Areloch said:
CloudAtlas said:
I have a question:
If I were to decide to write a story where it was an alternate, fantasy history, in which the founding fathers from US history fought T-Rexes and Dragons and stuff - would you expect some of them to be black, or asian, or female?
I would expect your story to feature female characters, yes. After all, roughly half the population of the US at any point in time was female, so there's no reason not to feature them. Blacks and Asians, not necessarily, no..
The reason I ask, is because Tolkien built LotR as a fantastical alternate history for England, the same way that you had the old Asian folktales or Beowulf.
Because he was building it as an alternate history that would have been told if England had it's own ancient folktales, it makes sense that everything about it would represent England and it's history to that time.
What that gets you is a few women that have great power and can enact huge change, but when it comes to front line fighting and soldiers, it was all men, all the time. Which is exactly what LotR is like. A few women, but carry considerable weight on the story, similar to England having their Queen, as well as frontlines of war that are entirely men.
It would hardly be fair to figure that because I'm white, male, straight, middle-class and wrote an alternative history of the founding fathers were they were still old, white men, means that I'm a bigot, or that replacing those characters with "diverse" ones should happen, and I see it the same way where with LotR.
As I said before, and more than once, I'm not holding anything against Tolkien. But all that "fictional history" stuff or "that was just what these times were like" is no excuse to have so few female characters if you were to write such a story today. I'm not talking about a 50/50 gender ratio or anything like that (although you can do that), but you can do better than the LOTR, with exactly one female character that really does much, Eowyn. And even she has a pitiful end. I gave some examples for what could have been done different. Yea maybe the human societies in Middle Earth are traditional, to match to this fictional history stuff, but why do the elves have to be the same? Why aren't elven women fighting side by side with the men? Would make sense, too: elves are few in numbers, being immortal, can easily spend a couple of years on military training without harm, and the male elves pretty much look like women anyway
. Change that, and you could easily have a female Legolas too, and a female Haldir (in the movies), and you could show Galadriel actually doing something, and let Arwen not just wait in Rivendell until everything sorts itself out. To see a genuine, non-sexual friendship grow between Legolina and Gimli, wouldn't that be something cool, something which you don't see a lot in any story of any genre for that matter?
And speaking of the Hobbits and friendships, would it be so nonsensical for Sam being a girl? I mean, gardener is not exactly an overly manly profession, is it, and you could say there's some sexual tension between male Sam and Frodo anyway.
Now you just have to give Eowyn's arc a better ending, and these small and ultimately inconsequential changes already give you more and better female characters. And you still have your 'historically accurate' human societies, with armies without a single female soldiers, or women in leadership positions, so nothing has changed in this department.
