Sirens, part the second

[coraa]

This is mostly about the panels and things I went to. Since I'm discussing specific books and characters, I'll be using highlight-to-read spoiler markers. I'll try to indicate whether any given spoiler is a mild spoiler, a bookbreaking spoiler, or something in between.

...this took forever, and also, it's long.



As I mentioned before, Sirens was more readers talking to one another than writers talking to readers, which was awesome. (There was also some writers talking to readers, and writers talking to writers.) It was also very participatory -- there were a large, large number of roundtables with a lot of people talking, raising hands, contributing ideas or suggestions, and in some of them we broke off into small groups.

I'm not going to remember everything I went to, so here are some highlights:

Love Lives of Women Warriors

This one was a ton of fun. It started with the moderator/roundtable discussion leader having us help her make a list of stories about women warriors that include a romance that we enjoyed, or found interesting, or otherwise wanted to talk about. We then talked about, oh, a lot of things: how traditional romantic paradigms often (not always, but often) assume a woman who's weaker than her man in some way, and needs rescuing; whether there's a conflict between a woman's warrior side and her "feminine" side (scare quotes because, of course, feminine is cultural and subjective); whether the aforesaid conflict differed depending on whether woman warriors were normal for the society or unusual; and more.

Some of the discussion centered on whether there was a perception that a woman's warrior nature was somehow contradictory of or in conflict with romance, and that was what we discussed in the smaller breakaway group. Basically, my group's consensus was, 'uh, no.' ;) Specifically, we talked about Aerin from McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, who (serious spoilers) (skip) does have difficulty recognizing/appreciating that Tor loves her, but that has less to do with her being a warrior -- indeed, it predates her becoming a warrior -- and more to do with her inferiority complex, aided by Galanna, and later, with her PTSD and depression following the slaying of the dragon. And similarly, Katsa of Graceling (serious spoilers) (skip) had trouble with falling in love -- but that was mostly because she'd spent her life trying not to allow other people to own her; in the end, while she is in love with Po and happily so, she still refuses to marry. Then there's Katniss of The Hunger Games, whose problem isn't that she doesn't know how to love, it's that she (moderate spoilers) (skip) has to pretend to be madly in love with someone in order to, quite literally, save both their lives, and the crossover between true feeling and pretense is -- understandably -- difficult to untangle. We concluded that, if there ever was a preoccupation with female warriors not being able to love properly, it's certainly not so prevalent in current YA fantasy, anyway.

We did talk a bit about how an "old-fashioned" view of romance, where the hero rescues the heroine, might not jibe too much with women warriors, and I agree with that. But then, I think a man-rescues-woman, woman-is-dependent-on-man thing wouldn't jibe with many of the attendees, warrior or otherwise. The way I phrased it, that got people nodding, was "The woman warrior resists being infantilized by romance." But I don't think that means that the woman warrior doesn't have, understand or want romances; it means she wants to come to them as an equal. (Incidentally, not that I brought it up in the panel, but this is a big part of why I am sooooo picky about supernatural romances, especially werewolf romances, which by rights I ought to love, being a werewolf fan. Because so often they're about an alpha male of some kind -- metaphorically in the sense of vampires or the faerie queen's captain of the guard or whatever, or literally in the sense of a werewolf -- who dominates, and a female character who might be feisty but who ultimately hands over control to him. And that really does not do it for me.)

As a side note, the moderator was asking us to name stories in which a main female character -- a heroine -- physically rescues her hero at the climax of the book. In other words, a female character who gets the equivalent of a knight-saving-princess-from-dragon moment. We thought of female characters who saved their heroes in a metaphorical sense (like in Graceling, when (serious spoilers) (skip) Katsa kills the evil king to protect Po's secret), but not so much in the physical sense. Several people mentioned Katniss in The Hunger Games, but (serious spoilers) (skip) in retrospect, I disagree, because while Katniss undeniably, physically saves Peeta, her status as his love interest is questionable at best. Not that she isn't made of pure awesome, because she is. I've been trying to think of an example since then -- I know I must be overlooking something! -- so if any of you think of one, let me know.

(There was also a brief side discussion that I wish we'd had more time for, about Kell from the Protector of the Small quartet, who clearly does have romantic feelings, but who's... well, kinda busy during the series! So finding love just isn't a priority for her. I actually thought that was pretty cool when I first read the series.)

In retrospect, the one thing I wish we'd had more time to talk about was lesbian, transgender and/or queer female warriors in modern literature -- we mentioned the legendary Amazons and Bradleys' Free Amazons, but not much beyond that.

Non-European Fantasy

This was a panel of particular interest to me, in part because I've been participating in 50books_poc this year, and in part because (ahem) the YA novel I'm currently working on is not Eurofantasy. We mostly discussed and listed non-European fantasy that we've ready and enjoyed, but there was a bit of discussion of why so much modern fantasy is European, and specifically the European middle ages. To a certain extent, the feeling was that it was just sort of a default setting for most white, American writers; we grew up reading Eurofantasy, so the impulse upon starting a book is to plunk our characters and plot and shiny new magic system into a castles-and-dragons-and-princesses setting. It may not be so much a conscious choice as a subconscious feeling that that's just what you do with fantasy.

Someone also brought up that people sometimes get scared off by the amount of research needed for a realistic and respectful treatment of a fantasy based on, say, China or Indonesia or Russia or Kenya or Guatemala, whereas people already feel like they know a lot about the European middle ages. This is a point that I always find interesting, because -- if I may switch to my medievalist hat for a minute -- a great deal of what people think they know about the European middle ages is flat wrong. Or, if it's not wrong, it's a bizarre mishmash of accurate things in the wrong contexts. (I can go on for a while about how "European Middle Ages" is hardly one thing, because it covers many countries [with diverse languages, myths, and customs -- compare the Mabinogion to the Eddas and you'll see a marked difference, and that's not even getting out of Northwestern Europe!] and thousands of miles over about a thousand year period [during which things changed quite a lot, actually], and longer if you include the Renaissance in your mishmash, which a lot of people do. But I shall spare you.) (Which isn't to say that picking different bits from different cultures for your secondary world is bad! But you have to think about whether they fit together, and you have to do the research to determine how they would influence each other, and... okay, no, I said I would spare you the long version. At least, for right now.) Rant aside, it's undeniably true that researching a culture you don't know takes more effort than researching one you have absorbed at least some of.

The discussion skirted the topic of cultural appropriation -- there was some talk that maybe authors were afraid to tackle cultures not their own, and some other talk about the need for respect, but it mostly didn't get discussed much. On the one hand, this might've been a missed opportunity; on the other hand, I'm afraid I was glad that it didn't turn into Fail. So, there's that.

Anyway, interesting panel. One of my favorite things about it is that the moderator passed out a booklist of non-European fantasy novels, divided up by culture. It should be useful for culling more books for the 50books_poc list!

Tough Love: When Partnership Becomes a Paradox

This is officially The Panel That Changed My Mind About Twilight.

...Not that it made me like Twilight any better; it's very much not my kind of book. (See above about not liking the romance of the dominant/controlling guy, and the Twilight franchise has two, count 'em, two of those. Not my kind of book.) But after a few rounds of mild to moderate Twilight bashing, we got a point of view from a teen librarian (that is, a librarian who serves teens, not a librarian who is a teen, of course) who was somewhere between irked and upset at the negativity. She had essentially three points:

One, while many people have criticized Bella for being a weak female character/not a good role model, they had found that not to be the case. In fact, they'd found that a lot of teenage girls found her to be an unironically powerful female character: she had been jerked around by her family, shuttled by her mom's remarriage to a father she barely knew in a town that was nothing like what she knew. She found her place by taking care of him -- cooking for him -- and hiding in books. But she got a glimpse of a greater future for herself through Edward: that she was beautiful, loveable, destined for more and better things, as represented by... well, okay, sparkly vampires. But the librarian's point was that the girls who identified with her were girls who were jerked around by their parents, who had to take care of their siblings, keep house, make dinner (sound familiar?), who felt powerless... and who identified with Bella, and saw that a character like themselves might be able to reach for higher things. Her point was that, in pooh-pooh-ing their role model as weak and ineffectual and too domestic, we were taking away a female role model that they could identify closely with.

Two, she made the point -- and this one really struck home -- that telling people not to have a fantasy just doesn't work. Okay, maybe we'd rather those girls fantasized about taking up a (metaphorical) sword and attacking their troubles, but if they're actually fantasizing about being swept off their feet, making fun of them for it is a) insulting, and b) ineffective. I don't know anyone who gave up a fantasy because it was mocked. Either they got mad at the mocking person and tuned them out, or they felt deeply ashamed and hid it, but kept having the fantasy. (Have you ever wondered why romance, the single most mocked literary genre, is also the single highest grossing literary genre? Clearly making fun of bodice rippers has not harmed their popularity; it's just made a lot of women lie about whether they read romance. Trufax: I read romance, and I'm not an idiot.) If we really are protesting Twilight because we're afraid for the girls reading it -- an oft-made point -- perhaps we had ought to not make fun of them, eh?

Three, she made the point that fear that every girl who reads Twilight will seek out an abusive stalker boyfriend is really not giving the girls much credit. Sure, some small number might blindly imitate Bella's relationship, but frankly if they didn't have Twilight they'd imitate something else. And if we're going to fret that girls will copy what they read, then heavens, we need to get Wuthering Heights out of all junior high libraries. (Talk about a romance I would not recommend imitating.) But the vast majority of girls know the difference between fantasy and reality, and it's kind of insulting to assume that they don't. Again, it's similar to romance: I remember reading a study that discovered that, shockingly! the women who read the more, uhm, rape-y romance novels are perfectly well aware that rape is horrible and not fun in real life, and if you ask them whether they'd want to be raped by a romantic partner, they'll look at you like you're stupid and say, "No, of course not." They recognize that the romantic fantasy is not reality. (For another awesome take on this, see Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels, which I highly recommend.)

Anyway, like I said, this did not make me a Twilight fan -- it's not my kind of book. But it put a very different perspective on the Twilight thing for me, and it was really good food for thought.

(Side note -- artemisgreyvale, you did a great job moderating this one! Especially since it got a bit contentious at the end.)



...uhhhh, yeah. So I think I will put the workshops in a different post, because this is getting kinda long.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Excellent post. Thank you.