Quote!

[ljgeoff]

"Magic in fiction is the time-honored way of slipping a hand up the skirt of convention and giving her something to smile mysteriously about." -- Lilith Saintcrow

Thanks julia_reynolds for pointing the way to a very interesting essay about female heroines and Urban Fantasy:

What truly defines UF, and why the genre has exploded recently, is the moral and ethical ambiguity of its protagonists.

Urban fantasy is pretty much the only genre today exploring not only the ethics of power and consent, but also serious questions of violence and gender relations from a primarily female point of view.

I think that something else that urban fantasy is exploring is the nature of god and gods, and mankind's relationship with god. "What if God were one of us?" I'm reading eBear's Blood and Iron, and though there's no God of All in it's pages, there's Fae and Hell and everything in between (and power, lust, despair and honor; it's very yummy.)

One of the characters of the WIP is a strong female, violent when she needs to be, nurturing because she can. I like her, though someone that strong is intimidating. Though, come to think of it, I can imagine going out to pub crawl with her.

Comments

[julia-reynolds.livejournal.com]

After thinking about this essay for a while, it seems to me that Saintcrow is leaving out the primary emotional element of UF, which is not ambiguity - it's ANGER. UF heroines are usually damaged and angry outsiders and their anger is one of their sources of power.

But in the essay you also see that Saintcrow herself is mad about certain things, like the lack of respect she thinks publishing has for UF even though Anita Blake et al are raking in millions of reader dollars every year. Having an underdog mindset can be a powerful motivator.