Let's coin a new term: "Wotism"

[Thadlerian]

Originally Posted by jackokent

I was just wondering however, is it only male writers who are guilty of wotism or do female writers do it too? Are there writers out there who wotismise men?

That's a very interesting question. I've read very few female writers of Speculative Fiction, and they've seemed to be above the level on which a character's identity is founded on their gender. Doesn't mean there aren't, though. Only, it would feel rather strange. The writer would have to be very influenced by male colleagues.

I've actually read one male writer wotismising men. A Norwegian guy named Ingar Knudsen jr., in a rather demonstrative book series called Amazons, in which gender defined identity, and all the men were baddies. But that's really a dead-end; I think wotism is connected to real-life thoughts and ideas, and I can hardly imagine such a theme becoming very popular in modern Fantasy circles.

[j. d. worthington]

I've got to admit that I don't recall any such. Even where there's some pretty harsh criticism of male characters, it tends on the whole to be a few, or a group, rather than the whole. Perhaps the sole exception I can think of (and this is stretching it quite a bit) in my reading is the original short story "When It Changed" by Joanna Russ, which was the seed for her novel The Female Man. While she takes men to task for certain things, she doesn't really make them flat or two-dimensional, let alone one. It just seems to be something that is predominantly a male tendency, and even there it seems more limited in general than it used. Unfortunately, Fantasy is often where it is found most often, in my experience. But we again seem to be moving away from that with many of the more popular writers...

[Nesacat]

Ah a word to explain why I stopped reading the Wheel of Time books after the fourth one. Great word though. Thanks. Am going to tuck it away someplace safe in the tea room.

I'll agree with the others that I've not come across female writers who treat their male characters in the same way. No matter the nature of the stories, the men all tend to have well-rounded, many-dimensional characters. Wotism would seem to belong to the realm of male writers.

Unless you count the real 'popcorn' romance novels but in those both the men and women are flattened almost out of all recognition.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Nesacat

Unless you count the real 'popcorn' romance novels but in those both the men and women are flattened almost out of all recognition.

Yes, the trite "like they'd been run over by a steamroller" doesn't even touch what you run into there....

[Werthead]

I think the problem using WoT as an example is that the men are not tremendously well-written or defined either, and usually let the women order and boss them around for no logical reason.

[Thadlerian]

Originally Posted by Werthead

I think the problem using WoT as an example is that the men are not tremendously well-written or defined either, and usually let the women order and boss them around for no logical reason.

The point is not the deepness/shallowness of the characters, but the way men as a rule come across to the reader as far more sympathetic, tolerant and patient than women as a rule; they're more likeable characters.

[Werthead]

Not sure about this, but then I recall you haven't read the later books where the trend is much worse. Perrin was likable until he turned into Faile's whipping-boy, and by Books 9-11 has turned into an utter caricature of his earlier self. Mat took a turn for the worse under the influence of Tuon but at the end of KoD (Book 11) redeems himself. Rand has become a totally two-dimensional cypher.

Would the knowledge that Robert Jordan introduces a 'super-Myrddraal' later in the books who rapes two of the female Forsaken when they fail missions for him have any impact on your thesis?

[Thadlerian]

I don't think it would, not much. This 'super-myrddraal' example sounds too much like a single incident, while my thesis concerns the big picture male-female differentiation. There were several exceptions from wotism in the first five books (like the character Min, who seemed to be built far less on the Nynaeve model than the rest of the female cast), but as those were in a small minority, I feel that my statements are supported.

[Werthead]

No, the 'super-Myrddraal' (Shaidar Haran) is introduced in the prologue to Book 6 and plays a role in every other novel in the series.

Min degrades in the last few books into a lovestruck idiot. She starts wearing high heels to impress Rand, for example, which I thought was a bizarre reversal of her earlier character.

[Brown Rat]

Gack. You all are making me very glad I've not read any of the Wheel of Time.

[Thadlerian]

An important aspect, perhaps even the main function, of wotism is the point when the man's patience and tolerance is stretched too thin: In a, to the reader, satisfying act of power and determination, he does what he "should" have done all along: He teaches the woman "her place". After all, who can deny him this right, after all the abuse he's accepted? Finally he can get on with saving the world, without further impediments.

As the WoT is drawing towards an end, perhaps this is what has started happening when this super-myrddraal incident takes place? Rape is a tasteless way of doing this, but they're bad guys, after all.

[Werthead]

Well, I still wouldn't wish it in on my worst enemy. I think it's the way of Shaidar Haran exercising power, although that does beg the question of what he'd do to a male Forsaken if they failed on such a scale (although it hasn't happened since most of them have been eliminated by Book 11).

[Siberian]

I have to agree with everything the original poster said. I tried to reread WoT over the past couple of years... and I just couldn't get past wholly unsympathetic characters, men and well as women. Everyone is constantly engaged in a gender war, not to mention immature and one-dimensional.

[thepaladin]

Men don't actually "rule" the women in WoT. There are plenty of instances where the "wrapped around her finger" principle kicks in (and gets "WaYYYY" annoying!) That's one of the waeknesses in the WoT from the first..that "battle of the sexes" nonsense.

[Thadlerian]

Ah, Wotism revisited, three years later, is it?

I have not quite forgotten this thread, and I have certainly not forgotten the ideas conveyed here. The thread was a rather impulsive action of youth, and today - with the wisdom of years - I see that I would not again have formulated some of the ideas that way. Even so, my conclusion remains; I have seen the idea verified over and over in a number of works since.

If I should phrase the idea over, it would simply be this: Many male writers have a strong propensity to create character galleries in which female characters play overwhelmingly negative roles compared to the male characters. SF/F women generally seem to be confined to a small selection of available character roles, whereas male characters can play any thinkable function in a story.

This view may be biased - I might simply be predisposed to sympathise more with male characters than females, due to my own gender, and see their roles in a more positive light. I do, however, argue that the effect I observe is far too strong for such a bias to explain it.

In the years since I made this thread, other sources of opinion of male-female differences in stories have developed. I am, of course, referring to TV Tropes. The Wotist ideas of my original post can be found reflected in a variety of tropes, including Tsundere, Damsel Scrappy and Straw Feminist. But there is as of yet no trope for the general large-scale positive-negative differentiation of a writer's universe.

An example of a recently discovered case of Wotism, which left me in a state of great dismay upon conclusion, is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. For all of Robinson's grand sophistication, he has consistently designed the female protagonists of his trilogy to be highly unlikeable. The story is moved forward by the men, while the women largely acts as liabilities and sources of conflict.

The positive-negative differentiation can also be applied to a lighter degree, I have concluded after reading book 3 and 4, to Steven Erikson's Malazan books. With the exception of Tattersail, and perhaps a few others, Erikson's women are largely joyless and surly creatures, compared to the relaxed and playful men that comprise the light-hearted Malazan universe.

This time, however, I will not adamantly insist that such tendencies are a conscious reaction to feminism and society's incremental development towards gender equality. It is probably a sign of something more latent.

Though I cannot see why everyone is talking about a "gender war" in WoT. A war has, as far as I am aware, two sides, and through the five WoT books that I read, I could only see one. Does this mean the men are finally allowed to return fire in the later books?