Not right now—I’d have to do a serious reread, I think. I can do some generalities though, if that might help.
First, I realize that analyzing stereotypes in fiction is difficult because it’s about background assumptions (aleifs?) of the author and the readers interacting with each other. And I keep wondering why so much thought goes into GRRMartin possibly stereotyping his female characters when King Robert is a more simple negative gender stereotype than I think any of the female characters are.
Part of the problem is that the girls in HPMOR seem like an undiferrentiated gossiping mass. I admit that I haven’t noticed differences among the minor boy characters, either, but at least they don’t all seem like they’re all the same.
I’m not sure I’m quite on the same wavelength here, but what I’m seeing is that the boys are mostly proto-somethings—not just the obvious ones, like Harry being on the road to being a Light Lord or Draco gearing up to be the first reasonably-enlightened Lord Malfoy, but even relatively minor characters like Neville and Ron, you can get a pretty good idea of what kinds of people they’re going to be when they grow up by looking at what they’re like now and extrapolating—and the question of what kinds of people they’ll be is taken seriously, too, in how things are framed and how the other characters react to things. (Harry’s very first interaction with Neville, for example.) The girls don’t really seem to have that same quality of being adults in training; even Hermione’s heroism arc was more about her reputation and ego in the here-and-now than anything I can imagine her continuing past age 16 or so, and it takes a lot more work to imagine any of them having interesting roles as adults—it feels like it really doesn’t matter whether any of them do anything more interesting than being housewives.
This seems a strange comment to me. After the SPHEW arc I think I have a much better understanding of the thoughts and ambitions of e.g. Padma (doesn’t want to fall back into harmony with her sister and is now seeking a non-evil way to do this), Susan (voice of caution through the influence of her Aunt, non-arrogant enough to seek out Tonks help) or Tracey (Darke Lady who’ll have everyone as her husband), than e.g. the characters of Dean Thomas or Seamus Finnigan or even Blaise Zabini. Possibly even Neville Longbottom.
The boys get the HPMOR equivalent of “I want to be a selfless doctor” or “I want to be an important politician.”
The girls get the equivalent of “I don’t want to be like my relatives” or “I want to be adored by lots of men”.
The girls’ aims seem defined by types of relationships, which makes them more fragile and harder to visualize than aiming for a type of occupation.
This doesn’t mean that Padma wouldn’t be cool in reality. (Real-life outcomes seem determined as much by search method as by deliberately planned destinations.) But in a story, it gives her less narrative impact.
The boys get the HPMOR equivalent of “I want to be a selfless doctor” or “I want to be an important politician.”
I don’t see it. Can you speak specifics? What does Blaise Zabini, or Neville Longbottom or Lesath Lestrange or Seamus Finnigan or Dean Thomas get in regards to the above?
On my part, I see Blaise want to amuse himself via lots and lots of counterproductive-to-his-own-good plots, Neville wanting to avenge his parents, Lesath wanting to be Harry’s minion, and I don’t remember Dean and Seamus ambitions at all...
We don’t need to know the details of what a character is trying to do to see that they’re acting in a goal-directed kind of way, or to infer some general things about the types of goals they’re going after. It’s kind of like—imagine watching a documentary about rubber balls, and there’s a two-minute clip in it about how they’re shipped that shows a truck and gives a vague handwavey map of the transportation network. At the end of the documentary, you’ll know much more about rubber balls than trucks, but that doesn’t make rubber balls more complex or more interesting than trucks are—and you have enough information to know that, even if you can’t say much more about trucks than that they exist and can carry things over long distances.
What I was actually trying to get at is a bit more subtle than even that, though—even the boys who aren’t actively trying to become specific plausible types of narratively-coherent adults are pulled into that by the assumptions of the people surrounding them, whereas the girls don’t just care less individually (of the ones you named, only Padma has anything remotely like a realistic goal for adult-herself, as opposed to a simple set of character traits or a silly fantasy that obviously won’t happen), the people around them don’t take an interest in the issue, either.
I agree with the “undifferentiated gossiping mass” bit.
Any specific example has a corresponding counterexample. Padma Patil, for example, gets nonzero development and, IIRC, perspective time, which could go a ways to counter “undifferentiated gossiping mass”—but a male character on about her tier of importance, like Blaise Zabini, gets to enact plot and is more distinct as a single person than she is. Even Ron, who is of negligible relevance, has a named skill that differentiates him from the background. Does Padma? As far as I can recall Padma is just sort of generically informedly bright. Hermione’s intelligence, gratuitous perfect recall, and magical prowess can go a ways to counter “female characters are less competent”—but the most competent characters, even if you don’t count the protagonist, are all male.
Padma feels to me like a much more important character than Blaise Zabini, and a more developed character too. I could go into detail but I’m not sure I should, since that sort of thing an author is supposed to communicate through story. I wonder how that perspective difference developed?
It seems clear to me that Padma has a future, whereas Blaise has none. This isn’t quite the same as saying that she has been more important than he. Also, Padma has been developed as a character insofar as she has actually been changing over the course of the story, but her personality is only slightly more explored than Blaise’s.
I can’t off the top of my head think of anything Padma has done apart from trade places with her sister, whereas Blaise was helpful to Hermione’s start as a general, pulled off the ridiculous underwater plot, and had the badass moment of sitting exactly in the middle of the room. I even know something about his mother.
Padma had the subplot where she was mean to Hermione and Harry “reformed” her or whatever. She is put as second in command in Dragon Army and is respected enough by Draco to make him realize why his father said that Ravenclaw was an acceptable House from which to choose one’s wife. She is shown to be powerful and loyal in both the armies and in SPEW (her prismatic sphere or whatever is mentioned to be particularly strong; she doesn’t hesitate when Hermione tells her to go find help). Finally, she sort of kind of notices that something is wrong when interacting with Tonks!Susan while the others all think that Susan is a double witch. I’m not going to argue about whether she’s more important than Blaise but she definitely does more than just switch places with her sister.
On the topic of Blaise, we can be fairly confident that almost none of what happened in the underwater battle was the result of his competence; he was just the headmaster’s tool. Also, we are shown that he isn’t that skillful a leader as without the advantage of the green glasses he loses his battle against (I think) Dean Thomas. On the other hand, Padma successfully leads Dragon army to victory after Draco looses his duel with Hermione.
Hm. This suggests that an important factor might be reader bias as well. Though really, all anyone remembers Blaise Zabini for is his moment-of-badassery. Anyone without an in-writing moment of badassery is going to seem less memorable no matter what.
In terms of memorable badassery, sure, Blaise seems to have more. But Padma feels more relevant, and more developed. It’s just that she’s so incredibly not in the spotlight that people seem to gravitate toward Blaise as the most ascended of the first years because of how showy his displays were. Outside of the plotting in the battles, Blaise doesn’t seem to do anything, whereas Padma is around and interacting with people and even got Harry to do something politically dangerous to protect Hermione’s reputation.
I was actually a little surprised that the tvtropes article made Blaise out to be the most notable ascended extra, when he had effectively one moment in the spotlight and the plotting surrounding that, whereas Padma seems like a more consistent secondary (or maybe tertiary) character.
It’s possible that this perception of undifferentiated gossiping masses may be affected by bias in what the named characters listen to. The male population of Hogwarts might well seem like an undifferentiated Quidditch-loving mass if it weren’t for Harry’s tendency to fling Quieting Charms around when he wants to get out of conversation. (And, as a more literary reason, the girls’ gossip is often plot-relevant whereas Quidditch jabberings wouldn’t be.)
I admit I don’t remember Padma, but that may be more a matter of me than the book. I’m not the most focused reader on the planet.
If the boys were as stereotyped as the girls, I think they’d be constantly boasting and talking about which wizard could defeat which other wizard and making fart jokes.
I agree with the “undifferentiated gossiping mass” bit.
Me too; I can’t remember the differences between the various female students that aren’t Hermione. They feel like background—possibly because they don’t interact with Harry very much and they spend most of their on-screen time talking to each other.
I feel that the SPHEW arc clearly differentiated half a dozen girls’ personalities.
I still wouldn’t really know much about Dean Thomas vs Seamus Finnigan. Do you really feel that you couldn’t tell apart Tracey’s and Susan’s characters?
I don’t even remember the names of the different girls. There’s one named Susan?
Then again, I don’t remember the minor male characters you mentioned either...
::goes and looks up chapter 87 again::
You know, I thought that “Hypothesis: Hermione Granger” section actually was just the usual gang of girls talking again. I didn’t even notice that it wasn’t until just now...
Well here’s a reminder of the SPHEW members for the benefit of all: The following is the impression I’ve already gotten from their personalities
From Hufflepuff: Susan Bones—cautious, loyal, feeling they’re getting into DOOM and trying to avert it. Hannah Abbot—smaller than the rest, shy, but trying too hard sometimes in order to impress the others—and Neville
From Slytherin: Tracey Davis—very theatrical, very very eager, getting into the Darke Lady spirit, most silly of the girls, wants Draco and Harry for her husbands Daphne Greengrass—attempts to seem dignified and self-controlled as befits her Most Ancient House, also crushing on Neville
From Ravenclaw: Hermione Padma Patil—currently trying to find a non-evil way of not-falling-back-into harmony with her sister Parvati)
From Gryffindor: Lavender Brown—most enthusiastic about the hero/superhero thing, with costumes and catchphrases and such Parvati Patil- only one who’s personality I’m not certain about.
From a storytelling perspective, authors are not obligated to make their main characters (or even 50% of main characters) female. Considering the way the whole SF&F genre has been taken over by gritty female urban fantasy vampire hunters in recent years, finding a decent story with a male lead is actually a nice change.
From the perspective of realism, the fact that the most competent characters are male is to be expected. That really is the way the world works, thanks to the fact that males have a flatter bell curve with longer tails on just about every measure of ability. It isn’t the result of an evil male conspiracy, and there’s nothing wrong with an author depicting this elementary fact of (current) human nature accurately.
So I’m left wondering how your comments amount to anything more than “I’m unhappy because you aren’t writing the story the way I would have done it.”
You’re missing my point by a long ways. I’m not complaining about the main character. I keep explicitly saying “even if you don’t count the protagonist”. I’m mostly examining how the not-protagonists stack up against each other. Your remark about variance might be on point, except I’m complaining not only about the ratio of competent males to competent females, but also about the specific sorts of insufficiently varied flaws that are depressing the female characters’ abilities/badassery.
I was commenting specifically about the end of your previous comment, not the whole topic. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. But as to this new point, why should an author feel obligated to gender-balance the complexity of the flaws they assign to minor characters?
Yes, I’m aware that there’s a fairly common intellectual position claiming that authors should devote vast amounts of energy to worrying about that sort of thing. I just think that’s a deeply misguided enterprise. A good author will naturally come to a pretty reasonable balance in the natural course of writing a story, and any major tweaking beyond that point is more likely to make the story worse than better.
Do you really think HP:MoR would be a better story if EY had spent a few weeks listing all the characters by gender, and trying to tweak the plot and insert details to ‘balance’ things? As opposed to, say, working out plot complications or dreaming up new moments of awesome?
I do think it would be better if the girls had more varied characteristics-- flaws, virtues, and interests. Who knows, there might be something generated from more interesting characters which would lead to more moments of awesome.
Do you really think HP:MoR would be a better story if EY had spent a few weeks listing all the characters by gender, and trying to tweak the plot and insert details to ‘balance’ things?
You’re strawmanning me. I will reply to you no further.
Do you really think HP:MoR would be a better story if EY had spent a few weeks listing all the characters by gender, and trying to tweak the plot and insert details to ‘balance’ things? As opposed to, say, working out plot complications or dreaming up new moments of awesome?
Well, there’s always coinflips. Much quicker than lists.
Not right now—I’d have to do a serious reread, I think. I can do some generalities though, if that might help.
First, I realize that analyzing stereotypes in fiction is difficult because it’s about background assumptions (aleifs?) of the author and the readers interacting with each other. And I keep wondering why so much thought goes into GRRMartin possibly stereotyping his female characters when King Robert is a more simple negative gender stereotype than I think any of the female characters are.
Part of the problem is that the girls in HPMOR seem like an undiferrentiated gossiping mass. I admit that I haven’t noticed differences among the minor boy characters, either, but at least they don’t all seem like they’re all the same.
Alicorn, what have you noticed?
I’m not sure I’m quite on the same wavelength here, but what I’m seeing is that the boys are mostly proto-somethings—not just the obvious ones, like Harry being on the road to being a Light Lord or Draco gearing up to be the first reasonably-enlightened Lord Malfoy, but even relatively minor characters like Neville and Ron, you can get a pretty good idea of what kinds of people they’re going to be when they grow up by looking at what they’re like now and extrapolating—and the question of what kinds of people they’ll be is taken seriously, too, in how things are framed and how the other characters react to things. (Harry’s very first interaction with Neville, for example.) The girls don’t really seem to have that same quality of being adults in training; even Hermione’s heroism arc was more about her reputation and ego in the here-and-now than anything I can imagine her continuing past age 16 or so, and it takes a lot more work to imagine any of them having interesting roles as adults—it feels like it really doesn’t matter whether any of them do anything more interesting than being housewives.
Yes, that’s it: the girls don’t aim for distinctive future selves, the boys do.
Blaise and Neville are each trying to become something, and it’s something different in each case. The girls? Not nearly so much.
This seems a strange comment to me. After the SPHEW arc I think I have a much better understanding of the thoughts and ambitions of e.g. Padma (doesn’t want to fall back into harmony with her sister and is now seeking a non-evil way to do this), Susan (voice of caution through the influence of her Aunt, non-arrogant enough to seek out Tonks help) or Tracey (Darke Lady who’ll have everyone as her husband), than e.g. the characters of Dean Thomas or Seamus Finnigan or even Blaise Zabini. Possibly even Neville Longbottom.
The boys get the HPMOR equivalent of “I want to be a selfless doctor” or “I want to be an important politician.”
The girls get the equivalent of “I don’t want to be like my relatives” or “I want to be adored by lots of men”.
The girls’ aims seem defined by types of relationships, which makes them more fragile and harder to visualize than aiming for a type of occupation.
This doesn’t mean that Padma wouldn’t be cool in reality. (Real-life outcomes seem determined as much by search method as by deliberately planned destinations.) But in a story, it gives her less narrative impact.
I don’t see it. Can you speak specifics? What does Blaise Zabini, or Neville Longbottom or Lesath Lestrange or Seamus Finnigan or Dean Thomas get in regards to the above?
On my part, I see Blaise want to amuse himself via lots and lots of counterproductive-to-his-own-good plots, Neville wanting to avenge his parents, Lesath wanting to be Harry’s minion, and I don’t remember Dean and Seamus ambitions at all...
This isn’t what I was talking about.
We don’t need to know the details of what a character is trying to do to see that they’re acting in a goal-directed kind of way, or to infer some general things about the types of goals they’re going after. It’s kind of like—imagine watching a documentary about rubber balls, and there’s a two-minute clip in it about how they’re shipped that shows a truck and gives a vague handwavey map of the transportation network. At the end of the documentary, you’ll know much more about rubber balls than trucks, but that doesn’t make rubber balls more complex or more interesting than trucks are—and you have enough information to know that, even if you can’t say much more about trucks than that they exist and can carry things over long distances.
What I was actually trying to get at is a bit more subtle than even that, though—even the boys who aren’t actively trying to become specific plausible types of narratively-coherent adults are pulled into that by the assumptions of the people surrounding them, whereas the girls don’t just care less individually (of the ones you named, only Padma has anything remotely like a realistic goal for adult-herself, as opposed to a simple set of character traits or a silly fantasy that obviously won’t happen), the people around them don’t take an interest in the issue, either.
I agree with the “undifferentiated gossiping mass” bit.
Any specific example has a corresponding counterexample. Padma Patil, for example, gets nonzero development and, IIRC, perspective time, which could go a ways to counter “undifferentiated gossiping mass”—but a male character on about her tier of importance, like Blaise Zabini, gets to enact plot and is more distinct as a single person than she is. Even Ron, who is of negligible relevance, has a named skill that differentiates him from the background. Does Padma? As far as I can recall Padma is just sort of generically informedly bright. Hermione’s intelligence, gratuitous perfect recall, and magical prowess can go a ways to counter “female characters are less competent”—but the most competent characters, even if you don’t count the protagonist, are all male.
Padma feels to me like a much more important character than Blaise Zabini, and a more developed character too. I could go into detail but I’m not sure I should, since that sort of thing an author is supposed to communicate through story. I wonder how that perspective difference developed?
It seems clear to me that Padma has a future, whereas Blaise has none. This isn’t quite the same as saying that she has been more important than he. Also, Padma has been developed as a character insofar as she has actually been changing over the course of the story, but her personality is only slightly more explored than Blaise’s.
I can’t off the top of my head think of anything Padma has done apart from trade places with her sister, whereas Blaise was helpful to Hermione’s start as a general, pulled off the ridiculous underwater plot, and had the badass moment of sitting exactly in the middle of the room. I even know something about his mother.
Padma had the subplot where she was mean to Hermione and Harry “reformed” her or whatever. She is put as second in command in Dragon Army and is respected enough by Draco to make him realize why his father said that Ravenclaw was an acceptable House from which to choose one’s wife. She is shown to be powerful and loyal in both the armies and in SPEW (her prismatic sphere or whatever is mentioned to be particularly strong; she doesn’t hesitate when Hermione tells her to go find help). Finally, she sort of kind of notices that something is wrong when interacting with Tonks!Susan while the others all think that Susan is a double witch. I’m not going to argue about whether she’s more important than Blaise but she definitely does more than just switch places with her sister.
On the topic of Blaise, we can be fairly confident that almost none of what happened in the underwater battle was the result of his competence; he was just the headmaster’s tool. Also, we are shown that he isn’t that skillful a leader as without the advantage of the green glasses he loses his battle against (I think) Dean Thomas. On the other hand, Padma successfully leads Dragon army to victory after Draco looses his duel with Hermione.
Hm. This suggests that an important factor might be reader bias as well. Though really, all anyone remembers Blaise Zabini for is his moment-of-badassery. Anyone without an in-writing moment of badassery is going to seem less memorable no matter what.
...yep.
In terms of memorable badassery, sure, Blaise seems to have more. But Padma feels more relevant, and more developed. It’s just that she’s so incredibly not in the spotlight that people seem to gravitate toward Blaise as the most ascended of the first years because of how showy his displays were. Outside of the plotting in the battles, Blaise doesn’t seem to do anything, whereas Padma is around and interacting with people and even got Harry to do something politically dangerous to protect Hermione’s reputation.
I was actually a little surprised that the tvtropes article made Blaise out to be the most notable ascended extra, when he had effectively one moment in the spotlight and the plotting surrounding that, whereas Padma seems like a more consistent secondary (or maybe tertiary) character.
It’s possible that this perception of undifferentiated gossiping masses may be affected by bias in what the named characters listen to. The male population of Hogwarts might well seem like an undifferentiated Quidditch-loving mass if it weren’t for Harry’s tendency to fling Quieting Charms around when he wants to get out of conversation. (And, as a more literary reason, the girls’ gossip is often plot-relevant whereas Quidditch jabberings wouldn’t be.)
I admit I don’t remember Padma, but that may be more a matter of me than the book. I’m not the most focused reader on the planet.
If the boys were as stereotyped as the girls, I think they’d be constantly boasting and talking about which wizard could defeat which other wizard and making fart jokes.
Me too; I can’t remember the differences between the various female students that aren’t Hermione. They feel like background—possibly because they don’t interact with Harry very much and they spend most of their on-screen time talking to each other.
I feel that the SPHEW arc clearly differentiated half a dozen girls’ personalities.
I still wouldn’t really know much about Dean Thomas vs Seamus Finnigan. Do you really feel that you couldn’t tell apart Tracey’s and Susan’s characters?
I don’t even remember the names of the different girls. There’s one named Susan?
Then again, I don’t remember the minor male characters you mentioned either...
::goes and looks up chapter 87 again::
You know, I thought that “Hypothesis: Hermione Granger” section actually was just the usual gang of girls talking again. I didn’t even notice that it wasn’t until just now...
Well here’s a reminder of the SPHEW members for the benefit of all: The following is the impression I’ve already gotten from their personalities
From Hufflepuff:
Susan Bones—cautious, loyal, feeling they’re getting into DOOM and trying to avert it.
Hannah Abbot—smaller than the rest, shy, but trying too hard sometimes in order to impress the others—and Neville
From Slytherin:
Tracey Davis—very theatrical, very very eager, getting into the Darke Lady spirit, most silly of the girls, wants Draco and Harry for her husbands
Daphne Greengrass—attempts to seem dignified and self-controlled as befits her Most Ancient House, also crushing on Neville
From Ravenclaw:
Hermione
Padma Patil—currently trying to find a non-evil way of not-falling-back-into harmony with her sister Parvati)
From Gryffindor:
Lavender Brown—most enthusiastic about the hero/superhero thing, with costumes and catchphrases and such
Parvati Patil- only one who’s personality I’m not certain about.
So what?
From a storytelling perspective, authors are not obligated to make their main characters (or even 50% of main characters) female. Considering the way the whole SF&F genre has been taken over by gritty female urban fantasy vampire hunters in recent years, finding a decent story with a male lead is actually a nice change.
From the perspective of realism, the fact that the most competent characters are male is to be expected. That really is the way the world works, thanks to the fact that males have a flatter bell curve with longer tails on just about every measure of ability. It isn’t the result of an evil male conspiracy, and there’s nothing wrong with an author depicting this elementary fact of (current) human nature accurately.
So I’m left wondering how your comments amount to anything more than “I’m unhappy because you aren’t writing the story the way I would have done it.”
You’re missing my point by a long ways. I’m not complaining about the main character. I keep explicitly saying “even if you don’t count the protagonist”. I’m mostly examining how the not-protagonists stack up against each other. Your remark about variance might be on point, except I’m complaining not only about the ratio of competent males to competent females, but also about the specific sorts of insufficiently varied flaws that are depressing the female characters’ abilities/badassery.
I was commenting specifically about the end of your previous comment, not the whole topic. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. But as to this new point, why should an author feel obligated to gender-balance the complexity of the flaws they assign to minor characters?
Yes, I’m aware that there’s a fairly common intellectual position claiming that authors should devote vast amounts of energy to worrying about that sort of thing. I just think that’s a deeply misguided enterprise. A good author will naturally come to a pretty reasonable balance in the natural course of writing a story, and any major tweaking beyond that point is more likely to make the story worse than better.
Do you really think HP:MoR would be a better story if EY had spent a few weeks listing all the characters by gender, and trying to tweak the plot and insert details to ‘balance’ things? As opposed to, say, working out plot complications or dreaming up new moments of awesome?
I do think it would be better if the girls had more varied characteristics-- flaws, virtues, and interests. Who knows, there might be something generated from more interesting characters which would lead to more moments of awesome.
You’re strawmanning me. I will reply to you no further.
Well, there’s always coinflips. Much quicker than lists.
Of course, that’s harder with fanfiction...
Beware! You have summoned the ancient demon of Sexism. You must pay for your hubris … in blood.
(Blood is another word for karma, right? Right.)