also, this may be a sexist opinion, but it seems like its easier to have a male protagonist for any type of story. for one thing, female readers generally seem to have an easier time empathizing with a male protagonist than the other way around. second, it’s easier to pigeonhole yourself with a female protagonist in fantasy: for epic fantasy, its easy to slip into “warrior princess” mode and for contemporary fantasy, its easy to end up with the archetypal “kick-butt hardass on the outside, sensitive girl who just wants to be held on the inside”. no doubt, this has more to do with perception than it does with female characters being inherently more limited than male characters, but when you’re dealing with a genre that relies as heavily on archetypes as fantasy, these kind of things are worth considering.

Rachel, yes, YA is a great boon to all of us, as well as to the readers. When I was that age, the books available to me just didn’t have the rich variety the genres now have. I’m thrilled at this explosion of great stories.

I do agree that there is a strange tendency of “othering” women by male authors (which isn’t present at all to the same degree when women write men… I’d suspect it comes back to the old male norm again: Men are normal, and women are somehow “not-men”, and that is what defines them)

Gender is after all just one more aspect of a person’s background. While in most gendered societies (which is pretty much all human ones at the very least) it is going to have an impact, it is not and should not be a used for “the entire character” whcih too often happens.

Incidentally, this reminds me of that Bonnie Tyler song…

One thing I note is that many depictions of medievaloid (great word!) societies are really what I also call “Victorian medieval,” with that entire Victorian sensibility and Victorian view backward onto the Middle Ages (speaking of Europe here, but also of the Victorian English view of other cultures).

Yes. That.

I’m a historian, and I *still* catch myself jumping to easy conclusion, to, as it has been called, ‘the history of dead white men and their wars’ - because that is how things have often been presented. You need to dig deeper, you need to *work* to unearth a richer, more rounded picture of reality. Whenever I read a book that makes the same old assumptions about societies (particularly medievaloid) I tend to end up putting it down - it tells me that the writer has not worked to question how such a society would work, and I cannot recall a single example where flimsy worldbuilding went with in-depth characterisation and intricate plotting skills.

To give an example from film, Lawrence of Arabia works just fine for me despite its lack of a single female speaking role. As Lawrence’s story told, as it were, from his point of view as an outsider, and in the specific circumstances in which the film is set, it makes sense. Told from a different point of view I might find the lack of any female characters more problematic.

Nor do I have any argument with readers who state, right up front, that they prefer reading books with no or few female characters in them. That’s their prerogative. I don’t read books set in universities in which a middle aged tenured male professor has a midlife affair with a young female grad student (or whatever). To each his or her own.

The quota business is a red herring, as I hope you realize. It has nothing to do with what I’m talking about, which is that writers may be making choices about whose stories fit into, say, epic fantasy, based on erroneous assumptions about how people live and what kinds of lives they lived in the past and whether their individual stories are worth reading about.

“(and, of course, which assumptions need to be challenged is in itself an assumption … one that nobody seems willing to challenge)”

Who is this nobody you speak of?

I do agree that children are underrepresented in fantasy fiction. Have you read Sherwood Smith’s INDA cycle? The story begins when the hero is a child and continues to feature children in important roles through the 4 book sequence.