This thread on sffworld.com has engendered a very interesting discussion, one that is worth checking out.Here's a teaser:
Male leads dominate literature, movies, television, games, etc. It is possible for a women to ignore all male lead stories but it means missing out on a lot of culture. And in terms of our schooling, etc., we're exposed to a large number of male pov's and male leads as the default by the time we hit our teens. Consequently, women are very comfortable with male leads in stories. But males can easily avoid female lead stories and consequently, many of them are uncomfortable with female leads and female pov's. For boys and teens, reading female lead stories, especially if written by female authors, indicates feminization to other males, which is considered evidence of outcast status and/or homosexual tendencies. Boys get teased for reading for pleasure and they get teased for reading anything deemed too "girly." So you only get the percentage of male teen readers willing to run through that gauntlet.
Feel free to add your two cents!
15 commentaires:
I'm sure there is some truth to that, but my two sons read the Hunger Games series with no issues. They just seemed like good books to them.
I don't think HP would've been such a phenomenon if the lead had been female - or even if J.K Rowling had written those books as Joanne K. Rowling and revealed herself as a female author at the very beginning.
But I think things are getting better. Everybody knows these days that Rowling is in fact a woman. We have also seen female POVs, e.g. in Philip Pullman's Dark Material series and in GRRM's Ice and Fire series. I like to believe that kids and (young?) adults aren't anymore as allergic to girl germs as the previous generations.
I would partially agree with the statement of the post. I do not know whether the povs are kept males to avoid readers being branded feminists or whether it is just because readers are more comfortable with male povs.
However, it should also be noted that many fantasy novels have main characters in settings (e.g. medieval) where having a female pov would not be conformant with the setting. (Is it a coincidence that most fairy tales etc. have either male leads or female leads as damsels in distress?)
A relevant point to be mentioned is that the publishers of Harry Potter decided to use the name "JK Rowling" instead of "Joanne Kathleen Rowling" because it sounded less feminine.
No, I don't think it would actually. The success of Harry Potter came from kids reading it and it would have been much harder to reach the critical mass level if you removed the majority of boys from the readership by making it Harriet Potter.
Effectively it's a saviour story, and those have traditionally been about men. Even in religious terms, Jesus wasn't the expected military saviour and despite being a man, I don't think in fantasy fiction terms his story would have stretched to a seven book series, if you're looking at the 'plot' of the gospels.
I think even today the majority of the world's a long way off viewing women in the same way; those individuals with the necessary strength of character for a saviour plot tend to do it in a quieter way than suits the scaled-up drama of fantasy fiction.
Off-hand I can't think of any saviour-type fantasies that have a woman as the focus of it all, but there must be some. Anyone?
I don't think it would have been near so big with a female lead. I believe lots of men and boys will only pick up a fantasy novel if the author is male though it doesn't matter as much to women. However, once the males know they can trust a female author to be writing something other than a fantasy romance disguised as fantasy they'll be loyal. The recent habit of bookstores of placing fantasy romance in the sci-fi and fantasy section of the bookstores has added to the impression that female fantasy writers create books that are more romance than what they want.
Girls stereotypically like fantasy more than boys. As we have seen, girls have no problems reading Harry Potter as it is with a male character. Would boys like reading about a girl? I don't know.
"Off-hand I can't think of any saviour-type fantasies that have a woman as the focus of it all, but there must be some. Anyone?"
JV Jones's SWORD OF SHADOWS series, arguably Mary Gentle's ASH (though if Ash is a saviour or not is debatable). Maybe A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE if Daenerys does indeed turn out to be the 'Prince' Who Was Promised.
I read The Hunger Games trilogy and was absolutely blown away by it....recommended it to some of my sons but they have yet to read the books. And I'm a 49 y/o father of 4 boys and 1 daughter. Maybe they'll read it soon.
Troy
I disagree that a female author turns boys off. It never once entered my head as a boy to think about the author when I picked fantasies by LeGuin or Cherryh, McKillips or Kurtz. I do think a girl lead can turn off some boys, but certainly not all.
I think it's BS point since half my fave authors are female, most of my fave main characters are female and since childhood I never thought much of either.
It's simply a POV.
Word verification: REGAL that asshat who caused Fitz so much grief...
I agree with the teaser- if HP were a girl, there would have been less male readers, at least for the first books in the series. The numbers of female readers would be the same, or maybe even bigger, but those male readers who are sensitive to teasing or being thought of as readers of 'girly' books, wouldn't have picked up the books, at least not until the more grown-up later ones. And the story would have been more girly anyway, with more girl problems, so probably less appealing to boys too.
But I think it would have made little difference if JKR would have remained Joanne K Rowling. As long as the story was interesting, it wouldn't really matter.
Honor Harrington. Arguably the most popular character in modern science fiction. Female. Totally awesome.
There was something horrible about the actual writing of Hunger Games. It did not flow well for me.
@ Dovile
"And the story would have been more girly anyway, with more girl problems, so probably less appealing to boys too."
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by girly story and such? It's just that I've read some girl/woman POVs and I really see no essential difference...
Not sure how widely it has been read, but Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy features multiple strong female leads (probably more than male leads). Jordan's Wheel of Time series also features several important female POV's.
I concur with tomlloyd's point, though, about a lack of saving-the-world stories that feature a woman as the saviour character, as well as apoorv020's point that it requires some creative thinking to employ heroines in a medieval fantasy setting.
I would add that a third difficulty might be (and I apologize for stereotyping here) that many male authors might find it more challenging to write believable, complex female characters than they would to write male ones.
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