nyet-marionetka t1_j4q3p2i wrote on January 17, 2023 at 2:05 PM

Reply to comment by walking-the-ashes in Why don’t I, as a woman, like books with female protagonists? by out_cyder

Literally every female character ever written is totally stereotypical, vastly more than male characters? Women can’t write female characters but somehow do much better at writing male characters? It sounds more like you have a toggle where you just flip it off if the character is female and nothing will fly for you.

walking-the-ashes t1_j4q4ct7 wrote on January 17, 2023 at 2:10 PM

It's not what I've written. I think you're emotionally triggered and saw in my comment something that it doesn't have.

nyet-marionetka t1_j4q6ffh wrote on January 17, 2023 at 2:25 PM

lol sure

walking-the-ashes t1_j4qb2oy wrote on January 17, 2023 at 2:59 PM

I never said that every female character ever written is stereotypical. I said among what I've read, which is a totally different thing. There must be some good female characters out there, but I personally haven't seen one, to my regret.

I also never said that woman can't write female characters. The fact is that among authors I'm familiar with, female included, there's a preference to write male characters.

nyet-marionetka t1_j4qd2o5 wrote on January 17, 2023 at 3:13 PM

>I think historically there's still much more misunderstanding of female nature compared to male one. That's why male characters are subjectively more universal and flexible and make a better vessel for a wide range of writers' endeavors.

This is weird because you seem to think that women don’t know themselves and are incapable of writing stories about women, because their own identity has been masked from them. On the other hand, male characters are completely accessible and women can write about them easily.

I think that there is nothing unique about men versus women, and they’re basically all people. So saying “people can’t write women” is incoherent to me. A person might have difficulty writing a particular type of character (like I think I’d have a hard time writing a very self-conscious and approval-seeking person, because that’s not me), but globally not being able to write characters of one gender only works if a person is operating within a very sexist framework where women are some mysterious unknowable other, and is much less likely if the author is that gender.

Based on your previously stated preferences, I’d suggest the Broken Earth trilogy and The Library at Mount Char.

walking-the-ashes t1_j4qicmc wrote on January 17, 2023 at 3:48 PM

"A very sexist framework where women are some mysterious unknowable other" is exactly the reason behind the lack of good female characters. Both men and women have been largely influenced by this idea for thousands of years, so it's still widely present in books written by authors of both genders. Authors do write female characters as "too female" in a stereotypical way. And this is why I don't find them believable.