NOTE: I am not complaining in the slightest. This is not me complaining, but rather me coming to a bit of a realization with this story due to the changes. Remember that!
For the novel series, Red Reign: The Breaking of Renna, I made some serious changes that I wasn’t even thinking till it happened as I was writing the prologue.
There are two MCs and they are sisters named Jorildyn and Civiria Eljeon.
The supporting character to become the main is Nixora Darthoridan, who is royal princess and happens to be Renna is full disguise.
The main antagonist/the major big bad is none other than Nirvana and Anti-Genesis. Anti-Genesis is a being modeled after the good in Nirvana which is lies within Nirvana.
Celestica is the somewhat unimportant sister of Nirvana/Genesis and in disguised form…Anna/Annika would be considered an elite minion of Nirvana even though she is indeed Nirvana.
Siora is the mother of Jorildyn and Civiria along with the matriarch of their high ranked noble house that loses their nobility, but become highly famous in the world of entertainment and business. Siora is important too since her mother’s mother has a close tie with Renna and possibly Nirvana too. Also, Siora discovered things and knows things that her daughters do not.
I wasn’t really planning on making this story so female-centric, but here it is.
LOL!
I don’t even know where the males would fit in here far as character roles and positions.
I get that it is Women’s History Month, but that was never my intention, everyone! LOL!
In my case, I didn’t realize how many males were in The Rat Girl until I listed up Bethany’s Wodeland friends. They are all men. The few females that do appear don’t become close with her, so there was just no point in having Bethany build a relationship with them.
Bethany is also more focused on getting her family figured out than making some nice Wodeland girlfriend. Those that can help her figure her family out are princes and their trusted male soldiers.
For your story, if it so happens that all the females are playing big roles and their stories matter to the plot, why try to force a male character in the mix? You would have to be careful not to have a male character for the sake of having a male character to mix things up a bit.
I say it’s fine if it turned out to be female-centric.
You’re right it is just the thought of how the main characters and main supporting characters are just female. In The Breakers (the older Red Reign), it was more diverse than it is now…gender wise.
I did try to have diverse characters in The Rat Girl, but the females did not like Bethany. I tried to get them to like her, but Bethany’s first impression is mean-girl vibes in the beginning. Not a good first impression and makes enemies out of the females right away.
One is actually the two Wodeland princes’ personal guard, Samantha, and she is fire. She hates on Bethany the moment they meet and doesn’t think Bethany could ever fix Wodeland.
So, with females, Bethany will not interact at all meaning that those around her end up being an all-male cast. I do hope Samantha will come around. She’s got tough-boarding-school-teacher vibes and is actually fun to write.
Bethany was showing her mean-girl vibes to everyone and the females were the first to actually hate on her for it. The males knew Bethany way before the females came into the picture and know, although not excusable, why Bethany thinks she has to shove people away by being mean.
I don’t mind being truthful about women who are hurt by men, and forming female centric alliances, but it’s especially frustrating to have the plot so overwritten by it that there is no story other than “Man bad, woman good”. It’s the “Shallow Hal” approach to the story where they simplified “pretty girls are evil” and “fat girls are nice”.
Here I am a nearly 300 lbs 40 year old who is not nice: I can be kind, but I make no bones a out pretending I’m a nice person. I’m happily mean and funny.
So, I don’t fit into the world of “Shallow Hal”. I would be ugly/fat the whole way, with a great sense of humor.
So I’ve got to disconnect from myself to enjoy the movie, and since it’s a very silly movie, I’m not making the effort.
Likewise, most the worldviews where women feel oppressed by men, held back by them, or any other iteration where Karening is confused with strength. I’m not there. I’ve dealt with horrible men–I know they are out there–but most the ways others act around it just ain’t for me.
So because of that, I don’t get obsessed with certain types of fetish books like The Handmaid’s Tale. You notice that a lot of women do like it, to the point where it’s dragged into every situation under the sun? I don’t find that useful.
The sex is ritualistic, specifically for taking a woman’s power from her. It’s within the realm of stuff I find far less strong than whomever though x move by various women was from strength, so I don’t connect. That’s all.
But more my points had to do with the reader’s take, and not the story itself.
I liked Handmaid’s Tale but I sure wish Margaret Atwood had done more research on right wing Christian fundies. There was no reason for that ridiculous ceremony when the Bible’s full of polygamy. A man would simply have sex with multiple women without any elaborate ceremony to justify it.
It’s in Judaism, Christianity has to reject Pauline authority to go full-support of polygamy, which is why in most mainline fundamentalists will blast the heck out of Mormons and their polygamy. And as it is, that use of the OT would lend too much to in-fighting because if you reduce a woman’s marital rights, by OT law, she has the right to walk out of the polygamist marriage as if she was never married–that in a society that didn’t allow women to initiate divorce–but would allow men. (Which culminates on Christ’s own argument that lays the sin on the man who refuses to write a divorce for the woman he kicks out and forces into adultery.)
Strictly, going by how hard it is to rile these sects into a fight, I’d expect it to go like a lot of current poly-marriages into the churches in Africa: no one agrees on poly-marriages after conversion, but those who walk in with multiple wives cause big arguments–which I’ve had to sit through quite a few times. But then, these are segments that are fighting over women wearing pants still, so, it’s a wholly different world.
So, yeah, I see problems of realistically arriving to the premises of the story, but that is common to that type of story. I’ve talked about Native Tongue and it has similar issues without invoking religion.
Honestly, there will be males in the story so it isn’t too ridiculously female-centric. So, I do have males in the story that range from really important to just semi-important.
