Female Characters

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Just to cover the bases:

Yes, men can write women. Some men can do it really well. But over the course of history, women in fiction have been rather lacking, both in depth and in characterization. The truth is we live in a society loaded with biases and unspoken rules about what can and cannot be feminine and the value of traditionally feminine traits in the larger picture. Both men and women have been raised with these cultural ideals that can make it rather stifling to come up with a compelling female character. It's something everyone needs to work on and that doesn't make any of us bad people, nor does it mean you've been writing women the wrong way. It just means we can do better if put in the effort to do so.

As for how much it matters to write a decent female character in erotica, I'd say, unless it's a fetish, a flat character is a flat character. She doesn't magically become interesting as a person just because you think she's hot. If you don't want to flesh her out that's a perfectly valid choice on your part. The people who give a shit about this issue probably aren't your target demographic. Which is totally fine and dandy. We can all coexist and chill out with the mutual understanding that this thread is for people who are interested in figuring out how to write more fleshed out female characters. If you don't agree, that's fine, I'll stay out of your threads on the topic if you stay out of mine as there's nothing to gain from arguing on the subject.

I’m not here to tell anyone that they’re bad people. I am of the opinion that evil is not a thing you are, but instead a thing that anyone can do. This is meant to serve as a thread of tips and tricks for the people interested in hearing them.

Let’s get down to business:

It’s okay to be stereotypical with a woman's motives so long as they’re taken seriously.

If a woman's motive in a story is to have a baby she’s likely going to be concerned about more than just the creation of the baby. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense for someone who genuinely wants to be a good mother to have that child with just anyone. Wanting the baby to have a present second parent is a key factor and how qualified the second parent is to raise a child is also something she’d be looking out for. She might also want to make a cute nursery. Adding that extra depth can really make her feel like a real person even if it’s not pushing the envelope in terms of gender roles.

She doesn’t need to break the mold if the writer frames her respectfully. Acknowledging that being a stay-at-home parent, dedicating herself to taking care of a child and keeping the house in order is a full-time job, even if it doesn’t pay the mortgage. Her staying home is quite possibly what’s allowing the breadwinner to pick up those extra hours and put in the work necessary to earn a raise. By asserting that the role in life she has chosen is important to the health of the household, it no longer feels to the reader that the woman's role in the story is to fulfill a misogynistic fantasy. (Obviously in stories where degradation is the point, and misogyny is a fetish, this goes out the window.)

And this level of thought can be applied to any motive. I’m merely using the baby motive as an example.

Imply she has a life outside of the sexual encounter

In stories that jump right into the sex this may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. You can tell a lot about a person's plans based on what they're wearing. So maybe have her dressed like it’s laundry day, or maybe wearing an article of clothing that tells you where she was immediately before an encounter. Maybe she enters the scene in khakis and a blue polo, implying that she works at a bust buy. If she’s a prostitute, she could mention putting the money earned towards a new car. Just about anything counts.

Even if she’s not the main character, her actions should have some impact on the plot

Any alteration in the trajectory of the plot counts. Just make it feel like her actions have some kind of weight in the story. If she could be replaced by another female character without any change to the plot, she’s probably a little flat.

Do research and ask questions!

This goes for everyone. The more educated you are on a topic, the more likely you are to have a solid concept of what you don’t know. It’s the Dunning Kruger effect. An example in my own life as a woman is when my MTF girlfriend sent me a flaccid dick pic and I thought she’d been in some sort of accident. Turns out uncircumcised dicks just look like that when they’re not hard. It’s okay to not know things, and it’s okay to feel like an idiot while you’re learning. Because a lot of the time it’s just shit that you had no way of knowing until you get corrected.

No matter who you are or what you’re writing about, there’s going to be some detail that you just don’t know about. So ask for help. Don’t be afraid to get the opinion of someone who would have personal experience with the subject at hand. Just be careful about who you ask and be sure to get consent from the person you're asking. A simple “Hey, can I ask you questions about (insert topic here)?” is more than enough.

If you’re unsure where to start, find yourself a female beta reader and ask her what she thinks of the female lead.

If you have any other tricks or suggestions feel free to add them to the thread!

All I ask is that we be mindful. I'd like this thread to consist of people saying "try this" so if you have a tip that's more of a "Don't do this thing" maybe hold onto that thought for a different thread. I want to keep this topic approachable to those who might not be ready to hear that they've done something wrong.

 

[pumpkindice]

I have a really dumb question that I've always wanted to ask, but, why doesn't a topic like this ever discuss the sociological aspect of male and female characters? It's a well-established thing in screen-writing, as an example, but also literature in general, that the male characters work in more situations than female ones do, and that gender is not something that's simply switchable all of the time.

Society, in general, has a lot less patience with violence towards women than it does with violence towards men. In a recent chapter of my current on-going novel, I had a scene where a woman was raped and murdered. I tried my best to shelter the language I used to describe it, I set the plot point in the distant past from the story's present, didn't describe what had happened to the woman, and made it clear that the man involved was basically a super-villain and also a liar. Still, I knew it was a risk.

The issue is that if you want your characters to have an arc, and I assume that you do, you need to be able to beat them down, to some degree, till they reach their lowest point before building them back up. An arc implies a change, and the more radical the change, the stronger the arc is. If the character is a man, for example, you can cut off his arm, then cut off his other arm, and both of his legs, have him suffer severe burns across his entire body, and have his lungs be so badly damaged that he cannot breathe without the help of a machine for the rest of his life, and you do all of that, and you wind up with. . . amongst the most iconic characters in the history of cinema. I try to picture to myself a woman undergoing that kind of injury, pain, and sheer brutalization, and I don't think it would work. I think society would be offended.

I think that's part of what pushes into the Mary Sue problem: I think sometimes, you're wary of those social conditions when you write, and so, your female characters become a Mary Sue just because of the limits you impose on them. In this world, we all want our stories to be read and enjoyed, and pain and harm coming to female characters is hard for a lot of people to stomach, and often, a Mary Sue is the logical end result. Without pain, suffering and some level of harm, it's hard to form a cohesive character arc and it's hard to make your character sympathetic and relatable.

Those are just my own struggles, and I'd be very interested in how people have managed to strike the balance.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Well written characters are well written characters, regardless of gender. Poorly written characters are poorly written characters, regardless of gender.

Solution: write well written characters, regardless of gender.

I'm male, but many readers have thought I was a woman, because of my female/non-male characters. So how does that work, in this paradigm?

I don't see the dilemma, personally. Good writing is good writing - write thoughtfully about all of your characters, and the issue doesn't arise.

Some writers apply stereotypes about men, too. An equally bad idea, yet we see it often, especially on Hyde Park Corner.

 

[Lady2020]

"bust buy" is a spelling error, right? Could be an interesting plot on that. I like developed characters in stories. I kind of wish when it comes to role-playing, there weren't so much wam bam, but that's an entirely different issue. Great points.

 

[Lovecraft_Lore]

Well written characters are well written characters, regardless of gender. Poorly written characters are poorly written characters, regardless of gender.

Solution: write well written characters, regardless of gender.

I'm male, but many readers have thought I was a woman, because of my female/non-male characters. So how does that work, in this paradigm?

I don't see the dilemma, personally. Good writing is good writing - write thoughtfully about all of your characters, and the issue doesn't arise.

Some writers apply stereotypes about men, too. An equally bad idea, yet we see it often, especially on Hyde Park Corner.

I totally assumed electricblue66 was the woman in his pic.

​

I think that is a problem in movies and also with stories on Literotica when it comes to female characters. The reader is told her measurements, her first name, and a sad story. The sad story is almost always either miscarriage, a husband dead from cancer or car crash, or rape. That is how the character is defined, that is her one motive. She is not a well rounded character let alone a smart, accomplished women. Instead she is just sort of a warm place for the male character to put his penis after he fixes everything or saves the day.

This is why a whole generation of women like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is the protagonist doing the saving. She stops the bad guys, saves the day, is clearly the protagonist of the story, not a girlfriend character just there to serve the main hero. She dates, like fashion, but also does violence such as hunting and killing vampires on her own or with others who are clearly there to back her up.

​

​

 

[pumpkindice]

Personally, I think that accepted wisdom is wisdom promoted by men who don’t like seeing smart, accomplished women as protagonists, but that’s another discussion.

So, in your example, I’d argue that the real issue is not that violence against female characters is less acceptable, but rather that women are tired of rape being used as the sole means of encouraging change and growth in a female character. I’d also argue that violence against women is often used as a motivation for men (I must avenge my woman type stuff).
So, I’d ask this: are you defaulting to rape as the only type of violence against a woman? Do you use rape against your male characters? I’d also ask you to consider that there’s a difference between mindless violence and violence that occurs as part of the story. Or, to put it another way, is the violence really a part of the story, or is it just torture porn?

In my own case, the reason I wrote in the rape mention (it wasn't a "scene", I didn't describe it) and the murder mention was really two-fold:

-The reason for the rape mention was that the villain of the story wanted a woman, was turned down, took what he wanted anyway, and that this led him down a dark road that dominated the rest of his life. He did it because he could, and felt he had a right to, and it wasn't the act that changed the course of his life (he had no remorse for what he did), it was the fact that he got caught and went to prison that altered his life. He let go of his feelings for that woman, but later murdered her, not because he wanted revenge, but because he wanted to show other people he meant business. I realize this is really close to what we call "fridging" from the fan-dome of super-hero comics. I tried, for days, to find another way to present this, but, I eventually went with it because it was the most direct and powerful way I could convey the story. In my own case, the woman coming to harm wasn't a way of advancing the male character's plot, rather, it was a way to demonstrate the evil of the story's villain.

I also don't think the accepted wisdom is promoted just because men don't like seeing smart, accomplished women as protagonists, I think it's promoted because it's absolutely true. The field of sociology and psychology have mountains of evidence that human beings are much, much more uncomfortable by violence directed towards women than towards men. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes perfect sense, imagine a story where a woman was depicted as a dumb, completely clueless individual who had bad things happen to her all the time because of her own stupidity. In popular culture, a story with a woman who is wired that way is usually allowed to escape the consequences of her bad decisions, but a similarly situated man is not.

Or, let it not be about that kind of thing at all, instead, go back to the example I gave above:

"If the character is a man, for example, you can cut off his arm, then cut off his other arm, and both of his legs, have him suffer severe burns across his entire body, and have his lungs be so badly damaged that he cannot breathe without the help of a machine for the rest of his life, and you do all of that, and you wind up with. . . amongst the most iconic characters in the history of cinema. "

Could you do that to a woman? Could a woman really ever be Anakin Skywalker? The answer is: of course you could, but audiences are fine with it when it happens to a man, audiences would not be so fine with it if it was Rey Palpatine who went through that ringer. Anakin was completely deformed, Luke got his hand cut off, Rey suffered. . . no injuries of any consequence. That's the reason why I find the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy compelling, but the sequel trilogy boring and irrelevant. A plot needs stakes, and it needs a character arc, and it needs to have it's hero overcome something, and the more powerful and compelling the antagonist, the better the hero's character arc, or, in the case of Anakin, succumb completely to all of the challenges and dangers in his pathway and have the story come out as a tragedy.

That's not to say that there aren't great stories featuring female protagonists that have been absolutely wonderfully done. As another commentor said on this thread, I'm a massive Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and consider that to be one of the best shows ever made. There absolutely should be more stories with a female protagonist, but I also understand why there aren't: they are harder to write, because society constrains the bad things that you can depict happening to a female protagonist. A simple google search will turn up tons of scientific evidence that this is the case. It's one of the reasons why, in my view, fridging is so despicable but why it was also so common: showing the villain doing harm to a hero's love interest was a powerful, and very quick and easy, way to build audience sympathy for the hero and build audience antipathy towards the villain. Human beings respond to that, on a deep level, whereas a female villain murdering, chopping up and putting putting the female protagonist's boyfriend into a refrigerator (hence "fridging" or "women in refridgerators", which was actually done in an old Green Lantern comic, and became a hobby meme) just doesn't carry the same weight.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Without pain, suffering and some level of harm, it's hard to form a cohesive character arc and it's hard to make your character sympathetic and relatable.

Relatable to who?

Sometime a story trusts it's readers to pay attention to the characters. Just because an arc is more obvious in the case of violence doesn't mean it's better.

Outside of the action genre, violence as a means of kicking off a character arc is actually really uncommon. I'd say one of my favorite character arcs in history is from Mean Girls. Which actually has the main character change her style of dress and personality to fit in with a clique, only to recognize the monster she's become later.


Chick Flicks do it all the time. And they're all very compelling stories, especially to their target audience.
If you really wanna dig in and do some critical analysis to see what I mean I recommend watching:

The Duff
Legally Blonde (This one is super campy and cringe but it's got a solid character arc)
Clueless

And if you don't want to sit through a bunch of chick flicks because they're too girly for you:

Howls Moving Castle (Keep an eye on Sophie and the Witch)
Queens Gambit (Beth and Her adoptive mother)
The Tick (2017) (Dot and Ms Lint are solid examples of side characters with their own arcs)

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

"bust buy" is a spelling error, right?

It is. OMG hahah!

 

[pumpkindice]

Relatable to who?

Sometime a story trusts it's readers to pay attention to the characters. Just because an arc is more obvious in the case of violence doesn't mean it's better.

Outside of the action genre, violence as a means of kicking off a character arc is actually really uncommon. I'd say one of my favorite character arcs in history is from Mean Girls. Which actually has the main character change her style of dress and personality to fit in with a clique, only to recognize the monster she's become later.


Chick Flicks do it all the time. And they're all very compelling stories, especially to their target audience.
If you really wanna dig in and do some critical analysis to see what I mean I recommend watching:

The Duff
Legally Blonde (This one is super campy and cringe but it's got a solid character arc)
Clueless

And if you don't want to sit through a bunch of chick flicks because they're too girly for you:

Howls Moving Castle (Keep an eye on Sophie and the Witch)
Queens Gambit (Beth and Her adoptive mother)
The Tick (2017) (Dot and Ms Lint are solid examples of side characters with their own arcs)

I absolutely LOVE Legally Blonde and Clueless! Two of my all-time favorite films, they were both great!

I heard about Queen's Gambit when it was coming out, and everyone seemed to like it, but I haven't gotten around to watching it yet.

I unfortunately haven't seen the other three on your list, but will be sure to check them out.

Clueless, in a very real way, is exactly what I'm talking about. Cher, in the movie, is a busy body who busies herself with everybody. She's depicted as, well, clueless, for lack of a better word. It is a striking interpretation of the Jane Austen novel, Emma, which I also read, and liked. However, the point is that despite Cher's cluelessness, nothing really bad ever happens to her in the film's runtime.

That's not to say that something bad has to happen to the main character in order to raise the stakes and drive a plot. The most important thing, from a character arc standpoint, is that the main character grows and changes throughout the narrative, or, that the main character stays the same, but changes everyone else in the story through their actions. Either way, an arc happens through change, and Cher certainly has an excellent arc.

The point is that because her actually paying any kind of a high price for her mistakes is off the table (like an Anakin Skywalker did) the number of possible narratives you can tell with a character like Cher are far more limited than those you can tell with a character like the Dred Pirate Westley. Could you imagine Cher being strapped up to the machine in the pit of despair?

That's not to say that she should be, of course, or that it makes any sense for her story that she would be, but Cher's story is of a person who doesn't really know the ugly side of life, if that makes sense. That's sort of the point: if society won't let a woman play Anakin Skywalker, then that, of necessity, limits the kind of stories you can tell with a female protagonist.

Not saying that's right, or that more of an effort shouldn't be made, just saying it's a restriction that is not the author's to change.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Without pain, suffering and some level of harm, it's hard to form a cohesive character arc and it's hard to make your character sympathetic and relatable.

Why do you need pain and suffering to make a character relatable? As another comment says, relatable to who? But that's an aside.

That's a pretty bleak world view, especially when it comes to erotica which, let's face it, is mostly a form of escapism, I'd have thought.

This was brought home to me with a comment from a reader who said my stories gave her a "safe haven," a place of escape from her everyday world, which she intimated was stressful, fearful, hard. The point being, my stories, being joyful, positive, gave her a safe place to escape for a short while from her life; and she expressedly didn't want a story with pain and suffering. She had enough of her own.

I wrote characters she wanted to identify with, and did, for those few hours it took her to read my stories. Positive, confident women, a kind man, a bit of seduction, some pleasure.

You don't always need angst and drama to make a good story. Sometimes, you just need an erotic mood, and the job is done just fine.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Could you do that to a woman? Could a woman really ever be Anakin Skywalker? The answer is: of course you could, but audiences are fine with it when it happens to a man, audiences would not be so fine with it if it was Rey Palpatine who went through that ringer. Anakin was completely deformed, Luke got his hand cut off, Rey suffered. . . no injuries of any consequence. That's the reason why I find the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy compelling, but the sequel trilogy boring and irrelevant. A plot needs stakes, and it needs a character arc, and it needs to have it's hero overcome something, and the more powerful and compelling the antagonist, the better the hero's character arc, or, in the case of Anakin, succumb completely to all of the challenges and dangers in his pathway and have the story come out as a tragedy.

After watching the Last Jedi, I remember having a conversation with my sister about the issues I had with it. One of the main one's is that, at the end of Empire Stikes Back, Luke is completely destroyed both physically (his hand cut off) and mentally (everything he's been told by the people he trusts is a lie) and is left for dead when he refused to join Vader. By comparison, the worst thing that happens to Rey is that neither men in her life listen to her. I was mostly trying to wind my sister up with that comment, but there's a certain truth to it.

 

[MaiaEmpire]

I think that, on the whole scope of human experience, there are a few experiences that are unique to cis men/women and trans men/women. Something like pregnancy; that's primarily a cis female experience and very rarely trans men, though even those two groups would experience it differently. But the vast majority of experiences are universal - everyone knows what it is like to fail and succeed, to fall in and out of love, to eat a really good meal. That tells me that if you're writing a character, just remember that at the end of the day we all want the same thing, we just have different ways of going about it. If you set off to, say, make a Mary Sue character for some sort of agenda you have, it will always read false by the audience. Just ground the characters, give them obstacles, and make them work for the goal. If it makes sense to assign them a gender based on the scenario, do it.

I don't know if it's related, but it makes me think of something I read once. Girls grow up, generally, with supportive friends who always try to praise and support them, and learn to compliment in return and be open emotionally. As a result are shocked when someone directly insults them. Boys grow up, generally, with friends who tease and make fun of them, and learn to put up with it and hide their emotions. As a result, they are shocked when someone compliments them. I don't know if this is true, but it makes me feel sad for men in general.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I have a really dumb question that I've always wanted to ask, but, why doesn't a topic like this ever discuss the sociological aspect of male and female characters? It's a well-established thing in screen-writing, as an example, but also literature in general, that the male characters work in more situations than female ones do, and that gender is not something that's simply switchable all of the time.

There are slightly more women than men in the world, so it seems like IRL there must be plenty of situations where female "characters" fit. If writers can't find roles for female characters in fiction, that's on the writers and their lack of imagination.

Yes, in a story about the Battle of the Somme, or Cold War fighter pilots, or 1980s Wall Street traders, or the World Mustache-Growing Championships or whatever, it might be hard to find a place for a female character. But those aren't the only kinds of stories we're allowed to tell.

Fantasy authors will spend hundreds of hours coming up for explanations of how dragons manage to fly in defiance of all RL physics, and then explain that women can't be warriors in their setting because something something upper body strength. That is a choice that reflects their priorities, not how it has to be.

Society, in general, has a lot less patience with violence towards women than it does with violence towards men. In a recent chapter of my current on-going novel, I had a scene where a woman was raped and murdered. I tried my best to shelter the language I used to describe it, I set the plot point in the distant past from the story's present, didn't describe what had happened to the woman, and made it clear that the man involved was basically a super-villain and also a liar. Still, I knew it was a risk.

The issue is that if you want your characters to have an arc, and I assume that you do, you need to be able to beat them down, to some degree, till they reach their lowest point before building them back up. An arc implies a change, and the more radical the change, the stronger the arc is. If the character is a man, for example, you can cut off his arm, then cut off his other arm, and both of his legs, have him suffer severe burns across his entire body, and have his lungs be so badly damaged that he cannot breathe without the help of a machine for the rest of his life, and you do all of that, and you wind up with. . . amongst the most iconic characters in the history of cinema.

That's not how it happened, though.

Vader was an icon before that backstory or his injuries were revealed. All that Episode 4 gives us is the full helmet (like most of his minions, and not a very weird choice in a space setting), the heavy breathing (no detail on why), and an unreliable source describing him as "more machine than man" with no detail on what that means or why he got to be that way. He became famous because he looked impressive in black and had some great lines; all that character arc was inserted in backstory later.

I try to picture to myself a woman undergoing that kind of injury, pain, and sheer brutalization, and I don't think it would work. I think society would be offended.

...and yet movies like Unforgiven, Silence of the Lambs, The Bone Collector, and Seven have been tremendously successful. In fact, women get brutalised in fiction so often that TVTropes has three pages on the topic.

What doesn't happen so often is women getting brutalised as a setup for stories about those women. Mostly it's "fridging" where a woman gets tortured and/or killed as a way to motivate a male protagonist to revenge. But that, again, is a choice that writers make.

The broader issue, though, is that even if you believe traumatising characters is the only way to make them interesting (which I don't buy), there are plenty of ways to do that which don't depend on violence.

I think that's part of what pushes into the Mary Sue problem: I think sometimes, you're wary of those social conditions when you write, and so, your female characters become a Mary Sue just because of the limits you impose on them. In this world, we all want our stories to be read and enjoyed, and pain and harm coming to female characters is hard for a lot of people to stomach, and often, a Mary Sue is the logical end result. Without pain, suffering and some level of harm, it's hard to form a cohesive character arc and it's hard to make your character sympathetic and relatable.

I really haven't found this to be the case. I've read plenty of stories which managed to make female characters sympathetic and relatable without giving them the ol' Anakin treatment. I guess the question is: "relatable to whom?"

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

I absolutely LOVE Legally Blonde and Clueless! Two of my all-time favorite films, they were both great!

I heard about Queen's Gambit when it was coming out, and everyone seemed to like it, but I haven't gotten around to watching it yet.

I unfortunately haven't seen the other three on your list, but will be sure to check them out.

Clueless, in a very real way, is exactly what I'm talking about. Cher, in the movie, is a busy body who busies herself with everybody. She's depicted as, well, clueless, for lack of a better word. It is a striking interpretation of the Jane Austen novel, Emma, which I also read, and liked. However, the point is that despite Cher's cluelessness, nothing really bad ever happens to her in the film's runtime.

That's not to say that something bad has to happen to the main character in order to raise the stakes and drive a plot. The most important thing, from a character arc standpoint, is that the main character grows and changes throughout the narrative, or, that the main character stays the same, but changes everyone else in the story through their actions. Either way, an arc happens through change, and Cher certainly has an excellent arc.

The point is that because her actually paying any kind of a high price for her mistakes is off the table (like an Anakin Skywalker did) the number of possible narratives you can tell with a character like Cher are far more limited than those you can tell with a character like the Dred Pirate Westley. Could you imagine Cher being strapped up to the machine in the pit of despair?

That's not to say that she should be, of course, or that it makes any sense for her story that she would be, but Cher's story is of a person who doesn't really know the ugly side of life, if that makes sense. That's sort of the point: if society won't let a woman play Anakin Skywalker, then that, of necessity, limits the kind of stories you can tell with a female protagonist.

Not saying that's right, or that more of an effort shouldn't be made, just saying it's a restriction that is not the author's to change.

If you want horrible shit done to women with a narrative purpose,
Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood (Edwards teacher, Nina, Lust, )
Nausica Valley of The Wind (If I remember the plot correctly)
Rogue One
Sukeban Deka (It's just girl gangs who beat the shit out of eachother.)

My list is short but notably I'm not a fan of action as a genre. Fight scenes are boring. I could probably pester my dad for a bunch more.

I'd argue that Deadpool could have gone either way as his origin story is Cancer and his major internal struggle is about his appearance. Though audiences would probably find a female protagonist that acts like Wade Wilson to be a bit mean.

The "He's an asshole but he's fun to watch" Archetype doesn't seem to have a female equivalent even though I'd personally watch the shit out of that.... I should write that.

 

[pumpkindice]

I don't know if it's related, but it makes me think of something I read once. Girls grow up, generally, with supportive friends who always try to praise and support them, and learn to compliment in return and be open emotionally. As a result are shocked when someone directly insults them. Boys grow up, generally, with friends who tease and make fun of them, and learn to put up with it and hide their emotions. As a result, they are shocked when someone compliments them. I don't know if this is true, but it makes me feel sad for men in general.

I like to think of myself as someone who grew up in an extremely supportive family with extremely supportive friends, however, that being said, the only time in my life where I can remember myself as not knowing what to say was when a girl I knew told me "You're really funny". Take from that what you will, it's just one data point.

Why do you need pain and suffering to make a character relatable? As another comment says, relatable to who? But that's an aside.

That's a pretty bleak world view, especially when it comes to erotica which, let's face it, is mostly a form of escapism, I'd have thought.

This was brought home to me with a comment from a reader who said my stories gave her a "safe haven," a place of escape from her everyday world, which she intimated was stressful, fearful, hard.

Some stories require it, most do not. However, a question I hinted at above is really my point: you can cast a man to play the role of Cher in the movie Clueless, and, of course, you'd need to re-write the film, but you could do basically the same film, for the most part, and it would probably work fine. You couldn't really cast a woman to play Anakin in the prequel trilogy, it doesn't work.

As far as relatable to whom, relatability isn't really the question here, the question is about what human beings will tolerate, sociologically and psychologically. There is a long history of scientific literature that indicates mainstream audiences won't tolerate violence directed towards a female protagonist. It is unrelatable not because it doesn't jive with a lot of people's own lived experiences, but because audiences find such stories to be queasy.

It's not an issue when writing erotica, or other forms of escapist entertainment, where such considerations often don't matter, but it does imply that it can be a problem in other genres. I read a lot of comic books, in addition to other forms of literature, and it's absolutely an issue with female super-heroines.

 

[pumpkindice]

If you want horrible shit done to women with a narrative purpose,
Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood (Edwards teacher, Nina, Lust, )
Nausica Valley of The Wind (If I remember the plot correctly)
Rogue One
Sukeban Deka (It's just girl gangs who beat the shit out of eachother.)

My list is short but notably I'm not a fan of action as a genre. Fight scenes are boring. I could probably pester my dad for a bunch more.

I'd argue that Deadpool could have gone either way as his origin story is Cancer and his major internal struggle is about his appearance. Though audiences would probably find a female protagonist that acts like Wade Wilson to be a bit mean.

The "He's an asshole but he's fun to watch" Archetype doesn't seem to have a female equivalent even though I'd personally watch the shit out of that.... I should write that.

I'm a big fan of Rogue One: A star Wars story. I consider it to be the only one of the 5 Disney SW movies that I think of as really good, so it's the only Disney SW film I've watched more than once. I think I've watched it about 12 times, between the theatre and Netflix, and Rogue One is decidedly not what I'm talking about. Jyn Erso dies at the end of the film, of course, and she's involved in several action scenes too, but the only thing truly awful that happens to her is that she dies, and she's killed not by being shot, or any one of a number of ways, but she's killed by the explosion caused by the death star laser destroying a world.

The point was never that bad things don't happen to female protagonists in media, but that there is a line that cannot be crossed due to the audiences' innate revulsion to them, and that this same revulsion doesn't exist for men. There are, therefore, simply more kinds of stories you can tell with a male protagonist. Most of the time, and in just about every single instance that one could think of, it doesn't matter whether the story has a male or a female protagonist, a little re-writing is all that's needed to make the story work.

However, the point really is a woman can't be Anakin Skywalker, and specifically, a woman can't be Anakin Skywalker as played by Hayden Chistienson, that is where the line is. It's not that writers don't want to write women into that role, it's that audiences won't accept it if you do. That's the reason why, for example, the female led action film, a genre I'm a huge fan of, is so hard to get right; it's tough to find the Sarah Connor line, the line where a female protagonist endures an acceptable amount of pain and suffering to really flesh out her character arc, but where she doesn't step over the line of discomfort for the general audience.

I'm also not saying that a protagonist has to endure pain and suffering to create a story arc either, I'm just saying that's one way to do it, and lot of stories, in certain genres, rely on that tactic.

 

[Bramblethorn]

In my own case, the reason I wrote in the rape mention (it wasn't a "scene", I didn't describe it) and the murder mention was really two-fold:

-The reason for the rape mention was that the villain of the story wanted a woman, was turned down, took what he wanted anyway, and that this led him down a dark road that dominated the rest of his life. He did it because he could, and felt he had a right to, and it wasn't the act that changed the course of his life (he had no remorse for what he did), it was the fact that he got caught and went to prison that altered his life. He let go of his feelings for that woman, but later murdered her, not because he wanted revenge, but because he wanted to show other people he meant business. I realize this is really close to what we call "fridging" from the fan-dome of super-hero comics. I tried, for days, to find another way to present this, but, I eventually went with it because it was the most direct and powerful way I could convey the story. In my own case, the woman coming to harm wasn't a way of advancing the male character's plot, rather, it was a way to demonstrate the evil of the story's villain.

This is still fridging, though. It's brutalising a female character for reasons that have more to do with a male character's story arc than with her own.

I also don't think the accepted wisdom is promoted just because men don't like seeing smart, accomplished women as protagonists, I think it's promoted because it's absolutely true. The field of sociology and psychology have mountains of evidence that human beings are much, much more uncomfortable by violence directed towards women than towards men.

Stop me if you've heard this punchline before: "Nothing, you've already told her twice."

I grew up hearing "jokes" about domestic violence against women all the time. I'm old enough to remember when it was a legal principle that a man couldn't be found guilty of raping his wife, because as husband he had a right to her body. Pop culture has plenty of stories like Carmen that romanticise the idea of a man murdering a woman for saying no to him. Throughout most of history there's been plenty of cultural tolerance for violence against women (especially certain kinds of violence, and certain kinds of women). We could argue about whether there's more tolerance for one than for the other, but there's plenty of tolerance for both.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes perfect sense, imagine a story where a woman was depicted as a dumb, completely clueless individual who had bad things happen to her all the time because of her own stupidity. In popular culture, a story with a woman who is wired that way is usually allowed to escape the consequences of her bad decisions, but a similarly situated man is not.

Allow me to introduce one of the most popular fictional characters of the 20th and 21st centuries:



Most episodes of the Simpsons involve Homer doing a bunch of stupid and sometimes selfish things, and ultimately escaping all consequences of his actions.

Or, let it not be about that kind of thing at all, instead, go back to the example I gave above:

"If the character is a man, for example, you can cut off his arm, then cut off his other arm, and both of his legs, have him suffer severe burns across his entire body, and have his lungs be so badly damaged that he cannot breathe without the help of a machine for the rest of his life, and you do all of that, and you wind up with. . . amongst the most iconic characters in the history of cinema. "

Could you do that to a woman? Could a woman really ever be Anakin Skywalker? The answer is: of course you could, but audiences are fine with it when it happens to a man, audiences would not be so fine with it if it was Rey Palpatine who went through that ringer. Anakin was completely deformed, Luke got his hand cut off, Rey suffered. . . no injuries of any consequence. That's the reason why I find the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy compelling, but the sequel trilogy boring and irrelevant. A plot needs stakes, and it needs a character arc, and it needs to have it's hero overcome something, and the more powerful and compelling the antagonist, the better the hero's character arc, or, in the case of Anakin, succumb completely to all of the challenges and dangers in his pathway and have the story come out as a tragedy.

Barbara Gordon. Harley Quinn. Imperator Furiosa.

 

[Mal_Bey]

Could you do that to a woman? Could a woman really ever be Anakin Skywalker? The answer is: of course you could, but audiences are fine with it when it happens to a man, audiences would not be so fine with it if it was Rey Palpatine who went through that ringer. Anakin was completely deformed, Luke got his hand cut off, Rey suffered. . . no injuries of any consequence. That's the reason why I find the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy compelling, but the sequel trilogy boring and irrelevant. A plot needs stakes, and it needs a character arc, and it needs to have it's hero overcome something, and the more powerful and compelling the antagonist, the better the hero's character arc, or, in the case of Anakin, succumb completely to all of the challenges and dangers in his pathway and have the story come out as a tragedy.

Pumpkindice, I think you are setting yourself up with a challenge. I will bring up the old call-to-action quote of "Be the change you want to see." In a broad sense, I think the world is ready for such "non-chivalrous" fiction. Not in spite of women's equality, but because if it. If you truely believe in women's equality, you have to believe in the right of your character to have her hand cut off (to keep your Anakin metaphor alive). But, as you point out, there is a lack of that story availible. I would challenge you to filll this market void. Write your metaphorical "Handless Rey" story. Given equal writing ability, i think it can be pulled as well as a handless Anakin story. Of course, you know there will be detractors, but there are detractors to every story. It can be argued "Hansel and Gretel" is an anti-elderly screed ad that anyone on the side of the kids is an Agist Communist. Don't let how others will view your story effect how you write it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm a big fan of Rogue One: A star Wars story. I consider it to be the only one of the 5 Disney SW movies that I think of as really good, so it's the only Disney SW film I've watched more than once. I think I've watched it about 12 times, between the theatre and Netflix, and Rogue One is decidedly not what I'm talking about. Jyn Erso dies at the end of the film, of course, and she's involved in several action scenes too, but the only thing truly awful that happens to her is that she dies, and she's killed not by being shot, or any one of a number of ways, but she's killed by the explosion caused by the death star laser destroying a world.

Say what?

Jyn loses both her parents as a child - mother killed by Imperials, father kidnapped. She escapes only to be raised by an extremist who brings her up as a child soldier. She gets captured by Imperials and interned in a labour camp. Eventually she gets a brief reunion with her father, and then he too is killed.

Do you really not think any of these count as "truly awful"? Can you not understand the possibility of suffering other than physical?

 

[Bramblethorn]

As far as relatable to whom, relatability isn't really the question here, the question is about what human beings will tolerate, sociologically and psychologically. There is a long history of scientific literature that indicates mainstream audiences won't tolerate violence directed towards a female protagonist.

I'm gonna need a cite here. Which "scientific literature" are you referring to?

 

[pumpkindice]

There are slightly more women than men in the world, so it seems like IRL there must be plenty of situations where female "characters" fit. If writers can't find roles for female characters in fiction, that's on the writers and their lack of imagination.

Yes, in a story about the Battle of the Somme, or Cold War fighter pilots, or 1980s Wall Street traders, or the World Mustache-Growing Championships or whatever, it might be hard to find a place for a female character. But those aren't the only kinds of stories we're allowed to tell.

Fantasy authors will spend hundreds of hours coming up for explanations of how dragons manage to fly in defiance of all RL physics, and then explain that women can't be warriors in their setting because something something upper body strength. That is a choice that reflects their priorities, not how it has to be.



That's not how it happened, though.

Vader was an icon before that backstory or his injuries were revealed. All that Episode 4 gives us is the full helmet (like most of his minions, and not a very weird choice in a space setting), the heavy breathing (no detail on why), and an unreliable source describing him as "more machine than man" with no detail on what that means or why he got to be that way. He became famous because he looked impressive in black and had some great lines; all that character arc was inserted in backstory later.



...and yet movies like Unforgiven, Silence of the Lambs, The Bone Collector, and Seven have been tremendously successful. In fact, women get brutalised in fiction so often that TVTropes has three pages on the topic.

What doesn't happen so often is women getting brutalised as a setup for stories about those women. Mostly it's "fridging" where a woman gets tortured and/or killed as a way to motivate a male protagonist to revenge. But that, again, is a choice that writers make.

The broader issue, though, is that even if you believe traumatising characters is the only way to make them interesting (which I don't buy), there are plenty of ways to do that which don't depend on violence.



I really haven't found this to be the case. I've read plenty of stories which managed to make female characters sympathetic and relatable without giving them the ol' Anakin treatment. I guess the question is: "relatable to whom?"

When I was a kid, one of the coolest scenes in the Empire Strikes Back is when you saw Vader, for that brief moment, without his helmet on in his meditation chamber. You saw all the scars and it was at that moment where it sunk in that he'd been through some shit.

The character arc and backstory may well have been inserted later, but that's kind of the point: the Anakin/Vader arc in the prequels is ONE HELL of a character arc. That's why the prequels have aged so well these 15 years or so, the Clone Wars cartoon show helped, but as the years have gone by, people have appreciated just how good Anakin's arc was in the prequels. A young boy, who was a slave until he was 9 years old, and who some absolutely terrible things happen to him and those close to him growing up. That childhood made him extremely possessive of those closest to him, and if you mess with someone he cares about, he will bring holy hell on you. A jedi order that was too inflexible and too busy with it's own problems to properly help him. A wise mentor figure who could have changed the entire thing, tragically killed before he had the chance to really help. A young jedi, in over his head, with no idea how to train an apprentice, taking on the kid. An older man, the villain of the story, who knew exactly how to play upon a young man's quest for security and the safety of those he cares about, and knew exactly how to frame the Jedi as the enemy that was preventing him from accomplishing his goals, and the confirmation bias of the Jedi's actual actions not helping things. His own strength increasing, leading to arrogance and pride, and complete overconfidence in his own abilities. The entire thing creating a toxic cocktail of ambition, greed, power, love, and misunderstandings. That Mace, the Jedi who insulted him by not giving him the rank of master, is the one who has a lightsaber to Palpatine, the man who promised he'd help him save his wife. Anakin makes a split-second decision, what would you have decided? He was the chosen one, the most powerful Jedi ever, who was undone by the deep seated character flaws that someone like that would have.

You are right: women are often brutalized but not for stories about those women, which was my point: if you brutalize a woman, the audience feels hatred for the person doing the brutalizing, making it easy to figure out who the villain is and who the protagonist is. If you brutalize a woman for her own story, that seems to land differently, and it's generally not done. Heck, we pretty much agree that fridging is extremely deplorable, ought not to be done, and is just lazy writing. However, if you fridge a woman, it elicits a reaction from the audience, the reason fridging men isn't a thing is because if you do it, the audience doesn't care enough to make it worthwhile.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Anyway. Enough derailing. Can we focus on writing tips please? This bickering is really unproductive.

 

[pumpkindice]

Say what?

Jyn loses both her parents as a child - mother killed by Imperials, father kidnapped. She escapes only to be raised by an extremist who brings her up as a child soldier. She gets captured by Imperials and interned in a labour camp. Eventually she gets a brief reunion with her father, and then he too is killed.

Do you really not think any of these count as "truly awful"? Can you not understand the possibility of suffering other than physical?

Of course I can, but it's the physical dimension that elicits the reaction from the audience. That's why fridging isn't about inflicting mental trauma on the love interest to move forward the male protagonist's plot, but physical trauma. In a strange way, if it was about mental trauma, it wouldn't land as hard with the audience and wouldn't be used. Fridging is used as a plot device because it's really effective, and easy to implement, which is why it's used so often by lazy writers.

Don't conflate what I believe with what the sociological and psychological evidence is. I'm talking about the physical dimension because that's what makes audiences uncomfortable, and it's what makes audiences uncomfortable that restricts how the story can be told.

 

[pumpkindice]

Anyway. Enough derailing. Can we focus on writing tips please? This bickering is really unproductive.

Agreed. I will leave this topic now, since I can see I'm doing more harm here than good. I apologize to you for that, it wasn't my intent, it just sort of worked out that way. Have a good one!

 

[SimonDoom]

Your thread raises a huge issue that is hard to do justice to.

It's certainly true that many women characters in erotic stories are written in a flat or stereotypical way.

It's an issue that extends to "good" fiction outside the scope of Literotica. For instance, I enjoy the novels of Philip Roth and John Updike, but I think they have women issues. I think their women characters come across as projections of the author's male fantasies or quirks or insecurities rather than as fully authentic real people. It's a big flaw in the novels of both of these authors, whom I like in many ways.

If authors want to write stories that remedy this problem, I think that's great. I support that.

And yet at the same time, many people WANT to read erotic stories based on flat, stereotyped characters, because that's what turns them on.

Some men want to read stories about bimbos with big tits.

Some women want to read stories about controlling assholes with big dicks.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I don't think there's any right or wrong on this issue at Literotica.

I think the right way to frame this issue--which is a legitimate issue--is to steer away from suggesting that others "should" be doing things a certain way as you want them to do them and instead say "Here's what I want to do" and invite supportive and useful commentary about that.

It's a hellaciously complicated subject, because the reality is that so much of our sense of self worth and what we want is tied up in how those we sexually desire perceive us. And I don't know if there's a way out of that.

My basic answer to the initial question is: come up with a motivation for your character, give it verisimilitude (enough facts to give it the appearance of reality), and run with it, whatever it is. In art, a little goes a long way. Not that much is needed.