Sirens Panels

[rachelmanija]

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.]

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

I should have mentioned that the Carrie Vaughn novel, "Voices of Dragons," probably does qualify as a companion-animal story, since at the end the girl and the dragon fly off together with the intention of jointly attempting to improve dragon-human relations elsewhere in the world, as they already have to some extent where they started out, in their universe's version of New Mexico. It's been a while since I read the book, so I'm not sure if it was explicitly stated that some sort of human/dragon peace talks had been scheduled after the heroine and her dragon friend proved that dragons and humans could work together in harmony via the dragon flying over the town with the girl--who happens to be the local sheriff's daughter--riding on his back, obviously voluntarily. However, both girl and dragon seem to be convinced that this dramatic display of dragon/human solidarity has made enough of an impression on their respective species to at least temporarily put a stop to the panicked humans' plans to send their most advanced new fighter planes to attack the dragons in retaliation for the other species' recent perceived violations of human airspace.

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.)

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

And if you're not totally fed up with the "women and dragons" theme yet, although the main human/other species bond in Naomi Novik's "dragons in the Napoleonic Wars" Temeraire series is between two males, the aerial Dragon Corps that the protagonists belong to also includes female officers. Of course, this seems to have happened largely because one particular breed of dragon, the Longwings, will only bond with female captains. (One of the prepubescent midshipmen riding along with human series protagonist Will Laurence on his Chinese Imperial dragon Temeraire is a girl--although since she has short hair and dresses like a boy, it takes Laurence a while to figure this out--but as far as I can tell from the two and a half books in the series I've read so far, all of the few female officers who command their own dragons have bonded with male-averse Longwings.)

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).