Females in fiction.

      Hey there.

     It has been put up for discussion, again, recently about females in the media. Mainly in the writing of films, games and literature. The issue mainly seems to be that there are lots of really badly written female characters in all of these things and this usually occurs when they are the protagonist of the story. So I'd like to give my piece in explanation of it as it is quite a tough subject, so naturally I'm going to tackle to with both feet.

     This is a gender issue. It's as simple as that, and throughout history there has been a huge abundance of male domination in writing and stories - with women often seen as prizes or side characters, etc. That is a problem, of course it is. But it has happened, so not much we can do about this. That does not, however, mean that people should be writing about women protagonists for the sake of writing women protagonists - that doesn't solve everything. All of the sexist stuff is history, people should not be writing on the basis that we USED to be sexist, do you see? Every story that is written should be tackled as that story, and a character's gender should be absolutely second to them simply being a good character!

    Let me clarify. People who have crap female characters in their stories are crap for two reasons, a) that they simply are bad writers anyway. b) They think that you should write females as female and males as male - as if there is a difference. There isn't.

     There are plenty of tests now to 'tell if you're book is sexist' and don't get me wrong, there should be equally drawn characters of both genders, I'm not saying anything negatively about gender, I'm simply saying that men and women are so much the same that we shouldn't be considering gender as the important factor in this. If I have a short story that doesn't involve two males talking and not about girls, that doesn't make me sexist. It means the story didn't lean towards need for that. Get it?

     Yes, I understand that my view may be unpopular. But good writing is about good writing and nothing else, so when i read a book like The Hunger Games, that has a horribly written female protagonist in an otherwise brilliant book, I can spot that she sucks because she has been written purely to be a strong female. Which doesn't work. And it doesn't not work because she's female, it doesn't work because you can't write a gender as a gender, you write it as a fucking good character and for all purposes you should be able to swap the character's gender and it still be the same book but with very little tweaks.

    Yes, I may be swaying all over the place with my explanation, but all the information is there. You should stop telling people they're sexist because they don't have certain stories. You should stop trying to write gratuitous powerful female characters. Just write something good, write in a good/realistic/deep/interesting/relatable character; make them female. But make sure she's written because of a good character in a good story, not just because women can be strong too. Because male and females are the same when it comes to the mind. Get it? Good.

Ciao for now.