Personally, I figure if I’m already writing a fantasy (or scifi) setting then realism goes out the window and I can have as many female warriors, rulers, (or whatever) as I want.
Unless there is a fantasy society within the story that I’ve mentioned to be predominately patriarchal I just ignore gender in terms of status and/or roles. Doesn’t mean there won’t still be such types around though.
I usually ignore color lines as well since racism often takes on a different form in a fantasy or scifi setting. While racism usually does come into play, it usually isn’t based on skin color. It’s human vs. orc or alien or whatever, etc. Nobody cares what color you are when there’s so many annoying elves running around to hate instead.
I find this thread has a lot in common with my own thread, “gaming, story, realism”. Personally, I have a strong tendacy toward realism because unrealistic scenarios take a lot from the experience. What I want to say, though, is that the choice really only depend on you, the writer. If unrealistic scenarios or settings really bother you, then writing such scenarios will take away from your quality of work because you yourself will be less interested in your work. And I always say, if you don’t enjoy your own work, how can you expect others to enjoy it?
I think there’s a common misconception which arises in discussions like this: That realism means corresponds to reality, i.e. is true of our world. If you’ve borrowed something from our world, then yes realism does mean that - but generally in writing, realism simply means creating a coherent environment. This holds true for fantasy writing as much as any other. If your environment is not logically consistent, it’s not realistic; your environment can have beaches where swimming is prohibited due to reported sightings of Charybdis, but so long as that’s consistent with everything else you write then it’s a realistic approach.
@Chrysoula Screw what is commonly excepted as fact when it isn’t. I believe the theory is called ‘argumentum ad numerum.’ The idea that something is true because large numbers belief it.
My response (I hope this isn’t considered ‘offensive’). Eat shit, 20 billion flies can’t be wrong.
There’s no misconception, much less a common one. Literary realism always means something is true to reality. Whether or not your world is believable is called suspension of disbelief, and the onus is traditionally in the hands of the reader. The world becomes realistic because they suspend their disbelief; obviously there’s a limit to how far you can push this, but the bar’s pretty high in fantasy; its inherently unbelievable.
@ADNox I would dispute that point, particularly the relevance of belief to this matter. For all fiction is not so much unbelievable, as not believed - we are fully aware we are not reading history, even in the most as-true-to-the-world-as-possible stories. Anything fictitious is not approached in terms of pretending we don’t believe it’s not true, but in projecting ourselves into the environment; hence, the criteria is not belief/disbelief, but conceivability/inconceivability. Realistic writing is a piece where the environment is so consistent that the projection can be made with little flaw; this is possible from Low Fantasy to High Fantasy - it is only the tendency for hand-waving explanations in the latter which increase it’s tendency towards the unrealistic.
When it comes to writing fantasy, the key to setting up your world are implications. Fantasy does not have to make sense externally, but any non-absurdist work has to have sort of internal logic. The world needs to function on a set of rules, and unless your world is entirely inhabited by non-humans with their own social structures and norms, then every change you make from “baseline” human reality as we know it has to also affect a great number of other things.
For example, say you create a medieval fantasy setting where men and women have equal rights. Women can become knights: are they addressed as “Sir NAME”, or “Dame NAME”? If the former, does the word “madam” and all other derivatives still exist in your setting’s linguistics? Why do dresses and skirts exist, if women are expected, as men, to defend themselves at any time? What happens when a woman is pregnant, and her liege requires her to lead her troops into war? When a couple have a child, whose name does the child take, the mother’s or the father’s? I hear that physical activity like melee combat without proper chest support can be rather painful: have you taken that into account? If you have knights, what separates them from common mercenaries. Is it because they are anointed by the church or a liege who derives his/her authority from it? If so, how does this church operate? What happens when the men and women are called off to war? Who watches the children? Who brings in the crops? Plate armour was originally made to accentuate the western european male ideal of beauty: wide pecs and a narrow waist, how does that change now that feminine standards of beauty are also considered? How do feminine standards of beauty themselves change, if women can fight, rule and trade as men would be.
These are just a fraction of the things that have to be considered, because you’re basically building a whole new culture from scratch. Fantasy is often based on a real world template so writers don’t have to manage such things. In the case of high fantasy, that template is usually Western Europe during the late middle ages, minus gunpowder and the Bubonic Plague. Templates are easy to work off of, but they’re also restricting.
Be as realistic or as politically correct as you want. I have no problem with either. My problem is with *lazy* worldbuilding. If you’re going to create new gender relations in a way which never existed in history, expect to write justifications and webs of implications serving to build an entire culture from scratch.
“Men go to war. Women care for children. Females are allowed to go to war, as long as they fully embrace being men. Males are allowed to stay home and care for children, as long as they fully embrace being women.” There, done. It even has some basis in history.
First of all, that still doesn’t answer the rest of my questions, you’re probably going to find them much harder to answer now that you’ve committed yourself to answering the first few.
An example: Your answers mean that the men are the ones with the vast majority of the weapons, the training and the equipment to wage war. As the social norms you have set up basically means that either women who fight “become men”, it implies that male combatants are still in the majority. The establishment of a ruling class over any political unit is the monopoly on the legitimate use of force: it was why peasants weren’t allowed to carry swords and why the Pope outlawed crossbows in the 11th century. Now you have an overwhelmingly male warrior class ruling over an overwhelmingly female child-rearing class, who must also deal with the ancillary tasks of keeping another human being alive long enough to reach adulthood: cleaning, cooking, teaching and education.
The ruling class, will, of course, try to cement their grip on power, as ruling classes tend to do. Since the majority of the people who AREN’T them are female, it would be easiest to exclude females from their new military aristocracy altogether.
I’ve voiced my opinions on this subject in several previous threads. This time I’m simply going to point towards @Drazen and @Cataphrak’s posts, especially @Cataphak’s last 2 posts on lazy world building. I’m in complete agreement with them on this subject.
Why would men care about who is male and who is female? Men may not want women around trying to straddle the boundary-- gender roles are sancrosact! But the idea of discriminating against a man just because of a trick of anatomy is dishonorable. Also, what makes you think this is a new military aristocracy? This has been true for centuries, ever since Emperor Tahakenet declared himself a man and thus transferred the privilege of the gods into the purview of mankind. Even before that, females became men and males became women, but they usually then associated themselves with one of the holy orders, because they were seen as representing the divine. Then, of course, challenging one of them was actually sacrilege.
Men certainly don’t want women bearing swords (just children), and female men feel just as strongly about this as male men. On the other hand, women definitely don’t want men trying to run a household. Have you seen a man try to balance a budget? It’s laughable!
If gender roles are sacrosanct, then you’ve defeated the purpose of the exercise: we come back to the concept that you must be a man to fight and a woman to raise children. This means you must be a man to establish a monopoly on legitimate force (all state-forms start this way, it’s the basis of political philosophy), which means the state is controlled by the men, which means the men are in power. All you’ve done is shift the criteria of men and women into self-identification as opposed to anatomy, which leads to a whole bunch of other problems.
In short, you’ve now created a caste system, which certainly works to an extent, but now you’ve raised a whole bunch of different questions: if a female man marries a male man, is that considered a homosexuality? If we accept that homosexuality (as we know it) is natural and not a social phenomenon, what happens to the children of a two-men pairing? Is “heterosexuality” (between warrior-men and homemaker-women) allowed? Expected? What allowances are made from the fact that some warrior-men have different organs from others, that some bleed from said organs once a month and that some can have children. What stops a male warrior-man from being attracted to the “proper” female, as opposed to the “improper” one.
By this point, you’ve created a world entirely dissimilar from high fantasy. Mind you, it is a damn intriguing one which I’d love to see you expand, but it is an entirely new world with entirely new social codes and mores. The very worst thing you could do now is not expand it further if you were to turn it into a full setting.
While waiting for you to respond, I came up with answers to many of those questions and some you didn’t ask! mostly continuing on from the point of view of somebody in the setting. But if there’s interest in continuing the exercise I imagine a new thread should be started rather than further hijacking this one.
I think, yes, any properly explorative fantasy doesn’t feel like ‘high fantasy’ anymore. But frankly, most ‘high fantasy’ feels like Tolkien or alternate-history Europe and does in fact limit the roles of women to ‘the weaker sex + exceptions’. (The exceptions are important, mind. They provide a release valve.) And it sells.
I do think it’s possible to write a story with the trappings of high fantasy and the trappings of moderate sexual equality with limited worldbuilding if you want it (hint: magic can explain a lot) and to do that for reasons other than ‘political correctness’. If it’s a good enough story the vast majority of readers won’t mind that it’s Europe With Black Women Fighting Dragons.
I also think you need to decide what you’re doing with sex & gender based on the kind of story you’re trying to write. Gritty historical Euro fantasy? Sure, copy historical gender relations. But don’t forget the release valves, or that exceptions were documented. If you’re writing a light-hearted comedy, your decisions are entirely different. If you’re writing a romantic fantasy like the Valdemar setting by Mercedes Lackey, you’re almost constrained to have much more equality, at least in Right Thinking Parts. Trying to wrap it up as ‘a choicescript game’ is much too broad.
A good way to justify giving women more rights, especially when it comes to warfare, is to put in some level of “magic lottery”. If magical ability is random, or by birth, and doesn’t require any sort of resource-heavy, time-consuming training to make it militarily effective, it can work as a gender equalizer, especially when it comes to exceptional individuals. The “women are the weaker sex” argument doesn’t hold up against a particular woman capable of melting your face with her mind.
That being said, I’m justifying the gender relations in SoI with the fact that it *is* a gritty pseudo-historical Euro fantasy. In fact, level of technology and the sort of society prevalent in SoI is actually *more* restrictive in some ways than the medieval equivalent, for both genders.
And yes, I for one, would love to continue this whole thought exercise.
Hmm. I think a way for gender equality could emerge without magic as it had emerged inour own world. Actually, medieval Europe was fairly gender-equal, at least as far as the peasant class was concerned. Certainly, there were expectations from different sexes but when both wife and husband had to break their backs in the field all day, any justification for the wife’s obedience and servitude dissappears. Similarly, when mothers and wifes had to pick up the burden of the household’s income while men were away at war through the two world wars, we see a massive rise in demad for more gender-equality among both men and women. How can we bring this into a fantasy world? Perhaps, like some native American tribes, we can set up a law that only women can hold property.
The problem with writing in the peasant classes is that while there was a level of gender equality, it existed because you either let women do the same work you did or you starved to death. If you’re going for realism in a medieval setting, you’ll have to accept that nobody wants to play a medieval peasant: a life of back-breaking labour, a complete lack of social mobility and the prospect of being the hapless victim of any jackass with a sword, a retinue and an urge to target your village for a Chevauchee is not something most people want to play.
If we’re talking medieval fantasy, people will want to play as knights and merchant princes, or at the very least, outlaws with something approaching a level of education (playing an illiterate thug and rapist doesn’t appeal to many people either). In our medieval europe, martial training, formal education and the right to carry weapons or wear armour in peacetime were not particularly avaliable to anyone, male or female, short of the merchant class.
“I hear that physical activity like melee combat without proper chest support can be rather painful: have you taken that into account”
HAhahahaaaaaaa
“What allowances are made from the fact that some warrior-men have different organs from others, that some bleed from said organs once a month and that some can have children.”
AHAHHAHAAAA!!
Seriously? Really?
HAHAHHAAAAAA!
I’d ask my sister her thoughts but I’ve a feeling she might… actually I will ask her next time I see her since I think her reaction would be priceless.
Hahahaaa!
Oh no women have breasts and periods, if they are to be warriors you must take this into consideration?
What would you think if someone asked “Men have external genitalia and as such this presents a very obvious weakness in their anatomy and a point of vulnerability. Whatever would male warriors do in order to combat this? Be sure to spend extensive time detailing their codpieces. They are also required to shave their faces, but the act of shaving can cause bleeding which could cause those small nicks to become infected. In order to properly write about male soldiers you must detail out whether they choose to shave or if they must instead suffer from being unkempt and possibly the risk of beard-lice. They are said to have extremely high-sex drives how could they possibly survive at war when there are no women to help them sate these needs? Have you taken all these points into consideration when writing your story?”
When did this become a flame war? Someone call the fire department! Also, @FairyGodFeather what you listed was the reason why hitting someone in the groins is seen as “dirty fighting” in almost every culture. It’s why rapes happen and why beard lice don’t exist.
RE:Oh no women have breasts and periods, if they are to be warriors you must take this into consideration?
Simply, yes. For anything I want to write seriously I’ll probably research how armour either in that time period or in the modern day takes into account anyone top-heavy and I’d (sadly) research how if at all they dealt with periods back then.
Would I make it a prime focus of the story however? Would I force the player to have to deal with these issues? Perhaps not, there’s doing your research and there is being over the top. But if it can fit in somewhere in the story, a part of showing your research then even better.
I do think you’re jumping the gun a bit on the ridiculousness scale there, and it slightly bothers me as I’m an author who would research that amount of detail that you’re dismissing it so casually. (I mean for gods sake for my story I researched long-sword battle stance techniques and whether a sword could even breach armour AND the effectiveness of ‘mere’ chainmail on nerdtastic medieval historian sites)
