Posts Tagged ‘Women’
Young Adult Heroines
Friday, September 10th, 2010
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a strong female character in the realms of young adult fiction. This article by Laura Miller in particular caught my eye, not just for its (potentially inflammatory) comparison of Katniss Everdeen – the hunter-warrior protagonist of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy – with Twilight’s Bella Swann, but because it touches on what are, for me, the two main lynchpins of the debate. First is the question of agency: the extent to which a given heroine takes an active role in deciding her fate, whatever it might be, with preference being given to decision-making processes featuring a modicum of sense. Second is the matter of domesticity versus what in straight fiction reads as pluck or feistiness but which in SF/fantasy might be better known as kickarsity – that is to say, a separation between heroines who are content to fulfil non-aggressive roles, and those who are forever going into battle, whether verbally or physically.
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