Tag: females in YA (Page 1 of 4)

The Different Strengths of Female Characters: A Study of Anna and Elsa in Frozen 2

July 27, 2020 / Katie L. Carroll

Long-time readers of this blog know I’ve been writing about female characters for years and even did a wholes series of “Females in YA” posts. Some topics I’ve covered are unlikable girls, the Bechdel Test, and the feminist world in my first YA fantasy ELIXIR BOUND. One topic in particular I enjoy talking about is the different ways female characters can be strong (see “Females in YA: Part 5 Strong Female Characters”).

Frozen 2, which was the last movie I saw in theaters and is quite popular in my house right now (the whole Frozen franchise really…as evidenced by the requested Frozen Fever cake I made for my 3-year-old’s birthday earlier this month), is a really good example of the different kinds of strengths female characters can have.

Let’s take a look at Elsa. She embodies what a lot of people think about when it comes to strong female characters, à la Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games series or Sarah Connors from the Terminator franchise. I’m talking about the butt-kicking, weapon-wielding type. Elsa is powerful and so full of magic she literally cannot control it. These characters are seen as extraordinary and labeled as strong, often in a way that marks them as different from other female characters. Almost as if implying that women are inherently weak, especially since strong isn’t used nearly as often to describe male characters because it’s assumed of them.

These strong female characters certainly have their weaknesses; they wouldn’t be very interesting characters if they didn’t. Elsa can be distant to the people she loves, she has trouble accepting help, and she fails to recognize her own limitations. A character without such flaws is boring and has nothing to overcome internally.

In general, though, the power of characters like these women is in your face and often of the physical variety, so they get the descriptor of strong. Not to say that they aren’t mentally strong, too, (which they absolutely are), but their most obvious displays of strength are physical. These characters are clearly not to be trifled with. They go on adventures and quests. They face dangers and conquer them. I love these types of strong female characters!

But I also am quick to note that this isn’t the only way a female character can be strong (and this is true for male characters and we definitely need male characters to show different types of strength, but that’s for another post). That’s where Anna comes in.

There’s a running joke in the Frozen franchise about how Anna is ordinary. When she calls herself ordinary in the first Frozen movie, Hans (her love interest at the time) agrees by saying, “That’s right, she is.” When Anna shoots him a wounded look, he adds, “In–in the best possible way.” In Frozen 2, Olaf recounts the events of the first movie and describes the sisters by saying, “One born with magical powers, the other powerless.”

Anna is also openly affectionate, is not afraid to be silly, and is all too aware of her powerlessness. She has her moments of physical strength (justifiably punching Hans in the first Frozen movie after he’s betrayed her and Elsa), but I don’t think she would be described as a strong female character in the way Elsa (or Katniss or Sarah Connors) is.

Warning about Frozen 2 spoilers….

Yet one of the biggest examples of an act of strength in the entire Frozen franchise is performed by Anna in Frozen 2. Having come to the realization that her sister has sacrificed herself for the truth and clutching Olaf as he flurries away to his death, Anna lies on a dark cave floor and just wants to give up. In the song “The Next Right Thing,” she sings:

I’ve seen dark before, but not like this
This is cold, this is empty, this is numb
The life I knew is over, the lights are out
Hello, darkness, I’m ready to succumb

By the end of the song, Anna has found the strength within herself to make her way out the cave and has vowed to save her kingdom and the enchanted forest. Despite facing the darkest moments of her life and personally being done with it all, she gets up and moves forward (not on…there’s really no moving on from something like that). Then, despite the heartache and depression and physical fatigue, she proceeds to anger the Earth Giants so they throw boulders at her as they chase her to the dam that she is trying to get them to destroy. Now that’s a show of strength!

I’m not trying to take sides on whose strength is better. None of Anna’s strengths diminish Elsa’s, and vice versa. The point is that there are many different ways for characters (and people) to show strength and to be powerful. Let’s not limit our characters–male or female–to one type.

This is something I thought a lot about when working on the characters in the Elixir books. I wanted there to be strong female characters in every sense of the word. So if you enjoy stories about sisters and strong female characters (and ice palaces!), I encourage you to check out the award-winning YA fantasy ELIXIR BOUND and its standalone sequel ELIXIR SAVED.

Feminism in YA Fantasy: A Study of ELIXIR BOUND #InkRipples #FemalesInYA

March 21, 2016 / Katie L. Carroll

When I started writing ELIXIR BOUND many, many moons ago, I never intended to write a novel with feminist themes. I set out to write a fantasy adventure about two sisters with a structure modeled on the there-and-back-again journey of THE HOBBIT (a very non-feminist book!). Being the third of five children and a woman, it was important to me that the guardianship of the Elixir wasn’t passed down to the firstborn or a son, but I didn’t necessarily think about it in terms of feminism as I wrote the book.

It was only after I finished the first draft that I realized that I had created feminist characters, a feminist mythology, and a general feminist worldview.

At one point in an early draft, I had an older, male character–Hirsten’s father–in a brief scene question the decision to let Katora, a young woman, lead the quest to find the secret healing Elixir. He wasn’t questioning her abilities as leader, but the fact that Katora’s father was comfortable letting her venture into the dangerous Faway Forest. It stemmed from the fact that he only had male children and young women seemed a bit of a mystery to him.

I remember that as I wrote that scene, something about it wasn’t sitting well with me. I couldn’t pinpoint what the problem was until I had a whole draft, and then I quickly realized it didn’t fit in with the worldview I had created in pretty much every other aspect of the story. The world of ELIXIR BOUND wasn’t a place where the gender of a person was a reason to question whether or not they should do something. And it was only then that I was able to consciously recognize the type of world I had created.

The Greater Peninsula is ruled by Mother Nature, an unseen goddess character, whom Katora often refers to in dialogue as the “Great Mother” in way that in our world would probably be considered blasphemy (though it’s okay in her world). A young women leads the quest to find the secret ingredient for the Elixir, and the other women on the quest, though different, are certainly as worthy as any of the male characters, and believe themselves to be so. And so do the male characters…all of them (once I got rid of that rogue scene with Hirsten’s father). The external antagonist is called a witch, but she is really a minor goddess and has three male characters as her henchmen. No shortage of feminism there.

I suppose my own feminist ideas bled into the world I was creating all of their own accord. Once I was able to take a step back from the work and look at what I had done, it clicked that this was the way it was supposed to be. It’s my world, right, so why shouldn’t it have a more idealized version of women’s rights? I’m not saying it’s a perfect world or that I represent feminism in a perfect way, but it sure filled a need in me to create a world that didn’t paint someone like me in an inferior way.

I’ve read a lot of fantasy, and a whole lot of YA fantasy. Adult fantasies and their portrayal of women has generally been a disappointment; I know there are exceptions to this, but as a whole the genre is seriously lacking. There are many amazing female characters in YA fantasy, too many to list here (but for a sampling, Katsa from GRACELING, any of Tamora Pierce’s female characters, Alina from the The Grisha series, and Elisa from the Fire and Thorns series). The thing about a lot of these awesome female characters is that they often are the outliers: women doing things that men usually do or bucking against a world with inherent sexism. (Again, I recognize I’m generalizing here and that there are exceptions to this, but I’m talking about the greater picture I’ve observed in fantasy.)

So it came as a surprise to me that my world might be considered unique. I didn’t really think of it as such (I mean, everything has been done before, so I never consider anything I do as even remotely close to unique), but after thinking about it and noticing the trends in what I’ve read, I was like, “Huh. Maybe I’ve got something slightly out of the norm here.”

Then I thought, “Well, isn’t that kind of sad.” Even in our imaginary worlds, we can’t seem to break out of the sexist mold that we are pegged into in our real world. Even when we have dynamic, interesting female characters that pass the Bechdel Test, we too often put them in a patriarchal world, or worse a sexist one, or worst one that normalizes violence against women. (Seriously, just Google “sexism and fantasy” for a whole slew of articles about the topic.)

I’d love to read more fantasy books with a feminist outlook and not just the so-called “strong” female characters. So please throw some recommendations out there, and we can work on bringing more attention to fantasy books with feminist worlds.

#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (there’s still time to add to the March topic of feminism), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. Be sure to check out Kai’s and Mary’s posts this month. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.

March #InkRipples: Feminism, Title IX, and Aging

March 7, 2016 / Katie L. Carroll

I guess I was born a feminist. When I say “feminist,” I mean someone who believes women should have equal rights to men (for further discussion on this, see my post “Females in YA: Part 9 Feminism”). What girl isn’t born a feminist? And for that matter, what boy isn’t? I have a hard time believing a boy could be born and suddenly think, “I am a far superior being than any girl and deserve to be treated as such.”

But then we (both girls and boys) are exposed to our parents’ ideas, beliefs, and prejudices; and then our peers’ ideas, beliefs, and prejudices (and by extension their parents’ I/B/P); and societies’ I/B/P. So somewhere along the way, many of us become non-feminists. Or maybe we stop thinking that feminism is still important or relevant.

I think this was me in middle and high school: though I never stopped believing women deserve equal rights to men, I just didn’t see the need for feminism anymore. Admittedly I fell into the trap of thinking being a feminist meant I had to be a radicalized bra-burning, man-hating woman. And I also believed I was being treated equal to my male peers.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older: It was an earlier push for equal rights that granted me the ability to be apathetic about it. I grew up playing sports in a post Roe v. Wade world and post Title IX era, which states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

That created an environment where my fellow female athletes and I were often celebrated along with our male counterparts because we were just as successful, or even more successful. We were treated with respect and won awards and accolades. We wore our own letter jackets, not our boyfriends’. Not to say we never heard the comments about “playing like a girl” or where our “place” in the world was, but I always felt those comments were from people of an older generation who had no clue. They were antiquated ideas, outdated. Or so I believed at the time.

As I’ve gotten older and my horizons have expanded beyond my (maybe progressive) hometown, I’ve seen a bigger picture of how women are being treated in the U.S. and the world. It’s not a pretty picture. I’ve also been educating myself about the gender pay gap (see “There’s A Gender Pay Gap At Every Age, And It Only Gets Worse As Workers Get Older” by Shane Ferro), sexism in the tech industry and Hollywood (see “Why are women leaving the tech industry in droves” by Tracey Lien and “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out” by Maureen Dowd), and the cost of staying home to raise children (see “When Being A Stay-At-Home Mom Isn’t a Choice” by Jillian Berman).

I see the assault on a woman’s right to make choices about her own body and the rampant and disgusting sexism in this year’s presidential election, and the importance of feminism is more obvious to me than ever before. I have a desire to be more outspoken in my mindset of being a feminist. I sometimes feel alone in this because sexism isn’t rampant in my everyday life and in the live’s of many of the people I know, and there isn’t necessarily an immediate need for us to rise up and demand equal rights. I’m lucky to live in a place where my rights as a woman are protected…for now.

It’s that “for now” that gives me pause and drives me to a greater call. I want the next generation of women to feel secure in their rights and that they are considered equal to men. I want them to feel this way their whole lives, not have a sense that their worth erodes as they get older, which is something I have begun to feel and I’m only in my mid-thirties.

Feminism is a topic I have many, many thoughts on, far too many for one blog post. I know, too, that it’s a divisive topic. I’ll be revisiting it throughout the month here on the blog. Coming up soon, look for a post about how my first novel ELIXIR BOUND ended up having many feminist viewpoints in it, initially without a lot of intention on my part.

#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (March is all about feminism), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. Be sure to check out Kai’s and Mary’s posts this month. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.

Females in YA: Part 10 Hot, Rude Boys

March 9, 2015 / Katie L. Carroll

Tell me if this sound familiar.

Young woman in a YA novel meets young man. He’s rude to her, maybe even outright mean. He might talk to her in a demeaning or condescending way. He doesn’t seem to care about what she wants because his agenda is the only important one. He’s probably done some things that make him morally questionable. Said young woman notices all these shady characteristics about him.

But he’s hot, and has a mysterious air about him. Maybe she suspects he has some sort of special power. So the young woman hangs out with him willingly or allows herself to be coerced into spending time with him. As she gets to know him, she’s impressed by his piercing eyes or muscular physique. And that time he flashed a perfect smile at her just made her heart skip a beat.

Young woman clings to every small act of kindness he shows her or anyone else. Maybe he even saved her from some terrible fate that was brought on by either her own stupidity or his arrogance. He mostly still acts like a jerk, though. But he’s really, really hot, and now she knows there’s something special/unique/supernatural about him. So she lets him brush a lock of hair out of her face and gently caress her face. Maybe she lets him kiss her because even though the kiss was originally forced on her, once it’s happening, it’s just so magical.

Recognize this scenario? Feeling sick yet? Because I feel like this type of relationship is in soooo many YA books I’ve been reading lately, particularly, but not exclusively, paranormal romances. I blame Stephenie Meyer, but moreover I blame our culture.

(A note on the Twlight series. I’ll fully admit I loved the books. They sucked me in from the start and I devoured them. I’ve read them several times and still enjoy them. Intellectually I can recognize the issues of the whole Edward/Bella relationship, but when I first read these stories, I just didn’t care. I wanted them to be together. Here’s the thing, Stephenie Meyer tackled this type of relationship better than all these other books I’ve been reading and rolling my eyes over. I didn’t roll my eyes when I was reading the Twilight books–though I can’t say the same for the movies! And she did it before all these other books, so they just come across as knockoffs that aren’t nearly as successful. I also found Edward to be a more nuanced character than the young men in other books.)

Back to our culture. We’re raising our young men to think it’s okay to treat women like a means to an end, like objects, like something that is theirs to use as they see fit. And if they’re hot, rich, and white then it’s even more okay. Just as bad, we’re raising our young women to think it’s okay, even desirable, to be treated this way.

And it’s not okay…let me repeat, it’s not okay! A man treating a woman this way does not make a healthy relationship, and it certainly isn’t love, not the mutual, respectful kind of love that is true.

I get that novels serve many purposes and one of their main functions is to entertain. I’m not saying we can’t have dysfunctional relationships in books or that every book needs to set an example for young people. There are certainly YA novels out there that show healthier love than my above example, and it’s okay to read novels with this type of love in them.

My problem with this type of relationship is how normal is has become in YA novels. So normal that it’s almost become a cliche. It feels like every other YA book I pick up has this in it (one of the reasons I’ve have more DNFs–did not finish–on my reading list in the last year than ever before). Yet the characters in these books never seem to think the unbalanced relationship is a problem. No one else recognizes there is a problem, and if they do, they’re opinions are quickly dismissed.

Young women are voraciously reading these novels. I want these young women to know that it might be fun to read about these kinds of relationships, but that it’s not okay to be in one of these types of relationships. I want young men to know that this is not how they should be treating women. I want YA authors to understand that they are writing their characters this way and think about the impact they might be having on young readers.

Okay, I’ve said my peace. Rant over. What are you thoughts on “love” relationships in YA?

Females in YA: Part 9 Feminism

February 3, 2015 / Katie L. Carroll

Somewhere along the line the word “feminist” got a bad rap, so much so that people seem to be confused about what it really means to be a feminist. Feminism is simply “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men”. So if you think women should have equal rights as men, then you’re a feminist. No man-hating or bra burning required!

When the heck did feminism become a bad thing anyway? Turns out a simple Internet search turns up plenty of discussion on that topic already. See “When Did Feminism Become a Bad Thing?” by Daisy Lindlar; “Why men have a problem with the word ‘feminism'” by Martin Daubney; and “Feminism: Has it Become a Dirty Word?” by Barbara & Shannon Kelley…just to name a few.

The idea of feminism has been so construed to some kind of men vs. women mantra that even these 10 really famous women celebrities (including Madonna and Susan Sarandon) have come out and said point-blank that they are not feminists. Many of whom go out of their way to say they are “humanist” (whatever the hell that means…can anyone who isn’t a sociopath not be a humanist?), but I suspect that they are actually feminists and are simply under the delusion that feminism is a bad thing. There’s even a hashtag on Twitter #womenagainstfeminism. Really?

C’mon, ladies, let’s get our shite together and take back the word. (Initially I wrote “our word” but changed it because men can be and should be feminists, too.) Still not convinced you’re a feminist? Check out the article “Not Sure What Feminism Is? Allow These Famous Authors To Explain” by Maddie Crum. Even as I write this rally cry, it seems someone may have beaten me to the punch.

In September 2014, UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson made a speech about gender equality (i.e. feminism) and launched the HeForShe campaign. Among the things she said about was this:

I decided I was a feminist and this seemed uncomplicated to me. But my recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word.

Apparently I am among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-men and, unattractive.

Why is the word such an uncomfortable one?”

After this speech, Watson faced both praise and criticism (see the article “Emma Watson’s UN speech: what our reaction says about feminism” by Michelle Smith), and also threats to release nude photos–which didn’t actually exist–of Watson (see “The Emma Watson Threats Were A Hoax, But Women Face Similar Intimidation Online Every Day” by Emma Gray). In my mind, it was yet one more thing to confirm that we do need feminism and that we need to show what being a feminist really is.

So by now you’re probably asking, “Ummmm, Katie, when are we going to get to the part about YA?” Patience, dearies, and you shall be rewarded! Before we get to the YA part, let me point you to one more article, “Teen spirit: young feminist heroes” by Kira Cochrane, showcasing real, non-celebrity young people and their insights on feminism.

Okay, so now we’ve finally reached the YA part of all this. Writers of YA have a huge impact on the lives of teenagers. We can take our own messages of feminism and weave them into our narratives (in a non-didactic way of course). And I, for one, think we not only can, but we should. Let’s not pretend that gender inequality hasn’t infiltrated not only the fictional world of YA but also the real world in which women and men writers are treated differently (see “A Censored History of Ladies in YA Fiction” by Kelly Jensen).

Will feminism be a central issue in every piece we write? Certainly not. But even when we write about something else, like first love or a daring adventure, I think it’s important to understand what messages, even indirectly, we are sending to our readers. Is every character we are going to write be a feminist? Again, of course not. But it’s important to examine our work and wonder if in it we are buying into and maybe even feeding into gender inequality. Let’s not pigeonhole our characters, thereby not pigeonholing our teen readers.

And just in case I haven’t given you enough reading to do already with all those links, here are a few more that make me hopeful for the idea of feminism in YA: “13 Contemporary Novels All Feminists Should Read” by Emma Cueto, “13 Female Young Adult Fiction Authors That Owned 2014” by Caitlin White, and “2015 Is the Year of the Feminist YA Novel” by Kelly Jensen.

Finally, let me state for the record that I, Katie Carroll, YA author, am a feminist.