While She Knits - Fantasy tropes, much?
Apr. 14th, 2012 11:03 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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queensthiefMost of us read a lot of fantasy books, right? There are elements/characteristics/tropes that appear often--things like: good vs. evil, magic, DRAGONS, swords, a quest, the reluctant hero, etc. These conventions sort of set the tone for the fantasy genre. Sometimes they seem like old friends we're comfortable with. Sometimes, in the right hands, they seem brand new.
But, sometimes these things drive me crazy. Here's an example. I'm reading The Rise of a Hero, book 2 in Hilari Bell's great Farsala Trilogy (thanks for all the recommendations). When, however, the heroine chopped off her long hair with a knife, donned boy's clothes, and was immediately mistaken for a 12-year-old boy, I started to say "hey, wait a minute!" How many 16-year-old girls could pass for a boy just because their hair is short? How many boys have a face like a 16-year-old girl? Am I being too picky? Has anyone else ever pondered all the tropes we accept just because they are always there?
What other regular elements of fantasy books make you stop and say, "hey, wait a minute!"?
(my computer has eaten this post twice, so posting it NOW, grr. Why, imac, why??)
But, sometimes these things drive me crazy. Here's an example. I'm reading The Rise of a Hero, book 2 in Hilari Bell's great Farsala Trilogy (thanks for all the recommendations). When, however, the heroine chopped off her long hair with a knife, donned boy's clothes, and was immediately mistaken for a 12-year-old boy, I started to say "hey, wait a minute!" How many 16-year-old girls could pass for a boy just because their hair is short? How many boys have a face like a 16-year-old girl? Am I being too picky? Has anyone else ever pondered all the tropes we accept just because they are always there?
What other regular elements of fantasy books make you stop and say, "hey, wait a minute!"?
(my computer has eaten this post twice, so posting it NOW, grr. Why, imac, why??)
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Date: 4/15/12 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 4/15/12 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 4/15/12 03:29 am (UTC)But yeah... it does depend on the girl/boy in question. There has been, for instance, at least one 16-or-so girl who, on first seeing her around, I had a seriously hard time figuring out whether she was actually a girl or a boy because... she had a very short, boyish haircut, athletic build, and liked to wear slightly looser fitting clothes that didn't reveal much in the way of curves.
And there is, also, something to be said for the average person seeing what they expect to see, especially in a medieval/ancient world setting, where men's vs. women's attire would be much more sharply differentiated, and it would be highly unexpected, to say the least, to see a girl wearing "boyish" clothes on a normal basis.
But no, I wouldn't say that the transformation would be quite so simple in many cases. Especially in the case of many heroines, who are described as extremely beautiful and feminine otherwise...
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Date: 4/15/12 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 4/15/12 04:14 am (UTC)I actually prefer aversions of the Sweet Polly Oliver trope. My favorite being in The Singer of All Songs, in which the heroine needs to urgently sneak into a boy's academy, and comes up with a male disguise even she knows is weak (she doesn't look anything like a guy). It turns out, girls could visit the school just not attend (she was lied to so she'd stay on the ship), and a new friend she makes immediately asks why she's wearing boy's clothes. Cue epic disguise fail! XD
However, historically speaking, it has happened. There was actually a women named, Deborah Sampson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Samson), who fought in the American Revolution as a man. So it is possible.
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Date: 4/15/12 05:04 am (UTC)I don't know if this counts as a trope, but when fantasy worlds that are supposed to resemble medieval Europe have things like potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, turkey, pumpkins, corn (maize), tobacco, or any of the other foodstuffs that didn't exist in Europe until the post-Colonial era, I get a bit snippy at the author. I can accept it if there's a good reason for it, like it's obvious that in this fantasy world the flora and fauna are not like in our world (or they're deliberately mixed). But having random potatoes in an otherwise turnip-and-parsnip setting makes me think the author just didn't do any botanical research. I guess the trope that this applies to most is the Meat-n-Potato Stew trope, which only makes sense in a post-Colonial world, if the author is otherwise claiming it's Just Like Europe.
Speaking of which, while the Just Like Europe trope doesn't irritate me, it does bore me. I want to read fantasy stories set in places reminiscent of Siberia or sub-Saharan Africa or India or Central America or the Polynesian islands (like The Lost Conspiracy, which was an amazing book).
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Date: 4/15/12 05:19 am (UTC)There you will find, along with many other fine songs, "The Ballad of Deborah Samson".
As you wish
Date: 4/15/12 05:30 am (UTC)1. The Ice Is Coming (1977)
2. The Dark Bright Water (1978)
3. Journey Behind the Wind (1981)
Set in Australia and based in native Australian mythology.
Summary of The Ice Is Coming from FantasticFiction.com (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/patricia-wrightson/ice-is-coming.htm):
The Ice is coming. Frost is seen in summer and ice patches form in spite of the hot Australian sun. To the Happy Folk, the town-dwellers, following the progress of the ice is a new game - but Wirrun, whose People have lived in the land since Dreamtime, feels fear in his bones. The Ninya, the green-eyed ice men, are abroad. Ancient foes must fight again. Wirrun goes out to join the battle. Ko-in, hero, brings him to the power held in a crystal of quartz which will protect him as he meets the oldest race of the country: the creatures born of the land itself, sly and secret creatures, the earth spirits. Oldest of them all is the Eldest Nargun, a monster of rock poured molten from the fires in the heart of the land itself and able to summon up the fire of its beginning. The Ninya can never rule unless they defeat it. So they search for the Eldest Nargun, and Wirrun searches too. Here, in a country young only to its latest settlers but in truth ancient, close to the world's beginnings, the spirits of the Dreamtime are locked in battle with the ice - the frail, courageous Mimi, little grey Nyols of the rocks, that terrible, red-eyed beast the Bunyip, the many-shaped Yabon, and the great white bird-spirits, the Yauruks. Through it all the Happy Folk continue their relentless search for happiness. And Wirrun moves towards the country of the Narguns, to the unexpected and stunning climax of an epic struggle. The first book in the Wirrun trilogy.
From the same site (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/patricia-wrightson/):
Patricia Wrightson (Australia, 1921 - 2010)
iswas one of Australia's most distinguished writers for children. Her books have won many prestigious awards all over the world. She was awarded an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) in 1977, the Dromkeen Medal in 1984 and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1986, all for her services to children's literature. She is a four-time winner of the Australian Children's Book Council Book of the Year Award: in 1956 for The Crooked Snake, in 1974 for The Nargun and the Stars, in 1978 for The Ice Is Coming and in 1984 for A Little Fear. Patricialives and writeslived and wrote in a beautiful stretch of the Australian bush beside the Clarence River in northern New South Wales.no subject
Date: 4/15/12 05:41 am (UTC)Deborah Sampson is one those awesome, but very often forgotten female historical figures.
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Date: 4/15/12 05:47 am (UTC)That being said, there are many, many accounts from the 19th century of women fighting in the Civil War as men (http://www.angelfire.com/ny/anghockey/NAME.htm/) (more info here (http://bemm1462.tripod.com/)), and part of the reason they were successful is because there were so many boys and young men also enlisted in the army. One of the women wasn't discovered until she had a baby in a prison camp, so I suppose it's possible that people were just not paying attention, but that idea gets stretched pretty thin when you see estimates of somewhere between 400 and 1000 women serving disguised as men during the Civil War.
I think it's a lot more plausible than a lot of other fantasy tropes, like everybody except the bad guys (and then most of them!) being really incredibly good looking. That bugs me. I'm a lot more willing to imagine a young woman might pass as a young man than I am that everybody is pretty, except for a few dashing and character-building scars.
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Date: 4/15/12 05:47 am (UTC)Fall of a Kingdom! I love that trilogy! Hope you're enjoying it!
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Date: 4/15/12 05:59 am (UTC)You might like Cinder (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11235712-cinder) by Marissa Meyer. It's a sci-fi/fantasy/fairy-tale mix set in futuristic China. :)
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Date: 4/15/12 06:13 am (UTC)This annoys me too! Also the presence of coffee and non-herbal tea in a medievaloid setting, because neither of those caught on in Western Europe until the 17th century, and the structure of Europe in the 17th century is SO DIFFERENT from any time in the Middle Ages.
Have you read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin? I suppose it's technically sci-fi, but it's not lasers-and-blasters sci-fi and reminds me more of political intrigue-y fantasy. The planet it's set on only has winter, never summer. Very unlike any pseudo-European setting!
Lois McMaster Bujold has a fantasy series called the Chalion series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Chalion), which is inspired by medieval Spain. I know that Spain is technically part of Europe, but it's a lot different from the parts of Europe that usually inspire fantasy stories, and Bujold is an amazing writer.
She also has the Sharing Knife (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sharing_Knife) series, which is set in a world inspired by frontier Ohio. No, really. Ohio. Promise!
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Date: 4/15/12 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 4/15/12 06:43 am (UTC)I've seen Cinder and it looks intriguing to say the least. I hadn't realized it was set in China though. Just one more reason to read it :)
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Date: 4/15/12 06:47 am (UTC)I've seen Bujold's other books, but the only ones I've read are the Vorkosigan Saga. Considering what an amazing writer she is, there's really no good reason for me not to have read the rest of her backlist. Chalion does look interesting... but the Sharing Knife is set in Ohio (!), as you say, so that one's definitely going on the TBR list first. [edit: a place like Ohio, obviously. Not actually Ohio. Although that would be kind of cool, too... a sort of alternate-reality fantasy, maybe? hmm...]
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Date: 4/15/12 06:53 am (UTC)(Doesn't stop me from envisioning Gen as Jude Law in my head, of course. But that's different...)
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Date: 4/15/12 07:02 am (UTC)Well, that's only reasonable! Though I do personally imagine Gen as being more of a slender Mario Lopez, because I watched way too much Saved by the Bell as an innocent child, and it has permanently warped me.
Another thing MWT doesn't do and another reason I love QT.
Yes! Even when Helen worries about being plain, she actually has a believable reason to do it, because of her poor smashed nose.
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Date: 4/15/12 07:10 am (UTC)I would be all over alternate-reality fantasy set in real Ohio. Urban fantasy set in Ohio, even, though . . . I dunno. Something seems not quite right about werewolves of Cleveland.
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Date: 4/15/12 07:48 am (UTC)I don't think characters need to be super ugly (because that's also unrealistic), but to be believable, a world needs a range from average looking characters to exceptionally attractive characters. The only characters that Megan describes as being exceptionally beautiful are Irene and Legarus the Awesomely Beautiful, of course; and their looks are only mentioned because they're important to their character.
Don't worry, I'm guilty of picturing Gen as Craig Horner (http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=craig%20horner&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi). XD Enough said...
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Date: 4/15/12 08:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 4/15/12 08:17 am (UTC)That said, in such worls, precisely because the gender roles are so rigidly divided, I find it even harder to accept that a girl would imitate such things as the gait, mannerisms, vocabulary etc. of an average boy than I do to accept that they could fool the eye on first appearances. If you've spent your entire childhood being taught how a lady moves, sits, holds a cup, eats, looks at men etc. etc., it must be very hard to not to act that way instinctively. Lower down the social scale, I expect it would come easier, but a princess or a lady...?
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Date: 4/15/12 08:25 am (UTC)Dark Lords! I love Dark Lords for their comedy value (and have written several short stories (http://www.rhymer.org.uk/misc/lord/lord.html) laughing about them) but as serious baddies...? Why do they want to destroy the world? Why do they live in hideous pointy citadels in ravaged wastes, rather than in comfy mansions in pleasant sun-kissed meadows? Why don't they have competent, pretty minions? Why do their citadels never have safety rails? Why are there no moral shades of grey in their worlds?
Prophecies - more specifically, prophecies that become a To-Do list for the hero, and he works his way through each line and deliberately does what the prophecy tells him, like someone following a recipe for chocolate cake.
Wise old mentors who speak in riddles, only tell the hero a quarter of what he really needs to know, and then snuff it half way through. I suspect all wise old mentors of being in league with their local Dark Lord, since I can find no other sensible explanation for their constant witholding of useful facts.
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Date: 4/15/12 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4/15/12 12:41 pm (UTC)http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/humor/evilovl.html