195 replies to this topic

[Peiper]

Koshirou, on 12 July 2015 - 02:28 AM, said:

Just a fun game: Count how many of these dialogue pieces concern two female characters talking to each other. (And if you want to complete the test "... about something other than a man.")

As I am writing a Battletech novel right now, I've been doing my best to try to represent females proportionately to males. Unfortunately, as I'm trying to include so many of my fellow Devil Dogs in the novel, all but one of whom are male, I've been hard pressed to fit females in. This observation above, though, is really a good observation. I can think of one novel where two females have a conversation (and so far it's not mine). It's a Dark Age novel with Tara Cambell and I want to say another mechwarrior in her unit named Tamera. There is another, Candice and Romano Liao!

[Nightmare1]

[redacted]. Frankly, I don't understand why it's even such a big deal; male authors tend to write most heavily about male characters using male leads. Female authors do likewise, but with respect to female characters and leads. Folks write about their own gender the most normally. It's not really a big deal. Using a thread to gripe about it or demand implementation of more female leads is kind of pointless.

Edited by Catalina Steiner, 13 July 2015 - 12:26 AM.
Redacted because of rule violations

[SnagaDance]

Narcissistic Martyr, on 12 July 2015 - 01:19 AM, said:

Ok, I'm not sure if this was mentioned because the thread got a wee bit hijacked and I decided to just skip the rest but the battletech novels aren't us the reader watching events unfold. Instead the battletech novels, the stories in the scenarios, and all the rest of the fluff are a collection of reports, retellings, propaganda, and historical reconstructions.

The novels have never been propaganda, and it is mainly those we are discussing here. But many of the source books etc. have a propaganda slant indeed, with some like the Jihad books actually filled with lots of lies and rumors to boot.

[Catalina Steiner]

Again I needed to work on this thread. It's very easy to find clear moderator statements (additional to our rules) that show you which kind of posts are appropriate.

I won't close this thread. Whoever wants to discuss about female characters in the BattleTech universe (and nothing else) will find a place here. You are also absolutely free to open new ones. But this thread won't be abused for insults, cheat discusssions or any rule violation.

Edited by Catalina Steiner, 13 July 2015 - 12:30 AM.

[Peiper]

SnagaDance, on 13 July 2015 - 12:01 AM, said:

The novels have never been propaganda, and it is mainly those we are discussing here. But many of the source books etc. have a propaganda slant indeed, with some like the Jihad books actually filled with lots of lies and rumors to boot.

I think what Narcissistic Martyr is trying to suggest is rather tongue-in-cheek. Battletech characters are often only so deep and only so flawed in order to allow the story to keep flowing forward. Because not a single character is described as having painful hemorrhoids or other small problems like petty jealousies or crushes on minor characters, it is easy to look at the characters as stereotypical heroes or villains. Typically, only recurring characters have a lot of character development because there's only so much space in a novel. In books like the Warrior Trilogy and Blood of Kerensky trilogy, there are so many characters on so many planets fighting so many battles that it takes a lot of skill to present the characters as being different from each other enough so you remember who is who.

Sometimes it comes down to: Kuritan, Yakuza - has some tattoes, owns a battlemech and swam across a river. Next character, Kuritan, traditional samurai type, is dispossessed, but has political influence. Okay, next character. Kuritan, Yakuza, old man nope. Too many Asians. Next character, FRR defector, woman, flies an aerospace fighter, in love with Yakuza guy. I have a LOT of characters in the novel I'm writing right now. I'd like to, over maybe a couple more novels, flush out many of the characters. But I'm writing a story about an entire unit, made up of people from many backgrounds all working toward a common goal. Not only that, but they keep knocking out their enemies, making it so I have to create even more for them to fight. I have to do this in a couple hundred pages. To set this up for a trilogy, I have to create a lot of characters early on and they will be 2 dimensional for the most part. Many are simply names and I'm now wishing I started writing about a platoon worth of characters rather than a company.

None of the Battletech writers are Tom Clancy, except maybe one or two one-shot writers in the Dark Age novels. Tom Clancy would introduce a character and spend three paragraphs describing the meal the character ate for breakfast before adding a few words of dialog. His target audience liked that detail, or maybe Clancy just got paid by the word, I don't know. But that's not what Battletech fans want. They want giant stompy robots playing their way through the galaxy causing havok, saving princesses and toppling empires. Battlemechs aren't alive. They don't have personalities. So, the authors have to put pilots in those mechs and reasons for them to fight. In the end, most battletech books are about glorious battles or tragic losses. They aren't about border skirmishes, training accidents, days recollecting drinking parties at war college. They aren't about how when Bob was little he broke his toe and now his mech walks with a very slight limp in sympathy with his slightly off-sense of balance. So, yeah, the books DO seem like historical fiction, and the characters are either straight up heroes or villains - and we all know that in war there are both on both sides of the front - but if we told about each and every one of them, we'd have several biographies and the battlemechs would be lost in the details.

[Catalina Steiner]

Deleted half a dozen posts. Here are the rules again:
Whoever wants to discuss about female characters in the BattleTech universe (and nothing else) will find a place here.
No politics, no sexist statements, no off-topic posts, no unconstructive posts, no insults and no discussion of our moderation will be tolerated. Deal with it or don't post here, please.

[IraqiWalker]

Marack Drock, on 12 July 2015 - 11:13 AM, said:

The reason is because most of the authors only developed male characters. Its not that the authors are at fault, its that the whole franchise may have problems and needs to be reworked with more lead females. It is not the fault of the authors really, it is just that there are so few really great female characters that aren't minor. We just want more female characters because there is a huge gender imbalance.

As someone who enjoys writing a lot of the time. It's really hard to write, and relate to a different gender. I can write very good female characters. It takes 10 times the effort, energy, and time that it would take me to write a male character of the same caliber.

Nerdy things were considered boys only, and even then, for a small subset of boys. So girls weren't in the club at all, and this wasn't even the cool kids club. So the authors are majority male. Is it any surprise they write mainly for male characters? I'd say the surprise is that they had ANY female characters in the setting. Let alone ones that had central roles.

[Lionsroar]

Nightmare1, on 12 July 2015 - 02:10 PM, said:

[redacted]. Frankly, I don't understand why it's even such a big deal; male authors tend to write most heavily about male characters using male leads. Female authors do likewise, but with respect to female characters and leads. Folks write about their own gender the most normally. It's not really a big deal. Using a thread to gripe about it or demand implementation of more female leads is kind of pointless.

I think you had mostly male writers, writing to a mostly male customer and fan base, during a time when women played a more limited role in the military. You're likely to write about what you know and what will sell and please your fans. Even today, women are a tiny minority in MWO. I'd love to see more stories about female characters and more women playing the game. Who knows what the future will bring. Write away....

[Peiper]

Lionsroar, on 14 July 2015 - 08:43 PM, said:

I think you had mostly male writers, writing to a mostly male customer and fan base, during a time when women played a more limited role in the military. You're likely to write about what you know and what will sell and please your fans. Even today, women are a tiny minority in MWO. I'd love to see more stories about female characters and more women playing the game. Who knows what the future will bring. Write away....

See, I actually disagree with this statement. There are LOTS of women in Battletech novels going way back. Sure, most of the main characters are men, but there are many more women in Battletech - and often in command or officer positions - than in the 1980's military. The Battletech writers were pretty progressive. Now, I will agree that some of them seemed to exist purely for love story fodder, but not all of them. Adding more and deeper female characters into Battletech will not do much to bring in more female readers and players though, and that is simply because there is no character development or personality at all in the game. It's a purely team-based wargame. WoW gets women because the characters can be cute or pretty, and they have hunters with pets and female characters who can kick ass. On the player side, there is also a lot of social interaction, and more general interaction as people quest and do their character development stuff. You can also help other players develop their characters.

In Battletech, you grind, and between drops, you wait a couple minutes in a queue, talk about builds maybe, then get back into combat. There's no character, there's no development, there's no personality.

And finally, there's subject matter. I posted a video of a Panther tank tooling around on my facebook the other day and stated "If you love this video, we can be friends." No females 'liked' the video, but plenty of guys did.

Now, I DO think that adding more strong female characters to the books would help build up some female readership - if you can even attract women to read a book with an ugly robot on the cover. But few will get into the tabletop game, and fewer will want to play the video games proportionately.

[SnagaDance]

Peiper, on 14 July 2015 - 09:19 PM, said:

Now, I DO think that adding more strong female characters to the books would help build up some female readership - if you can even attract women to read a book with an ugly robot on the cover. But few will get into the tabletop game, and fewer will want to play the video games proportionately.

I've got to admit, I think most of the novel covers are ugly, I think we could fill a whole topic about how awful those are. A good cover helps to sell the novel and invites impulse buyers who may connect with the lore and get dragged into the franchise. I don't think that happened much with the BattleTech novels.

[IraqiWalker]

Peiper, on 14 July 2015 - 09:19 PM, said:

See, I actually disagree with this statement. There are LOTS of women in Battletech novels going way back. Sure, most of the main characters are men, but there are many more women in Battletech - and often in command or officer positions - than in the 1980's military. The Battletech writers were pretty progressive. Now, I will agree that some of them seemed to exist purely for love story fodder, but not all of them. Adding more and deeper female characters into Battletech will not do much to bring in more female readers and players though, and that is simply because there is no character development or personality at all in the game. It's a purely team-based wargame. WoW gets women because the characters can be cute or pretty, and they have hunters with pets and female characters who can kick ass. On the player side, there is also a lot of social interaction, and more general interaction as people quest and do their character development stuff. You can also help other players develop their characters.

There is significantly more character depth to male characters in BT, than there is for female ones.

There are female characters in command positions, and some that are power players, but the overwhelming majority of them are very 1 dimensional.

[Koshirou]

Peiper, on 14 July 2015 - 09:19 PM, said:

See, I actually disagree with this statement. There are LOTS of women in Battletech novels going way back. Sure, most of the main characters are men, but there are many more women in Battletech - and often in command or officer positions - than in the 1980's military. The Battletech writers were pretty progressive. Now, I will agree that some of them seemed to exist purely for love story fodder, but not all of them.

True. Some of them are also major political characters. Usually crazy, evil major political characters.

Stackpole and the other writers of the era had two independently politically powerful women who did not fall into this category: Katrina Steiner I. and her daughter Melissa Steiner-Davion (after Hanse's death). They dropped both of them like hot potatos. What we do get is the likes of Romano Liao and Katrina II.

[Bill Bullet]

I am actually a fan of the MechWarrior Dark Age (dodges thrown debris) novels as they were my main intro to the BT universe. Having read the Dark Age novels and the Classic ones you see a serious uptick in good female protagonists. The latest one I've read "Surrender your Dreams" contains at least three good female characters (2 heroes, 1 villain). These characters are written by male authors and there also female authors writing Dark Age novels as well. So the I definitely think the Classic BTU's problems with female characters (see Cassie "Crybaby" Suthorn in anything other than Close Quarters) really comes down to the times they were written in.

[SnagaDance]

Bill Bullet, on 16 July 2015 - 04:30 AM, said:

So the I definitely think the Classic BTU's problems with female characters (see Cassie "Crybaby" Suthorn in anything other than Close Quarters) really comes down to the times they were written in.

See I don't have any problem with Cassie Suthorn's emotional distress in the 2nd and 3rd book. She's finally wrestling with and dealing with inner demons that have been accumulating since she was a pre-teen. Having emotional breakdowns and still being able to kick ass and take names isn't mutually exclusive, except in a purely simplistic machismo world.

Having seen a tough combat veteran have a breakdown because of PTSD has surely driven this message home for me.

Guess I should really start reading those Dark Age novels.


Edit: Huh, writing pre-teen without the '-' got the word censored...

Edited by SnagaDance, 16 July 2015 - 06:11 AM.

[LORD ORION]

You're judging the fluff of battletech on current standards instead of 80s standards.

Objectifying women is still a large problem right now, and the justified attacks against this by most of society have only recently begun.

Now look back to the 80s on this subject, it was still pretty bad all around (and even still not nearly as bad as it had been 20 years earlier). Now, for certain the movement against this behavior was alive even back then, but it did not have the mainstream intertia that it does now.

[Catalina Steiner]

Please note this new thread: The evolving role of women in the BattleTech universe.
With this new thread, the existing thread that you are reading right now became obsolete. I'm asking you to continue your discussion about this topic in our new thread. Thanks in advance.

Certainly this new thread is not a thread for political discussions about gender. Our moderators will watch this new thread and make sure that we all stay on topic. Nonconstructive posts will be deleted.

Last but not least I want to thank Peiper for this thread, it's a nice summary. The content of this thread shall not be forgotten and presented characters from this thread can be discussed in our new thread.