Welcome Kristen S. Walker, author of A Flight of the Marewings. Kristen talks of the woman warrior. If you like what she has to say, enter to win a copy of her book, or go and buy one.
The Controversy of Female Warriors in Fantasy
I grew up in the 90s when “girl power” was a popular catchphrase. I
was surrounded by fantastic female warriors: Xena the Warrior Princess and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer from television, Alanna the Lioness and Aerin the
Dragonslayer from books. Even Disney, known for their passive princesses,
released a movie about Mulan, a Chinese woman disguised as a soldier. I eagerly
read historical accounts of women like Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and Joan of Arc.
I loved to follow the adventures of all these amazing women who could kick
butt! (Also, shout-out to my niece-in-law, who joined the Air Force and became
a modern female soldier!)
But recently, when I wanted to write about warrior women of my own, I
made the mistake of asking for help. And while other writers and fantasy fans
had helped me create everything from flying horses to mage-scholars, I received
a huge amount of negative feedback when it came to women fighting. I guess I
shouldn’t have been surprised at the backlash, given how female combatants are
still controversial today, but the vehemence of their responses shocked me.
“Those are such a cliche, and they’re not realistic at all,” they complained.
“These feminists want to push their agenda into stories, but in a medieval
world, real fantasy doesn’t have these fake women warriors.” Here
are some of their arguments and my rebuttals.
Women are Weaker Than Men
"So many people forget - or ignore -
that the gulf between traditional male and female roles wasn't an accident.”
Whether it’s swinging a sword or drawing a bow,
pre-modern fighting needs some amount of strength. And the average woman is
smaller and weaker than the average man. But does that mean that women can’t
match men in a fight? Not really. Like most human traits, physical strength is
distributed on a bell curve. The bell curve for women’s strength is below
men’s, but there’s actually a lot of overlap. So there are actually some women,
on the high end of the curve, that are stronger than even the “average”
man. Not everyone fits perfectly into averages. And we can see that today,
while pre-modern fighting techniques and martial arts are more of a hobby than
actually used in warfare, there are women who can learn how to wield a sword, joust
on a horse in full plate armor, shoot a bow, or become a black belt in karate.
Women Have to Make Babies to Sustain the Population
“If women were allowed to fight in wars, then the whole population
would die off.”
It’s true that we do need at least some women to reproduce, and more
women than men are needed to produce babies because women take more time and
energy to be pregnant and give birth while one man can father children with
many women at the same time. But wars are not usually ongoing—you’re not losing
half of your population to battles every year (if you are, then there’s bigger
problems with your society!) Armies are typically gathered from only a
fraction of the population. Why can’t a few women be allowed to join? After
all, some women are barren, some women in medieval societies didn’t have
children for personal choice—for example, nuns take a vow of celibacy. Not
every single woman is needed simply for reproduction 24/7. If you can spare
some men, you can spare a couple of women to go with them.
Traditional Values Won’t Let Women Fight
“Ignoring gender differences, while
aesthetically more pleasing, is pretty "fantastic" even for fantasy
stories.”
Because our society happened to develop in a certain way doesn’t mean
that every society has to develop the same way. We can see that there are
differences in societies and cultures in our own world. Why does a fantasy
world, that exists in a completely different set of circumstances, have to have
the same values as ours? In particular, we can think about why certain values
might have become a tradition (perhaps because of religion, or a philosopher’s
teachings) and then change those specific conditions in our fantasy world. Why
not imagine a society that believes women’s maternal instincts make them value human
life more than men, so they are better commanders in war because they will make
choices with more compassion? Or a society that believes (like modern-day
Israel) all young adults should give a certain number of years of service to
the military before they can join a profession or start a family? There are
many stories to be told out there, and they don’t have to be constrained by a
pseudo-medieval Western European clone.
Pushing Modern Values Makes Fantasy Unrealistic
"Almost every woman has felt (to a greater or
lesser degree) that experience of being subjugated in some way for having been
born with the substandard plumbing. People also write their
wish-fulfillment.... Anyone who has felt the aforementioned experience wishes
she could do something heroic and spectacular to change it."
Some people think that politics shouldn’t be in fiction. But every
choice that you make as a writer comes from what you believe in, and whether
conscious or not, the stories you tell reflects your biases. Why do you have to
be constrained by the values of a particular time or society? And our ideas of
medieval European life aren’t always that realistic because we’re viewing them
through a modern lens of books that were written by men. If you dig for the
information, there were women warriors in virtually every period of history from ancient Vikings to modern gangs of women in India. Some of them dressed as
men to hide from the constraints of their time, but others fought openly, and
they were good enough at it that we’re still talking about them centuries
later. Is it accurate to say that we can’t have even a few women warriors in a
fantasy world that doesn’t even exist when there were real women who fought and
killed and died in real wars? And is that really the kind of history that we
want to celebrate?
So Here’s My Cliche Feminist Women Warriors
I didn’t let all of the naysayers discourage me and I wrote what I
wanted. A Flight of Marewings, the main character Korinna joins a
mercenary company called the Storm Petrels. In my fantasy world, the main
governments, little city-states, don’t have their own armies, so they hire
these mercenary companies to do their fighting for them. Mercenary work is
actually viewed as one of the lowest professions in their society, so most of the
people who become fighters are driven to it by a lack of other options. But
they do allow women who want to join. They’re a minority, but they’re treated
equally. And I’m not the first author to do this. Elizabeth Moon used her own
experiences as a Marine to write about men and women in a mercenary company in
her Deed of Paksenarrion series. I don’t mind following in those footsteps!
Links to More Discussion of Female Warriors in Fantasy
A Flight of the Marewings
Korinna's life gets turned upside down when the ghost of
her father suddenly appears. Her father was duke of Kyratia City and he wanted
Korinna to marry his warlord, the foreign mercenary Galenos, and inherit his
title--but the city's Council has other plans. When the Council denies
Korinna's right to rule, she decides to join Galenos's mercenary company and
tame a wild marewing in order to take the city by force. But people whisper
that the late duke's untimely death was murder, an induced madness that forced
him to dance himself to death--and now that madness is spreading. Can Korinna
become a marewing rider and conquer Kyratia in time to save everyone?
Author Biography
Fantasy author Kristen S. Walker dreams of being a pirate mermaid who
can talk to sharks, but she settles for writing stories for teens and adults.
Her new novel, A Flight of Marewings, tells the adventure of a duke's
illegitimate daughter who must stop her father's murderers--by taming a
dangerous monster. A Flight of Marewings is now available in print from
Amazon and digitally from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and other
ebook retailers. To read a sample chapter or check out Kristen's pirate
pictures, please visit kristenwalker.net. You can talk good books, cats, or
medieval cooking with Kristen anytime on Twitter (@KristenSWalker) or Facebook.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
In this segment, I want to explore the many modes of
travelling in time from a few different points of view and authors. The guy who
started it all was HG Wells and the mode he used was the same as the title of
his famous book, The Time Machine.
The machine was a Victorian invention which propelled his protagonist into the
future. The George Pal, 1960 movie version of this title has actor Rod Taylor
amazed at the changes going on around him. He watches a woman’s dress shop and
the changing styles as the years move up, making him comment to himself,
“That’s a dress?”
There can’t be a post like this without talking
about a time-traveler first seen in 1963 on the BBC in the UK. Doctor Who uses a device that is stuck
in the image of an old police box called the TARDIS. The letters stand for Time
And Relative Dimension In Space. It is infinitely large on the inside and can
move the doctor and his colleagues anywhere and to any point in time.
Now I will give you the
time travel mode used in my books. First, a person has to be born with the
God-given ability. Not everybody is, but those who are must realize the secret that is contained in the simple element of
water. The same water that is all around us and within us is the water that
has existed in every time period since the Earth was formed. It is the conduit
to every possible timeline. So it is the same water that character’s Kevin and
Cheryl encounter down Route 66 in 1946, that is there when Katya and Cyrus find
themselves in the great Chicago Fire of 1871, and when Cathy Callahan finds love
in 1906 during the San Francisco earthquake. Water, along with concentration, is
my character’s main mode of
travel.
(2).jpg)
