Hi! New here, but I plan on sticking around. I'm working on a scifi/fantasy story and am probably over-worrying about this scenario but I take gender roles and subtext pretty seriously. This story uses gender roles as a plot device too, making it doubly important to me to get this right. I'd love to hear from other writers about their opinion of this (and if they have any tips?) My main character is a young woman soldier who's character arc involves her combating robots, depression, inferiority, and PTSD. I'm pretty confidant in balancing her depiction of those, but it's how she interacts with other characters that is frustrating me. Her best friend is an older man and their relationship is entirely platonic, but he becomes an emotional rock for her, supporting her immensely even when she tries to push everyone away. This support is what catalyzes her realization that she can't do everything by herself, and her desire to grow into a stronger person and open up to people, including depending on him to have her back. My problem becomes the male-female dynamic of this. I'm trying to avoid making it seem like she needs male support or she can't succeed/win, while not downplaying the importance of their relationship or his character. While he fills the 'traditionally female' role of being an emotional center for her (and others), making him the calm to her storm dynamic also brings up the ugly notion that women are 'irrationally emotional' compared to men. I really don't want to downplay the effect of depression and PTSD and overcoming them, either, so making her a more 'stable' person isn't an option. How do I avoid these pitfalls?
I don't think they are pitfalls. One of my most hated phrases of recent years is "strong, independent women" which is rattled out by all half-witted automatons when they are discussing modern female characters, without stopping to think that you are only taking female characters out of one box and placing them into another. Characters should be complex and compelling, they should have many and varied characteristics, they can be independent and they can be needy or both, or neither, whether male or female. The characters you have described and their dynamic sounds interesting to me.
I think the best way to combat potential implications that you don't want, in these scenarios, is to have other characters who don't fill the same roles as the ones you've described (which sounds pretty interesting and compelling, by the way). Have female characters who are more emotionally stable, have male characters who are less so. Then you're not presenting a world where %100 of the women are 'irrationally emotional' or need male support or can't succeed on their own. They don't have to be major players - I don't know what kind of cast size you're working with here, and certainly you don't want to inject unneeded characters - but even if they're just in the sidelines, it counts for something. My first thought, though, is that the main male character could just also be female. Is there any reason to not go that route?
@Pinkymcfiddle Thanks, that's relieving to hear that. I have to admit I struggle with avoiding stereotypes by being too hyper-aware of them to the point of overworrying about them even when I already know who my characters are (and they do too, lol). I guess I just need to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb characters. And I totally agree. That phrase irks me too, because 'strong female character' fundamentally misunderstood by 80% of people to mean 'bad*ss in booty-shorts' instead of 'well-written and developed character who is female'. Females in boxes just makes me think of yuri kuma arashi though. "I won't give up on boxes, so I'll give up on love!" (rofl, sorry if you've never seen it.) @izzybot I've heard that before, and it's always good advice, but I sometimes forget I already knew it. But I love playing around with personality foils, so I already have satellite characters that contrast them a bit. My cast grows over time, but starts small: One of the satellite protagonists is small-town girl who has the exact opposite arc as my main character. She starts off a doe-eyed damsel swept 0ff her feet, and ends up stepping up to the plate and holding her own just when my protag really falls apart. The others include a young man who is an absolute emotional wreck from years of bullying, and doesn't have the faintest clue how to friendship, and a very angry factory worker on strike who hates everything the main character is and stands for. No real reason other than as he is he's pretty firmly ingrained into my mind. Thank you both for saying they sound interesting!
Imma just ask a more fundamental question cos I don't get it: Why are they having mentally "unstable" young women with PTSD and as soldiers instead of support staff? Is she being forced to by a tyrant? Is she so strong that she HAS to be there as a soldier regardless? Assuming she has no children to look after, there's usually medical staff, factory/foundry work, Manual labour jobs at home that the men left behind, cooking etc. The real pitfall is rationalising the fact that the male character doesn't just get her sent home or at least out of soldiering.
@rocketshark Welcome to the site! Maybe the older character went through PTSD when he was younger, and his most important emotional rock at the time was a woman (possibly also platonic, possibly his wife/girlfriend)? Maybe the OP could explore what happens when a military's culture doesn't take PTSD seriously and expects soldiers to "tough it out" instead of getting help?
Perhaps this will help you : http://jmvh.org/article/effects-of-deployment-on-mental-health-in-modern-military-forces-a-review-of-longitudinal-studies/
In other words appropriating a male condition and masculine expectation and pasting it on women in the name of feminism?
Where have I been unclear? Since when have women ever been expected to be unemotional and tough fighters in the face of trauma? It's men who have these expectations. It's men who are shamed as being woman like when they're anything but. So if women are considered the insult to denigrate weak men in the societies we know, the OP has to answer why young women are considered essentially the same as men are. The pitfall is just changing gendered expectations in the name of feminism without rationalizing this. Doing so would ring extremely false.
How does countering the traditional mandate "men must be X, women must be Y" with "men and women can be X, Y, both, or neither" equate to mandating "women must be X, men must be Y"?
Women are not, nor do I think they have ever been, culturally expected to tough out emotions and be tough fighters. That is not the same as saying women must be anything so it's my turn to go Huh? If the society is so progressive that gender roles are eliminated and non traditional, how can it also be so regressive as to be willfully ignorant of the effects of PTSD?
I need to ask for more setting to get a bead on this. I don't care about her gender or the gender of the other character you mention. I really don't. I care about her current condition. If she is a soldier in a uniformed branch of service that is still intact and fully functional, with all the many dynamics and paradigms in place to support that ground troop who is the point of the spear, then this soldier is a problem, gender being of no importance. So that's one scenario. If instead we're at the tail end of a war, things have broken down, the chain of command is damaged and compromised, the dynamics and paradigms I mentioned prior are missing, shelled out, destroyed, then that's a different scenario. Which is it?
As above, but one thing you could do to remove the gender dynamic is to make him much older than she is. If you make it a mentor/mentee relationship, that goes a long way to removing the sex/sexuality/gender of the characters. What if Yoda was actually female?
Hi Rocketshark. I'm new here, too. I actually made an account just to answer your question, because I thought it was interesting. I had a similar relationship in a book I wrote recently, but the situation was reversed. The apocalypse happened, humanity collapsed, and a forty-five year old (female) soldier rescues a teenage boy. She ends up raising him and teaching him how to survive. They both struggle with PTSD a bit. She's very much a cranky hardass. They're mentor and mentee, but they're also best friends. So... I've got a few different thoughts. First of all, I do think you're over-thinking it a little. It's okay if he's the emotional center for her. Don't let it stop you. Think of them both as people first and everything else second. It sounds like that's what you're doing, and that's great. So your main character is unstable. That's okay. Women are people, and sometimes people are unstable. If you're worried about people reading this as 'women are unstable,' the best thing you can do is have other female characters. People come in a lot of different shapes and sizes with a lot of different flaws and strengths. Have female characters that are strong. Female characters that are weak. Female characters that are emotional, and female characters that are unemotional. In other words, the best protection against stereotyping is variety. Like... for example... if you're reading a book and the only female character in it is an evil, manipulative, selfish witch, that might come off as a little weird and sexist. If you have twenty female characters and only one of them is an evil witch, that's fine.
@Phil Mitchell You do bring up the valid point of why no one sends her home when she becomes compromised. The answer is because there is no one there to do so - they're all dead at that point. Her unit and her commander. Her best friend in question is actually a deserter and would rather shoot out his own eye than send her 'home'. Instead, he just tries to be there for her best he can. I watched Rambo: First Blood years ago, and it left a deep impression on me on how soldiers are treated and what they go through. (never want to see the sequels, lol) Since then, I've always wanted to explore that and it was one of the inspirations for this character. Like Simpson17866 mentions, this is very military culture in the vein of 'tough it out' - that might as well be their motto. @Wreybies It's actually both. The setting is a vast desert that's not under anyone's control, but the group that my main character belongs to (The Machine Brotherhood) is trying to expand into it and put the various tribes/gangs/pirates down. She's physically not in territory under their control with only her own unit - I'm thinking there will only be 10-20 of them altogether. Where the story starts, she's certainly damaged emotionally, but she's stable and one of the best they have at what she does, hardly a liability outside some (inflated) pride. She's a well-trained, capable professional with an excellent service record as a soldier on top of being what amounts to basically a valuable special-operations cyborg. However, she loses her powers, her unit, and her liaison when she's betrayed, and her best friend has to help her pull herself together so they can survive the mad man that caused all of that. So by that point, all of her support structure and even her literal uniform has been taken from her and she isn't in a situation where she can call for backup. By the time they make it through it and she makes contact with the Brotherhood again, she's on much steadier ground emotionally (if not 'well') and no longer at the brink of pure despair or is a liability any more. She also has attained a rare technological 'upgrade' that the Brotherhood is dead-set on using against it's enemies, even if she weren't capable emotionally. (I'm not THAT mean, though) @Simpson17866 That is exactly his backstory! You nailed it, lol. Time travel is involved. @Cave Troll Thank you! I'll read this right away. @Iain Aschendale While there is an age difference already, I disagree with the mentor-mentee relationship removing gender dynamics. There is still a dynamic there, it's just different (lol @ maz kanata tho). Also, it would change their relationship significantly, and I like their relationship as bffs and battle brothers without a mentoring aspect. @CoyoteKing - Hi! Wow, I'll take that as a complement, hahaha! This is sort of post-apoc too, but it was far enough ago society has found its feet since. Yours definitely sounds interesting though! I've always had a weak spot for friends forged in hard times. Yup, overthinking things is definitely one of my vices, lol. Great advice, I'll try and remember to add variety went I want to avoid unwanted stereotypes.
Except awareness of and sensitivity to shell shock and PTSD preceeded gender equality on the front lines by 100 years in our world. These being two points along a scale of progressivism. He's super possessive over her?
1) Executing veteran victims of PTSD / shell shock for "cowardice" doesn't sound like awareness and sensitivity to me. 2) Even if one military's culture respected PTSD before it respected female soldiers, does that automatically mean that every military's culture would? Any chance that it's just a simple human connection?
1) Only around 350 soldiers were executed in WW1 by Britain. Which is a proportionately very small number. And they've been given posthumous pardons. We still don't have women on the front lines. 2) Every military's culture has so far. He's a deserter who wants to keep this unwell woman around him instead of just getting her the help she needs. That's like withholding someone from going to the hospital for a physical condition. Super possessive, because I would have thought he would cut her loose before it the depression and PTSD really takes hold. She's woman who's still young with her whole life ahead of her but he wants to keep her around as a soldier despite mental deterioration. How good can she really be? How necessary for his survival? The OP would have to set it up where cutting her loose at any point would be more perilous than keeping her around, otherwise it makes this so called best friend seem like a huge asswipe.
Less possessive, more 'I hate this effing dictatorship, but I love you and I'll respect your decision to work for them. They're still dicks, though'. He would at this point follow her into, and out of, the mouth of hell, but it's not out of possessiveness but pure camaraderie and loyalty, so yes, pure human connection He does kind of have abandonment issues in other ways, though. I think you're making a couple of assumptions - he's not stopping her from getting any help, or forcing her to stay with him. He's being a friend when she desperately needs someone to rely on - she's falling apart and alone, and he's there to make sure she doesn't get shot and saying 'Hey, you're not worthless. You're important to me.' He hates and distrusts the Brotherhood and thinks they'd do more harm than good. I don't think 'Cutting her loose' is what you imagine it would be. Once they're on safer ground and she's more stable as a person, it would make him more of a jerk to tell her to go home (which she'd see as pushing her away, and to him to people he distrusts) or to leave her himself (abandonment to them both). She's just started to rely and trust on other people again at that point, and from personal experience I can tell you a person suffering from depression being abandoned/left/pushed-away by a friend can send them to rock bottom. I will try and make sure he doesn't come across as possessive, however, because you're right about how much a jerk that would make him. Although we are all a little possessive of our friends? http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/03/458319524/pentagon-will-allow-women-in-frontline-ground-combat-positions Not anymore!
Welcome to the forum. There's a similar platonic relationship in my and my writing partner's WIP: a young woman soldier becomes emotionally rattled due to some horrible experiences in the line of duty and an older man becomes her emotional rock. We've tried to write it as naturally as possible, without any ideological guidelines to pull as into either direction. It's more about them as people instead of representatives of their gender. Of course she'll think she should hide it all or people will think she's a stereotypically emotionally shaken woman, so I'm not saying it's all gender-blind, but the goal was to write them simply as people who're dealing with their current situation the best they can and who make decisions based on their personalities and experiences, not their sex. Our goal to begin with was to write both as fighters first, while their sex or sexual orientation or race definitely won't take precedence even though naturally they are there. So I'm not sure if it'd dispel your worries some if you focused more on writing them as their own persons and for a moment just forgot about their genders? While it's a good thing to be aware of "harmful" gender tropes, there's always the danger it'll handicap you and you may end up writing what you think some people want to read instead of what you'd want to read. In the end, whatever you do, there will be people who'll love it and people who'll dislike it because you didn't write your story the way they think it should've been written.
Thought I'd mention this since it's a similar case, minus the PTSD aspect, which is a separate issue than the male/female relationship in question. Has anyone here played Horizon: Zero Dawn? The entire game is very unique, it has a strong female MC, Aloy, that is not by any means a "sex symbol" (what teenage boys turn her into has no relevance either). The whole beginning of the game is about her and a character named Rost. He is not her father, but he does raise her, and acts like a mentor mostly. This entire relationship is purely out of respect. It's very clear that she does not "need" him, or anyone for that matter which becomes very obvious, but she respects him and loves him like family. It does not diminish her in any way or show a "reliance" on a man. I feel like the OP's relationship is similar in a lot of ways. Rost was obviously a support for Aloy, a voice to give her confidence, and make her understand that she is strong. No need to overthink things in this sort of situation. Simply treat the two characters as human beings, who have emotions despite their gender. There's the stereotype for men that I believe hurts us in general (speaking as one myself), we aren't suppose to have emotions for some reason, but ultimately this turns us into sociopaths and a myriad of other mental cases. It takes a real man to express their emotion, not the other way around. Thankfully I figured that out soon enough in life, but now I'm getting off topic. As someone that does have PTSD, while it is not from combat but from severe mental abuse as a child and young adult, I can kinda add a couple things there. Mostly that it always helps to talk to someone, doesn't matter who. After I was informed of my condition, it sorta made a lot of sense to me. You can have it and not realise it at all, but once you admit it to yourself you can start to heal, at least to a point that is more functional. As the story progresses, your MC can get stronger along the way, and while it is a condition for life, it does not have to keep you down forever. It can be managed. Same was true for someone I knew that did have PTSD from military, medic, and firefighter post trauma. It can be mended, doesn't ever go away completely, but the sufferer can become more functional and mentally stable with support and treatment. Just thought I'd add that.
