Let's Solve Problems Using Violence
Apr. 9th, 2010 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lea_hazel posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
hooked_on_heroinesWe all (I assume) want (more or less) the same thing: women characters who have agency, volition and power. Characters who are proactive in moving forward their own plots, who actively solve problems rather than just reacting to what happens around them. Many (most?) of the genres we consume have plots that revolve somehow around a violent conflict; if there is no apocalypse there will be at least a war, and if not a war, then a serial killer, or arsonist, or stalker.
Supposing you have all this, and also the desire to write a character who is something of a pacifist. Not necessarily a hardline pacifist, but someone who generally believes that violence is bad and ought to be avoided. How to make your character proactive, without reducing her involvement in the plot to out-of-character aggression? In a more general sense, how to resolve a violent struggle in a nonviolent way? In a more specific sense, how to avoid the typical conflation of conscientious pacifism with softness or passivity?
Each individually is a complicated question; I have not read many books that give a good nonviolent solution to a violent conflict. Writing primarily female characters complicates this, because of the conflation of women with a "healer archetype" opposite to a masculine "warrior archetype", and even more so when writing women in a contemporary setting, or any other setting in which the majority of fighting professions will be men.
Supposing you have all this, and also the desire to write a character who is something of a pacifist. Not necessarily a hardline pacifist, but someone who generally believes that violence is bad and ought to be avoided. How to make your character proactive, without reducing her involvement in the plot to out-of-character aggression? In a more general sense, how to resolve a violent struggle in a nonviolent way? In a more specific sense, how to avoid the typical conflation of conscientious pacifism with softness or passivity?
Each individually is a complicated question; I have not read many books that give a good nonviolent solution to a violent conflict. Writing primarily female characters complicates this, because of the conflation of women with a "healer archetype" opposite to a masculine "warrior archetype", and even more so when writing women in a contemporary setting, or any other setting in which the majority of fighting professions will be men.
