The protagonist’s backstory (and first-chapter-or-two-story) is that she’s been spending years sneaking under a security fence to hunt game, keeping her sister and mother from starvation and prostitution after her father died. Anti-feminist still? Two decisions to save other lives by risking one’s own is still above average, no? I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of imaginary protagonists have done more, but real-life examples, particularly of teenagers, are less common.
Eliezer may claim that “it is an unvarying rule of fiction that problems are solved by protagonists”, and maybe that’s important for drama, but the idea that problems are all solved by the same character (or even few characters) is obviously grossly wrong in reality. If an author manages to pull off a story in which the plot-advancing choices are evenly split among many characters but the readers aren’t put off by that, shouldn’t we be congratulating Collins on her realism rather than criticizing her for not writing a superhero?
(I have my own criticisms of The Hunger Games, of course—please don’t interpret this comment otherwise)
Thing is, keeping this sort of thing mostly in backstory is problematic in itself. There’s a truly astounding number of failure modes for media dealing with feminist (or other social, but I’ll just talk about the feminist case for simplicity) issues, but one of the more common ones involves making a female character hypercompetent in exposition but limiting the latitude of her choices in narrative. The idea is probably that we get to feel good about watching an empowered woman (not to mention that Strong Female Characters are a selling point in their own right) but at the same time get the pathos that comes with watching other people (e.g.) save a damsel in distress. But the flaw in this line of thinking, of course, is that alleged empowerment tends to feel a bit hollow if it’s not backed up by onscreen use of power. With a couple of honorable exceptions, after all, we don’t watch action movies to hear the characters talk about how badassed they are.
Now, that’s all fairly orthodox feminist media criticism, albeit without the normal jargon. I should probably mention, though, that I think a related problem infects a lot of genre fiction, and not only that dealing with empowered females and other persons of social interest: namely, modern genre fiction takes a remarkably dim view of proactive heroes in general. You can blame some of this on the popularity of the straight Hero of a Thousand Faces plot: narrative conventions don’t allow anyone playing Luke Skywalker to display latitude of choice, because all the choices have already been made for him. But even in highly non-Campbellian stories—the James Bond plot, for example—it’s rare for protagonists to take major action which is neither requested by some authority nor forced by immediate moral or physical necessity. About the only conventional exception is in romantic subplots.
There’s also a partial exception in print SF, but in a lot of ways that’s a genre isolate.
The protagonist’s backstory (and first-chapter-or-two-story) is that she’s been spending years sneaking under a security fence to hunt game, keeping her sister and mother from starvation and prostitution after her father died.
Eliezer may claim that “it is an unvarying rule of fiction that problems are solved by protagonists”
Like everything in fiction, sometimes this rule is broken. Deus Ex Machina is generally frowned upon, but it exists. And sometimes problems simply aren’t solved at all, or end up being solved by people unrelated to the main plot.
The protagonist’s backstory (and first-chapter-or-two-story) is that she’s been spending years sneaking under a security fence to hunt game, keeping her sister and mother from starvation and prostitution after her father died. Anti-feminist still? Two decisions to save other lives by risking one’s own is still above average, no? I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of imaginary protagonists have done more, but real-life examples, particularly of teenagers, are less common.
Eliezer may claim that “it is an unvarying rule of fiction that problems are solved by protagonists”, and maybe that’s important for drama, but the idea that problems are all solved by the same character (or even few characters) is obviously grossly wrong in reality. If an author manages to pull off a story in which the plot-advancing choices are evenly split among many characters but the readers aren’t put off by that, shouldn’t we be congratulating Collins on her realism rather than criticizing her for not writing a superhero?
(I have my own criticisms of The Hunger Games, of course—please don’t interpret this comment otherwise)
Thing is, keeping this sort of thing mostly in backstory is problematic in itself. There’s a truly astounding number of failure modes for media dealing with feminist (or other social, but I’ll just talk about the feminist case for simplicity) issues, but one of the more common ones involves making a female character hypercompetent in exposition but limiting the latitude of her choices in narrative. The idea is probably that we get to feel good about watching an empowered woman (not to mention that Strong Female Characters are a selling point in their own right) but at the same time get the pathos that comes with watching other people (e.g.) save a damsel in distress. But the flaw in this line of thinking, of course, is that alleged empowerment tends to feel a bit hollow if it’s not backed up by onscreen use of power. With a couple of honorable exceptions, after all, we don’t watch action movies to hear the characters talk about how badassed they are.
Now, that’s all fairly orthodox feminist media criticism, albeit without the normal jargon. I should probably mention, though, that I think a related problem infects a lot of genre fiction, and not only that dealing with empowered females and other persons of social interest: namely, modern genre fiction takes a remarkably dim view of proactive heroes in general. You can blame some of this on the popularity of the straight Hero of a Thousand Faces plot: narrative conventions don’t allow anyone playing Luke Skywalker to display latitude of choice, because all the choices have already been made for him. But even in highly non-Campbellian stories—the James Bond plot, for example—it’s rare for protagonists to take major action which is neither requested by some authority nor forced by immediate moral or physical necessity. About the only conventional exception is in romantic subplots.
There’s also a partial exception in print SF, but in a lot of ways that’s a genre isolate.
And herself.
Like everything in fiction, sometimes this rule is broken. Deus Ex Machina is generally frowned upon, but it exists. And sometimes problems simply aren’t solved at all, or end up being solved by people unrelated to the main plot.