/lit/ - Literature

>>10807345
It truly is mystifying. I consider myself very traditionalist, but constantly politicizing absolutely everything is poison for the soul. Likewise, I try not to get too caught up worrying about non-'traditional' female representation, but the way they always go about injecting it into everything it is so paradoxically contrary to what they claim to believe. Every female protagonist of this new wave of fantasy/scifi is always written as if they are some amazing outlier that women could never aspire to. If it's not that, it's a female character that's generally written by a European, male author who's introduced as simply a matter of pseudo-religious sacrament, as if there absolutely has to be a female main or the work could not possibly stand regardless of what it is - and they will stop at nothing to bend whatever idea they have to accommodate them. It's always "the first ever female airship captain", "the cross-dressing renegade who joined the king's army", etc. It's some weird, socially acceptable form of tokenism. "Women are valuable because I go out of my way to invent a circumstance in which they are exceptionally valuable, every single time." You can argue that, hey, that's fantasy, right? But why do they always frame it in a society where a female soldier or whatever is something to be ostracized? The social justice element always has to be there.

You get the feeling these people wouldn't be able to characterize a loving mother or faithful wife if they tried.