Recs: Women Creating Their Story

[rachelmanija]

This is for a possible Sirens presentation. The theme this year is "retold tales."

Can you recommend to me fantasy media or myth in which female characters, in some sense, alter reality by telling stories about it?

This "altering reality" doesn't have to be magic in itself; the ultimate example is Scheherazade, who changes the world by telling stories. There's also Martha's world-changing storytelling in Doctor Who.

The other examples I thought of were magical: Paperhouse (girl creates spooky new reality by drawing it), Fudoki (a dying princess of the Heian court writes a story about a cat who becomes a woman; she may or may not create a reality in which the story is true), The Secret Country (kids create a fantasy world, then travel to it and find that it is and isn't as they imagined), The Tricksters (characters from a girl's lush fantasy narrative show up, again not exactly as she pictured them), Voices (Annals of the Western Shore) (spoilery but sort of fits), Witch Week (the entire climax depends on a girl telling a story which alters reality.)

Can you think of others? Especially, examples from myth and folklore, and examples which aren't about white girls?

ETA: If you rec something, please explain how it fits.

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

Although it's originally Drosselmeyer telling Princess Tutu's story, she does take some control of it and its outcome by the end. And even though her Tutu self has to play out the role assigned to her (turn into a speck of light and disappear) her Duck self heads off into her own story (hanging in the pond and with Fakir and generally being her own self).

I'd need to reread The Hero and the Crown to be sure, but isn't it Aerin's imagining herself as a hero and dragonslayer that sets her to working out ways to slay dragons?

And Tiernay West in Secret of the Three Treasures is totally about altering reality by telling her own stories about it. :-)