Manic Pixies, Doctor Who and female role models in SF

[sesquipedality]

I thought this article was interesting, if overly long for the point it was trying to make. However, the alpha SF nerd in me feels compelled to point out:

(a) if your role models came from SF and fantasy, why didn't you want to be Lessa the Weyrwoman, or Sigmy Mallory (or pretty much any Cherryh heroine) or Cassandra of Troy (the Marion Zimmer Bradley version)?* I bloody well know I did. To suggest that the genre is absent of real female protagonists is odd. For Lessa, you don't even have to wonder away from entirely mainstream SF (although being a McCaffrey character, she is of course, problematic in some ways).

(b) I don't think Moffat's female characters are any worse than RTDs, low bar though that is. The only one that was genuinely likeable was Donna Noble. This is one of the reasons we so desperately need a female doctor (preferably a fat, 40 year old, slightly obsessive one - still waiting for that call, Moffat) - so the writers can get used to the idea that female characters can exist as people (although to be fair, it's rare that anyone, except the Doctor himself, is allowed to be a rounded person).

*Or Marianne from Sherri S. Tepper's Marianne Trilogy, whom I sometimes felt like I actually *was* (despite, I should make clear, not suffering emotional abuse from my brother myself). But very few people will have heard of her, I suspect.

Comments

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I think we can agree to differ on this one, but I do agree with a lot of what you say. Particularly irritating was that RTD teased this possibility by turning Donna into someone who could genuinely be an equal to the Doctor, then tearing it away. River Song could also have taken this role, but got ... erm, emasculated. The advantage of a female doctor is that the writers pretty much can't sideline the main character in that way.

[mrdreadful.livejournal.com]

What annoys me most about the Doctor-Companion dynamic is that it mostly seems to exist now because That's How It's Always Been Done, which is always the worst reason for keeping any tradition going. I can forgive 60s and 70s Doctor Who because of the time they were around and people like Verity Lambert and Delia Derbyshire were real pioneers in the whole Women Being Taken Seriously In Entertainment thing, but there is no exuse for 2000s Doctor Who to still have the female character be a combination of eye candy and rescue fodder.

I was disappointed that 'DoctorDonna' didn't become a longer term thing, and as much as I find Alex Kingston attractive, I don't want River Song to just end up as eye candy spending all her time winking and saying "sweetie" and "spoilers" instead of being a well rounded character.

It's particularly frustrating because my own writing has shown me first hand that it's quite possible for men to write very good female characters (I get good feedback from the women in my writing group, in any case). Being a male writer is no excuse for not making your female characters just as fully realised as the menfolks.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I used to think I couldn't write male characters convincingly (I still don't tend to - I find the female perspective more comfortable, and there's no shortage of people doing male perspectives well) until I realised that all you do is write people. Some awareness of the differing societal pressures on men and women certainly helps, but really, people, just people.

[mrdreadful.livejournal.com]

Writing people rather than genders was certainly quite a breakthrough for me.

One story I did that I got a lot of positive feedback for and hope to try and get published was a romance where the two characters involved were women (Doctor Who featured in the story too, natch)... I wrote people and did not draw unnecessary attention to the sexuality of the characters. I'm quite proud of it, really. And just for the extra challenge it was told in the first person too. :)