I don’t quite want to push back against this (because I agree) but I do kind of want to iterate on it from where I’m sitting.
First of all, yeah. The fact that you’re genderlocked male starting in Sabres of Infinity absolutely reinforces patriarchy. That was a conscious design decision I made partly because of the story I wanted to tell, and partly because it was easier. The historical sources I’d used to build my setting, the way which power dynamics work in that setting, and some of the particular themes I wanted to address made it easier to write that sort of setting, and as a 20-year-old undergrad who’d never written anything professionally before in his life, that was an important factor.
Do I regret doing that? Not really. I chose to make a vast number of compromises starting the Dragoon Saga (foremost of which being the fact that I did start with Sabres of Infinity and not the middle of Lords of Infinity where my original plot kicked off) for the sake of getting something written and published. Genderlocking was probably the easiest to make(given the alternative was tearing the whole setting apart and rebuilding it). I made my peace with the fact that there would be a large proportion of people who’d decide against going through the series for that reason, and I consider that a perfectly valid reason to avoid it.
That being said…
I’m a cis-het dude, that gives me a certain amount of privilege. I was also born in a place which colonial empires seemed to favour as a punching bag. The most famous thing to happen to my hometown in recent history was the time the armies of one of those colonial empires used a diplomatic miscommunication as an excuse to murder several thousand locals. That gives me a certain amount of cultural and historical baggage. The effect that baggage has on me and the way I express myself affects how other people - people who have come from societies who’ve benefited from the same wealth plundered from the land of my great-grandparents - see me. Hell, that baggage has an effect on how I see me.
I didn’t necessarily write The Dragoon Saga for people who want to be heroes of their own story. I wanted to write it so others could understand the baggage that I, and billions of other people, are carrying around. I wrote it because genre power fantasy so often comes from a certain mindset that if only certain people applied enough violence or veiled threats of violence to a problem, it would go away, and everything would be fine. That baggage I carry around is the residue of successive waves of people who acted as if they were in power fantasies, and that colours how I see them.
I wrote The Dragoon Saga for the sake of the bystanders, the NPCs, the “quaint locals with their absurd customs” which the “hero” “rescues” and “civilises”. I wrote it because I feel that power fantasy, and especially power fantasy in the fantasy genre, carries with it a nasty colonialist streak if not in text, then certainly in subtext, not because the people who write them are racists, but because that’s the political status-quo, and as I’ve already noted, choosing to maintain the status-quo is easy.
So I guess there are my controversial opinions:
1: Power fantasy works for escapism, but it reinforces the structural mentalities of the powerful in a way which disassociates them from the situation of the powerless.
2: Works can be progressive in some ways, and reinforce harmful status-quos in others, because it takes concerted effort to make strides towards the former. How that balances out is based on the opinions and circumstances of the individual reader.
3: Progressive, permissive power fantasy comforts the afflicted. Restrictive non-power fantasy afflicts the comfortable, there is, and should be space and support for both.
Think that normally happens because
