I've come across variants of this idea in shifter books before, where women don't survive becoming shifters, shifters are never female, shifter women are very rare, etc, and it's a trope I really dislike. It typically means either people are constantly trying to kidnap or rape the heroine, and/or she's the only woman in the book.
I had forgotten how common this is in the worldbuilding of especially older-school shifter books. SF romance is very much That Way, too - alien species who are only male and therefore have to kidnap human women are super duper common. It's a sort of interesting inverse of the way that heroines in some of the other subgenres (reverse harem, say, or vampire) are super-duper-special - in this case, they're still ordinary human women who are made super-special just because women are incredibly rare. I assume it's a similar kind of fantasy, except that the fantasy is not "I could gain lots of powers and be special!", it's "I'm special just the way I am, and I could step into this world as my ordinary self and be valued and rare."
(But I agree with you that it's not a worldbuilding feature I enjoy.)
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Date: 2020-02-28 10:43 pm (UTC)I had forgotten how common this is in the worldbuilding of especially older-school shifter books. SF romance is very much That Way, too - alien species who are only male and therefore have to kidnap human women are super duper common. It's a sort of interesting inverse of the way that heroines in some of the other subgenres (reverse harem, say, or vampire) are super-duper-special - in this case, they're still ordinary human women who are made super-special just because women are incredibly rare. I assume it's a similar kind of fantasy, except that the fantasy is not "I could gain lots of powers and be special!", it's "I'm special just the way I am, and I could step into this world as my ordinary self and be valued and rare."
(But I agree with you that it's not a worldbuilding feature I enjoy.)