I want to be able to shed light on how women are portrayed in media, but I will admit that even I have my own blind spots. As a woman, for whom this is personal and real, and has a vested interest in raising up women in media, I am still lost in the cyclical reality in many cases.
For a moment I’m going to talk about two books that I read very close to the same time. I’m going to spoil the endings as well, because that’s where my point gets made. The first book, Legendborn by Tracy Deonn Is the story of college student, Bree, who finds out that there’s magic in the world when she runs into a society who are basically all descendants of King Arthur and his knights, who fight against demons. When the Demons endanger the world, the person directly descended from each of the knights of the round table ‘awaken’, getting powers of that knight. This happens in order of importance and thus Lancelot and King Arthur have not awakened in like…forever. Bree is discovered to be a descendant of Lancelot and Nick, the boy she falls for, is in the line of King Arthur. The twist at the end of the book is that Bree’s ancestors were raped, which caused the knight’s bloodlines to switch, thus Nick, instead awakens as Lancelot, while Bree awakens as King Arthur. Hold onto that for a moment.
The other book is King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo. One of the major plot-lines in this book is that the current king of the country, Nikolai, is possibly a bastard, and thus doesn’t deserve the throne. But he’s a great guy and a great king, so we (the reader) don’t want him to be ousted. This mystery is thrown around through the book as he and Zoya complete the rest of the plot. (Read the book it’s great. Really, read everything by Bardugo.) We finally get to the climax scene where it comes out that Nikolai is a bastard and has no right to the throne, and during the resulting conflict, he throws out the idea that Zoya should be queen. She doesn’t have royal blood, but neither did the royal family when they first became royal. And she ends up becoming queen.
Now I read both of these books within a week of each other, and while reading I just …accepted that the woman in each of these story lines would end up in a secondary position to their romantic interest. (I could name you a dozen books where this does happen.) The man was King, and the woman was going to support him. That was just the expected and comfortable reality, and when each of these authors was like ‘Okay, and now the woman is the king/queen.’, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen that as an option. I realized how complainant I was in the cyclical reality that the woman would be secondary to the man.
I, personally, like supporting other people. I don’t like being the one taking charge. Whether that’s my personality or it was beaten into me hard enough by society, I don’t quite know, BUT that doesn’t mean that it should be true for every woman I write (or read). This was a complete blind-spot for me, and it made me completely reconsider one of the books that I’ve been writing where the female lead was, to a certain extent, just support for the male lead.
And I know that there are likely other blind-spots in my view of woman’s place in society, but now that I’m more aware of it, I am aware of the necessity to question everything, not just the obvious. Because stories shape who we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change that shape.
