don't reread your faves
Mar. 7th, 2019 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frith_in_thornsA few days ago I heard that the last ever Edge Chronicles book was being released next week. I bought a ticket to the launch party. I found there were actually two books out that I hadn't read!
So I re-read The Immortals (because I couldn't remember much about it) and have just now finished the next one. And, damn. Has it always been One Girl Per Book in an incredibly crowded cast of boys and men? I'm terribly afraid it has and I was too young to notice. The books are full of major and minor characters with names, personality, snapshots of story. Sky pirates, heroes, criminals, academics, soldiers. And dead mothers (there are zero live or even recently-alive mothers in 11 books) and one Exceptional Girl. The girl in The Nameless One shows up 45% of the way through and is the only female in the book to have a name. There is one other female character in the whole book who has lines, at 85%.
Frankly, I feel kind of betrayed. This series meant *so much* to me when I was in early secondary school. My best friend and I spent hours planning our sky pirate names and our sky ships. But it wasn't for us all along, apparently.
I think I'm cancelling my ticket to the launch of the final book. How do you worldbuild with no women? How do you defend that? (I have been to 3 of their author events previously. I remember them talking about how they wrote these books for their daughters. What a fucking gift.)
So I re-read The Immortals (because I couldn't remember much about it) and have just now finished the next one. And, damn. Has it always been One Girl Per Book in an incredibly crowded cast of boys and men? I'm terribly afraid it has and I was too young to notice. The books are full of major and minor characters with names, personality, snapshots of story. Sky pirates, heroes, criminals, academics, soldiers. And dead mothers (there are zero live or even recently-alive mothers in 11 books) and one Exceptional Girl. The girl in The Nameless One shows up 45% of the way through and is the only female in the book to have a name. There is one other female character in the whole book who has lines, at 85%.
Frankly, I feel kind of betrayed. This series meant *so much* to me when I was in early secondary school. My best friend and I spent hours planning our sky pirate names and our sky ships. But it wasn't for us all along, apparently.
I think I'm cancelling my ticket to the launch of the final book. How do you worldbuild with no women? How do you defend that? (I have been to 3 of their author events previously. I remember them talking about how they wrote these books for their daughters. What a fucking gift.)
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