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HUMAN_AGENT

                                             March 22, 2016

                                                   (From material posted to
  Some thoughts on literary gender-swapping:        the Charles Stross blog,
                                                    antipope.org.)
  "Male" genre fiction exaggerates human
  agency, whereas "female" genre fiction nearly
  eliminates it.  In male fiction, the lone
  rogue male runs around with a gun being              ROMANCE
  tougher, faster and smarter for just long
  enough to resolve every problem and save the
  day. In female fiction (e.g. shoujo manga)
  the heroine *will* land with a high-status
  male, but will take very little positive
  action to achieve this (that's reserved for
  grasping, manipulative women-- her
  competitors), instead she wins everyone over
  with her sheer niceness, including the
  villains who she eventually befriends.

    Note that *both* of these are insane: Solve all your
    problems entirely by yourself, without outside
    assistance, because you just know better than everyone
    else?  Ha.  Solve all your problems without effort,
    with little awareness of what's going on?  What?

    It's hard to get away from a conclusion that what's
    needed is "somewhere in between", but that's evidently
    a hard lesson for many to learn.

    Consider American foreign policy:
    Arguably it's continually contaminated
    by the dreams of male adventure fiction
    when it could use a dose of shoujo: win    Really: human knowledge and
    people over by example and diplomacy       capabilities are often too
    instead of driving them away with          limited for heroics to achieve
    heavy-handed attempts at control.          much, and human agency is fairly
                                               limited in most real cases.
    So, my question is, what would be
    a "space opera" form that tempers
    "male" craziness with "female"
    craziness?

    Consider Gaiman's "Seasons of the Mist": it's
    a very successful, colorful fantasy, but it
    skips the usual "hero's journey" and instead
    uses a "romance novel" structure: the main
    character is in charge of a powerful resource
    (the key to hell), and various different
    factions appear as suitors, and he must choose
    one of them.


                                                          HELL_OF_DIFF


                      One solution for Space Opera
                      might be: replace the romantic
                      with romance.




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