Comments on: First Girl Ever

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:19:16 +0000

Faye — exactly. And we need more exploration of that stage, more admittance of the fact that crossing the threshold doesn’t mean the journey is over. We want it to mean that, because the boundary is a nice clear goal to aim for, and what’s on the other side is a great deal messier. But we need to deal with it anyway.

By: Faye

Faye — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:52:55 +0000

I fully agree on the points about the Kel books, and in my opinion that is why they’re exceptional. Though I love the Alanna books and they are probably some of the first fantasy First Girl Ever books, there are so many others these days that are tired, uninteresting, and cliche–and definitely agree on historical context, if I had read Alanna when it was published I’d probably have a different reaction to it. But I didn’t, and the Kel books mirrors the society I grew up in better than the Alanna books do, in the extent that most girls are LEGALLY allowed to participate in male-dominated fields, but many don’t because of the social pressures and covert bullying. That’s why I admire Kel–I think, in some ways, her path is more difficult: the bigotry is obscured, masked in a rhetoric that is legally acceptable but still socially debilitating.

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:13:00 +0000

Y’know, I should have reread the original post before I posted my last comment, for some reason I thought you’d stopped short of making the exact point you were actually making. D’oh.

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:19:18 +0000

I’d go further and say that generally fantasy does worse than a bad job of covering class issues, and actively promotes them.

90% (figure-plucked out of the air!) of fantasy novels follow the Ugly Duckling approach to elitism: oh no, it’s terrible, you’re poor and downtrodden, look at you suffering, but don’t worry, at the end of the book it will all be ok, because it’ll turn out YOU WERE ONE OF THE ELITE ALL ALONG!

That makes it all ok then, and let’s just forget about all the faceless masses who didn’t get a book written about them.

It’s a similar thing to what you’re almost saying in your post: one person breaking in from outside is the exception to the rule, but the rule is still there.

Things aren’t fixed until the rule is gone, and there’s nothing exceptional at all involved by equal treatment.

The struggle to get from one to the other is something that isn’t just lacking in fiction, but in the general understanding by people of our own world too.

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:43:24 +0000

Mary — or even in our own societies. But that has a lot to do with bad understandings of history in general, and my rant on the abysmal state of history education in the United States is a whole other rant.

By: Mary

Mary — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:46:54 +0000

The class issue is the 20th/21st-century Western-culture viewpoint in disguise. Most people have a very poor grasp on what class meant in most societies.

By: hampshireflyer

hampshireflyer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:32:04 +0000

The post-First Girl Ever stories can probably tell us a lot more about the society, as well (and, as you say, put it under a lot more stress)… so a lot more story and a lot more freshness.

By: Elias McClellan

Elias McClellan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:40:06 +0000

@8, Jaws, isn’t the audience for our work a so-called enlightened, progressive western audience? Your anology begs the question of circumstance and how soon we see another CJC that is a minority and/or how soon we see a female CJC. One of the few aspects of Battlestar Galactica I liked was the gender conflict in the pilot episode and how Edward Olmos’ character covered his bias as a question of qualifications. I think the line was, “Your taking orders from a teacher?”

Wonder if anyone asked the Joint Chiefs “Your taking order from a ‘melaninically enhanced immigrant’?” I bet the question was asked and in a more… colloquial manner. Quite frankly, I don’t want to live in that world. Think that’s the point of reading/writing other worlds and other stories.

Back to our enlightened west. Another author, posted to another essay that in his native Germany, he could not garner open attention for his work. Seems that genre writing in general and scifi/fantasy specifically is regarded as below contempt contempt there. Challenging ideas are iffy here. It’s easy, Ms Brennan as pointed out, to point fingers at other cultures. I think the idea is to write better than what we’ve accepted as a norm.

By: Margaret Lion

Margaret Lion — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:01:40 +0000

Like your post! And yes it is fun that Tamora Pierce keeps going with Tortall and the knights and how everyone is coping with the changes. ‘Tis good.

Now it might be fun to write a story where the heroine would love to disguise herself as man to do what she wants, but alas, her breasts and hips are just too big. (And yes, this would be my problem.)

By: Jaws

Jaws — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:11:45 +0000

I suspect that the defining characteristic is more an “evaded Destiny’s inherited mandate” than anything else. That applies to race, gender, sexual orientation, class and financial resources, even formal education (Craig Ferguson the high-school dropout drunk v. or Conan O’Brien the Harvard grad — as to who is more intellectually inquisitive). For example, within the military officer corps in the US, there’s the class divide between military academy graduates (usually multiple generations!) and ROTC/OTS… because in 1990, it was rather shocking not just that Colin Powell was melaninically enhanced from an immigrant family, but that he became Chairman from an ROTC background (the last non-ringbanger Chairman/equivalent had been Bradley). On the other hand, we’ve now had almost 15% of the service chiefs and Chairman since who were not ringbangers… even though most officers (even most legally qualified officers) are not ringbangers.

Remember, too, that we’re dealing with the relatively tolerant West here; just try telling one of these tales in a quasi-Persian setting!