Interviewing C. Dale Britain about the Royal Kingdom of Yurt

Starflight RavenWhen I was nine or ten, my mother and I used to go to the local chain bookstore — Barnes & Noble? Borders? Walden’s? I don’t remember now — on about a weekly basis. I’d go stare at the science fiction and fantasy section and trawl for paperbacks. I discovered a lot of writers that way — Patricia Wrede, Tanith Lee; I had a David Eddings phase; I could go on. (My other major source of new author discovery was my parents’ science fiction bookshelves.)

One of my discoveries there was C. Dale Brittain‘s The Royal Wizard of Yurt series which begins with A Bad Spell in Yurt (link to Amazon), It’s a really light-hearted, charming epic fantasy series, in which the characters are by and large kind to each other and the author is kind to them. It would be many years before I learned about the concept of generosity to one’s characters, and more years before I intuitively understood why it felt precious to me, but these books are an example of it.

One thing I also liked about the series and its medieval world was its strong, political religious presence. As a child, I’m not sure I knew exactly what to make of it. Having been raised by atheist parents (though I did attend Bible study at about the age I was reading these books), I had a vague understanding of Catholicism. I think I felt intrigued because it was a different way of handling medieval settings, and also a little uncomfortable because coming from a Jewish-atheist family with a side of a-couple-generations-back Mormonism, I was well aware of the problems of mixing religion and government. I remember being a little worried about that in the setting of the world, despite the light tone.

Once I’d been to Europe though in my early twenties, I started to understand how much the history of medieval Europe was deeply influenced by Christianity, particularly Catholicism. It seems almost inconceivable to me now that one could write a medieval-inflected world that’s supposed to have a realistic edge — whether or not it’s light-hearted and funny — without incorporating that. Many books do, but Brittain takes a gentle approach; while the church is not perfect, by and large the priests who show up are well-meaning and acting in (literal) good faith. This is back to the generosity toward characters thing.

So anyway, I was flipping through my SFWA directory and I happened to see C. Dale Brittain’s name. At which point I squeaked. The author kindly agreed to answer some interview questions for me.

I hadn’t realized how far the Yurt series had come in my absence. There are 3 or 4 new books now that I haven’t yet read, including this new one, THE STARFLIGHT RAVEN (Amazon link), which tells the story of the generation who lives in Yurt’s castle after the characters in the original series.

1) One of the things that makes your books distinct is the role religion plays in them. I appreciated how the church has an impact on the world-building, as of course it did in the real world. I also appreciated that while the church isn’t perfect, the main character associated with it is truly devout and caring. Can you speak to the way you built the church into your world and your experience in writing it?
When I started writing “A Bad Spell in Yurt,” I don’t believe I made a deliberate decision, “This story will include religion.”  Rather, as a medievalist writing a fantasy set in a vaguely-medieval world, it just made sense that the castle of Yurt have a chaplain.  Romances and epics written in the twelfth century–the real origin of what we now consider the fantasy genre–all included Christianity.  One of the major themes that keeps coming up in my stories, I think because I believe it myself, is that people who don’t agree on many issues still need to find a way to get along, and a rivalry between organized wizardry and the Church seemed like an excellent way to show this.  I’ve also never liked stories in which all the priests are either scheming hypocrites or else prejudiced ignoramuses–ie, some weird combination of caricatures of the Spanish inquisition and of modern evangelicals.  Sure, pompous ignoramuses certainly existed in the real Middle Ages (and in my “The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint,” a lot of the priests don’t come off real well), but so did extremely devout, sincere people, so I wanted to include that aspect.  The religion in the Yurt series isn’t exactly real medieval Christianity, but it should remind one of it.


2) Have you always been a humorist? What do you like about writing humor?
Actually I originally wanted to write books where reviewers would say things like, “Searing,” and “Uncovers the failings of our society as a whole.”  Instead I get, “Charming light fantasy,” and “Gave me a few chuckles.”  Daimbert points out that this is what I should expect of a series where the title of the first book is a pun.  In fact, I think I’ve always made people laugh–I used to entertain my family on long car trips–but it’s because I always see the humor in situations.  I rarely tell jokes per se, but I like looking at things from a slightly different angle.  There’s always a lot of laughter in my big Western Civ lecture classes–how could someone *not* laugh at Zeus chasing anything in a skirt, or anything not in a skirt?  PG Wodehouse and Garrison Keillor are probably formative influences (I get the line about “Gave me a few chuckles” from Garrison, who has the same problem).


3) As a teenager, I didn’t know whether you were a man or a woman. I think I assumed you were a man (possibly because the main characters in your books are male) and didn’t really think about it again until I picked up your books as an adult. There are a lot of reasons why women writers decide to take on gender ambiguous bylines–including, of course, just preferring the sound. If you’re willing to talk about it, what were some of the reasons you decided to go by C. Dale Brittain?
C. Dale Brittain is indeed a part of my real name, but parts that I don’t use in my day-job as a professor.  I always liked Dale (derived from Hinsdale, an ancestral name), and in my cowgirl phase around age 8 I was very excited to learn about Dale Evans.  (Hey, I can’t rope a steer, but I bet she never published a fantasy novel.)  Since “Bad Spell” is told by a first-person male wizard (Daimbert), it made sense to use a potentially-male name.  I have a male narrator for the audio versions of my books, and when I first listened to him my initial thought was, “Hey, Daimbert doesn’t sound like that in *my* head,” because of course Daimbert sounded like me.  I should add that I really like my narrator once I got over the initial shock!  The other reason for writing my fantasies as C. Dale Brittain is to keep them separate from my scholarly books.  I didn’t want a fantasy fan seeing the title, “Sword, Miter, and Cloister,” rushing out to buy it even though it was $60 in hardcover, and then being bitterly disappointed.  I also didn’t want a professional colleague saying, “Oh, look, Connie’s published a new book called “The Witch and the Cathedral,” probably about gender issues in 12th-century religion, I think I’ll assign it in seminar.”


4) When I was reading your books, I was also reading a lot of other contemporary sword and sorcery. It felt like your books fit in with the zeitgeist of that moment–at least the zeitgeist I was reading as a teen. Did you feel like you were working in unison with other writers? Who were your influences, contemporary or past?
Oddly, I hadn’t read much fantasy recently when I wrote and published “Bad Spell.”  Tolkien and CS Lewis had been early favorites, and I read a lot of SF and fantasy in the ’70s, when Ballantine first started their fantasy line (that became Del Rey).  At the time I think there was more good YA fantasy than “adult” fantasy (for some reason that term still makes me think of things like peep-shows, we definitely need a better term), authors like Ursula LeGuin and Susan Cooper (of “The Dark is Rising”).  In the ’80s however I probably read more mysteries than speculative fiction–in some ways “Bad Spell” is an English country-house murder mystery.  Once I got published and joined SFWA and all those good things I started reading in the field again.  I think my main knock on a lot of sword and sorcery is that–somehow, against all odds, can he do it?–the hero ends up whacking the Bad Guy into submission.  My heroes win (happy endings and all that), but they do very little against-all-odds whacking of Bad Guys.  I really like Tolkien’s point that he very deliberately did *not* have Frodo use the Ring to overpower the Dark Lord, and yet a lot of modern imitation-Tolkien has exactly that outcome.


5) The Starlight Raven came out in April 2015. Forgive me for not knowing, but is this the first book that takes place with the new Yurt generation? What made you feel like it was time to move on to them? Can you tell us a bit about the book?
Yes, “The Starlight Raven” is the first of the “Yurt, the Next Generation” series.  (That is *not* the official name of the series.)  I’d originally started writing it over 10 years ago, after the Yurt series wrapped up with “Is This Apocalypse Necessary?”  I was figuring this would be a good way to relaunch my career, and fans were asking, “What happens to Antonia?”  The problem, as it turned out, is that having teenage protagonists at a wizards’ school made all the publishers and agents pronounce, “This is too much like Harry Potter.”  It was of course useless to point out that it was nothing like HP, or that “Bad Spell,” with its wizards’ school, appeared long before the first HP book.  Then I got really busy with that pesky day job.  But a few years ago, when the original Yurt series went out of print and I got the rights back from Baen, I decided them to re-publish them as ebooks, as an indie.  And then this spring I figured, since no one (other than my fans!) seemed to want a story about a wizard’s daughter, that I’d publish “Starlight Raven” myself, both as an ebook and in paperback.  Antonia, our heroine, is the daughter of a wizard (Daimbert) and a witch, and she wants to be the first female wizard, but the wizards’ school is not so sure a girl belongs there.  Meanwhile the witches on her mother’s side of the family want to bring her into the Sisterhood of workers of *their* kind of magic, which the wizards have always looked down on.  The story tells how Antonia tries to find her own way between competing claims of the right way to learn and practice magic, and has to deal along the way with some fairly scary creatures out of wild magic who have no use for either wizards or witches.

 

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27 Responses to Interviewing C. Dale Britain about the Royal Kingdom of Yurt

  1. 1
    Jake Squid says:

    Yay! I have a whole new (old) series to read. And I really enjoyed the interview.

  2. 2
    Pesho says:

    I did not know that “A bad spell in Yurt” had any sequels. Half a dozen of my friends and I once spent until daybreak discussing that book – it was one of the only three books on board on a two-week sailing trip, in the dark ages before e-readers.

    Thanks for letting us know about the sequels!

  3. 3
    Ampersand says:

    Thanks for this interview! It was fun to read.

  4. 4
    Pesho says:

    By the way, did you really not know she was a woman? On that boat, there were four men, and three of us were sure that the author was a woman. The fourth one thought ‘maybe he’s a very nice man’. One of the women agreed it must have been written by a woman, the others were appalled at our thinking.

    The main character is a saint. The priest is saintlier. The queen is perfection personified. 99% percent of the characters are at least very nice. Everyone gets along to an insane degree. Everyone forgives, everyone is redeemed, communication is shown to solve all problems. Men do not keep grudges, and bow down to fate gracefully. It is the ultimate feel good book. My wife and I kept the copy (well, she did, now that we’re married, we both have it) It brings so many good memories, we should be rationing it.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great read but it’s comfort food… maybe healthy enough, but comfort food in any case. And if people blather that C. J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold’s books are too feminine (I disagree) there should be a new word for “A Bad Spell in Yurt”.

  5. 5
    Jake Squid says:

    And if people blather that C. J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold’s books are too feminine (I disagree) there should be a new word for “A Bad Spell in Yurt”.

    People say that Cherryh is too feminine? Wow, that’s certainly… bewildering? I haven’t read enough Bujold recently enough to comment on that. But Cherryh? Makes me wonder about people’s conceptions of masculine and feminine.

  6. 6
    Mandolin says:

    I didn’t know she was a woman. The female characters, IMO, are really idealized in a way I associate more with, e.g., Guy Gavriel Kay or Eddings, more than McCaffrey. The books are mostly about male-male friendships.

    But yeah, the books are deeply gentle.

    I feel like there were male authors who were also gentle I was reading at the time, but it’s been decades…

  7. 7
    closetpuritan says:

    I feel like there were male authors who were also gentle I was reading at the time, but it’s been decades…

    Not sure how much science fiction you were reading, but Hal Clement, maybe? He’s pretty famous for being nice. (I’ve only gotten around to reading one Hal Clement book, Mission of Gravity, but it seemed to fit.)

    I would have thought that a couple decades after the Mean Girls meme had been introduced to the public, people would have gotten over the idea that women are reliably nicer than men. In fact, when it was first introduced it seemed in some ways progressive and anti-sexist, because it pushed back against the idea that girls are always meek and noncompetitive, and it’s now been around long enough that I’ve seen feminists criticize it as a tired stereotype.

    I mean, I’m not ruling out the possibility that if you objectively measured Average Niceness of authors somehow, women might be better on average, but if that was true, that doesn’t mean it would be possible to pick up a book where the author’s gender is unknown, and say, “This book is very Nice. Aha! We can be all but certain that the author is a woman!”

  8. 8
    Pesho says:

    I’d be very surprised to learn that you have never read a book, and thought “This character is very different from any X that I have ever known. Hey, these other characters are also very different from any Xs that I have know. The author is probably not an X.”

    Hal Clement wrote hard SciFi. Very hard. He had a lot of ‘nice’ characters, but they were usually (always?) alien – one can write aliens behaving differently from humans. As a matter of fact, it’s made for pretty good SciFi, every now and then. But he understood chain of command, he understood leading by example, and he had a firm grasp of how men on a crew interact. Considering his age, I would have been absolutely shocked to learn that his was a woman’s nom de plume.

    On the other hand, the shelves are full of authors who have no clue how a military unit operates. You can make a pretty damn good guess that the authors have never been military officers. In the same way, there are some laughable male and female characters out there. When an author does not understand how menstruation works, he is quite likely male. When an author does not understand how ejaculation works, she is quite likely female.

    It’s not an exact science, and sometimes the bet is wrong. But I trust my instincts in this case. The most idiotic case I recently saw was a web comic in which a virgin female character was not sure whether she experienced or dreamed hours of great sex the previous night, and used a mirror to check her hymen. I would bet dollars to donuts the author is a male, and very likely a virgin himself, or at least has very little interest in talking to his partner. The chances that the author is a female who has ever had vaginal sex? You tell me.

  9. 9
    closetpuritan says:

    I’d be very surprised to learn that you have never read a book, and thought “This character is very different from any X that I have ever known. Hey, these other characters are also very different from any Xs that I have know. The author is probably not an X.”

    Sure. That seems very different from saying, “This book is so nice to its characters. I can be pretty sure its author is a woman.”

    IIRC, “Mission of Gravity” had an alien as its protagonist, but the second most major character was a human, and they worked together to learn about the science of the alien’s world. And the alien protagonist had the human stand on him so he could provide transportation, because on that world it would not crush him, but the human was reluctant at first because the protagonist looked a lot like a centipede and the human felt it was too much like stepping on a bug to squish it.

  10. 10
    Jake Squid says:

    I’d be very surprised to learn that you have never read a book, and thought “This character is very different from any X that I have ever known. Hey, these other characters are also very different from any Xs that I have know. The author is probably not an X.”

    If X=person, sure. Except for that last sentence. I think. Honestly, nothing comes to mind. Except for Robert Jordan. Robert Jordan had such a restrictive view of people that I am sometimes amazed that he ever interacted with another person.

    But I’m really trying to think of some reading experience of mine that matches what I think you’re saying and I’m coming up blank.

  11. 11
    closetpuritan says:

    I guess actually, that part I quoted is a little vague compared to the part I definitely agree with, Pesho and Jake Squid. Because all of the examples below that aren’t so much someone being “like” an “X” [black person, woman, etc.] as they are “this person lacks knowledge that I would expect an X person to have/has knowledge an X person would almost certainly lack”. Which, again, is very different than saying that no (or at least, extremely few) “X” people (men) would have a particular way of writing (generosity to their characters).

  12. 12
    Jake Squid says:

    Yeah, closetpuritan, I agree with that. I’ve certainly thought that this author has no knowledge of X profession, but not “I’ve never known this ethnicity/gender/etc to be like this.”

  13. 13
    Pesho says:

    Sure. That seems very different from saying, “This book is so nice to its characters. I can be pretty sure its author is a woman.”

    Did I say that? I said “The main character is a saint. The priest is saintlier. The queen is perfection personified. 99% percent of the characters are at least very nice. Everyone gets along to an insane degree. Everyone forgives, everyone is redeemed, communication is shown to solve all problems. Men do not keep grudges, and bow down to fate gracefully. “.

    Most of the above has to do with the fact that NONE of the men is selfish, aggressive, pushes once it’s clear it’s no use, has a truly malicious bone in his body, or even acts on his anger and frustration. Even the brawlers and braggarts are ultimately reasonable and open to persuasion, and never have a truly mean thought. Yes, even the landless knights, which should be pretty damn close to a very different platonic ideal. One wonders how their feudal society stays pyramid shaped.

    So, I and many of my friends, including some women, decided that the author had a very strange idea of male psyche, and that she was probably a woman, and maaaybe a very nice man who had grown up with very nice men in an environment where no problem ever had to be solved by forcing someone to carry a disproportionately burden.

    Because all of the examples below that aren’t so much someone being “like” an “X” [black person, woman, etc.] as they are “this person lacks knowledge that I would expect an X person to have/has knowledge an X person would almost certainly lack”.

    You mean, you think “this X lacks information that most Xs should have” does not mean that “this X is very different from most Xs”? I used a phrase that would fit a crowd of 1960s Russian criminals who have not heard of the Сучьи войны (bitch wars) as well as a whole platoon of veteran soldiers who fail to either eat or restock their food supplies when they have a perfect opportunity. Both being actual characters of whom I thought when I wrote my post.

    One week from now, if I remember, I will come back to this post, and make a list of examples that I’ve encountered meanwhile.

  14. 14
    Mandolin says:

    Really, Jake? You’ve never encountered a female character who seems to embody stereotypes or archetypes more than personhood? I have. I’m just finding this bend of the conversation a little odd.

  15. 15
    Jake Squid says:

    Robert Jordan comes to mind once again, Mandolin. But, generally, in cases like that (and here comes Eddings) all characters are stereotypes of gender and so on. I’m having a hard time thinking of a case where just one gender was represented that way in a story. The ones I can remember are all or nothing. Even in amateur works that I’ve read, if one character’s features and motivations are gender stereotypical to an unbelievable extent, so are those of all other characters of either gender.

    I’m struggling to remember one where just one gender was rendered silly and distracting by absurd stereotype. It may be that I put that crap down so fast I just don’t remember it or maybe I’ve just been fabulously lucky or maybe I’ve got a bad memory for that kind of thing. Even Simak is all gender stereotype all the time… But in a way that’s funny and readable for me.

  16. 16
    closetpuritan says:

    You mean, you think “this X lacks information that most Xs should have” does not mean that “this X is very different from most Xs”?

    But is the converse true?

    What I mean is, I’m not sure what you meant by this phrase. I initially read it one way, then after reading your examples read it a different way, then thinking about the thing you were arguing for and Jake’s reading applied it the first way…

    Most of the above has to do with the fact that NONE of the men is selfish, aggressive, pushes once it’s clear it’s no use, has a truly malicious bone in his body, or even acts on his anger and frustration.

    I’m just not sure why writing a character that way becomes more unrealistic if that character is a woman, or is more likely to come from a female author than a male author.

    I mean, do you really think that women tend not to keep grudges?

    Did I say that? I said “The main character is a saint. The priest is saintlier. The queen is perfection personified. 99% percent of the characters are at least very nice. Everyone gets along to an insane degree. Everyone forgives, everyone is redeemed, communication is shown to solve all problems. Men do not keep grudges, and bow down to fate gracefully. “.

    Most of the above has to do with the fact that NONE of the men is selfish, aggressive, pushes once it’s clear it’s no use, has a truly malicious bone in his body, or even acts on his anger and frustration. Even the brawlers and braggarts are ultimately reasonable and open to persuasion, and never have a truly mean thought. Yes, even the landless knights, which should be pretty damn close to a very different platonic ideal. One wonders how their feudal society stays pyramid shaped.

    I’m not getting much from this besides, “No, this book is REALLY REALLY nice to its characters, it’s REALLY REALLY charitable to them. UNREALISTICALLY nice, that’s how nice it is. Even the MEN characters are REALLY REALLY nice.”

    My argument wasn’t, “No, this book isn’t at all unrealistic!” I said, “Why is this sort of book so much more likely to come from a woman than a man that it’s a near certainty?” It doesn’t sound like the women characters are any less nice than the men characters–you just said the queen was is perfection personified–so it doesn’t sound to me like the men are written less realistically than the women. I mean, I don’t know anyone who’s perfect, male or female. Are you arguing that “perfection personified” is a realistic female character?

  17. 17
    Pesho says:

    OK, I stand corrected.

    I was clearly wrong in thinking that a number of male characters who behave like no males I’ve ever known meant it was more likely that the author is female. Clearly, it is sexist to believe that a female would have less insight in how important face saving is to men, in how much they are driven to persevere even when all hope is lost, in how much men try to rationalize every time they prove unable to deal with a challenge. Because of course, women know, as well as men, everything there is to know about growing up as a man, being judged as men, having to maintain one’s status among men, and about how men interact among each other.

    The women may have been idealized, but they felt right to me – especially the lady who had made a deal with the devil, and who was the most human, and alive of all the characters – the only one I could identify with. She had motivations, foibles, and character. The queen was idealized, but still felt like a complete person, who could feel and care about what happening around her. All the men felt strangely unaffected by feelings that I consider very important to most males, and were unmoved by things about which I, personally, could not have remained detached.

    Obviously, I was a bigoted fool to feel that the above made it more likely that the author was female. I’ll go away, and reflect on my failings.

  18. 18
    Ampersand says:

    Pesho, no one here called you a bigoted fool, that I saw.

    If you return, please dial it down a few notches.

  19. 19
    Elusis says:

    I’m having a hard time thinking of a case where just one gender was represented that way in a story. The ones I can remember are all or nothing.

    Sadly, “The Dark Forest” (follow-up to the Hugo-winning “Three Body Problem”) is an example of that. The only female character who gets any significant “screen time” is literally a “delicate Asian flower” version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who teaches a remorseless man whore to live, laugh, and love when she materializes out of his fantasies and falls instantly in love with him. The many male characters, though, are fairly varied.

  20. 20
    Mandolin says:

    So, one reason I thought Brittain was male is that I thought the female characters played to stereotypes. Maria, foolish and vain. The Queen, the perfect example of a figure imagined for courtly love.

    I thought both Daimburt and Joachim felt a bit more human than that. They’re very nice, sure, Joachim being saintly and Daimburt being–essentially–a coward (especially at the beginning). But it felt like they had more background and dimension, and I liked the drawing of their friendship.

    Maybe we’re just seeing that the characters in general are drawn more as archetypes than through nuance. And that can be fine in a book sometimes; we both enjoyed it, after all.

  21. 21
    Mandolin says:

    Pesho, fwiw, I agree with you that characters can be drawn poorly because the author hasn’t researched or doesn’t understand the lived experiences of a certain group. We have a different read on this text, but I think that basic argument is pretty fundamentally true… I’m really surprised to see people arguing otherwise. Unless I’m not understanding them.

    I do think mildness and idealization (as overarching plot characteristics, as opposed to individual character traits) are techniques used by both sexes, though… at least in my experience of slush. I realize this is a weird example, but our current (or recent?) poet laureate is someone whose work I find unbearably shlocky in that regard. It may be there are more women who do it, and it certainly is associated with feminized modes of writing, like romances or fluffy children’s books. The writers I’ve known personally who trend to the most extreme ends of this (which Brittain hasn’t hit) were all women, but also working on unpublished stuff. I’ve had a fair number of arguments in workshops with writers on that extreme end, because I believe you need to have at least some bite. (Brittain does have some bite.)

    Jim Hines might be a decent analog to Brittain? But I’ve only read short stories. Eugene Myers is another possibility.

  22. 22
    Jake Squid says:

    I think it’s possible that we’re not talking about the same things. I’m confused about what, precisely, were defining as stereotypes or lack of knowledge of X.

    In A Bad Spell In Yurt I found all of the characters to be somewhat archetypical. Daimbert & Joachim were more developed characters than the Queen (who was basically Daimbert’s crush), certainly. I thought her flatness was a function of focus and role rather than a belief in stereotype. I was able to empathize and identify with Lady Maria more than any other character in the book. Sure, her desires and motivation and mannerisms were pretty stereotypical, but not outrageously so. Knowing people who place great importance on youth and girlishness, she doesn’t seem absurd to me. I can’t imagine myself doing the things that Daimbert & Joachim do, though I can see that there are people who would.

    But is Daimbert’s vanity (beard & velvet attire) so different from Lady Maria’s vanity? His foolishness about appearance certainly doesn’t carry the consequences that hers do & his education allows him to see her mistake for what it is whereas her lack of knowledge allows her to delude herself about what she’s doing.

    I could read that book with the characters genders being reversed and enjoy it exactly the same as I the existing book.

    If I hadn’t known beforehand, I would’ve guessed Brittain was a man. But I think that would be because most novels I’ve read are written by men.

    All of this may be due to my limitations as a reader and I may very well be completely wrong.

    (Aside: It was several novels and 5 or so years before I found out that Cherryh is a woman. I’d just assumed she was a man. Am I alone in that?)

  23. 23
    closetpuritan says:

    (Aside: It was several novels and 5 or so years before I found out that Cherryh is a woman. I’d just assumed she was a man. Am I alone in that?)

    I knew from the beginning that she was a woman because my dad had been eager to get me to read The Pride of Chanur as soon as he could and was talking enough about her that the female pronouns came up.

    Pesho:
    I was clearly wrong in thinking that a number of male characters who behave like no males I’ve ever known meant it was more likely that the author is female. Clearly, it is sexist to believe that a female would have less insight in how important face saving is to men, in how much they are driven to persevere even when all hope is lost, in how much men try to rationalize every time they prove unable to deal with a challenge. Because of course, women know, as well as men, everything there is to know about growing up as a man, being judged as men, having to maintain one’s status among men, and about how men interact among each other.

    You could have done a better job explaining why the women seemed more realistic to you than the men. (Maybe your own thoughts weren’t that clear to you until you thought about it more and had more chance to remember the book? I have no way of knowing whether it’s that, poor communication, or goalpost-moving.) The only female character you described previously, you described as “perfection personified”, and you said that 99% of the characters [not ‘male characters’, ‘characters’] were at least very nice. What you’re saying now is more along the lines of specific constraints preventing men from being nice, not that it’s more realistic for women to be non-grudge-holding saints than for men. I think your argument there is much stronger [depending on how closely Brittain meant to model her world after medieval Europe in that particular regard, and it sounds like maybe she didn’t if her characters don’t find face-saving important], but you didn’t communicate it well. (I certainly wouldn’t say that women never have any desire to save face or to not admit that something is a lost cause, but if it’s more permissible in that culture for women to lose face…) As Amp notes, I did not call you a bigot; my feelings were more along the lines of, “What planet is this guy from? Why is his mental model of women so unrealistic?” Not so different from your reaction to the male characters after reading the book.

    Face-saving varies cross-culturally (for example, in a quick “Arab education” workshop/class/thingy at work, it was stressed how much emphasis Arab cultures put on face-saving), so I wonder if you put more emphasis on face-saving than men in Brittain’s cultural milieu, as well.

    Obviously Mandolin had a different take on whether the female characters were more realistic than the male characters. I wonder if the women you were around were unclear in expressing themselves and were not merely “appalled at our thinking” but thought that you were wrong because the women were not exactly drawn with gritty realism, either.

  24. 24
    closetpuritan says:

    Mandolin:
    characters can be drawn poorly because the author hasn’t researched or doesn’t understand the lived experiences of a certain group.… I’m really surprised to see people arguing otherwise. Unless I’m not understanding them.

    I don’t think either me or Jake Squid is arguing that, and I’m not sure who else you could be talking about. My reaction was prompted by–as I read him–Pesho arguing that if both the male and the female characters are basically saints, the men and only the men are unrealistic.

  25. 25
    Mandolin says:

    Okay, I’m probably just confused. I do see writers who can handle group X, but not group Y, though.

    Jake, I could probably pull close reading from the text about Maria, but I really don’t have time. I like her, too. She just embodies some stereotypes.

    Re: face-saving — yeah, I think that’s part of the idealized middle ages.

    Has anyone read Guy Gavriel Kay? He works in archetypes in a mode we could usefully compare to this, I think.

  26. 26
    closetpuritan says:

    Has anyone read Guy Gavriel Kay? He works in archetypes in a mode we could usefully compare to this, I think.

    ‘Fraid not.

    In the hope that it might help clarify things (because we haven’t exactly had a lot of clarity in this discussion), here’s what I consider to be the steelman version of Pesho’s argument:

    All the characters are very nice, but that’s not what bothers me/strikes me as unrealistic about the male characters specifically. What bothers me is that even if you assume equal desire to be nice, the men [and the queen, because she’s the ruler? maybe that’s why she was mentioned specifically?] will have societal constraints greater than those of the women that prevent them from being equally nice in practice–most prominently among those, expectations around face-saving.

    If that’s what you’re trying to say, Pesho, I think it makes sense, at least if I assume that Brittain was trying or should have been trying to create a culture with that level of emphasis on face-saving.

  27. 27
    Jake Squid says:

    I’ve read several of Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels but it’s been a few years so I’ll probably need some reminders.