A weak female character?

Don't worry female characters have a natural weakness: being female!

I think pterry has a some weak female characters...some of the people from MR...the really religious one for example. Magrat is, in many ways, weak. Sure both these characters have strong points, but so do all of pterrys weak male characters. That’s what makes them good characters because they have more than one dimenion. I think Vimes and Granny (Granny more so) have massively weak parts of there characters, but it's that weakness that makes them strong.

I think what Pterry doesn't write is comedic weak female characters. He doesn't write stupid women. Maybe becuas that’s playing to a sterotype, or maybe (and probably) because they don't work as well.

If I was going to write a weak female character I'd give them the same weakness I'd give a male character, stupidity, arrogance, insecurity etc

I suppose you could have someone who's weak minded, easily tempted by trivial delights and always giving up on stuff when it shows the least possibility of being difficult; though it would be hard to do without it looking very funny, like a female Homer Simpson.

A weak character is a passive character; one that does little to affect their own situation, letting others do the work. A strong character is active, working to change their situation for the better.

Weak and strong should not be confused with bad and good characters. A weak character can still be well-rounded and well-imagined. A strong character can be two-dimensional.

I think there's a whole seething, teeming cauldron of gender issues underneath the concept of a "weak female character" versus a strong one.

I know that a male author's ability to write 'realistic' female characters is a fairly common yard stick for his actual worth as an author. The problem is, what is realistic to one person may be utterly unrealistic to another. Take Robert Jordan and his wheel of time serries... someone once complained that all the female characters are virtually identical (and appearantly Jordan himself said they're all based on his wife), but I'd never seen it that way. I found a lot of the Wheel of Time serries had some weaknesses that verged on shoddy writing/conceptualizing, but 'identical female characters' never once occured to me.

I think women just read women characters differently. And not all women will agree on what makes a good character, either!

A staunch verging on militant feminist might view the early magrat as a disgrace, but applaud the early granny at every step of the way. Even when Granny is making an absolute fool of herself in social situations, she is the strongest witch and can beat a wizard at what a wizard does best, so clearly she's a superior 'female character'.

An anti-feminist might find the wizards' house keeper (forget her name) to be the more ideal female character, as she has iron rules of social propriety that don't even approach equality.

Some women I've spoken to about it found Monsterous Regiment to be their favorite novel out of the serries, but I know of at least one self declared feminist who found the novel highly insulting to women in general and specificly women in the military. In that instance, her complaints seemed to be focusing on an entirely different novel than the one I (or anybody else) read, but this probably has more to do with that person's particular issues with women in the military than anything Pratchett actually wrote in his book.

And that's what I think it boils down to for a lot of people... men or women, and with ANY character, male or female.

We project, as the audience, our ambitions, our desires, our wants, fears, and needs. We 'sympathize' with a character most strongly when we 'identify' with a character.

The little kid who wants attention will identify with and dream of being the messiah figure around whom an entire universe may depend. The kid who's socially frustrated and picked on, or even abused, might identify with the villan who wants to destroy everything as a testomony to his power.

An author who is unable to create "weak" female characters, whatever that may mean, is guaranteeing himself a readership base of women who want strong female characters to identify with and aspire to... which would be most women, especially 'of a certain age', simply because there's so few examples of a 'strong female character' that isn't also a complete sex crazed maniac when a stronger male character walks into the scene.

In other situations, one could almost view this as market manipulation, but of course Pratchett started discworld out simply as a Fantasy Parody, and his general 'purpose' as an author has been social satire and commentary, if not outright philosophy.

Anyway, a "weak" character, as has been said already, would be far more static than a strong character, but strong characters can also be static. I'm personally a bit tired of Vimes always coming out on top from more and more grueling physical situations despite the constant ailments of age that are mounting on him. His knees and his general health are not strong enough to keep on like he does, and yet at the end of night watch he's dual-wielding longswords as he rolls nothing but natural 20's through a big mob of thugs.

Despite the fact that this is pushing vimes well out of the realm of plausibility, this is a favorite scene for a lot of male readers, because there's just something so *desierable* about having your hand on TWO fruedian symbols of sexual agression at the same time AND beating up other guys with them. Oh yeah!

Strong characters and Weak characters are secondary in importance to Realistic characters.

Nanny Ogg is, I would say, a supremely realistic character. I've known women like her. I've known few like Granny... only women who want to BE that sort of iron maiden, but there's a common vein that can be found in granny and any number of vinager soaked old prigs out there. Magrat... magrat got reinvented as a character. This happens from time to time, and even teh best of authors do it, but I'd say that magrat fails to be a perfectly 'realistic' character when taken over the course of the serries, yet book by book, she seems quite believable.

Sybil is one who i've never gotten my head around, either she's soppy or she's tougher than oak, and it's never quite clear to me where the balancing line between them is. I think this is because, like vimes, she probably wasn't intended as a long running character, but vimes was easier to flesh out a bit.

Susan is, I think, the worst of pratchett's female characters. She's gone through such extreme metamorphosis since we first saw her, it's only a minor blessing that it's been in the same direction the whole time. Susan in Soul Music was fairly believable... i've known kids of both genders that had that vauge 'contempt for the illogical unwashed masses' attitude. Susan in Hogfather was less believable, but then she has to be taken with a grain of salt, since she's one of the least 'natural' of the characters in a fantasy setting. For most of the book, Susan reads a bit like vimes in many ways. There's an absolutely brilliant moment near the end where we see how human Susan is... during the chase with the Hogfather, as he's being chased by the auditors in wolf form, Susan's desperation makes her, to me, a more human character than we ever quite saw her before, and far more than we'll ever see her again.

Susan in Thief of Time was... well. The less said the better, but I hardly think Discworld was lacking a 'deliberate bitch' character. A neurological obsession with chocolate, however realistic, does not make an utterly horrible character somehow redeemable.

And on that note, what IS it with chocolate? Does it only trigger the endorphine release for women? Cause I'd just rather have the coffee beans and leave off the coating if it's all the same.

So... um... what was the original question?

That's the bunny. thanks CJ

That point about sums up my position. And I've never liked Susan, either, apart from her appearance in "Soul Music". Seeing the whole series, though, and with no particular book in mind, I can imagine how the original question popped up. There seems to be a slight tendency in PTerry's books to let girls rather start out as relatively tough know-it-alls, and boys rather as anti-heroes and partly naive. Especially when its the coming-of-age-category of heroes (aka, the ones starting out young): Tiffany, Conina, Esk, Susan, Annabelle, Ginger.... contra Mort, Carrot, Teppic, Eric, Victor... The background characters, like Agnes, the junior witch covens from Lords and Ladies and Hat full of Sky somehow don't have much weight.

Most male roles mentioned here grow a lot, and that makes them interesting all by themselves. The girls start out smart. If most of them weren't still interesting characters, that might make them shallower.

I didn't mind the chocolate thing in "Thief of Time", mostly because it apllies to me, too, and I thus refuse to see it as stereotypical. Which demonstrates the truth of Garner's theory on how we perceiva characters.

I do intend to get round to answering this thread eventually!

Revive! ...inspired by:
http://www.terrypratchettbooks.org/discworld/witch-books/1230-new-granny-2.html

Sorry if some bits are a bit repititive.

Hm, okay, reviving an unfinished discussion... although I have to admit I am a little bit at a loss here. Basically, I agree to many points already made – that a stereotypically weak character is as bad as a stereotypically strong one, that realistic characters are the most important thing, that in literature, a character with weaknesses is not the same as a weak character.

Mind you, compared to most fantasy literature I know, Pterry’s female characters are, of course, still good.
But I do find this discussion interesting, because in his later books (some of them still being my favourites despite critical points) there is a pattern of women who kind of annoy or slightly dissapoint me, so to say. Well... more women than there used to be, who aren’t strong female characters, but female characters without weaknesses.

I’ve just recently seen an old children’s film, and thought, so that’s one of those stereotypically weak female characters I don’t miss at all – by default more stupid and more helpless than the boys of the same age, always in need of guidance, and very pink-ish.
So, what exactly did I not like about.... hm... the later Susan, Sally from the Watch, Adora Belle? It’s not even that I totally disliked these characters. They were still entertaining, but they all were a let down compared to their male counterparts. Lobsang and Jeremy in Thief of Time read more alive to me than Susan, who I kind of lost when her inner conflicts faded into the background, didn’t transport anymore, and stepped far behind from her extra powers. So, by actually being portrayed stronger as a person, she became to me weaker as a piece of literature.

Maybe one of these characters, Adora Belle, has one disadvantage: The story isn’t being told from her point of view (yes, obvious, sorry). We only get as much of her background story as she tells the main character, and as much of her thoughts as the dialouges have room for. She necessarily stays "flatter" than Moist. Buuut.... somehow what he does see in her, what he finds so fascinating except that her dress sits tight, somehow isn’t being transported – at least not to me.

I just re-read Going Postal and Making Money. Everything he writes about Adora Belle’s attitude could have been more cool as annyoing, it clearly is intended to be, but it doesn’t come across.I sometimes have that feeling as if, when dealing with female characters who get no part in the story where it is told from their point of view, he tries not to do anything wrong with the character. And if he does write silly scenes for them, they suddenly end up mudfighting – I am still puzzled about those girl scenes in Thud. Not as in “Eugh...”, more as in “Why? What was the point? No one would miss this scene at all if it were erased from the novel. Actually, no one would miss the new characters as well.” (Maybe Angua was another proof that it’s not about women showing as much flaws as male characters, but about how credible they are, because she was displaying insecurity and all, just not in a way that fit her earlier portrayals...)

In the end, I guess it doesn’t matter if the character is written as a strong woman or a weak one, but if the character is well written. (That was the repititive bit, by the way.) A good writer can afford dislikeable, flawed, or passive female characters as much as he can afford dislakable, feeble male characters.

PS: Sybil should get more room again if there is another Watch novel to be written, or any room at all. (Did she appear personally at all in “Nightwatch”? Or only through being mentioned by others?)