Female characters: how necessary?

[Leto]

Again that's bad characterization.
On a side one, I like the way Pratchett write women - none are similar, and although they are humourous, none are cliché. Good job.

 

[jenna]

personally, i prefer male characters and POV's. but i don't think i'm a typical female, i'm probably in the minority. (i'm one of those girls with all male friends and who likes to watch action movies and motor racing... i'm not a tomboy though. i'm just weird.)

 

[Drachir]

I have certainly read a number of books with strong female characters (Kahlan in Goodkind's Sword of Truth series and Althea Vestrit in Robin Hobb's Liveship Trilogy come to mind). What seems to make a good female character is that she be more than an object for the hero to rescue. She must have her own independent quest or be someone the male protagonist needs in order to succeed. Female characters who are simply damsels in distress don't rate as far as I am concerned.

 

[Circus Cranium]

I prefer male characters, not sure why, but I do love reading about intriguing female characters. I have to add a sort of tangent to this...most of the fantasy/scifi I read has really good female characterization. I also read some horror thought, and I find myself cringing time after time at the poorly written female characters, completely unbelievable. It seems that Richard Laymon was convinced that women spend 80 percent of their time thinking about their own breasts.

 

[jenna]

. It seems that Richard Laymon was convinced that women spend 80 percent of their time thinking about their own breasts.

LMAO that's hilarious!

 

[LadyFel]

This was also back in the days (I remember them well) when it was possible to go all the way through high school English classes without being assigned more than one or at most two books by female writers. (And that one was usually "To Kill a Mockingbird" by the somewhat confusingly named Harper Lee.) This was in the US, I hasten to add. Teenagers in the UK may have been reading Jane Austen in class even then for all that I know.

Doubt it...I went to high school in London, finished 9 years ago...We read 'Little House on the Prairie', 'The Outsiders' and 'Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh' (although I'm not actually sure if the last was written by a woman) in the first three years, but for the 'important' exams, GCSE and A level, (in my case, as it's a 'pick and choose' curriculum where the teachers decide on the books we work on from and then we'd just skip the rest in the exams) the only books by female authors were 'To Kill a Mockingbird' (not even the novel, my group was saddled with the stage adaptation ) and some of my friends were set 'The Color Purple'...all the rest were Chaicer, Shakespeare, Dickens et al...We did a bit of Sylvia Plath's poetry but that was maybe two lessons.

Sad but true...Don't know what other people's experiences were like...

 

[NSMike]

In reference to Aglaranna, her falling for Tomas was actually more of what he had become than who he was... The race of people who he was sort-of turning into were their masters, and it was kind of built into Aglaranna to be submissive to him, so it's not just the hero factor there.

Sorry, those are my favorite fantasy novels of all time.

I think to make a viable world, there has to be some degree of feminism in the story. Feminism, however, is different than including a female character. Any character can be empathized with if they include elements of both sexes. Sometimes, that has to be done forcefully through an omniscient narrator, however. Men are generally less openly emotional than women, but if you make a male charater's emotions more accessable through that omniscient narrator, you make him accessible to both men and women, because men know that while they don't show emotions as much, they still have them, and describing those emotions through the omniscient narration allows a female reader to relate to him. Female characters who are emotive in a story seem natural to both men and women. Of course, men and women have different emotional responses to different situations, but done well it won't make too much of a difference.

So, in conclusion, female characters may not be necessary, but a general understanding of humanity is essential.

Just call me Captain Obvious.