Channelknight Fadran

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There was that whole thing a little while back for someone's work seeming like it was "written by a woman," which I think is just a backwards way of looking at it.

Not heard of this tbh. For what it's it's worth I agree, it's silly to assume that only a woman can write a certain way.

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I mean, Peeta (from the Hunger Games) was pretty much as damsel-in-distress-pretty-face-love-interest as it gets, but no one craps on Suzanne Collins (that I know of). Guys are just like "yeah he's cool" and just read the story about the fun survival game.

To be fair, those tropes have a long history of being applied to women (along with a load of other sexist stereotypes) so it's natural that people are more sensitive when reading female characters. And fair enough, this can lead to some stupid takes and seeing things that aren't there.

A tangent - women have been perceived as secondary to men for much of history. In a lot of older fantasy, there were basically no female characters; almost all of the interesting characters were male. This leads to a lot of internal biases, stereotypes, and people not being good at writing women because they haven't read enough interesting, three-dimensional female characters.

There are a wide variety of female characters in fantasy these days, not just the heroine or Designated Badass love interest. Soldiers? Innkeepers? ? The poor lazy schmuck who dies in chapter three? All female, and I think that's awesome.

Also, Peeta is a cool character and I would be A-okay if it was a girl in his place.

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But otherwise, I think people take the whole thing a bit too seriously. Stereotypes are bad, yeah, but I think at this point we're looking for them more than actually just stumbling across them

^ This.

If you are looking for something, especially in such an interpretative medium like writing you are always going to be able to find it, whether or not it was the author's intention.

You can see this a lot in reviews as well, pick a book you love, and find a really long negative review of it, chances are the person writing it came into the book with preconceptions and forced the book to fit them. One that comes to mind right now is this review for Mistborn where the author claimed that it was some kind of bad YA. Because that makes sense.

Now that's not to say there aren't horrible female depictions, there are. And there are horrible male depictions. I just think that the fantasy community at large should give the benefit of the doubt, and give authors chances to improve(especially new authors) rather than unequivocally condemning anything they perceive as a poor depiction.

Sorry, that got a little long.

Hmm. 
 

I think mostly why this kind of thing happens is when authors don’t do their research. They don’t truly understand (none of us really will, but bear with me) the other sex’s thoughts or motives behind their actions. And when you don’t understand why a character is doing something, they can end up looking quite… flat. 
 

Look, people are people. Sure, males and females differ in some ways, but in the big picture, we’re all the same. If you change your mindset to think like you’re writing human characters rather than male and female characters, I think it’s gonna be a lot easier to avoid stereotype. 
 

and lastly, I think we should remember that stereotypes are not bad. of course, there will always be characters that will be “stereotypical”, and we might get bored with them or not like them much, that’s okay. They can also be so much fun! Stereotypes are not BAD. 
 

in short, when writing the opposite sex: do your research. Ask around for feedback, recall memories and interactions. Rather than writing strictly male or strictly female characters, write HUMAN characters. 
 

anyways, that was a bit of a rant, and I think it got a little muddled or unclear in some spots, but those are my views on the topic. 
 

also, I think why male authors face so much criticism when writing female characters is because there will always be feminists and critics who disagree with the way a female character may behave. But authors will write characters the way they want, and we can’t really do much about it.