Thus far we have spoken at a distance of character vulnerability. That is, we’ve talked about other people’s characters which were created years ago and which are currently being degraded by those tasked with preserving them for future generations. With that unholy mess staring us in the face, won’t it be hard to find examples to emulate?
Forgive me for reaching for my own work, but talking about my heroines and heroes just makes it easier. I know what I was and wasn’t thinking when I wrote them, so that allows me to discuss the topic more ably than if I talk about other writers’ characters. With them I can only make educated guesses. For my own characters, I know what I considered when writing about them, so the knowledge is more concrete and tactile.
Let’s start with my first story: Halcyon, available through this Amazon Affiliate link here*. The story follows two prisoners – a man and a woman – in their struggle to survive an alien POW camp that doubles as a lab for human experimentation. The aliens value their lives so little that they leave the humans in an open pit with barely enough water and food to survive.
The heroine has a moment, early on, where she stabs one of the alien guards with a nail from a female compatriot’s chain. Most modern writers would have had her then rise up defiantly after another guard strikes her for her impudence but that never made sense to me. One, these particular aliens – the grunts in the enemy’s army – are far stronger than humans. They can take a fit, perfectly healthy human man and rip him apart with their bare hands. Believing a woman can face such a creature defiantly after she’s been backhanded, however mildly, is insane.
My second reason for having her remain in the mud is simple physical exhaustion. She and the others in the prison have been weakened by casual cruelty, lack of food and water, and continuous exposure to the elements. If the men can’t fight back, proven when my hero takes a brutal beating for trying to avenge the woman who is sent sprawling in the mud, then expecting my heroine, who is physically weaker than a man even when she’s healthy, to do more than the physically weakened hero is asinine.
This, too, is why my heroine in Halcyon doesn’t gain the same kind of fantastic powers my hero does. One of the best things about Andre Norton’s works (please remember that she is one of my favorite writers and inspirations) is that her Witches or those with Witch-talent in her Witch World saga have different powers of the mind than the heroes. This isn’t portrayed as better or worse, just a natural outgrowth of masculinity and femininity.
In the case of Norton’s male characters and my hero in Halcyon, since men are naturally stronger than women on a physical level, it is relatively rare for them to be powerful telepaths or mind readers in the way that many women are. One of the reasons why Professor X is the most powerful telepath in Marvel Comics is due to the fact that he is wheelchair bound; his telepathy compensates for his lack of physical strength. The same can be said of Mastermind, at least in the animated X-Men: Evolution series, because his weaker than average physique means his telepathy compensates for this disparity.
For female characters such as Jean Grey or the Scarlet Witch, their powers are outgrowths of their will and emotions. This is why, like my heroine in Halcyon, they can accomplish so many insane feats of mental prowess on the battlefield. Women are more emotional than men, and this lends them a type of power which men do not demonstrate in the same manner or degree. Hence why Halcyon’s heroine has a greater range and well of telepathic strength to tap into than the hero: neither of them are weak, but they both have different gifts which complement their physical capabilities.
This complementarity extends to one another as well, shown when the heroine gives the hero a weapon that includes some of her own hair. She cannot physically go into battle alongside him, but like the ladies of old, she gives her knight a token to take to the field. Such favors were a sign not only of the lady’s love but, as here, a display that her thoughts and will went with him to the field of combat in the hope of helping him win.
In All the Lamps Are Lit*, the limitations for the heroines are even more explicit. Shawnee, the primary mover of the story, is a young woman dying of cancer. Even before the disease takes its toll on her, she is mostly bedridden. She’s too ill to fight or do much on her own, something that becomes more obvious as the cancer finally runs its course. Her favorite nurse, Deirdre, is just that: a nurse. She is not a doctor and she has no special power or knowledge to eradicate the illness. In the end all she can do is pass on Shawnee’s legacy by living out the purpose she was created to find and fulfill.
When it came to writing The Long Dream*, I knew what I wanted Lt. Fine Tarawa to do from the start. She is a Reader – a psychic – assigned to the U.S.S. Andrew Jackson. By all the known standards, she is quite powerful, though she cannot reach out with her thoughts to touch the minds of those in the stern of the Jackson from the bridge of said ship. Before the story even starts, Tarawa is fronted by a mind more powerful than hers, one that is trapped in a body presently rendered impotent by cryostasis. This would be Lt. James Herman, who has been in suspended animation for three hundred years. He has had no recourse but to develop, even in sleep, extreme mental strength due to the strong emotions he feels and cannot physically “burn off” through action.
Later, when Tarawa is attacked psychically, she has no choice but to clamp down on her own thoughts to protect herself. This drawing in of her mind is dangerous, as it could mean she will retreat from reality and life – in other words, it might just kill her. James has to find a way to gently reach past the barriers she’s extended to defend herself to save her, but this emotional trauma she experienced renders her unable to join him physically in the final battle. Despite this, she does find a way to aid him when he needs her help. I won’t say how; you can read the story to find out.
Again, this is a matter of strengths and weaknesses complementing or cancelling one another out. Tarawa is not as physically strong as James, but she does possess something he has yet to fully internalize: training. James has raw telepathic power and force to call upon but that means nothing when his adversary learned to fight in an arena that he has only recently entered himself. By drawing on one another’s foundational strengths, Fine and James compensate for each other’s weaknesses and are able to overcome their shared enemy.
Muriel’s case in Scylla’s Lair* might be the weakest of all. Rapidly approaching her due date, the former mermaid is heavily pregnant with twins when the titular sea monster snatches her and takes her to her lair. With no voice – her most potent weapon as a mermaid – to summon to protect her, Muriel has to rely on what remaining psychic talents she has to try to find a way to save her children.
In the end, even that isn’t enough, and she has to seek other means to preserve the lives of her twins. Note here that the adversary is female; a monster out of Greek myth, one that can destroy ships and kill hundreds if not thousands of people. Though diminished by time and lack of nourishment, Scylla is still a force to be reckoned with – one which Muriel cannot defeat alone. Yes, Muriel has help from her husband in this tale. But if I were to tell you how that worked, I would defeat the purpose of selling the tale to Storyhack Magazine in the first place. Suffice it to say that even in a female vs. female conflict, the paradigm of reliance and union between men and women remains necessary to ensure victory.
This goes for Lupus One* as well. Kyle Franklin, the hero of the tale, ends up caught in a war between Artemis, ruler of the moon, and Pasiphäe, a witch and mother of the Minotaur. Although Artemis is more powerful than the ancient witch, that doesn’t mean their contest for her domain is easy. Thus Artemis has to maintain an army of men and women to defend her realm from the usurper.
Kyle’s love interest, Diana Harper, is part of Artemis’ army. She has been for a year and so is quite skilled at taking care of herself. She and her Mechanimal, Sylvia, act as something of a trump card to Pasiphäe’s army of monsters. They’ve developed the skills needed to handle monsters quicker and more efficiently than anyone else in the army due to Sylvia’s greater size and strength when compared to that of the monsters. By contrast, Kyle has just arrived. Mechanimals aren’t designed to fight but to serve as transport vehicles capable of rescuing lost tourists and miners. He is out of his league and ends up learning to fight on the fly.
When it comes down to it, however, he’s still stronger than Diana and finds the key to sending Pasiphäe packing. Again, I was aiming for practicalities in this disparity; Diana is not better or stronger than Kyle, just more experienced. Kyle is also adaptable enough to figure out how to fight on his own, meaning Diana and Sylvia only save him when he froze in surprise.
In each of these stories, the heroines are capable and able to take care of themselves – to a degree. Once that point is passed, they need the help of their male counterparts to accomplish their goals. This was something I aimed for consciously: I am tired of being told I have to be stronger than a man in real life. I am not, and will never be, that physically capable. That lesson wasn’t nearly as hard to swallow as the lesson that people will insist until they turn purple that I can and will become as strong as a man if I just do X, Y, or Z.
It’s not possible. I know it down to my bones, and being harassed to become something I physically cannot accomplish is annoying. That means I do not want to take part in the harassment of other women by propagating a harmful stereotype. Hence my heroines are unabashedly feminine. Women hear enough about the Usual Suspects’ idea of “strong female characters” from every other outlet in media, so why must they hear it from me?
My heroines are capable heroines. They fight, sometimes by standing and waiting for their man to come back (Halcyon), or on the field of combat (Lupus One). But whichever route they choose, they are women first and foremost. All else is secondary to that great power which resides in the natural vulnerability of the female sex, which doubles as their greatest weakness and greatest strength – depending on how, why, and where they use it.
So my heroines, in that respect, are like me. They think like women, they fight like women, and yes, they feel like women. I know what it is to be a woman, so I write them as such. Why on Earth would I write them as anything less than what I am and what the women I know are? Doing that would be an insult to my sex in general and all the great women who have taught me how to embrace my femininity personally.
I don’t like to insult anyone without just cause, and there is no just cause here. I’ll follow the “princess being saved from the dragon by the knight” formula in its many variations and permutations and never lose sleep over it. At the end of the day, we all want to be rescued by the Prince Himself, who defeated the dragon that stole this world. What’s not to love about that pattern? I’ve learned the hard way I can’t always save myself, so being saved by my Prince suits me just fine.
That’s why my heroines don’t mind being rescued, either. They know they can’t save themselves – they know they need a Savior. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, everything is right with it. So why not embrace it and run with it?
Slightly off topic, but vulnerability is IMO another aspect of "giving your characters challenges to over-come".
It can be a very boring story if the main character is so powerful that easily meets every challenge he or she faces.
The reader has to Know The Character Can Fail.