this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
1183 points (97.3% liked)
tumblr
3386 readers
433 users here now
Welcome to /c/tumblr, a place for all your tumblr screenshots and news.
Our Rules:
-
Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.
-
Must be tumblr related. This one is kind of a given.
-
Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
-
No unnecessary negativity. Just because you don't like a thing doesn't mean that you need to spend the entire comment section complaining about said thing. Just downvote and move on.
Sister Communities:
-
/c/[email protected] - Star Trek chat, memes and shitposts
-
/c/[email protected] - General memes
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Even when gender is not the focus of the story, I feel that this risks "male default-ism" and sometimes erases femininity out of female protagonists. Not that women have to be feminine, but I find that fiction often defaults on that "girl boss™" trope to make women fit in the tropes of the genre they are in where male protagonists have traditionally solved all their problems with violence and kicking ass (I remember Lindsay Ellis complaining about that girl boss trope in a video essay but it's been a while).
I guess it comes back around to what you're saying, women in most times and places don't have the luxury of being able to ignore their gender. In such a setting, if you make your protagonist a woman, she's either going to have to be so much "one of the boys" that no-one acknowledges her as a woman... or the story is going to have to deal with gender in some way.