Gender Value in Fantasy

I rarely ever start a post with a disclaimer, but it's important to establish right out of the gate that this particular consideration in fiction is highly optional. Through the way your society mirrors an existing culture or through the way characters and environments interact, your readers will both decide if there's a gendered bias or if it's even personally important for them to observe one at all. What I'm going to cover here is a consideration, an analysis, of the many ways we can exhibit this in action on a conscious level. It's not 'woke' or any attempt to establish superiority and inferiority, just techniques in exhibiting it on many levels.

The broader you go, the less you need to think about it. An entire world is rarely on the same page when it comes to gender roles, so we tend to skip an unified norm there. It tends to narrow down perceptibly within a country, and more so as you whittle down to maybe tribes or clans, communities-- but where it gets trickier to maneuver is where it comes to occupation and, most difficult of all, the individual.

What do I mean by occupation? Well, let's take it to the current stories I'm reading, Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher. 

If you haven't read them but would like to, you may want to avoid this post. I don't like to spoil things for people and it's unavoidable since I'm using some pretty prominent plots to form the examples.

Sorceresses/Sorcerors, as well as Witchers, tend to carry their own priorities on gender value, due to the limitations and advantages occupation places on them. In this case, it's not a simple as a career or job role; this one is partially a genetic or altered genetic state that chooses their job for them, but before I go into that... Purely occupation being the consideration, then you're probably personally familiar with the term 'work culture' where certain attitudes and ways of life become normalized, often outside of the influence of standard cultural norms. What is appropriate and inappropriate in male and female interaction tends to be a matter of what is enabled or shut down. Despite laws considering sexual harassment, for instance, if there's an air of permission that no one challenges, it tends to be allowed until opposition is made. Even then, the flow is sometimes so hard to divert that even higher managers and human resources personnel caught in it may deny that the problem exists rather than risk being accused of enabling it. You then have to find someone outside of that culture, who also feels the situation is inappropriate, to alter it. However, once you become a 'problem', you're better off working elsewhere because you will be shunned from that culture even once you've changed it. This is no longer a gender value concern because the champion of the cause is often simply avoided by all people involved. This is often why certain gender-related bigotry is simply suffered. The isolation in an environment you can't readily leave is damning. In some ways, to be a champion of a cause is often the luxury of those who already have an escape plan.

I realize I did a bit of wiggling, but occupation is often a 'destined' element in fantasy, and one with a more important context. So past the real world parallel that I jumped over to, we consider how gender is valued in the series I mentioned. Early on, it is mentioned that most sorceresses and witchers are sterile. Though how the sorceresses are only *sometimes* sterile is a bit vague, but the way that their vanity is fed by potions to erase their physical flaws and appear younger so they can charm people, while male sorcerors tend to aim to gain respect by looking older, it's very likely that the female's unique use of magic comes at the cost of a working womb. Now this is a bit of a complexity that whittles down to an individual character's dilemma--Yennifer of Vengerburg.

In different stories throughout, we learn small details of her mysterious past. In one, Geralt (the main character and Witcher, as well as her lover) suspects that her ministrations to become more beautiful were more of a trial than most. He is trained to observe the minute details of movement and anatomy and, when she is speaking to him while applying make-up at her dressing table one morning, he observes an odd gesture of shame that is characteristic to people born with a hunchback. In another instance, she wistfully talks about what it would be like to have a child, to be able to share her knowledge with a creature of her own making. While Geralt, in his usual practical matter of dismissing what can't be had comes to play, we see the bitterness lingers--it's clear she would never give up the mastery of her occupation, but the nurturing instinct most common in women still lingers uselessly, looking for a place to go.

Perhaps it's due to Yennifer's influence then, an empathy for the woman he loves (albeit questionably, given he tethered himself to her to save her from a genie), that Geralt, who seems immune to any kind of nurturing instinct, begins to take to the clever little Ciri and her resolute stance that they are destined to walk the same path. While he never seems resentful of the inability to father children, he also seems uninterested in children at all. He isn't unkind to them but, like with cats, they seem to naturally be repelled by him anyway; another reason why Ciri's fascination with him, her choosing to trust and be around him, unbalances him as it does. He seems so opposed to the idea of destiny, so opposite this starry-eyed girl, that it shakes his own sense of value. Rather than resigning his existence as a necessary evil, Geralt begins to accept his worth in the eyes of the women around him. It doesn't visibly soften his heart, but his actions begin to reflect their significance in his value. In most instances, he pulls back for self-preservation yet is still willing to die if he is inadequate. Where they are concerned, he never removes himself as their shield--except in the case where their strengths outweigh his own. He has the most brilliantly flexible ego, ready to always concede to the best possible weapon. And never afraid for a woman to wield it.

Back on the sensitive subject of fertility, it is a privilege that no Witcher enjoys because their genes are altered, pushed to their limits, and they are no longer essentially human. Geralt expresses that they have no emotions, that only fear is preserved as useful. Witchers are never anything but male and are usually recruited through the law of surprise, an odd favor asked of someone they save without payment, claiming in return 'the thing that they did not expect to see on returning home'. Which is usually a fated child, coincidentally always a male. In this brutal world though, female fighters are fairly rare and short-lived (in human societies at least) and females are still pegged as emotional creatures, an attribute less than desirable in a warrior hoping to survive. So in a world where the alpha male reins, for anyone to think Geralt has emotions at all could be catastrophic. Despite Yennifer's suspicions that he is just good at masking his emotions, he lies that it simply isn't possible; that's how they were made to survive. In this world, the gender values are suitably shaky. Women are valued as abstractly as men and always with divisions considerate of culture, occupation, but most moving of all, in the individual. As with Yen's sensitivity about not having a child, this also means that she is not selective of its sex or the sex of any child determining its worth, a persistent trauma that actually does her credit in removing a gendered value. Which smoothly transitions into someone who wasn't so compassionate...

Geralt's birth mother, a sorceress. This is part of the reason why Yennifer is stunned that he knows only some sorceresses are sterile. It's knowledge they are rather keen on protecting, and largely because it appears that society is particularly against sorcerers and sorceresses breeding. It's unclear where Geralt falls in this, but we get the impression that his insistence that the 'law of surprise' is the only way to recruit young boys is bullshit and that his mother even willingly gave him up because she didn't want a son. I haven't read enough to know how accurate this assumption is or what it could mean about why she gave him up, but it is clear that Yennifer doesn't care what his mother's reasons were, simply hates the woman on principle because she was both able to have a child at all and was so quick to throw that away. For some reason, sorceresses seem to be more revered than their male counterparts, so I suspect that to be a factor. There tend to be a great deal more sorceresses than sorcerers floating around as well, even though sorceresses were persecuted en masse in the game I played. So it's possible women are simply naturally possessed of immense magical ability... or perhaps less guarded in having it to begin with.

While I'm straying from the gender value points only a bit here, one interesting feature of magic seems to be its tendency to 'skip a generation' when passed through a matrilineal line. It seems that females more readily genetically pass on powers, which makes them more frightening to ordinary humans. There seems to be a common belief that magic is simply learned, so I don't think it's common knowledge that there is a genetic thread or inherited gift at all. In fact, in one short story, the princess who discovers she inherited her grandmother's power not only is more powerful but when her power presents, it is dangerous and uncontrollable. It is also highly suspect that blood inherited powers are a sign of latent elven blood. It would explain the fear-based but long-buried persecution of both elves and sorceresses at least. This doesn't necessarily state a value or preference for females, especially since they aren't also given a societal advantage to put males at a further disadvantage. In terms of inheritance in human societies, women are not even considered. So race also bleeds into the factoring of male/female value.

Despite the possibility for a preference or value to be prevalent, I rather like when we, as readers, are informed of the actions and left to assume the reasoning behind them. If it's important enough to the story, it will recur time and again without having to beat the reader over the head with it. Of course, our own biases and imagination will sometimes create plenty of scenarios that were intended. All for the better. It's just important for writers to know that you can very effectively lace a gender value issue into the plot without making it so obvious or central. In fact, if you can make the reader forget about it until it's time to recall it, it can have an even more powerful effect.

So, what did you get out of this analysis? Hopefully, it's the sense that you don't blatantly isolate the male/female value from the elements of the story. If you place barriers on how your readers will perceive that balance, you're losing sight of how fiction weaves many threads. It's possible to explain these concepts without using an example story, but that would only help the non-fiction writer to write a step by step process. For the writer, it's simply more practical to weave in and out with an actual thread, to tell the story and infuse it with the possible reasons behind it.

I hesitate to use this story too freely from this point on. I've only read the two short story collections and played the third Witcher game, so my guesses could be very off. What keeps the story interesting is that the characters rarely wind into exposition about themselves. They're not mysterious just for the sake of dangling out the story, but because it is more than clear that trust, hope, and sharing are things more likely to get you killed than make you all warm and fuzzy about it. What is fed to the reader is slipped through the plots and it's quite the playground for possibility. It's actually the kind of story where it's both rewarding to guess and rewarding to be wrong. 

So if you've already read them and I'm off base, let me be. I'll get around to seeing if my questions are answered. I do, however, find value in analyzing possibilities well before they are revealed. It's good practice as a writer to maintain mental flexibility, even when it's not my own work. Especially when it isn't. I'm not as invested in the development, so it's a finished but verdant playground nonetheless!

Off I go, for now. Miles to go before I sleep, you know.