy is also a character more there for support.) I just wonder if that is more what people mean when they casually say the females are cardboard and the men aren't.
Okay, I was going to go on to the fanfic part next, but maybe it should be two posts. There's tl;dr and then there's wtl;dbf (way too long; died before finishing)
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From:
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Anyway, I like what you're saying about the girls, but I think there's also a sort of reverse thing that goes on, that people who are interested in female characters might not read HP in the first place (I know that Hermione really pulled me through that first book) and I think that the real dead spot in the book isn't so much the girl kids but Lily's friends. As you say, it is James's actions that really drive events, and Lily only ever seems to be reacting, rather than acting. Which can also be said of Ginny, unfortuantely. But I really wish we had a bunch of women running around talking about Lily.
From:
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It just doesn't compare to the type of thing we get with the Marauders. Lily, like Ginny--and even like Hermione to an extent--does not exist with that kind of social bond with other women. Hermione has it with Harry and Ron, which is important, but Ginny just sort of has references to "friends" to prove she's popular with none of the importance on the individual.
That reminds me--somebody recently told me a friend of theirs believed that the guys on Entourage were all "aspecs of one guy." Which I think is silly, but what he really meant was that they fell into that familiar 4-guy pattern that seem to make up a balanced whole. I don't think women's relationships are thought to break down quite the same way, but still James' friendships form an actual family everyone rightly acknowledges, which makes Lily almost become the Wendy-character to their Lost Boys.