Babel Clash

I think the consistency thing is the most important. If your characters are going to transcend normal or ‘realistic’ physical boundaries, they should do so in a way that’s consistent with the rest of your world. Now occasionally you get even great writers violating this, like in one very ‘gritty realism’ fantasy that I love, where the prince is chained in a dungeon for months with little food, but still whips everyone’s butt with a sword as soon as he escapes. If he were a magical being, in a magic or ‘unrealism’ intensive world, then sure, it might be believable. In a ‘gritty realism’ world filled with human frailty, less so, because sword fighting is physically demanding. I’m a cyclist, and I can feel myself getting weaker if I just miss a few days of cycling. After a few months chained in a dungeon, I’d be struggling to walk, let alone cycle. And the sword fighting prince would have been struggling to beat a ten year old.

So as a dramatist, I actually like frailty, because frailty can be dramatic, especially when you inflict it upon someone who’s not used to it. Which means also that I’m a firm believer in not making any character too powerful. I’ve never been particularly into superheroes, but I can at least appreciate the likes of Batman and Spiderman because they have flaws and weaknesses, which in turn gives them drama. But Superman on the other hand is just dull, because he’s so damn perfect. The best drama comes from internal struggle, characters battling against their own flaws and weaknesses, and when your character doesn’t have any, he or she will be unavoidably boring.

Now back to the male-female thing, Tom says his female fighter Legana is an assassin. Which for me absolutely works whether your fantasy world is ‘realistic’ or ‘unrealistic’. In ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel’, which definitely falls into the former category, Sasha’s swordsmanship is all about speed and technique, and the martial arts concept that some superior techniques can neutralise superior size and power. So she’s not too different from an assassin in that sense, relying upon speed, agility and cleverness. What she can’t do is weigh herself down with armour and fight in a mass combat shield line with the men, because there she loses all her agility and technique, and has to rely on size and power instead… of which she is lacking. She could certainly beat up most normal men (guys reading this blog, or writing it!) but against men who seriously train to fight, she’s just outmuscled, the same way Marion Jones could outsprint most guys, but not other top-level male sprinters.

But same concept in the real world, some fighting women do awesomely, some less so. Soviet female snipers did huge damage to the Nazis in WW2, but you wouldn’t have put them in the boxing ring against the guys. The point of having a sniper rifle is they didn’t need to. Today women fly fighter planes every bit as well as male pilots, because strength is irrelevant. And in related activity, at this very moment, there’s a 16 year old girl named Elena Myers making one of the youngest ever debuts in American professional motorcycle racing (AMA Supersport, isn’t the internet wonderful for finding out this stuff?). Which is one of those many things I think women would be great at, but have been socially precluded from for the last hundred years. So in comparing men against women, it depends on the activity. (And don’t get me started on how women’s ski jumping was banned from the Olympics!)

Related posts:

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