Were All Obligators Male?

[Raven Wilder]

I can't recall any mention of female obligators during the Final Empire, and checking the Coppermind indicates that all named obligators, at least, were men. So was the Steel Ministry an all-male organization?

[Spren of Kindness she/her]

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Brandon Sanderson

Lots of Female Keepers (one of the main characters in book two is one), no female Inquisitors or obligators (since the Lord Ruler was pretty much in charge of who got to do both.) However, there weren't actually hard fast rules, so I could see a determined woman ending up in the Steel Ministry if she put her mind to it.

Footnote: Brandon has later contradicted this statement, saying that there were female inquisitors, just none on-screen.
TWG Posts (Oct. 3, 2006)

Here's what I found on Arcanum.

[Raven Wilder]

9 hours ago, Spren of Kindness said:

Here's what I found on Arcanum.

Thanks!

And I think I know the contradictory WoB being referred to there, and that was Brandon saying some of the Inquisitors Vin fought during Hero of Ages were female. Since those Inquisitors (except for Marsh) were the creations of Ruin, that doesn't contradict the Steel Inquisitors under the Lord Ruler being an all-male group.

[+robardin he/him]

On 12/24/2020 at 8:12 PM, Raven Wilder said:

Thanks!

And I think I know the contradictory WoB being referred to there, and that was Brandon saying some of the Inquisitors Vin fought during Hero of Ages were female. Since those Inquisitors (except for Marsh) were the creations of Ruin, that doesn't contradict the Steel Inquisitors under the Lord Ruler being an all-male group.

Did Ruin create more Inquisitors from scratch, though, or simply augmented the Inquisitors that already existed with spikes they hadn't been allowed before (mainly ones for various Feruchemical powers, other than the recycled spikes for F-gold)? I've always assumed it was the latter.

Yes, Marsh killed all the other Inquisitors that were in Luthadel and "sleeping" in their resting chambers near TLR in Kredik Shaw by removing their linchpin spikes, but he admitted that there were an unknown number of Inquisitors out of Luthadel.

It could well be a reason for there being no more Mistborn after the Catacendre other than Spook, though, if Ruin had made a point of finding and Inquisitor-ing every Mistborn he could track down, male or female.

[Truthwatcher Artifabrian he/him]

On 1/4/2021 at 11:34 AM, robardin said:

Did Ruin create more Inquisitors from scratch, though, or simply augmented the Inquisitors that already existed with spikes they hadn't been allowed before (mainly ones for various Feruchemical powers, other than the recycled spikes for F-gold)? I've always assumed it was the latter.

I’m pretty sure it was a lot of both.

[Honorless he/him]

I wonder if it was the strong female protagonist effect, where you write a female protagonist so stronk! you forget other gals exist. Iirc Brandon actually talked about the effect, Imma go try to find it

Edit: found it

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libbykino

I'm only maybe 1/4 of the way through WOA (the second book of the first series) and something has kind of been nagging at me for a while. I figured out what it is, finally, and it's that there are no women in this story. I mean, obviously there's Vin as the main character, but she has a lot of overtly masculine qualities and quite frankly a suppressed fondness for dresses and perfume just isn't enough for me. All of the feminine characters are bad, jealous, stupid, flippant and/or unimportant. The only other positive female characters I've met so far are either dead (Mare) or "other"/foreign (Tindwyl).

And the series, so far, clearly fails the Bechdel test. The only conversations Vin has had with other women have been about men (particularly Elend).

Does it get any better than this? I mean, it's honestly really starting to bother me. This series is almost like a reverse-harem trope with all the males surrounding the main character.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the world and the story otherwise (except for Elend's chapters that drone on and on about his ideal political structure which don't have any place in a society like this one IMO), but the complete lack of any female interaction is starting to bother me, TBH.

Brandon Sanderson

I've always considered this a legitimate criticism of Mistborn. In my plotting and planning, I was so focused on doing a good job with a dynamic female lead that I fell into a trap that is common for newer writers--to be less intentional about other characters, and default to male.

I think I once counted, and was able to find interactions in each book between Vin and women that were not related to men, and so the series does strictly pass the test--but the test has always been intended as a bare minimum. You can pass the test and still lack any real and meaningful representations of people different from yourself, and you can actually fail the test while not having this be a problem at all.

In the case of Mistborn, I consider it a legitimate weakness of the stories. I'm sorry it is distracting to you.

libbykino

It is only a minor distraction, Brandon. And I think perhaps I am spoiled, because I read Stormlight 1 and 2 first and am only now just starting Mistborn, and your female characters in Stormlight are outstanding. The relationship between Shallan and Jasnah is amazing so I know that you are perfectly capable of writing complex and varied female characters. I think that's why I found it so striking that it seems to be missing in Mistborn.

Regardless... I am still enthralled with the books. I am enjoying the plot and I do love the characters. I can't wait to find out what the Deepness is or if Vin truly is the Hero of Ages (knowing the title of the third book probably spoils that one for me though, haha).

Thanks for taking the time to respond to me, Brandon! You are so good to your fans I really appreciate it! Can't wait to finish reading this series!

Brandon Sanderson

My pleasure.

It wasn't long after finishing the series that I started to think about this aspect. I really wish I'd made Ham a woman, for example. I think the character would have gone interesting places--and would have done good things for the lore of the world if women Thugs were heavily recruited to be soldiers.

Reflecting on Mistborn has been very useful to me as a writer, however, as it's part of what helped me personally understand that you can do something like have a strong, and interesting, female lead but still have a series that overall displays a weakness in regards to female characters. This has greater implications for writing, not just in regards to female characters, and is something I don't think I could have learned without this series. (Where I worked so very hard on Vin that I thought I had this aspect down.)

General Reddit 2015 (Dec. 31, 2015)

I also found the WoB confirming female Inquisitors exist:

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Chaos (paraphrased)

Does being female alter the spiritual overlays on a person, so that a Hemalurgically imbued spike would need to be placed differently than in a male body?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

No. In fact, there are female inquisitors in the huge fight when Vin goes blasting through them, but he felt like bringing that out would have been distracting.

Ancient 17S Q&A (May 1, 2010)

 

Edited January 27, 2021 by Honorless

[+robardin he/him]

I think it's interesting that he has repeatedly mentioned Ham as the character he'd most target for a retconned gender-flipping, even going so far as to do it for the Mistborn screenplay for a potential long-format serialization of the story; yet I think Marsh is really the best one to flip. (Not that they both couldn't be flipped, of course.)

I think it feels off to me because the name "Ham" just doesn't sound like a woman's (nick)name to me, even as a shortening of "Hammond", which unlike "Vin" or "Marsh" isn't something that sounds unisex. I'd want to see the character's name changed as well, to what I don't know.

I do agree that showing more female Pewterarms would be a good thing - for example, in the attack on Elend at the Council meeting in WoA, when a gang of undercover Venture Mistings including multiple Thugs go after him and Vin defeats them all without atium, at least some of them could or should have been women (including the Coinshots). And Beldre should have been much more practiced at Allomancy as well, given that she was raised as a noble and has one of the "prime battle metals" as her power.