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Challenge #11
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.
I actually want to talk about the subversion of a trope: namely, novels where primary female characters are written with traditionally "male" attributes—think ambition, brusqueness, devotion to work, disinterest in beauty, fashion, or creature comforts, aggression—but not singled out or punished for them. That is, the narrative doesn't make a big deal out of how the character is out-manning the men. It doesn't put her through a plot wringer until she comes out the other end chastised into being traditionally "feminine." And while she may grow and learn and grind some of the hard edges off, the story treats this process as part of her development as an individual, without linking that development to ideas of how she "should" be by dint of her gender.
これで以上です。
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.
I actually want to talk about the subversion of a trope: namely, novels where primary female characters are written with traditionally "male" attributes—think ambition, brusqueness, devotion to work, disinterest in beauty, fashion, or creature comforts, aggression—but not singled out or punished for them. That is, the narrative doesn't make a big deal out of how the character is out-manning the men. It doesn't put her through a plot wringer until she comes out the other end chastised into being traditionally "feminine." And while she may grow and learn and grind some of the hard edges off, the story treats this process as part of her development as an individual, without linking that development to ideas of how she "should" be by dint of her gender.
Melissa Albert's Our Crooked Hearts. Four, count them, four, female main characters getting to be sympathetic, relatable, flawed, and unreliable narrators as they engage in a Harmon cycle fantasy horror adventure par excellence that kept me glued to the book for 9 hours straight. Bonus: this book is a roller coaster of a read.
Laure Eve's The Graces. The Graces' teenage protagonist is ambitious and calculating. No false modesty here: she takes a look at the social pecking order and calculates what she needs to do to ascend it, because she knows she deserves to be at the top. Bonus: this book is a tightly plotted fantasy novel with awesome action and drama that also deals excellently with some heavy themes.
Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Fairies and its sequel Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherwords. Fawcett's protagonist is analytically minded, misanthropic, and focused on her job to the exclusion of much else...and the narrative rewards her for it. Bonus: this book has a fun and unusual Iceland-inspired setting, and its descriptions of faerie are excellent.
Charlie Holmberg's Followed by Frost. I'm not going to spoil anything by going into detail here, but suffice it to say that this entire novel is a massive trope subversion, and it's so well done. Bonus: no one writes a crypto-mid-19th century America fantasy settings better than Holmberg.
Malene Sølvsten's Ansuz. Ansuz kicks off with a standard YA fantasy set-up: lonely, misfit, parentless protagonist struggling to fit in at school discovers she's in mortal peril because The Fate Of The World May Depend On HerTM and must Fight Against All Odds Against Forces Much Bigger Than HerselfTM. But Sølvsten's protagonist succeeds just as frequently because of her cynicism, stubborness, lone wolf tendencies, and risk-taking than she does despite them. Bonus: the plotting is tight, the twists are massive, the secondary and tertiary characters enjoyable, and it makes the standard genre beats feel so fresh.
これで以上です。
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Also, you might like Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver and A Deadly Education!
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Ahd Spinning Silver and A Deadly Education are some of my favorite books! (Well, really everything Naomi Novik's written is some of my favorite books 😆) I can't believe I didn't think to include that series in this post—El is exactly the sort of character who belongs on it!
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