Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2023-06-28 06:59 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2023-06-28 06:59 pm
[ SECRET POST #6018 ]
ā Secret Post #6018 ā
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 16 secrets from Secret Submission Post #860.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 12:47 am (UTC)(link)There are LOTS of societies where women were socially and legally considered children, and were expected to be childish, and expected to become wives and mothers.
I'll take a childish female character who isn't childish in the makeup/dresses/buy me things as romance way who then becomes a wife. Give me a childish female character who wants to play with dinosaur toys while flying her space ship. Give me a childish female character who makes funny sound effects while she fights off a bunch of bad guys. Give me a movie about 5 high powered female execs who have been playing tag for 20 years. Give me a childish female Jedi Knight who uses the force for pranks. Love me a female character who loves to dress up in glittery pink to get her law degree.
Men get to have this. Give me it.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 01:09 am (UTC)(link)The mention of Tag in the middle of this was great, Iād love a version of that but with 5 high-powered female execs too!
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 01:20 am (UTC)(link)Try Barbara Hambly's books - I still reread the Darwath Trilogy every couple of years. Swordswomen and bishops and a teenage queen about to get a truckload of political theory dumped on her head because most of the government is dead by apocalypse and she needs to step up. (Something I love with Hambly, is she does warrior-women and politicians great, but she also writes very sympathetic 'silly' characters who I want good things for.)
Garth Nix's Abhorsen books - necromancers and magic and women routinely carrying swords. Librarians who carry a safety whistle in case the monsters in the stacks try to eat them (predominantly female).
Digger - graphic novel where the heroine is a wombat who loves a well-dug tunnel.
Pretty much everything by Elizabeth Lynn or Patricia McKillip has solid heroines with a variety of roles in life
Oops, you wanted specifically 'childish' heroines. Try Toshokan Sensou | Library Wars or Last Exile: Silver Wing for kinda... hot-tempered and hasty girls who do military stuff, as things I've watched lately.
(Some of these are a bit old - I just turned my head to read titles off one of my bookshelves.)
Are any of these recs going to make you feel better in yourself?
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 02:05 am (UTC)(link)I was gonna thank you for the recs, but then you had to go do that. Maybe don't be a dick? You don't even know what gender I am.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 02:22 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 05:47 am (UTC)(link)And Abhorsen's main characters are either boring or annoying as fuck.
DA
(Anonymous) 2023-06-30 02:34 am (UTC)(link)This just feels like moving the goalposts at this point.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 01:26 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 02:07 am (UTC)(link)No one will ever say that a Jedi Knight is not Manly (tm). If he's childish, that's just an approachable man and a loveable rogue. A narrative with a childish woman rarely ever shows her as childish AND competent. When they are, they're usually villains (violent women in lolita style for the titillation of a male audience).
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 02:50 am (UTC)(link)I think you're bringing a lot of personal bias into how you read characters.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 03:48 am (UTC)(link)This seems on target to me. Luke did a lot of growing up in the process of realizing that his "enemy" was telling him the truth, while his mentors had lied to him for their own purposes, and figuring out what the right thing to do was with ultimately no guidance. He's disobedient to a degree that endangered the lives of an entire side of the war - what had been his side - but he commits to negotiating or dying in the process. In a lot of ways, Star Wars was a full throated endorsement of men growing up to be whole human beings: with feelings and vulnerabilities and some ideals that didn't survive life experience, but a whole HELL of a lot more that did. This is childishness being brought forward as an expression of deep humanity, as a direct connection to intuition and imagination and love that doesn't apologize for itself.
And in that, IMO, it's very different from the infantilized, performative "look down on me, but feel affection for me" appeal that's forced on too many female characters.
I have no opinion on whether non-western media is typecasting women into this role, but I've seen a lot more of it than I want to in American canons, and if I never ran into it again, I'm pretty sure I would not miss it one bit.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2023-06-29 03:02 pm (UTC)(link)