Girls in pants
Whew. Insane week. I'd tell you all about it, because I apparently have no filter when it comes to revealing the secrets of my life. But I'm trying to respect the privacy of others, so I'll just the battle was waged on three fronts, involving emergency rooms, space heaters, and loaned shop vacs. And all around, very little sleep. Fun.
So, naughty, naughty Shannon. You don't make declarative statements like "Girls in pants with swords are bad" without explaining a little. So i 'splain.
First, I certainly don't mean to say that be-sworded girls eschewing skirts is wrong. My most favorite book growing up was The Blue Sword, for pity's sake! Harry and Aerin with the blue sword, Buffy with an ax, Zoe with a couple of space pistols, Eowyn with a broadsword, Wonder Woman with her battle sword, Annie Oakley with her gun, brown paper packages tied up with strings, these are a few of my favorite things.
Here's what I meant to say--for long, long time, action and adventure heroes were men. Female characters weren't allowed in the action. Then in movies, novels, and comic books, (mostly male) writers started to insert women into those roles, but they didn't seem to know how to write them. It seemed like they wrote parts for men then just had women play them. In order to make them "tough," they had them acting as masculine as possible. Or they wrote obnoxious women who were overeager to prove that they were tough too, foreswearing all things feminine and eager to slaughter everything within sight. A tomboy who grew up toughened by her brothers and capable with a gun or sword was considered cooler than a girl who might actually enjoy typically feminine past times. A few of those types of characters would be interesting and completely valid, but they seemed to be the only kinds of action and adventure heroines. I don't think this is largely the case anymore, but it used to bother me. I've done years and years of intensive research about this (read: none) and wrote about it for my PhD dissertation (read: I have an MFA in Creative Writing), so I feel confident in asserting (read: taking a stab in the dark) that Joss Whedon was the first to turn this lame incarnation of the female hero on its head and made it impossible for anyone to present a faux-woman like that again in any seriousness. Her name was Buffy, people. And she slayed vampires. She was a cheerleader, she liked lip gloss, she was almost extreme in her girliness. And she kicked serious butt. But she was wasn't just a joke--she was multi-dimensional, as were all the characters around her. Joss is a genius.
When I was writing goose girl, I reached a point where I had to make a call--what kind of story do I want to tell here? Should I go high adventure and have Ani learn to use a sword or spear from some kindly palace weapons master? That might've been a cool story. But as I thought about it, I knew I wanted to stay true to the core of the fairy tale, which wasn't about a girl who learns to kick butt in a man's world. It was about a half-girl who becomes a whole girl. And I decided that I didn't want to put a phallic weapon into my heroine's hands in order to make her powerful. I wanted to see how powerful my girls could be without using guns or swords. I love a lot of those girls-on-horses-wielding-swords stories a whole, whole lot. And I am absolutely not criticizing them. But for my own stories, I decided to go another way. For now. We'll see where I am in a decade. By the time my kids are teenagers, I might have a need to work a quality battle ax into book and send a girl out to chop off some orc heads.