And other thoughts on the popularity of chosen heroes in fiction.

As you may know, I'm not a big fan of the Chosen One or even lower-key chosen heroes, like Mercedes Lackey's Heralds or Kristin Britain's Riders, though I sometimes enjoy stories with chosen heroes of one sort or the other anyway.  I think there are a lot of problems with the idea that only certain people can be heroes, even if the certain people are supposedly chosen because they have the right heart.  When the chosen person - the Chosen One - is special because of other people's deeds or their bloodline or anything else that boils down to what they are rather than who they are, the problems are gigantic.

I’m really not sure what message authors think they’re sending when they write about Chosen Ones who have done nothing to warrant being chosen.  In The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, the kids are Chosen because they are “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.”   In the Harry Potter books, Harry is only special because his mother saved his life (somehow) and because he became an accidental horcrux (can’t explain that one either).  In both of these instances, the character(s) specialness has nothing at all to do with who they are.  Any humans would have provided what Narnia needed.  And Harry, well, he really was only valuable as an object.  He could have died at any time in the books and fulfilled his role. 

What message is the reader supposed to take away?   Was C. S. Lewis just telling us that humans are special?  I suppose that fits in with Christianity, so perhaps he was.  But J. K. Rowling’s message completely escapes me.  Why literally turn your hero into an object?  Did she not notice what she’d done?

Even when not taken to that extreme, the idea of chosen heroes divides the world sharply into inherent heroes and everyone else.  You either are a hero, whether because of your blood or your heart, or you are not.  This robs everyone of choice.  A person can’t rise above their failings and become a hero, and its rare that a chosen hero ever fails.  (In fact Chosen Ones can’t – by definition.)

This predestination by external forces strikes me as a problematic message.  Not only does it suggest that people have proper “places” in the world (which they really shouldn’t argue with or attempt to change), but it denies the reality that most people must make choices about who they are and what they do with their lives.  If your heroes are chosen, then their choice to be a hero is automatically the right one.  These heroes may struggle with that choice, but only because there was something else they wanted to do, never because they aren’t sure whether heroing is the right option.

At heart, the chosen hero story is really about embracing your duty, not deciding what you, personally, want to do with your life.  A duty, of course, imposed from outside, not whatever an individual defines their duty as.  It really is a very conservative fantasy.  Considering how many of these stories are about preserving the status quo (or returning the world to a previous ideal state), I shouldn’t be surprised.

I do, in a way, understand the appeal of chosen heroes.  They are safe heroes.  They don’t challenge one’s own choices or beliefs in the way that non-chosen heroes can.   And fantasizing about them is safe, not just because they’re fictional, but because the choice remains external.  You can’t choose to become a chosen hero.  Of course, the very thing that makes chosen heroes safe makes them less inspiring than non-chosen heroes.  You can’t choose to become a chosen hero.

Perhaps this is especially important to me because I struggle continually with what to do with my life.  I don’t know if following my dreams will lead to success.  I don’t even know which of my dreams I really want to follow.   And I’m not going to find inspiration in a story of a chosen hero; it won’t show me how a person (albeit a fictional one) weighed their options and made a choice.   And somehow, I really doubt that any of my dreams are going to be prompted to choose me.

But, as I said, I do see the appeal of that.  It would take the weight off my shoulders, after all.  I’m just not sure that’s a weight that should be lifted.

(cross posted from my other blog)

A discussion on a site I frequent got me thinking about why I tend to identify more often with male characters than female characters.  In fact, I generally like male characters better than female characters and have a far longer list of male favorite characters than I do female favorites.

Granted, there are obvious reasons, such as the fact that I’m not terribly feminine, or the fact that I tend to like types of characters who are usually male – adventurers, for example.  But there was always some quality I couldn’t quite put my finger on that tended to put me off of female characters, even ones that “should” appeal.  Why did I lose interest in Buffy?  Why didn’t Alias appeal?  Why did I look at the adds for Bionic Woman and have negative interest when many of my friends thought it had potential?  Why, even though I’m a feminist, do I gag and run away from any fiction that gets labeled as feminist?

According to Wikipedia (and his own site, which won't open due to traffic), fantasy author Robert Jordan died today, his twelve volume fantasy series unfinished.  I never tried the Wheel of Time, partly because of my aversion to "The One" as a story and partly because I first heard of the series back in the mid-90s (when seven or so books had been written) and just had this sinking feeling that he wouldn't live to finish it.  No, I'm not claiming psychic powers, and my pessimistic prediction was probably influenced by the fact that one of my favorite authors had just died, but the longer you make your series, the more likely life (or rather death) is going to interfere.

This hasn't been a good month for fantasy writers.  *sigh*  Just ten days ago, Madeleine L'Engle died, now Robert Jordan.  If I were a well-known fantasy author, I'd be tempted to get  a health check-up and avoid doing anything risky for the rest of the month.  Well, okay, if I were a superstitious well-known fantasy author.  After all, Robert Jordan was suffering from a fatal illness, and Madeleine L'Engle was far from young (though my grandparents are older).

Damn.  I'm not sure what to say since I'm not a fan of either author, but as an avid reader, I still hate to hear about authors dying, especially when their deaths seem at all before their time.  They will be missed.

Ami rewrote a few of the questions of the meme so that they involved different groups of characters.  So, I thought I'd run my characters though that version, too.

A poster on Girl-Wonder came up with an intriguing “fan-fic style meme” and I thought I’d take a stab at it.

First, select your ten fictional characters by whichever method you like best. Then answer the questions below.

Perhaps I've been reading the wrong books, but I've noticed a trend among books by women with female main characters and it's starting to bother me.  Not only do some women authors not allow their female main characters to have fun, but they seem almost to be punishing them for their career choices/heroism.  It could be that the authors in question think they're being realistic, but I can't help wondering if some of them actually hate their own characters.  It's one thing to, as the famous quote has it, chase your characters up trees and throw rocks at them, and another to seem to truly have it in for them.  And when it comes to certain writers and their characters it feels more like the latter.

This train of thought was prompted by reading a few Kathy Reichs books (not quite my usual fare, but a friend recommended her).  Now, I know Ms. Reichs really does write what she knows, so it's possible that she really has experienced the personal targeting she treats her character to, but it bothered me.  In each of the three books, Tempe (the main character) is directly targeted by the killer, people and animals she loves are threatened or injured, and she has a dramatic end confrontation with the killer in which her life is threatened and she is rescued by law enforcement.

Now that last (or a version of it) is a staple of mystery fiction...and I find one more historical example almost funny - the Campion books by Margery Allingham.  Campion goes to such great lengths to be alone with murderers to confront them that one wonders if he has a death wish.  Still, it's weird that Tempe never completely saves herself and its weird that her loved ones and her personal life is targeted.  Certainly that kind of threat does not prompt the reader to become a forensic anthropologist.  Not only that, but the stories are not fantasies - not ones the reader would want to participate in. (Interestingly, the real books about forensic anthropologists I've read do not suggest that criminals target them, threaten them, or go after their loved ones.)

Bothered by that, I started thinking about other books written by women with women main characters.  Fantasy and science fiction writers didn't seem to engage in the personal life targeting of their female heroes and while the characters themselves were endangered and harmed, they usually saved themselves and they didn't suffer differently from male heroes by the same authors.  (Though Mercedes Lackey might take that a smidge too far - I swear the world of Velgarth has more rapists per capita than anywhere else.)  But when it came to mystery writers, a lot of women writers have their female detectives targeted at home, have their loved ones and pets targeted, and have strange show downs where the detective is threatened by the killer and rescued by others.  Granted, that sometimes happens to male characters as well...perhaps it's the gender of the writer, not the character that matters for the disturbing trend I noticed.

As a woman who writes, I'm bothered by this trend.  Why write stories that almost come off as cautionary tales?  Don't be a detective, don't be a forensic anthropologist, don't solve mysteries...the bad guys will hurt those you care about and go after you at home.  It's not that you might get hurt on the job (as is the case for fantasy and science fiction characters, who also tend to triumph over whatever happens to them, making their endangerment and the harm they suffer less disturbing), it's that they might get you when you're minding your own business.  Even some humorous mystery writers do this to their characters.  The first Janet Evanovitch book has her heroine attacked in her home and has a woman involved with the case raped with a broken bottle and left on the heroine's porch.  (Please correct me if I've remembered this incorrectly.  It's been years since I read it.)  Yich and eek.  I really want to read the rest of the series now.  Not.  I also don't want to become a bounty hunter (the heroine's profession).

The only modern women mystery writers I could think of who didn't treat their detectives this way still did weird things.  Elizabeth Peters wrote okay stand alone mysteries, but her series are a bit odd.  Or at least the series I can read is (I cannot stand Amelia Peabody).  Vicky Bliss starts out as a competent woman who can take care of herself pretty well - the first two books in the series are fun.  After that, things go weird.  First, the author "resets" her relationship with thief/love interest John between books, which is annoying.  Vicky either trusts him or completely doesn't, no middle ground, and usually the return to lack of trust is from something that happened off camera, so to speak, between one book and the next.  Vicky also stops being able to save herself, is given a phobia that she did not have in the first book, but which is supposedly from childhood, and becomes a less and less likable character.  Was she having too much fun for her writer to stand?  Or what?  Even P.D. James took years to give her widowed police detective a love interest, leaving him a rather depressed man for years worth of stories.  Though her treatment of him may be the best treatment a main character gets from a modern women mystery writer.  (Which is odd, since she has one of the most pessimistic views of humanity I can think of among mystery writers.)

Are women who write stories that could actually happen jealous of their characters?  Do they feel compelled to make real the fears they would have in their characters' situations?  What is it?  What keeps them from writing characters who do what they want to do, enjoy it, and don't some how pay for it, either in story or through authorial interference?  Whatever it is, I wish there was an antidote.

The challenge for day six is to "find a redeeming quality in a female character you dislike."  This is another tough one as I can think of plenty of characters I'm neutral to or who could be better, but I'm having a heck of a time thinking of any I dislike.  Well, other than villains, who I dislike for the reasons people usually dislike villains - they're, well, villains.  Sure, even villains have redeeming qualities, but I don't think that's quite the point of the challenge.  I think the challenge is intended to get us to think about why we dislike the female characters we dislike and whether it reflects unconscious biases.

I tend to be rather neutral toward female characters partly because I really don't expect that much from them and partly because I rarely identify with female characters - even well writen ones.  Now, some of the ones on my list from day one I actually do identify with, so that's not a never, but female characters tend to have traits or concerns I just don't really relate to.  Female characters tend to be written more serious and more affected by baggage than male characters, and that's just not as much fun.  They also tend to spend more time focused on being female than male characters do on being men, and their story-lines, too, tend to reflect this.  Stories about women's issues, concerns about rape, concerns about beauty, certain kinds of relationship concerns...you can probably fill in the rest of the lengthy list.  Mind you, I'm not saying any of these are bad things, but too much and I feel preached to, distanced, or just too overwhelmed with "real life issues" to enjoy the stories.

Of course all of the female characters I feel neutral to have good qualities - they're often strong, compassionate, determined, caring characters.  Even disappointing characters like the princess from the animated Swan Princess series, who goes inexplicably from tomboy to typical woman when she hit puberty, have positive characteristics.  The Swan Princess stays intelligent and courageous, she just becomes oddly limited in her ability to act.  That's a writing issue more than a character issue, really; the writers probably couldn't figure out how to effectively imprison a grown princess who was as capable as the child version they'd created.

Hmm...that was rambling.  I really hope I made some degree of sense. ^_^;