![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am on two panels which I might be moderating - I'm not sure. One is going to be more of a general discussion, though, since there's only three of us.
I know that most of you, sadly, will not be present for these panels. (If you're lucky, someone will take and post notes.) But since I got really rushed due to grad school and traineeships, please help me out by proposing thought-provoking questions and discussion topics on either or both of these subjects. If I like them (and I'm modding) I'll put them to the panel.
The Huntress and the Dude in Distress: Gender Roles in The Hunger Games
Rachel Manija Brown, Faye Bi, Marie Brennan, Artemis Grey, Shveta Thakrar
This panel will discuss gender and gender roles as they relate to characters in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. We will focus our discussion on the changing roles of Katniss, Gale, and Peeta, but will also explore gender roles as they pertain to secondary characters and to the societies of Panem.
[NOTE: Discussion will be spoilery for all three books.]
Women Who Run with Wolves and Dance with Dragons
Rachel Manija Brown, Cora Anderson, Janni Lee Simner
From the magic horses of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series to the psychic wolves of Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s A Companion to Wolves, fantasy novels have featured a wide variety of soul-bonded animal companions. These bonds, which range from wish-fulfillment fantasy to outright horror, are as diverse as the creatures themselves. This panel will discuss the tropes and themes of the animal companion motif, and explore the metaphoric nature of the bonds between women and their very special animals.
[NOTE: Bear and Monette's series was mentioned because it explicitly deals with gender roles; however, we'll discuss both women with animal companions, and any gender issues which involve animal companions. We will not discuss men and their animal companions unless there's some gender issue involved. ie, no discussion of Ged and his otak.]
I know that most of you, sadly, will not be present for these panels. (If you're lucky, someone will take and post notes.) But since I got really rushed due to grad school and traineeships, please help me out by proposing thought-provoking questions and discussion topics on either or both of these subjects. If I like them (and I'm modding) I'll put them to the panel.
The Huntress and the Dude in Distress: Gender Roles in The Hunger Games
Rachel Manija Brown, Faye Bi, Marie Brennan, Artemis Grey, Shveta Thakrar
This panel will discuss gender and gender roles as they relate to characters in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. We will focus our discussion on the changing roles of Katniss, Gale, and Peeta, but will also explore gender roles as they pertain to secondary characters and to the societies of Panem.
[NOTE: Discussion will be spoilery for all three books.]
Women Who Run with Wolves and Dance with Dragons
Rachel Manija Brown, Cora Anderson, Janni Lee Simner
From the magic horses of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series to the psychic wolves of Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s A Companion to Wolves, fantasy novels have featured a wide variety of soul-bonded animal companions. These bonds, which range from wish-fulfillment fantasy to outright horror, are as diverse as the creatures themselves. This panel will discuss the tropes and themes of the animal companion motif, and explore the metaphoric nature of the bonds between women and their very special animals.
[NOTE: Bear and Monette's series was mentioned because it explicitly deals with gender roles; however, we'll discuss both women with animal companions, and any gender issues which involve animal companions. We will not discuss men and their animal companions unless there's some gender issue involved. ie, no discussion of Ged and his otak.]
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
If I also RC that daemons settle at puberty, there's something to be said about ideas of personality formation and development.
I'm not sure what I would say about the vulnerability and external nature of daemons gender-wise.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Wikipedia says that the author doesn't know why. I actually find it odder that the external manifestation of your soul is almost-always the opposite sex of you, actually.
From:
no subject
If the idea is that, say, a cisgendered woman would have a male daemon (her masculine side), then a person with a same-sex daemon might already be expressing "opposite-sex" traits - transgendered, androgynous, or just very much in touch with their other-gendered side.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I think Pullman was probably thinking of Jung's idea of the anima/animus - (cis) women have an inner image of the masculine self, and (cis) men have an inner image of the feminine self.
Post-Jung theorists have elaborated on those ideas to include everyone, not just straight cis people. A trans man who's a professor at Antioch said, IIRC, that a trans man would have an anima, not an animus, because it's about your inner image of what you believe to be the opposite sex as you, if you believe in the idea of opposite sexes. (There are also inner same-sex figures, which manifest differently depending on your sexual orientation. If you're bisexual, both the same and different-sex figures would be sexually charged.)
(I took a class on this last quarter, so I have Jung on the brain.)
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Hmm. Possibly not a perfect match, but certainly an interesting one, and the novels were written pretty explicitly as a counter-argument to McCaffrey and Lackey, or so I understand...
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Also don't know if it's applicable, but the generally female-reader-targeted horse books, versus other animals books, which I think tend to be more evenly distributed among genders? Which come to think of it is a little weird since I think Black Beauty is owned by people of different genders, and Marguerite Henry's King of the Wind (the only Henry book I read) has a male trainer? And maybe I am making up the female-audience of horse books, except that has been my general impression in a way that dog books are not (eg. Where the Red Fern Grows and Lassie and dogs + hunting stories). I mean, I do think it's interesting that there is more than one cannibal horse soul bond book out there.
Girls and their dogs: Mette Ivie Harrison's The Princess and the Hound, Robin McKinley's Deerskin, ...?
And now just rambling, but wondering how the stereotype of Crazy Cat Lady fits in.
Also, I'd be interested in how romances between bonded animals and their humans are treated in different ways (Lyra and Will's daemons fondling each other when they hit puberty, Pern dragon mating and noncon sex, can't remember how Valdemar does it, etc.).
For Hunger Games, I don't know if it's relevant, but I found Jennifer Lawrence's movie portrayal of Katniss as Stoic Action Hero to be really interesting and cool.
tldr comment now ending.
From:
no subject
I too think of horse books as being a female-targeted genre, but one of the ur-series in that line - still in print today - is Walter Farley's The Black Stallion, which had a male horse and a male rider. Later, he noticed how popular the books were with girls and added in a filly and a couple female riders as supporting characters.
From:
no subject
The animal-companion books I liked were Forty Thousand in Gehenna and Deerskin. Are the Dragonriders of Pern out? If that's too rape-heavy, what about Menolly's firelizards? Another good one was Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon," but that was a male human and female cat, IIRC, so probably not what you want. -- It's a bit heavy on the Mary Sue and woo-woo, but uh, I kinda loved Vicky Austin mindbonding or whatever with the dolphins as a twelve-year-old. Heh.
Genderfuckery: I never saw much of the series, but on Star Trek DS-9 there was the Trill who had been a man and then a female. And I don't know if it fits into the 'companion animal' genre exactly, but there's Kalessin and Tehanu in Le Guin's novel, and The Other Wind (talk about dancing with dragons....).
From:
no subject
Pern is absolutely in - we're discussing anything that's interesting/relevant, regardless of positivity.
"The Game of Rat and Dragon" also had a little girl with a bonded tomcat.
From:
no subject
I don't remember Gehenna that well either - I think the first part is about a female human, and there's a male human at the end? And there's some stuff about aggressive "masculine" vs peaceful "female" societies? I remember it spanning huge amounts of time....
From:
no subject
Maybe "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" could be seen as the ultimate female soulbonding-companion story. Heh. Heh.
From:
no subject
For the second panel, perhaps how the animal companions take a role that family or society has previously denied the human character? Animal companions taking the role of female role models (even if the animals are male or magically neuter)? Animal companions representing aspects of the personality that have been previously denied expression?
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Sherwood, can you think of other earlyish fantasies with women and companion animals?
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I've seen the Cheysuli novels, but I've never read any.
From:
no subject
Andre Norton was the mother of so many.
From:
no subject
*Something similar happens in a somewhat more Disneyish way in Carrie Vaughn's recent novel about a girl who makes friends with a dragon on an alternate Earth where dragons have their own separate territories and are regarded by most humans as some sort of horrific bloodthirsty menace.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
It may or may not be significant that in Vaughn's YA novel the dragon who befriends the heroine can not only speak human language, but has managed to teach himself English by consulting old human books found in his clan's archives. In the more boy-centric middle-grades "How to Train Your Dragon," on the other hand, the dragons can't talk. As the title of the original book and movie suggests, in "How to Train Your Dragon," the creatures in question seem to be perceived by even their biggest fan, the boy protagonist Hiccup, as more like Lassie-like really smart animals than intellectual equals, at least in the animated series spin-off currently airing on the Disney Channel.
Another possibility is Laurence Yep's middle-grades novel "City of Fire." This features both fully-sentient shapeshifting dragons who can take human form and a twelve-year-old heroine, Scirye, with a companion-animal pet dragon of a much smaller and apparently less intellectually--or at least linguistically--developed species. Scirye's mini-dragon can't talk either, but he usually makes his opinions on what's going on pretty clear, although he tends to be even more of a loose cannon during confrontations with the much more powerful magic-using villains than Scirye herself is. (Scirye is the daughter of a retired Chinese Amazon warrior type currently serving as her country's ambassador to the U.S. in early 20th century San Francisco. When the villains attack during the opening ceremonies of an exhibit of Chinese Amazon artifacts loaned to a San Francisco museum, Scirye's mother is seriously injured and Scirye's older sister, an officer in the local embassy's Amazon guard, is killed. This makes both Scirye and her pet dragon, who were there during the attack but escaped injury, obsessively determined to avenge their family's loss and get back the priceless artifact the villains stole.)
From:
no subject
Unfortunately, the readers see little or nothing of the British female dragon captains, at least, after the first book, "His Majesty's Dragon," since all the sequels seem to involve Laurence and Temeraire traveling around the world on various government missions. But the unorthodox by contemporary standards attitudes toward women as professionals, and as the captains of their own romantic and childbearing destinies, within the clannishly secretive Dragon Corps constitute a significant part of the cultural adjustment the much more conventional former navy captain Laurence has to make after the newly-hatched Temeraire imprints on him. And, within the structure of the series, the anachronistically liberated approach to gender issues personified by the female Dragon Corps members is inextricably linked to the crucialness of the dragon/human bond and the Longwings' insistence on female captains.
Also, if you want to examine the human/animal bond from the "animal" side of the equation at all, when Laurence and Temeraire travel to China in the second book, "Empire of Jade," they encounter an albino female dragon who is fiercely devoted to the Imperial prince who, despite the widespread Chinese aversion to albino dragons, chose to bond with her. Unfortunately, this prince turns out to have major political ambitions whose success would have drastic repercussions for both his father the Emperor and British hopes of diplomatic relations with China, and his dragon aids him in attempting to fulfill these schemes. When the prince is killed as a result, the grieving dragon vows vengeance, and at the end of the book is obviously being set up to return as a villain in her own right later in the series. So in this case the human/"animal" bond functions much like the trope of the woman led astray by her love of a reprehensible man, whether in the traditional melodramatic context of being seduced or pimped out and becoming a "fallen woman," or the superhero comics context of committing crimes or acts of terrorism out of familial or romantic love (like mutant terrorist Magneto's non-inherently villainous daughter the Scarlet Witch or, to some extent, Harley Quinn, who, though obviously mentally unstable, might have stayed on the right side of the law if she hadn't fallen in love with the Joker).
From:
no subject
In magical girl anime, on the other hand, the animals talk a lot and try to tell the heroine what to do starting as early as the Sailor Moon manga and anime, at least. In "Sailor Moon," Luna the cat has to break the news of her mission and supernatural powers to the heroine and give her step by step instructions on how to transform into her magical girl form, how to use her various evil-fighting gadgets, etc. (Of course, in the more recent notorious "deconstruction of magical girl tropes" series "Puella Magica Madoka," the cute talking animal who shows up to lure innocent girls into making a contract with him so the girl can have a wish granted in exchange for fighting evil and allegedly saving the world actually has rather sinister motives.)
All of this may or may not relate back in some way to the talking horse in the European fairy tale "Falada" (at least, that's the horse's name, even if the story isn't called that) in which the princess' horse keeps vainly warning her against the "All About Eve"-type servant girl who tricks her into switching places on the journey to her fiance's kingdom, then steals the princess' identity and marries the prince herself--after ordering the horse's head cut off so it can't give her away. Of course, once the severed head is nailed up on a bridge it becomes chattier than ever, and keeps giving the princess-turned-fake servant girl even more astute advice until the truth eventually comes out, I think when the royal procession rides past and the dead horse calls out accusing the usurping servant-turned-princess of her crimes.
From:
no subject
I once wrote a play loosely based on "The Goose Girl." It was a clunker preaching about how bad it was to be biased against immigrants - not one of my better moments.
From:
no subject
McKinley's Pegasus (which does have a cliff hanger ending though not a terrible one but I still wouldn't have read it if I had known) has the bonding thing, human and Pegasuses (that really can't be right, can it?), the Pegasusii being full sentient, and not at all like horses. I don't think Spindle's End counts, the protagonist can speak to all animals but there are a few who are special. Possibly the boy and his dragon one, Dragonhaven, dragon is female, named Lois, would count.
Only bonding with animals thing I read extensively was Pern, and I, like almost everyone, I think, wanted a firedragon.
I can't think of any books that do this off the top of my head but young girls and horses? Seems like what the dragons in Pern may have started from. If I remember correctly McCaffrey wrote at least one of her gothics around horses. But the idea of that bond is such a popular trope and it truly gives the girl more physical power than she'd have on her own.