evilthecat said:
While I won't condone Campbell's essentialism, he was a Freudian after all, the whole point is that there can be no female monomyth. To be a woman is inherently to fail, to fail to be a complete person, to fail to be the hero in your own story and to reconciling yourself to being a character in someone else's story instead.
To a certain extent he had a point, look at traditional fiction aimed at or written by women and you will overwhelmingly find this theme of finding your place in society (often explicitly through finding a man). Sometimes very young women are allowed to be tomboys and effectively live out a male story, but this is only socially acceptable when they are young. Ultimately, in traditional culture and in traditional story structure, women have to grow up and growing up means accepting your place as a woman.
Traditional story structures have never been kind to women, and thus I don't think it's particularly surprising that the first steps into writing "strong female characters" (I hate that term so much) have been fumbling. It's still a meme (and a meme with a lot of basis in reality) that straight men literally can't write female characters without having them constantly be aware of their own tits, so, you know, baby steps. We'll get there. In the meantime, I think the deeper question is why these "bad female characters" with "unrealistic" abilities and competence evoke such a strong and consistent reaction.. I mean, a lot of characters are "bad" in this sense right? Harry Potter gets to be the protagonist, and "the boy who lived" and have a tragic backstory and be some kind of Quiddich prodigy and defeat Voldemort multiple times despite being a goddamn child. Is he a bad character? Should critics have panned the books because of Harry's unrealistic Mary Sue qualities?
No, because it's an escapist fantasy for kids about a school for wizards.
Except you also have to remember that women have been written as primary, secondary, and tertiary protagonists by men very well. The Eddings' stuff, WoT, SoT, pretty much anything written by Steve Vance has good female characters, etc(and most of this was over 20 years ago and big enough most people have at least heard of them). And to act like it's something that's only been attempted over the last decade or so is complete ignorance, whether real or feigned.
My sentence talking about the female monomyth was simply to give an equivalent to the heroic idea of the male monomyth you were talking about not coming about without criticism being taken as criticism and not as sexism. That if YA novels like Katniss, Bella, the Grey what's-her-name, are going to be put forth as strong female characters written by strong female writers, it's never going to happen.
And the reason they evoke those reactions? Because they're presented as wholly realistic and amazing characters. That is literally the extent of it. Like I said, stop praising mediocrity. Find something worthwhile in them and praise that, but stop acting like it's all good when it objectively and narratively isn't.
Harry Potter is a slightly different thing because it basically came out at the right time for two generations to get involved with it and was written and released over like 15 years, meaning that people grew up with it and nostalgia grabbed them with it. Everything you just listed about him with the exception of the Quidditch thing is the same, everyone else's fuckups and abilities are what enabled all of it, very little comes from Harry beyond being the guy that everyone draws courage from. And it's praised as a fun kid's book with decent world-building and enjoyable adolescent characters, but not as a great male character or even filled with great story arcs. Hunger Games is not praised as a series with decent worldbuilding or innovative setting so much as how great of a character Katniss is and how well-handled a "rebellion" is in terms of psychology.
And yes, because it's an escapist fantasy, because it is presented as modern fantasy, something else which Hunger Games is not, as it is sci-fi and arguably future fantasy(both of which are less forgiving to inconsistencies). Unless you also fantasize about living in a dystopian world where starvation is a real threat and cake-making translates to knowing how to camouflage yourself perfectly.
