What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

shwetanarayan:

amazonziti:

shwetanarayan:

searchingforknowledge:

amazonziti:

Okay can I just say please how much I would enjoy having a cis female hero who says she does not want children and then DOES NOT CHANGE HER MIND

Kristin Cashore is the only author I can think of who’s done this and like

There is NOTHING WRONG with being a woman who wants children. And there is NOTHING WRONG with being a woman who thought she didn’t want children and then changes her mind. But I am SO DEEPLY SICK of female characters whose change in desire to procreate is the ultimate signifier of their emotional growth or the final point towards which their character arc was aiming all along

Because there is also NOTHING WRONG with being a woman who doesn’t fucking want kids

fucking. BOLDED

(Spoilers about a Cashore book in this, sorry)

And while I love what Kristen Cashore does with this (and with/to every other tired fantasy cliche!), she still gives us a heroine who loves kids and is heartbroken about the choice not to have them.  Which is a perfectly valid story!  But we need other stories too.  We need heroines who just don’t frickin like kids, we need heroines who have too much else to do, we need heroines who don’t think they’d be good mothers and are FINE WITH THAT and don’t get a stand-in stepchild, we need heroines who don’t see how putting their bodies through that much trauma would be the best thing they could do, we need all of them.  And not just mommies, future mommies, and wish-they-were mommies.

I say this as a wish-they-were-mommy who was in tears reading Fire.

Actually Kristin Cashore does BOTH. Fire makes the choice not to have children and is really super-duper sad about it — she makes the choice because to her it’s the only right, practical one, not because she doesn’t like the idea of having children. But Katsa, in Graceling and Bitterblue, wants NO KIDS and has ZERO regrets. She doesn’t want to be a mother, she doesn’t want to be that responsible for another human being, she wants absolute control over what happens to her body, and she’s NOT SORRY.

I hadn’t been sure about Katsa, thanks for pointing this out.  Read Graceling a very long time ago and in Bitterblue it doesn’t actually say why Katsa doesn’t want kids, just that she doesn’t.

(relatedly, I also want to note how much I love the fact that Cashore’s heroines get to not only figure out what works for them in relationships, but also what doesn’t work, and to *end* them; and not wanting to give their own lives up for a relationship IS A VALID CHOICE)

Still though is Cashore the only person doing this?  She’s … hours later, still the only one I’m thinking of.

Absolutely this: we need more female characters who just don’t want kids and are fine with it. Though it further irritates me that the genre most prone to having childless female heroines - UF - also tends to be similarly rife with Broken Birds who only shy away from men/family/children because they’re emotionally damaged, and whose journey towards stability inevitably tries to ‘fix’ that aspect of their personalities as well. And it’s like, look: I have no issue with the idea of women with fucked up histories not wanting to have kids or settle down - that makes sense. I do, however, take issue with the fact that possession of a fucked up history is seemingly the only valid reason in genre fiction for women not wanting partners and kids, as though only a specific type of brokenness can logically account for ladies not wanting families, and that suddenly changing their minds must therefore be a sign of healing.

Also: it really pisses me off that motherhood is inevitably taken as a narrative endpoint in genre - as though you cannot possibly follow a female protagonist after she’s had a kid, you can’t watch her being both a mother and a hero, or if you do, it’s always a struggle, always some difficult commentary on being a single parent or else rife with sexist implications about how fathers are sort of redundant when mothers do all the work or the perils of trying to be a superwoman. Or else there’s always a timeskip: we see her pregnant, we see the birth, and then she magically vanishes or becomes a background character until the kid is grown up enough to get their own adorable dialogue. As much as I love Tamora Pierce, for instance - which is a lot - this happens with a number of her heroines (Alanna, Daine, Beka, Aly): their books end when they have kids or get married, and though we see those women again as mothers, it’s always as background figures in the stories of other heroines, and not as protagonists. 

(Source: amazonpoodle, via shwetanarayan)

  1. menntun reblogged this from amazonpoodle
  2. domestic-lowlife-blog reblogged this from fozmeadows
  3. crossedwires reblogged this from kateelliottsff and added:
    Kate Shugak, whom I love, though her writer is um, problematic, and the books tend to be very white-gazey. But Kate....
  4. spokenletterset-blog-blog reblogged this from shwetanarayan
  5. kateelliottsff reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    N.K. Jemisin’s Yeine from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Also Sunandi from her Dreamblood series. And now that I think...
  6. fozmeadows reblogged this from kateelliottsff and added:
    Nyx from Kameron Hurley’s God’s War sells her womb in the opening paragraphs, and talks about never wanting kids; it’s...
  7. dukenarrativium reblogged this from fozmeadows
  8. thislizard reblogged this from shwetanarayan and added:
    The examples I can think of are all just women who, without comment, do not have children, like Katherine from Privilege...
  9. navigatorsanddemons reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    I’ve never run into this particular trend, but I read science fiction or high-fantasy. I write science fiction and urban...
  10. shwetanarayan reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    I have other problems with Pierce, like, the racefail (though I get she’s working on it and the later books are more…...