Beautiful and Reactive: On Poorly Written Fictional Female Characters

Almost sounds like I'm talking about an element off the periodic table: let's call it poorlywrittenum

Surprise and disappointed

Life’s too short to read all the books people recommend, let alone all the books on my list. That’s why I don’t read schlock, drek, tripe, or twaddle. (Though sometimes I get sucked in and need to find out what all the Da Vinci Code/Twilight/Fifty Shades of Grey hubbub is about.)

In particular, I don’t squander any of my precious time reading books with poorly put-together female characters. It’s not good for my blood pressure, and it strains my extraocular muscles if I have to roll my eyes too often.

One of my favourite authors—Kazuo Ishiguro—writes girls and women so well that I’ve investigated to make sure I wasn’t being duped by a nom de plume after I finished Never Let Me Go. Incidentally, its godawful film adaptation reduces a tumultuous but entirely platonic female friendship into tawdry titillation all for the sake of several seconds of “sexy” screentime. What a waste.

And yet, sometimes I do read books that don’t get it quite right. Often because I’ve briefly made friends with a man who’s impressed me by being a reader and then disappointed me by exclusively reading books in only one escapist genre. It’s a pattern. And let me tell you, reading an otherwise entertaining story with a poorly-wrought female character feels like biting into a freshly-baked cookie only to get a mouthful of raisins. You really can’t read, er, eat around them.

An example is the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Although the first two books were, at times, quite engrossing, I don’t plan to read the third. It might have something to do with the main female character, Vin. My issues with her are legion. Mild spoilers ahead.

Why Vin is a terribly mishandled character

She’s a paragon

There’s a phenomenon, which interestingly enough Sanderson describes in his online lecture series, leading me to believe he may have overcome this failing later in his career, whereby the sole female character can do no wrong.

She’s a paragon of virtue: everyone likes her, and even when she screws up, there are no consequences, much less censure. And she’s hyper-competent to boot; everything comes easily to her. If your sole female character is otherwise, well, then 100% of women depicted in your novel are both evil and stupid, so what are you trying to say exactly?

That’s why you have to have more than one… perhaps they could even have a conversation together? About something other than a man? And even then, that’s kind of setting the bar low, isn’t it?

She’s reactive rather than active

While the main male characters are active, Vin is merely reactive. She doesn’t have goals, she has compulsions. I suppose if you’re the Chosen One you’re always being buffeted by the mists of fate, but it doesn’t change the fact that all her “goals” are merely plot conveniences (learn magic, get more powers etc.). Most of Vin’s circumstances aren’t the result of any conscious choice on her part (her hand is often forced), rendering her bland and uninteresting.

At one stage she has to choose between two life paths and it’s presented as a choice between two men. Should she stay (with her current beau), or should she head out into the night and freedom (and into the arms of some broody, monochromatic twat—a total Tuxedo Kamen—who’s shown up a couple of times to spar and talk down to her—be still my beating heart)? Ridiculous. Apparently, the third option of striking out on her own never occurs to her, or at least not until the aforementioned quest-compulsion kicks in.

Have we mentioned she’s beautiful? Multiple times?

Despite being the viewpoint character to a greater degree than her love interest (particularly in the first book), the text is finagled in such a way that we get to hear how beautiful Vin is ad nauseam.

There’s nothing wrong with being easy on the eyes… it’s just the reader doesn’t need a reminder every few pages. (Whatever happened to show not tell?) On the other hand, why are heroines so often depicted as being beautiful—is it the reverse-halo effect? Or is having a plain or ugly female protagonist so truly unthinkable?

And yet, when Vin describes her love interest, it’s only ever in terms of his personality, or else dry facts about his mussed hair and sloppy dress-sense. It could be that he’s no looker, but realistically, there would be something she finds compelling about his appearance, even if only borne out of affection.

Perhaps this reflects some sort of idealised way men hope they are viewed in matters of romantic attraction, excluding any judgement of their physical appearance. Alternatively, it could be a dearth of empathy or a squeamishness around describing the attractiveness of a male character from a heterosexual female perspective. Whatever the cause, that Vin never thinks anything complimentary about his face or physique strains my suspension of disbelief.

Have we mentioned she’s not in love with her twice-her-age mentor?

At one stage Vin has to reassure her (also age-inappropriate) love interest that she wasn’t ever in love with her mentor (come to think of it, Sanderson harps on about his looks an awful lot too). For the record, you don’t need to tell your readers a sixteen-year-old girl didn’t have the hots for a man old enough to be her father, it’s assumed.

On the topic of Vin’s tender age, “…she supposedly didn’t even look her sixteen years. Some men preferred such women, however”. Public service announcement: there’s no such thing as an “underage woman”, if she’s under eighteen years of age and female, she’s a girl. The phenomenon whereby women are called girls to dismiss them, and girls are referred to as “women” to justify sexualising them is a topic for another time, however.

Her inner monologue is asinine

Vin used to be mistreated by her thieving crew and brother and thus felt like she could trust no one. Now, she has friends and can trust them. How do we know this? Because she thinks this over and over; it isn’t revealed through her actions, at least not in a way that supports this ostensible character growth without the need for accompanying exposition. Often, very clumsy exposition.

Take this exchange: ‘You’ve changed, Vin’ / ‘Everyone changes. I’m not a thief anymore, and I have friends to support me’. Groan. This conversation, by the way, occurs toward the end of the second (bloated) book, after we’ve been beaten over the head with it for hundreds of pages already. Who benefits from this bit of dialogue? A newcomer that’s joined us on page 323 at the airport bookstore, perhaps. A paper manufacturer, most definitely.

Here’s another thought which runs incessantly through Vin’s head. Let me paraphrase: Can I wear pretty dresses and still be a magic-user? I bet that young lady who wears pretty dresses cannot be very clever or good at magic.

Shock, horror, twice we’ve had a fashionable blonde revealed as a canny, adept magic-user. Each time this is presented as a “twist”, as though the audience would also find it mind-blowing that a young lady with feminine interests is also in possession of multiple brain cells.

Miscellaneous sexism

• We’re told a character’s habitual use of emotional manipulation magic is like “a beautiful woman [demanding] attention by virtue of her face and figure”. That’s right, a man’s active (albeit somewhat on autopilot) use of magic is comparable to an attractive woman (but not a handsome man) merely existing. The icing on top: this is Vin’s analogy. As if she would a) give a toss about attractive women and b) have such an absurd, reductive view of her own sex. This is stated twice, by the way, because apparently, cleavage is a form of magic in itself.

• Courtesy of r/menwritingwomen—where King and Murakami are quoted daily, sometimes Robert Galbraith (wink, wink), and occasionally the misogyny of a fictional character is mistaken for that of the author—I present to you the Testicle Test. Excluding sex scenes, test whether the sentence you’ve written is ridiculous by changing she/her to he/his and ‘breasts/chest’ to ‘testicles’.

  Here’s an altered quote from Sanderson’s The Well of Ascension to show you what I mean: “He accepted his tea from the serving boy—long braid, firm testicles, homely features*”. Good to know they were firm and unafflicted with premature ageing or some sort of dastardly Bio-Gravimetric Manipulation, I guess.

To be fair…

Now, before you get bent out of shape, I enjoy Sanderson well enough. The Mistborn series (far as I can tell from the first two books), avoids some of the more egregious pitfalls typical of men writing women and girls. At no stage does the underage female character examine her nude body in a mirror** while describing it in the manner of a slathering middle-aged pervert, nor does the book glamorise or romanticise prostitution—my top two pet-peeves.

And, to be fair, Vin is given a backstory and a semblance of an interior life, even if too much of it is spent overthinking frocks and reiterating that she no longer has trust issues to the reader. The problem is, it’s not done in a convincing way. The intent is discernible but the execution is what ultimately matters.

I hope I’ve given you food for thought, particularly if you’re a writer. After all, can one really say one is good at characterisation if one’s portrayal of half of humanity is half-baked?

Realistic female characters: recommendations

And now for my parting remarks, we’ll take a stroll over to TV-land, because some of the best-written female characters I’ve ever encountered in any media are those from Bojack Horseman. We know all their fears and foibles, their varied strengths, and exactly how their past experiences are reflected in their present-day worries, maladaptive behaviours, goals and relationships.

And, if cartoons about chimeric Hollywood horsemen weren’t bad enough, I’d also like to plug the children’s show Avatar: The Last Airbender for its diverse cast of young female characters, from the fiery to the earthy. (That was so dreadful a pun that apologising for it would only draw attention to the fact that I could have simply deleted it if I did not, on some level, delight in your suffering.)

Poorly-written male characters

This article only concerns one author, who happens to be male. It goes without saying that female authors can fall into the same traps regarding female characters, though this is less common. Further, they sometimes craft paper-thin, shallow, and unrealistic portrayals of male characters—look no further than the fujoshi-fest that was A Little Life. (This book review almost does that particular pile of tinder justice.)

Footnotes

*It’s mostly the emphasis on “firm” that cracks me up. I’m sure there are way more hilarious examples out there.

**I’ll be discussing the woman-examines-self-in-mirror-and-soliloquises-about-nude-body trope in an upcoming article.

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