The Gender game.

For a little while now there has been a growing push of people, mainly women who are discussing on twitter and through blogs the issue of gender in science fiction / fantasy mainly focused on Star Wars.
 It started here The GFFA Needs Women: The Disappointing Nomi Cancellation in a post by Nanci, then Chris wrote his rebuttal: EU Action/Reaction: Let’s Stop Thinking About Gender 
This post from Club Jade says it very well. Why do we want more women highlighted in the Expanded Universe?  And so does Tosche Station Why Star Wars Needs Women – Now More Than Ever.

One of my Twitter friends asked why women were so mad at the moment, well I think partly the post from Chris over at the EUC didn't really help matters and also I think that we're seeing several things collide at once not the least of which is probably a subconscious push against the misogynistic tendencies going on the e USA at the moment. There's a war on women and it's spilling out onto the streets ( but that's another post for another time)  

Does the Star Wars franchise need more strong female characters? Yes I think it does. While one can argue that SW is full of women, for the most part, as characters, they are not treated very well nor are they, as characters, written very well either and this is part of the problem.

Yesterday, when asked to pick out a strong female character in the scifi / fantasy world the 1st person that came to mind was Ellen Ripley. She is the standard by which I personally set the bar by. After that Zoe and Inara from Firefly also came to mind, both incredibly strong characters but for vastly different reasons. Olivia from Fringe, and let's not forget to mention half the cast of BattleStar Galactica. There is a wealth of strong female characters in today's sci fi, movie and tv. Women who are tough, smart, sassy, vulnerable, emotional and essentially human and very believable. And this is the point. Many of the female characters in Star Wars are two dimensional and personally I don't give a rat's ass about them, although in all honesty I feel the same way about many of the male characters in SW as well.

So I thought about this a lot and I think the issue is not so much a lack of female characters, because there are actually quite a few in the SW universe, but rather the incredible lack of really good writing. I've touched on this before but I think it bears saying again. Most of the SWEU books I've read are crap. While reading the NJO ( the new jedi order series in which an entirely alien and brand new to the SW universe bad guys set out to destroy all) I had to restrain myself from having a  good old fashioned book burning.   Honestly I've never read a worse set of books. There were one or two exceptions to this ( Matt Stover being the one that comes to mind) but for the most part I wanted to toss the set out the window. Waste of money. Why? Because they were awful. Bad plots, terrible and unbelievable dialogue and for the most part boring as hell. Evil bad guys vs out numbered jedi yeah what ever... And don't get me started on the Killik series which featured giant bugs and a bunch of the stupidest ideas I've ever read - ever. ( even worse than the NJO)

Well here's the thing. I find that Star Wars in general as of late has become a great deal about merchandising and tie ins and less about story and substance. ( in many but not all cases) It's a money maker. I get that, it's a business and it needs to make money. If something has the lable Star Wars slapped on it people WILL lap it up like cats at a cream bowl. I've seen people buy anything you can think of just because it's SW related. The same goes with books. People are so desperate for anything Star Wars related many don't care and or don't notice how badly done so much of it is, especially in novels.

Now there's a rising vocal group who want more. We clamour for well written books. Well thought out, in depth, clever plots with characters we can identify with, male and female. No more rehash of the movies, no more recycling the movie lines. Let's have more thought provoking situations with complex adversaries not some variation of keystone cops and overly empowered super jedi with some gratuitous harlequin romance thrown in for good measure.

When I wrote my fanfic I did so because, honestly, this was the book I really wanted to read. Something where the Imperials were not all mustachio twirling idiot megalomaniacs hell bent on destroying the universe before letting it fall into the hands of the enemy. ( Isard and her stupid plan to poison Courescant...really? Come on.) I wanted characters I could love and hate. People I wanted to hang out with and be friends with or shoot. These are the reactions I should get when reading books. Good, well written books make you feel. You fall in love, you feel pain, you learn to hate a little, you clamour for revenge and so on. You go on a ride along and if the book is really good, for a short time you're totally transported to another time and place. You should not be aware you're reading a book because you have been transported into the book instead.

Why is it that a single jedi can slaughter an entire battalion of battle droids and not get a single scorch on him. What is the point of all these super battle droids if they can't hit their mark at least once? Maul comes back as mechno man? Plot holes as big as the Atlantic and more all add up to YAWN as far as story telling is concerned.  What made Palpatine such a great bad guy is he WAS clever and evil and luckily for us portrayed by Ian McDiarmid in such a way that every time he was on screen he game me goosebumps and not in any good way.  Palpatine was evil, clever and subtle. In this respect we were shown not told.

There are a lot of awesome things about Star Wars and I love it in spite of its failings but I think there is a lot of room to improve and grow. So let's set aside all the weird gender issues. Star Wars is not just for boys and finding some great writers who would be willing to create or write really well rounded believable female characters in books with decent plots and worthy adversaries would go along way to helping this.

so I'm wordy...

I read a book while on the trip to Frankfurt. Coding Isis by David Roys. It was a free kindle so I had it on my ipod for the trip. It started off really well, a murder, a set up, mystery some mayhem but round about 2/3rds into the book I was starting to go... huh? He introduces a character, Wyn,  who serves no real purpose. I kept waiting for this guy to do something but he doesn't. Is he a bad guy? is he a good guy? Will he have to die to protect the wife? will he turn out to be a spy? Is he an alien from Mars? No seriously he has no purpose. If he wasn't in the book I wouldn't miss him and the fact that I notice this at all telly you how annoying this was, how noticeable the characters lack of purpose was. Yeah I know he was there to keep the wife say, but he doesn't because there's never a threat to the wife. She was never in danger.  It made me think of Chuck Wendig and a bunch of other authors who have written how to write advice. They tell you you no matter how minor the character they must serve a purpose. Every character thinks he / she is the most important being in the galaxy.

When the character of Wyn departs I was left with a distinctly WTF expression. I actually asked myself out loud, why the hell were you even there? And it annoyed me. The ending of the book did that as well. What started out so well ended far too quickly. I like happy endings, happy endings are good but a REALLY great book leaves you with questions as well. Leaves you with I want more. That was a great end but I want a lot more. This book ended with a slamming door and I could care less about what happens next which is sad because it started off really well. The bad guy dies horribly, the good guy wins the day and the faithful wife stays faithful. okay... next. Why am I writing about this? Well because it annoyed the crap out of me. I hate it when a book starts off well and then goes belly up. Like someone told the author okay you have to wrap this up in the next ten pages or else, oh and by the way we want you to add a guy named ( ---) because.... what ever. yeah. blah.

It seems to me that so many writers ( including movies tv etc) start out of the gate really well but when it comes to closure they seem to have some issues. 

On the other scale of things is Kiefer Sutherland's new TV show Touch.

I like tv shows that think outside the box a bit. Sadly these are exactly the kinds of TV shows that don't last. I am hoping this one does. This is a show about connections. About how we, as humans, are all inexplicably tied together and what we do matters. I've been saying this for a really long time. We make choices and those choices have consequences. As a single human being I have no idea how far anything I do or say goes. It's like tossing a pebble into a pond the ripples keep going.

This particular show managed to give me goosebumps right out of the box. It's a little bit magical, a little bit mystical and a whole lot about humanity needing to connect. To be noticed, to be loved. And that's the bottom line.

The internet has made it so much easier to connect the globe. We are able to communicate on such a level that's never been seen before. It's making some people very scared and once the majority of the globe figures out how to wield this power of communication effectively I think we will see a massive shift in how stuff gets done. It's already happening but the powers that be are terrified and work hard to block it at any cost.

So anyway, this show... which tells the story of a father trying to communicate with his autistic son. This is a rich complex show, it weaves stories like tangled piles of string. We get tiny glimpses into lives of others and then we move onward. I like when martin gets it. That a-hah moment. It's wonderful, it gives me goosebumps.

I personally like this show because it's about good things.  About how we need each other and should try to help each other way more than we do. It's a very positive show so far. So I hope it doesn't get canned. I do so think we need far more of smart shows like this than moronic reality tv.