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Gendered Tropes
If I'm completely honest with myself, I probably wouldn't like Henry as much if he were a female character.
This realization prompted a great amount of navel-gazing on my part last night and this morning. In some respects, I'd argue that his appeal hinges on his maleness. Much like a great deal about Sully would be different if she were a man, some parts of Henry's appeal rely on him being male, even though (unlike Ike and Libra) it's not entirely transparent how.
For instance, his smiley childishness. On a guy, smiley childishness is marked. It comes off as immature, kooky, asexual, or just sort of weird at best. But a smiley, childishly innocent female is a perfectly mainstream trope. Girls are expected to carry a vibe of innocence. And they are often also expected to smile and be cheery for others. Suddenly, something that's supposed to read as "this character is kinda creepy-weird" reads instead as "this character is frickin' adorable."Henry is frickin' adorable too but that is not the point.
Henry's sweetness and servility is, in much the same way, rendered mundane and uncomfortably stereotypical once swapped over onto a female character.
About all that would be left that would be in any way even vaguely remarkable would be his cold streak. That would just make Henrietta kinda-yandere.
I mean, I've said several times with varying amounts of seriousness that Henry does follow the yandere trope, and in some ways is closer to it than Tharja. Why is it that it's interesting on a guy but less interesting on a girl? Is this the defiant feminist in me with an appetite for things that transgress norms?
I mean, think about how the stalker aspect of a yandere changes in a genderswap. A female stalker is seen as over-loving, perhaps a bit crazy (in a hot way), maybe a little sad and pitiful -- even if their stalking is explicitly depicted as problematic ("I will kill any other women you speak to *eyeglint*"). A problematic male stalker is just creepy. Even some "benign" male stalkers ("I was just following you to protect you!") often come off as creepy.
I think, fundamentally, there's a certain vulnerability to the perception of female characters that makes yandere palatable instead of repellant. So it's kind of interesting that to fit it onto a male character in a way that's creepy in the "good" way, he is otherwise crafted as exceptionally squishy.
Perhaps Henry is the way you carry off a yandere when you don't have the sexist stereotype to ride off of? Instead of starting with all the baggage femininity brings, you build up the same vibe from scratch with a variety of classically feminine servile behavior. But this way, since you haven't actually involved the character being female themselves, you avoid invoking discomfort at recognizing the stereotype, as well as riding upon whatever inherent advantages a character may have by being male as opposed to female. (And given the prominence of male characters I'm certainly inclined to believe such advantages exist.)
All right, I'm starting to go in a circle. Enough about Henry. Let's talk about Maribelle.
I think I'd like Maribelle even if she were a male character. And fandom might like her even better. Characters like Sakuya from Hatoful Boyfriend certainly get plenty of love for being snooty nobles with a secretly kind heart. I like her as a lesbian valkyrie myself, but who knows, perhaps the character would have wider appeal if she were a dude.
Is it generally the case that characters are magically more palatable as dudes than women unless it's a woman making a big defiant deal out of her femininity a la Sully? I don't know. I like Lucina as a girl and I think many others, not explicitly feminist, would feel similarly. Is that because she benefits in her role as a daughter?
But there are certainly some characters that magically gained acceptance from being a female character with a male trope. Fandom (super-repressed straight dudes aside) loves to make a big ado about Heather whereas no one really seems to care about Gatrie. Aside from a minor man-hating streak and a bit of death-quote depth no one other than me seems to care about, the two characters do very nearly the same exact things -- flirt with women, join armies for women, serve women, live for women. Fandom, and not just the lesbians in fandom, latches onto Heather far more often than Gatrie, or Saul, or even Sain.
The womanizer trope is old and tired with men. The man-izer trope reads, unfortunately, like "sluttiness" with women. But the womanizer trope on a woman on the other hand...
I think that distinction, that if a woman is going after a lot of guys it reads very differently, might be important. A genderswap of a trope must be careful, because it might end up reading some other way entirely. (Remember what I said about male yandere and unwashed creepers?) But if it translates what made that trope work with that specific gender, or if it reaches a certain level of humorousness, then it's fresh and exciting and people love it.
Maybe? I think? I'm just babbling in my armchair here. Thoughts?
This realization prompted a great amount of navel-gazing on my part last night and this morning. In some respects, I'd argue that his appeal hinges on his maleness. Much like a great deal about Sully would be different if she were a man, some parts of Henry's appeal rely on him being male, even though (unlike Ike and Libra) it's not entirely transparent how.
For instance, his smiley childishness. On a guy, smiley childishness is marked. It comes off as immature, kooky, asexual, or just sort of weird at best. But a smiley, childishly innocent female is a perfectly mainstream trope. Girls are expected to carry a vibe of innocence. And they are often also expected to smile and be cheery for others. Suddenly, something that's supposed to read as "this character is kinda creepy-weird" reads instead as "this character is frickin' adorable."
Henry's sweetness and servility is, in much the same way, rendered mundane and uncomfortably stereotypical once swapped over onto a female character.
About all that would be left that would be in any way even vaguely remarkable would be his cold streak. That would just make Henrietta kinda-yandere.
I mean, I've said several times with varying amounts of seriousness that Henry does follow the yandere trope, and in some ways is closer to it than Tharja. Why is it that it's interesting on a guy but less interesting on a girl? Is this the defiant feminist in me with an appetite for things that transgress norms?
I mean, think about how the stalker aspect of a yandere changes in a genderswap. A female stalker is seen as over-loving, perhaps a bit crazy (in a hot way), maybe a little sad and pitiful -- even if their stalking is explicitly depicted as problematic ("I will kill any other women you speak to *eyeglint*"). A problematic male stalker is just creepy. Even some "benign" male stalkers ("I was just following you to protect you!") often come off as creepy.
I think, fundamentally, there's a certain vulnerability to the perception of female characters that makes yandere palatable instead of repellant. So it's kind of interesting that to fit it onto a male character in a way that's creepy in the "good" way, he is otherwise crafted as exceptionally squishy.
Perhaps Henry is the way you carry off a yandere when you don't have the sexist stereotype to ride off of? Instead of starting with all the baggage femininity brings, you build up the same vibe from scratch with a variety of classically feminine servile behavior. But this way, since you haven't actually involved the character being female themselves, you avoid invoking discomfort at recognizing the stereotype, as well as riding upon whatever inherent advantages a character may have by being male as opposed to female. (And given the prominence of male characters I'm certainly inclined to believe such advantages exist.)
All right, I'm starting to go in a circle. Enough about Henry. Let's talk about Maribelle.
I think I'd like Maribelle even if she were a male character. And fandom might like her even better. Characters like Sakuya from Hatoful Boyfriend certainly get plenty of love for being snooty nobles with a secretly kind heart. I like her as a lesbian valkyrie myself, but who knows, perhaps the character would have wider appeal if she were a dude.
Is it generally the case that characters are magically more palatable as dudes than women unless it's a woman making a big defiant deal out of her femininity a la Sully? I don't know. I like Lucina as a girl and I think many others, not explicitly feminist, would feel similarly. Is that because she benefits in her role as a daughter?
But there are certainly some characters that magically gained acceptance from being a female character with a male trope. Fandom (super-repressed straight dudes aside) loves to make a big ado about Heather whereas no one really seems to care about Gatrie. Aside from a minor man-hating streak and a bit of death-quote depth no one other than me seems to care about, the two characters do very nearly the same exact things -- flirt with women, join armies for women, serve women, live for women. Fandom, and not just the lesbians in fandom, latches onto Heather far more often than Gatrie, or Saul, or even Sain.
The womanizer trope is old and tired with men. The man-izer trope reads, unfortunately, like "sluttiness" with women. But the womanizer trope on a woman on the other hand...
I think that distinction, that if a woman is going after a lot of guys it reads very differently, might be important. A genderswap of a trope must be careful, because it might end up reading some other way entirely. (Remember what I said about male yandere and unwashed creepers?) But if it translates what made that trope work with that specific gender, or if it reaches a certain level of humorousness, then it's fresh and exciting and people love it.
Maybe? I think? I'm just babbling in my armchair here. Thoughts?
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And I think the reason Lyon as "silver haired maiden" grabs me as much as it does relies heavily on how his failure to fit gendered expectations affects his story. Would it be as interesting if he were a princess? I don't think so, honestly. Actually I immediately thought of a character who is essentially a female version of Lyon, but expounding on that is massive spoilers for a thing I want you to read, so I won't.
I think there can be a certain unsettling affect to seeing gendered tropes on another gender, though. And sometimes there's serious backlash! For example, Lightning from FFXIII is pretty much a standard FF protagonist outside her gender. She's impatient, stoic, repressed, and snarky. For male heroes like Squall and Cloud, that's hailed as "badass". Lightning, however, often gets lambasted as a "bitch". There's the inverse, too -- X's hero, Tidus, is the happy-go-lucky naive type usually seen in the series' women, and people hate him for it.
I think there's a certain double standard in fandom, too. Like I could go on forever about the weirdness of people loving Soren and Ike and hating Micaiah for being too "special", but I think a lot of that is dependent on gendered expectations. When a man has crazy powers or destiny or whatever, he's just a hero! Of course he's special! But I think a lot of us are so used to "special" females being plot objects more than actual characters that we just jump to that assumption whenever we see it. (And to be fair, FE's had quite a few of those: like, every Dierdre type up until Lyon.)
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But even with pretty "holy men" like Claude preceding him, I think Lucius stands out at least partly thanks to his gender. It's not a type you expect to see as a man, as typical as it is with a woman. And then you have the way he chooses to present himself, which adds a layer of interesting that wouldn't be there if he was a woman. I don't think fem Lucius would be 100% boring, but it would be much closer to a bland, expected type.
(Actually a genderswapped Raven would be super interesting, now that I think about it.)
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But it is interesting in how the male-specific tropes are appealing because of a uniquely male "weakness". Like, this thing would be passe and expected and just annoyingly feminine in a woman, but since it's a guy this makes him squishy. Percival and Lyon are gendered in the way Henry is gendered, in some sense.
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I think Echidna's a cool example, too, and Nailah also -- both of them would be pretty boring as guys, but adding that idea that they're women in charge makes them not only a lot more interesting, but a lot more hot. IMO anyway.
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[I think yanderes are creepy regardless of gender but obviously fandom don't agree.]
I mean, I bet you can count on your fingers the number of FE characters with dialogue that can probably survive genderswapping with their essential appeal intact. Like, Midia would work, because even with her canon husbando Astram, her essential qualities are a) loyalty to Nyna and b) leading failed rebellions and landing in jail. Jeorge likewise would work as a chilly but decent and pragmatic female sniper (with no known romantic interests, which might be important here). Astram.. well, is there a market for female meatheads? Dunno 'bout that.
The fact that I'm going back to FE3/11 to find examples says something about this exercise. :/
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It's kind of interesting that Morgan showed up in noticeably different positions in siraranispleased's posts -- F!Morgan was #2 of all girl children, and M!Morgan was dead last. And it's pretty striking that even with characters meant to be adaptable, they're clearly more likeable as one gender than the other.
I wonder if this is something about FE or something about sexism. Can you think of any work whose cast routinely survives genderswapping?
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I wonder if this is something about FE or something about sexism. Can you think of any work whose cast routinely survives genderswapping?
I think it's something about media and something about sexism. I mean, whether we're talking about Fire Emblem, Star Trek, or Harry Potter, you're dealing with-- dun dun dun-- archetypes. Fantasy war with knights and priests and pirates is working off VERY long-held notions of what knights and mercenaries and priestesses and sorcerers and brigands are. A pseudo-military space adventure, however deliberately integrated it may be, is working off expectations of what a) a naval force and b) space adventures are like. So you have the chick communications expert and the sexy empath counselor. I've read enough genderswapped Harry Potter to make myself sick and it don't work. Harriet and Herman and Rona just do not function as intended, much less Severa Snape and Draquel Malfoy. (A male Luna Lovegood kind of works; female Neville Longbottom does NOT.)
We are working off centuries of cultural expectations whether it's war/military/peacetime law enforcement or academia, business affairs or espionage or straight-up romance. Breaking free of that entirely is exceptionally difficult.
I don't even think genderswapped Mulder and Scully would work, because Mulder's vulnerable points and Scully's hardass behavior would read differently. And they're already playing against type by making the man the credulous one and the woman the skeptic.
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... So, maybe literary fiction set in Sweden, then. Or Ursula Le Guin?
spoiler-free lua-babbling-about-le-guin-in-extreme-excess
Genderswapped A Wizard of Earthsea probably works, just because that particular story is largely absent of women to begin with—years after the fact the only clear characters in my mind are Ged and Vetch, and you can totally have Best Female Bros. Genderswapped Atuan... actually might work, but I think that's because the girl-character's vulnerability arguably comes more from youth and inexperience rather than from her gender.
Le Guin's later stuff doesn't work genderswapped because the books tend to be about gender, very explicitly—i.e. The Eye of the Heron isn't just about Lev leading a resistance and Luz being reluctant; it is about Lev, a man, leading a resistance the way a man does, and Luz, a woman, being reluctant in a feminine way—and sort of deconstructs our expectations about how gender pertains to those things in the course of the plot. (There is a very relevant quote from Le Guin about her thought process / approach to gender when writing that book, but alas, said quote contains spoilers.) Tehanu is another example but I can't comment intelligibly upon it since I really wasn't fond of that book at all.
And The Left Hand of Darkness is another obvious one but uh I'm actually an awful Le Guin fan and have somehow managed to read basically everything by her except that :D;;;
edit: somewhat more relevantly to the entire discussion: if a characters in a work can be consistently genderswapped with no big difference in the characters, I sort of would start to suspect the characterizations aren't very full. like, if you're doing a universe even remotely like our own, you probably have to incorporate that universe's expectations of gender or whatnot into the framework; if it's a magically sexism-free universe then you probably need to do some extra work to show why that's not the case. (and again, can't say much about Left Hand of Darkness since I haven't read it, but I've read one of Le Guin's post mortems on the work, and she basically said that, even though all the characters were gender-neuter, going back she feels like her own implicit sex-related biases crowded the work and made them act overly masculine in places where it didn't make sense—which implies that maybe just tackling gender head-on, and trying to subvert tropes in intelligent ways when possible, is a better path, artistically speaking.)
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As a personal example, I was fourteen when I first played FE8. I saw Eirika as a role model, a maturity level to aspire to, and did not do so in Ephraim. (Of course, what I wanted to emulate wasn't necessarily her bravery, but that's beside the point.)
I think it's telling how it affects things on an authorial perspective, as well. My recent original fiction plotbunny has a male character who is intended to come across as a Stu, but because fans in general tend to excuse "specialness" in male characters, his intended-to-be-Sueish counterpart is much closer to reaching that goal. In the same way, I understood the character of the knight devoted to the absurdly youthful princess once I realized that said knight was a girl.
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I've also heard people say that authors have trouble writing a character of a different gender, but having read the POV of many characters in such a case, it doesn't seem like a challenge. There were differences from one case to another, but it reflected more on the author's style than anything else.
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You agree that Heather would be more fun than Gatrie et al even without it though?
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If writing different genders seems easy, here's another one: writing someone with a very different age than your own (not talking a five-year difference here; talking a 20-year-old writing a 50-year-old, or something similarly dramatic). Or writing a parent-child relationship from the parent's perspective instead of the child—it's surprising how often even adult fantasists will only ever write from a child's view.
tl;dr writing "the other" tends to be harder than we expect, i think, even in cases where "the other" should theoretically be accessible (basically everyone knows lots of parents but they're still hard for non-parents to write!)
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