Babel Clash

I’d certainly agree there yes, that some women in fantasy do fulfil that role, and it does make me think that for one reason or another, there’s usually more purpose/consequence in putting a woman into a fantasy plot than a man, unconscious or not. Chuck another bloke in and half the time it doesn’t change the dynamic, make them a woman instead and she often becomes a plot catalyst as characters change how they react around her. It’s a role that requires far more care and thought from the writer than most I suspect, unless you’ve got a gender parity in the book anyway in which case the dynamic’s different. And perhaps that tells us something about the genders – a group of women will change behaviour with the introduction of a man to some degree, but I doubt it would be near the same extent as a group of men and one woman.

And of course, the point of tricksters in a novel tends to be to spark something off or introduce the change-around that takes matters in an unexpected direction and lift a scene from the mundane to the interesting. Most fantasies need something that takes them away from simply brute force winning out or the dark lord’s armies tend to win and make the book quite short. I’m not saying that’s always women at all, often it’s a man effectively saying to themselves: I have to do this another way, my default position just isn’t good enough (and the default position is often to run up screaming and chop someone off at the knees).

As Joel and a lot of writers explore a more equal balance in their novels, that ‘traditional’ role may well be changing (which is a good thing, just to be clear – the genre evolving can only ever be good) so what in the future will be the detail that changes the dynamic of a plot? Most likely unconsciously, how will writers change around this new set of mental guidelines?

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