I certainly believe so--but agency in any given story is rather a zero-sum game, both in terms of available action and of audience attention. If the female characters are to have more agency, the male characters must cede some of theirs. If the female characters are to seem stronger and more defined, the male characters must be to that extent diminished. If that makes them seem less larger than life, then that's the way it has to be, and if complaining about the women not getting enough isn't working--as it manifestly isn't--then I suggest complaining that the men are getting too much.
In the story I'm writing at the moment I have six main characters, equally balanced as to gender, and I'm constantly trying to avoid falling into the habit patterns I picked up from the stories I've loved all my life. Strong man comforts weak woman. Admiring woman is admiring. Male hero has brilliant idea while female hero makes everyone tea. It's not as easy to balance everything out as it might seem, and in the process the male characters are inevitably made less than the larger-than-life heroes they could be. Everyone is subject to the redistribution of heroism, and the result has fewer stand-out characters. That's just the way it has to be, though, in films and tv and games as well as in books, if female characters are ever going to get a fair crack of the whip.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-06-17 04:02 pm (UTC)In the story I'm writing at the moment I have six main characters, equally balanced as to gender, and I'm constantly trying to avoid falling into the habit patterns I picked up from the stories I've loved all my life. Strong man comforts weak woman. Admiring woman is admiring. Male hero has brilliant idea while female hero makes everyone tea. It's not as easy to balance everything out as it might seem, and in the process the male characters are inevitably made less than the larger-than-life heroes they could be. Everyone is subject to the redistribution of heroism, and the result has fewer stand-out characters. That's just the way it has to be, though, in films and tv and games as well as in books, if female characters are ever going to get a fair crack of the whip.