• Home
  • Blog
  • News
  • Events
  • About the Author
  • About the Book
  • Bookstore
  • Reviews
  • Press/Media
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Blog
  • News
  • Events
  • About the Author
  • About the Book
  • Bookstore
  • Reviews
  • Press/Media
  • Contact
D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

Making History

9/28/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
                -Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
 
I recalled this quote the other day in light of what was, really, a throwaway point I made last post: “Yeah… I game… PS4, Xbox… so what? Stop looking at me like that. I really like games with strong, well-written female protagonists.” Several people --- not gamers --- commented, their thoughts tending to centre around two themes: 1) “Isn’t the gaming community mainly composed of adolescent male misogynists?” and 2) “Aren’t most games tailored to that market, with mainly over-sexed, impossibly muscled, aggressive male protagonists, tended by fawning, scantily clad, submissive females?”
 
Now, I don’t claim to be a gaming expert, but my answers are: first… I think there’s the usual cadre of lunatic misfits in gaming, as in any field of human endeavour (COVID seems to have brought this out with a vengeance) --- although I’m prepared to admit there may be more than usual in gaming. But I don’t run into them --- I’m a lone wolf, not doing multiplayer. Second, gaming may have begun with a bunch of Neanderthal male protagonists, but there’s a number of excellent, thoughtful games these days featuring ‘strong, well-written female protagonists’… and those are the games I find most worth playing. (IRL, I also find most women far more interesting than most men, but that’s another day’s subject.) Herewith, I submit for your approval five ‘strong, well-written female protagonists:’
 
Commander Shepard, Mass Effect Trilogy: ME was the first game I encountered where you choose your protagonist’s gender; my oldest daughter said the female voice acting was superior, so that’s what I chose. Either way, Shepard doesn’t, unfortunately, have an official first name --- I named mine Cat, short for Catherine, because she seems to possess nine lives. Shepard is a badass military commander/starship captain rolled into one, and through the course of a sprawling, sweeping trilogy, literally winds up saving the galaxy. Interestingly, this is the only game discussed here where you’ve the option of selecting a relationship --- either gay or straight --- for Shepard, adding an interesting subplot.
 
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider Reboot Trilogy: Now, let’s be clear --- the original Lara Croft was clearly designed to appeal to those adolescent male misogynists I referenced earlier, right down to her scantily clad, big-breasted appearance. But in 2013, Crystal Dynamics, the game developer, rebooted the franchise and gave us a far more intelligent take on the concept. Lara’s a recently graduated archeologist, interested in --- well, she doesn’t know it at first, but three games indicate her obsession is with the paranormal. Lara’s a bit intimidated at the beginning by the scope of what she must do, but she shakes that off pretty quickly.
 
Max Caulfield, Life is Strange: Maxine (I’d shorten that to Max, too) is an 18-year-old high school senior who discovers she has the ability to “rewind” i.e. turn back time, invariably to stop awful things from happening, particularly to her BFF, Chloe Price, a scrappy high school dropout with a lot of baggage (you get to play Chloe in the prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm). Unfortunately, as myriad time travel stories teach us, you can’t mess with the past without creating all sorts of problems/paradoxes, and by the climax, Max has to choose between saving either Chloe or her town from total destruction. (I chose Chloe, BTW.)
 
Ellie Williams, The Last of Us 1 and 2: TLOU is a post-apocalyptic tale --- twenty years before the game begins, civilization is destroyed by a fungal plague turning infected people first into raving maniacs, then into gruesome mutations. (Hopefully, COVID isn’t taking notes.) 14-year-old Ellie, it emerges, is the only person immune, making her invaluable: if her immunity can be replicated, humanity is saved. TLOU deals with her journey across the United States’ ravaged remains to the only place a vaccine can be made. She’s shepherded by Joel, a 50-something smuggler less than enthusiastic about his task, and the game’s main thrust is the father-daughter relationship developing between two characters who initially loathe each other. (The sequel is waaay darker and as a result, I think, met with decidedly mixed reviews --- though I thought it also superb. It deals with hatred and the futility of the revenge cycle.)
 
Aloy, Horizon Zero Dawn: HZD is another post-apocalyptic story, but this time technological rather than biological. Humanity has been brought low by its own mechanical creations, and now lives in varying degrees of savagery. Aloy, a 19-year-old outcast from her tribe, begins the story wanting desperately to fit in, although as she becomes more aware of humanity’s frailties, grows less interested in that and more focused on her quest, which deals with putting to rights a world falling dangerously, lethally apart.
 
So… what makes these five appealing? They’re:
 
Willing: while not cocksure (pun intended) about their abilities, they know the job’s gotta be done, and they’re the lucky nominees. So, no whining.
 
Characters with Attitude: Little Women, they ain’t. They don’t sit around with gloved hands folded primly in laps, being well-behaved, passive/docile ciphers; they’ve thrown that stereotype in the trash where it belongs.
 
Independent and Emotionally Secure: they pass the Bechdel Test (look it up). None need guys to present plans or save the day. They’re fully capable of doing that themselves, thanks very much, so they don’t go around wishing they were guys: they know perfectly well women can do everything just as well.
 
Intelligent: there’s problem-solving elements to be confronted before characters can advance, and they do it with aplomb. No “math is hard” gender stereotypes.
 
Vulnerable, but Strong: to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there’s a time for strength, and a time for vulnerability; a time to suck it up, and a time to weep forlornly. These characters know which is for when.
 
The odd thing is, all these characteristics are what make great characters great regardless of gender, and it’s incredibly unfortunate we even have to have this discussion; that in this day and age, these qualities in women characters specifically should be worthy of note --- or at all remarkable. But… *sigh* …here we are, in 2020, and it’s painfully obvious from current world events that, while progress has been made, we’ve still got a long way to go.
 
In the meantime: Shepard, Lara, Max, Ellie, Aloy… you go, girls. Don’t listen to the naysayers. Just keep on kicking ass.
 
You rock.
 
 
 

0 Comments

Report!

9/21/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Five years ago this week, so my calendar informs me, I had the book launch for my debut self-published novel, Gryphon’s Heir. As the autumn leaves were first seared by the frost, then withered, yellowed and gently cascaded to the ground, forming a crunchy carpet on the land, I gathered up my courage and launched my baby in the warm confines of an example of that increasingly rare and vanishing species, the indie bookstore. (The poetic drivel concerning autumn and leaves should be taken with a proverbial grain of salt… where I live, autumn tends to arrive with all the subtlety of an anvil dropping, and trees drop their leaves with the breakneck speed of the Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter books. After that, it’s seven months or so of winter that changes only in its degree of bleakness.) It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… well, not really. But it led me to random reflections, irresistibly reminding me of episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, where Kathryn Janeway, the trusty starship Captain, often swept out of her ready room adjoining Voyager’s bridge following an alien attack or other cosmic phenomena to make a terse, single-word demand: “Report!” Relevance? you ask. Well, this is me doing a similar thing… kind of a personal “Report!” musing, I guess --- so if you seek remarkably pithy and cogent observations about Life, Writing and the Whole Damn Thing, you may, to paraphrase Lemony Snicket, want to stop right now. This is just me, ruminating or free-associating or whatever you want to call it, on the occasion of a fairly significant personal milestone.
 
Five years ago! My social media guru back then (she eventually left the social media coaching gig after coming to the understanding how pointless and soul-sucking so much of it is) would be horrified to hear the number, particularly when that little factoid is coupled to the fact the sequel has yet to be completed, much less make an appearance. To which I’d say, chill out, girlfriend… it’s coming. Maybe not as fast as it should, but hey, been a lot of water under the personal dam (and other hoary cliches) the last five years: belatedly coming to the realization my little fiction wunderkind was not going to storm the literary world all on its own… my father’s passing and his estate’s messy settling… and the winding down of my nearly 35-year teaching career with consequent decision to retire, prompted by another grim realization i.e. all my bosses (I absolutely refuse to refer to them as superiors) had gone insane in their ideas about what constitutes sound educational philosophy. And let’s not even get into the dumpster fire that is 2020… plagues, infernos and other climate-change disasters, the shrill, demented worldwide chorus of discordant populist demagoguery/nationalism… gads, there are days it’s like we’re living the opening pages of Revelation. Yikes. Deep breaths, deep breaths…
 
Anyway, returning to one of the areas of sanity in my life. In the nine years prior to its publication in 2015, I wrote Gryphon’s Heir, a 186,000-word novel. It was never intended as a stand-alone, but the first installment in a longer tale… trilogy? Tetralogy? Dunno. The Muse has yet to inform me how long the story is. (And yes, I’ve asked. She hasn’t deigned to answer. She’s kinda standoffish like that, at times.) The sequel, tentatively titled Gryphon’s Awakening, currently sits at 178,000 words and change. Although, see, there’s a strange thing: it’s on hold.
 
No, I haven’t stopped writing. Several months ago, a very long time ago now, about last April (to paraphrase A.A. Milne), I was hijacked. I’d been minding my own business, writing Gryphon’s Awakening, thinking vaguely along the way about writing some YA or short stories with changed point of view just for something a little different, and this character unceremoniously popped into my head: a scrappy, 18-year-old girl named Areellan (ah REE lan) who plopped herself down beside me and in no uncertain tones commanded me to switch on my laptop and write as she directed. She didn’t say Hwaet!, but might as well have. 81,000 words and several edits later, I’m still listening… and she’s still dictating. And since she’s the one doing the talking, the story’s written in first person --- her perspective --- which I’ve never done before. (Strange how refreshing it is.) I’ve no idea how long her story is, or where she’s going with it. I’ve also no idea where she came from. Well, that’s not entirely true; at the time she appeared on the scene, I’d just finished playing a PS4 game with a young female protagonist, and her visual image resonated with me fairly powerfully. (Yeah… I game… PS4, Xbox… so what? Stop looking at me like that. I really like games with strong, well-written female protagonists.) Somehow, in a way I don’t fully understand, it allowed Areellan to shoulder her way up from the recesses of my subconscious, and she’s been beside me ever since.
 
And a couple of times a month, I crank out one of these little epistles --- this is my 188th blog post, incidentally, so, given I usually aim for a length of roughly 1000 words for them, I figure I’ve also written the equivalent of another novel in those five years. I used to do one every week, but that got a little untenable after a while, so now, I write (once again) more as the Muse commandeth. Sometimes she doesn’t provide a whole lot to go on: today’s post began with just two little words --- five years --- sitting naked and alone at the top of the page for quite a while, the cursor blinking impatiently behind them while it waited for me to get my poop in a group. But I started rambling, and before I knew it, here we are, that thousand words later, and --- whew --- literary collapse has been averted one more week. Today’s musings haven’t been quite as structured as I usually make them… as I said earlier, more just a personal reflection of where things are with me, writing-wise, at a rather arbitrary milestone during a very strange year… so, if you’re still here… thanks, Mom.
 

0 Comments

    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Copyright 2015-2025. All rights reserved.
    ​
    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

    Archives

    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly