So sorry to hear about your cat.😢 I was getting misty eyed at your description of finding him. Speaking of Never Let Me Go, in Plato’s Republic, the society Plato invents is ruled by Philosopher Kings called “Guardians.” This is a society in which kids are taken from their parents at the age of 10 and sent to a centralized boarding school. Also, I love Jonathan Haidt and I actually know him personally. In fact, funny enough, I’m teaching his book The Righteous Mind right now to my AP seniors. I would highly recommend reading The Righteous Mind to you.

I am very interested in the "Gendered Reading in Fantasy" topic but have no interest in the YA discussion. I was a bit disappointed that the first topic seemed to fade out quickly and that the majority of this vid is about the YA issues. I'd love to hear more concerning Gender.

thank you, such a great discussion

At 13:20 probably life stages .... Girls mature faster than boys and are ready for fantasy before boys .... Themes of YA fantasy are growth and change and becoming ....boys are playing computer games or sport just hanging out ... But young women are really confronting a very different reality we begin to have many life changes ..... Yet then the headwinds of what it means to be a woman really cuts into that reading time ...adult women serve their families intensely ... Career and parenting or caring is an extreme sport ... Men get to have more free time and head space that big epic battle fantasy entails .... Women who have had babies are tallying up the sheer number of human hours that looking after a young child requires that some author has written off for some battle feels thousands on thousands of unpaid labour thrown away because someone has a need to read violence feel emotional. I used to love fantasy so much ... But as I grew into an adult so much adult fantasy became absurd to me . Battle war fantasy epics became literally boring to me ... they are so narrow in their concept. War should have been consigned to history - fantasy and science fiction represent our future .... I need violence decentered from my fantasy.

Very concerning that when naming relatable female characters in ASOIAF, Johanna's mind went first to Cersei Lannister 😆 This was a great discussion!

A great discussion by three wonderful people! 🙌. I'm always trying to mix up the books I buy my nephews to include boy and girl characters. Just so they're surrounded with plenty of options. Now if they would just pick something up 😫

I think men can write for women. L. Frank Baum and Gregory Maguire both centered Oz in female-focused stories, most of the time. Terry Pratchett wrote the best women in fantasy: Granny Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg, Magrat Garlick, Sgt. Angua, Susan StoHelit, Sybil Ramkin, Tiffany Aching, and more.

fascinating video

Fantastic conversation. One dimension to this problem is who publishing has chosen to chase or exclude over the decades. Who they select has not always been based on who is genuinely unique and best. Even some of the authors we consider legends today had to start out as quasi copycats of other authors to even get published to begin with. And there are probably countless people who gave up after not getting published.

Sorry, I'm totally watching the replay. I used to read fantasy and contemporary romance. I would much rather read romantasy to get my romance fix than contemporary romance. Because I'm a fantasy reader. I've read fantasy since I was a child. So let's stay in the genre.

I'm thinking now that none of the misogynism bothered me because I was very aware I was reading fantasy. I never thought about the real life implications.

I'm Gen X and I was reading eipc fantasy in high school. I read McCaffrey and Lackey among others, but yes it was male dominated. But also read Sweet Valley High and the like, so I was reading female authors for more romance, so I never noticed the gender gap until adulthood.

Please ! Finish the series ! I want to see your reaction to the ending

The big 5 publishers have forgotten one key principle when it comes to writing: Target your audience. Instead, they have tried to become a political propaganda machine, and whether you agree with the politics or not, one thing is undeniable--it's terrible marketing advice. This doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't put messaging in your novels. Authors have been doing this for ages. The difference now is that the big 5 is trying to use a sledgehammer to shove their ideas down peoples throats rather than using subtle messaging. Take the Wheel of Time series in book form vs Amazon's video series as an example. Robert Jordan did an excellent job of pushing left-wing ideals in a subtle, yet powerful way that was consistent with the world, necessary to the plot, and let it speak for itself rather than trying to actually send any explicit messaging. When you look at Amazon's video interpretation, it's horrifically done. They tried to double down on the implied message, and instead beat the viewer over the head with propaganda. This angers existing fans, and makes them hate the series.

According to Wikipedia, Megan Lindholm deliberately chose an androgynous name (Robin Hobb) when she started writing in a different subgenre of fantasy. Where they got that info is uncertain. I remember hearing that there was a well known author behind the name and when I found out who she was I was a bit disappointed. I had almost all her books under her original name on my shelves by then. In her foreword to her short story collection 'The Inheritance' she explains how the duality came to be. There's nothing in that foreword that suggests the name was chosen for a specific reason. Only that she chose to publish under another name because she wanted to try a new voice. The foreword is available at gizmodo (published 2011) if anyone wants to read it.

Back in the 30's 40's and 50' all sf/fantasy stories that were written by female authors used their initials.

What annoys me is that all the long hair guy focuses on is the SA stuff.

Love the content ! loved everyone in the conversation, just not the guy that talks to much and complains to much. but overall its great !

🎉

I write under a male name and this was partly because what i write is more "mens interests" being military and war, strategies etc. It wasnt too long ago i read that women will read men and women authors, but certain topics will obviously be better done by women (pls give me some exceptions) rather than men (ig. Shad brooks book, soc) but men will mostly only want to read men.

Adult fantasy and sci-fi has a lot of really intricate things like world building that scratches the same itch as people into history or math (aka men). Men are more interesting in things, and women are more into people on average, so I think the feel of books and mange written by men or women have different vibes. You don’t have the same expansive and intricate world building and other really nerdy stuff in YA books, and it doesn’t appeal to men as much. This is at least what I’ve gathered from the men and women around me. Edit: it’s a lot like why channels that talk about really deep concepts like the views of early church fathers in Christianity are a large part made up by men, and why women focus more on volunteering in person.

That aged bad finn got screwed

If you would like to see fiction for young audiences* with complex and ambivalent endings, I'd recommend taking a look at Heinlein's juveniles, including "Podkayne of Mars" and "Farmer in the Sky". Several titles (including those two) told difficult stories and pulled no punches, and the endings were very hard. If you read Podkayne, make sure to find the original ending, which the publisher required Heinlein to change for publication, it hits very hard indeed. Oh, and Podkayne is a female protagonist, FWIW. Some books in that series were more straight adventure fiction ("The Rolling Stones", for instance), but they're all solid reads and they're all fairly short by modern standards (generally less than 250 pages). While they were written in the '50s and show evidence of that time period in their style, Heinlein was very good at not writing down to his purported audience and I find them still very readable today. * The series was characterized as "juvenile" by the publisher when the books were published in the 1950s, and at least one of the books (Farmer in the Sky) was published in condensed form in Boys' Life (the magazine of the Boy Scouts).

I think it’s totally cool for male authors to write for a men BUT it becomes a problem when the male perspective becomes the objective perspective. There’s ’Chick Lit’ and male lit is just lit. Throw in race and it gets even more difficult. Western fantasy’s issues are very western culturally based. You look at East Asia for example and they have so much folklore with women as the heroes.

Humans are hunter gatherers deep down. Fantasy in some sense is the ultimate, distilled down to it's most basic essence hunter-focused story. So it makes sense that most often it's written by men, for men, with male heroes, and why even female adult fantasy reads as if it was written for men "by men" as well. The opposite is true in cases like Jane Austen, Bronte sisters etc. It's not at all random that their writing seems to be on the complete other side of the spectrum - a lot more focused on the immediate and pragmatic challenges of then current life and society, interpersonal relationships and group status, with female protagonists. IMO looking at these literary sub-genres and wondering why one is male and the other female dominated, or thinking isn't this bad or strange or whatever is overthinking it. There is no greater meaning or insight behind it beyond being a reflection of the basic differences in interest and personality between men and women in general.

Most people dont read. >10% of humanity reads? Most readers dont read fantasy. >10% of readers like fantasy? So id assume on a Venn diagram a female author and a male author are not diametrically opposed on completely different sides they are very close. The female and the male authors are part of the very tiny same subsection of interests. It can be good to zoom out a little and realize the people who fight the hardest are both in the same tiny club liking almost identical things and fighting over the last 10% when they both agree to 90% fantasy is awesome. But maybe this is just the only fantasy topic im chill about and im just missing the nuances of it

Thanks for having me on Johanna. This was one of my favorite discussions in a long time, you and Jimmy always teach me so much!

So many thoughts in response to your discussion. I do think the skill of the author has more to do with their ability to characterize different genders as opposed to the gender of the author themselves. For example, Fonda Lee stands out to me as a female author who writes believable male characters. I think the gender of the author has more of an impact on how I react to sexual content. I don’t tend to enjoy romance in books generally, but when it comes to explicit scenes, I find it far easier to accept from a female author than from a male. When written by a male, I tend to find it creepy and indulgent that they spend the time to dream the scenes up and articulate them deliberately using prose, whereas this doesn’t tend to occur to me when coming from a female author. The second book in the Kingkiller Chronicles comes to mind; I struggled with a good portion of the second book. With regard to how the demographics split out across adult and YA fantasy, I happen to be an adult male, and I tend to recoil from books where the dominant perspective is not from an adult. I tend to find them irritating and impossible to relate to. Even as a kid, I struggled with the suspension of disbelief if there was an adventure from a kid's perspective. I tended to look up to adults and was in a rush to become an adult, so I gravitated heavily toward adult perspective fiction. I wonder how many males share this experience. I’m also not comfortable when spending time around children, so this is probably correlated. My own personal interests include practicing and consuming combat sports and reading a lot about history and politics, and I tend to strongly prefer grimdark fantasy. I’m curious if women with similar hobbies also favor the same subgenres of fantasy. I believe authors using initials has more to do with bookstore-related things than anything else; for example, I remember hearing Victoria Schwab say that her publishers wanted to be able to separate her adult fantasy from her YA, so her adult was published using her initials and her YA using her full name. I thought that was an interesting business decision. Thanks for the thought-provoking content!

I really enjoy the story of It as displayed in the various movie adaptations, and have toyed with reading it but just never pull the trigger xD.

Channels with women presenters that talk about fantasy are also Peruse Project and ElliotBrooks.

Who would've guessed, an absolutely fascinating and insightful discussion between some of the most thoughtful and well-spoken people on booktube. LOVED this! You all touched upon so many things that I had never even thought about. I really hope that the rise of social media in book marketing can help with celebrating female authors openly, that was such an interesting point! Thanks for sharing 🤩

I really loved this discussion! Even though it’s open ended, I believe it’s important to keep a dialogue going! Bookborn and Jimmy were the perfect guests for this topic, my only gripe is that the video ended! I could have listened to you all talk about it for another 2 hours at least!

I feel like all the Canadians know Hatchet. Jimmy's reaction when they had never heard of it 😂

Really appreciate this nuanced conversation. I had a thought pop up and will need to think on it more, but wanted to ask your thoughts Johanna: when YA fantasy is marketed more to women or romantasy, with less dense plot/writing style, is part of it to do with the state of society and women’s roles in it? I’m specifically thinking of how women carry the bulk of domestic and parenting labour in a marriage, as well as working a lot of the time, so they are exhausted and tend to turn to more ´light’ or ´easier’ books to read as an escape. Whereas data shows typically men have more free time and do less domestically/parenting, so their mental capacity may be higher for a denser story? They’re able to sit down and focus, as expectations on them contributing fairly are lower? Really curious about your thoughts on this, am I out to left field?

This was a really interesting discussion that covered many aspects of a complex topic. I personally don't think there is anything wrong with books geared to a specific audience. I think there is a need for young readers in particular to be able to relate to characters in books. In addition, books geared towards a specific gender can also appeal to someone from the opposite gender. Reading myriad different perspectives that are not our own I believe helps broaden our viewpoint. For example, I know what the female experience is but I don't know what the male experience is or the perspective of a minority. In the past when there were fewer female fantasy authors available I would search out as many as I could find. Today however, I like to think that I am gender neutral when choosing what I read. Great discussion and I agree there are no easy answers.

What a brilliant discussion about such an important topic. Thanks so much Joanna for hosting it! There is so much to discuss I’m not sure how much I could add in a quick comment section. But If I were to have a kind of utopia, books would be written for boys and girls, and in school everyone would read both. So in that way both genders get to learn a bit more about the world through the other’s eyes before they go out into the world. If I could extend it further I would include sexuality, race, class, caste etc etc. I know, quite the pipe dream.

Romantsy is just repackaged Harlequin Romance books, instead of the hunky fabio man its a hunky fairy/beast man

47:44 Had to pause the video in light of this WHAT?! When I think about childhood male role models via books Gary Paulsen was one of my first favorite authors. Hatchet 🪓 is a big school book where I’m from at least, and after reading that I got into Canyons and, my favorite, the Mr Tucket series which is a 5 book western series for young readers. Ugh my childhood. And now I learned that he died a couple years ago and I have feels.

So excited for this discussion!

The practice of more women authors going by initials explicitly due to sexist reader preferences (or going by male pen names) has been going on for a very long time, certainly well before JK Rowling or the like, unfortunately. Heck, Mary Shelley's publication of Frankenstein in 1818 was originally anonymous, but when it was found out she was the author the book was critiqued for her femaleness! While I'm sure we are somewhat better 200 years later, we certainly still have a ways to go. It certainly feels like traditionally most sci-fi/fantasy authors that go by initials to last name are women. Also, Robin Hobb did choose the pen name Robin intentionally to be androgynous due to concerns some readers wouldn't trust a book with a male protagonist written by a woman (according to her interviews). I've heard some conversations by trad authors that publishers definitely pushed potential authors of YA to have female protagonists more due to the demographics and that more girls and women read - especially YA. But there is a funny tension, because some (obviously bad) traditional rules of thumb for adult fiction or for movies/television is that male leads are universal (appreciated by men and women) but female leads are just for women. So that market force may push the opposite in non-YA, non-romance adult fiction. I think the gendering of YA has changed over time though as when I was young there were certainly many more sci-fi/fantasy books for younger people with male protagonists than female. There were some female leads (say Meg from A Wrinkle in Time), but they were more the exception. To me that period of male leaning YA protagonists lasts up through about Harry Potter. By the time the distopians came (Hunger Games, Divergent, Delirium, Matched, etc.) I think we were starting to see things swing more female focused (although you still had Maze Runner or slightly earlier Percy Jackson). The books I've read in the last decade that I feel deal the most with gender directly certainly aren't YA, and the most interesting in gender, are more often in sci-fi than fantasy and are very often written by queer and/or trans authors (and most often by female authors too). Be that robots/ships that might have trouble with gender, or alien species with different gender practices, or what not. You can certainly directly deal with gender roles in YA fantasy (Tamora Pierce's Alanna series is a very obvious example) though for any interested.

I don't know about the Arrows Trilogy, but whenever something like Magic's Pawn comes up from her Last Herald-Mage Trilogy, Misty and Larry always make it clear that they're not writing YA books in Valdemar, that they're adult books and intended that way. I think since a lot of readers since the 1980s onwards discover Valdemar in their teens, and that characters like Vanyel are so compelling that it's the first time we feel like fantasy has space for us, that it's easy to think it's therefore a YA book. (Of course, one look at the US paperback cover for Magic's Pawn makes it pretty clear the target audience for Valdemar are adults.) I guess Lackey might be a good example of a female author whose male characters appeal to a male audience. (Though if you look at her Canadian covers, I've heard male friends up there say that they were shocked she had so many male fans in America since instead of demons and mages they got shirtless guys and sparkleponies on their covers.) Still, I think one thing about her world is that the inclusion of lgbtqia+ characters means that it feels more realistic to anyone who is (or knows) any lgbtqia+ people. A lot of fantasy back in the 80s when Magic's Pawn came out seemed to take place in a land whose greatest fantasy feature was that it was a world without any queerness. I know Ursula Vernon has joked that like most Gen X, she discovered gay people existed through Valdemar novels, but I'd never heard of ace or aro before Brightly Burning, and I picked up her newest book over the summer and there's trans and nonbinary characters seamlessly part of the story.

Amazing conversation. I really appreciate how all of you had some really nuanced and interesting takes on a very complicated topic.

Excellent discussion, it's a very nuanced topic. For my own reading I am pretty similar to Jimmy, at age 11 I was reading Lord of the Rings, then transitioned into ASOIAF and Stephen King. But I also read Hunger Games and Harry Potter incessantly so I think it was a bit all over the place. I think it's definitely true that people react to scenes differently with knowledge that an author is male or female, though.

You dont need ever to be sure what to believe but you need to have an opinion and explore and test and check that opinion, and be open to be wrong if thats. Bu you dont need to be sure but have an opinion and be not afraid to confront and ajust and face wher eyou are wrong while having some belief in something. And wit hbelief i mean an opinion, something to be behind and test that not afraid to face being wrong and change if needed, and learn. But everything starts with an opinion and to test it and explore and grow. And knowing that ther ar people that know more than you is , basic humility, everyone has someone better, like homer in that simpson episode cam to realize with edison. also personally i think from near anything can be learned something.

Its a webtoon on mangadex more readable, but reccomand kubera the last god , thats kinda slow burnlike a book as, it was plannned as book. Also great eastern influences used while doing its own thin that, is actually fun, emotional and pretty deep too and it letts readers actually think about very different character philosophies. Also its still fun adventure drama, great characters and great mystery and fantasy. . ok hindu fantasy inspired isnt that often and thats, well done, if its own thing. I dont think most people believed literally in myths but kind of culturally accepted, yes we dont need to believe it but describe it us such, society have weird rituals that mak no sense without context that people agreed for some reason to do it so. And religion was always as much about community as beliefs, if not more. And people extragare, people use metaphors, people do that regulary (where fantasy and scifi are excelent mirror on that, terry pratchett my favourite, but a lot absurdist media in general, how we all are helly weird on social levels and thats fine if not tackling specific issues). Yes i agree fantasy and scifi is as real as any other , but its often truth through lies , if i had to describe shakespeare, as more distinct unrealistict makes it easier to look on reflections. And yeah zen riddles kinda do the same to reach an answer through realizing by thinking about a thing. And yeah fiction has the potential to become modern myths that societies accept a lot as cultural mythologies. I would dismiss to not mention Batman as example, or star trek, or , .... with even literally the same debates whats canon. Ok i will be not talking about beliefs as, thats not really the point but myths are kinda about something people agree that is so important to them they elevate it to myth. They dont have to litrerally belief it as it can be just a felt narrative truth even if peobably most know its fiction it hits real and means that much cultural. See Batman as example, batman definitly is a modern myth and inspiration, but ther is a lot. Or star trek that jokingly got a "church ot trek" joke because yeah culturalllxy it connected enough people has a philosophy even, that , i mean often people dont have to literally believe to connect wit hsomething or have it influence them. (enough catholics cough cough, are kinda so or so but are culturally) Things can be truth or resonant on very different levels or accepted. Like emotional truth doesnt mean its literally truth but still valid. And apearently is it what you want or think you want seems to be a major buddhist bit? The truth of the world or at least what matters vs what you can ignore and that.

So glad Bookborn brought up the absence of Rey toys. I remember seeing a giant Milennium Falcon toy with Finn and Chewbacca but not Rey. I was furious. It was an insult to boys, who can recognize who the hero of the story is.

I got half way through IT and put it down but it was really the bullying that got to me more than anything. Even though I knew because how the book is structured that the all the members of the loser club would make it to adulthood every time one got cornered by the bully I was terrified for them.

Fascinating discussion. It’s interesting that while traditionally fantasy books were geared toward men or boys; my recent experience at local bookstores is that the new fantasy bookshelves seems to be dominated by female authors or books that seemed to be marketed towards girls. These authors are getting a ton of space not just on the shelves, but also on special displays, table stands, etc. I wonder if that’s because these books are of high-quality or is there something else happening. I realize that girls tend to read more than boys. So maybe it’s just marketing to the demand.

Such a fantastic discussion. ❤ I loved that you guys took this topic on as it can be difficult to navigate. I have complicated feelings on this as a women who reads predominantly male authors. On the one hand I’ve deeply connected with stories that I wouldn’t be considered part of the target audience, so does it matter who it was written for? While also understanding the need for stories to be written and available for different audiences (in this case gender). I think I need to read more female authors as I am curious if they would hit me differently.

The issue of young people ability to read might have something to do with how they are taught. Someone teacher came up with this new way of teaching children to read in like the 90s, I don't recall the details but it was pushed into American public schools. Long story short it turned out to be straight bad way to teach how to read and set back a generation at least of kids when it comes to reading.