Attempt number two for this post :(

Thanks for writing this post, I really agree with you on the problem and thank you for raising the “we’re not on Earth for crying out loud” argument. My issue with Asha Greyjoy however is that not only did her storyline become very rapey in the end but she seemed not only accepting of this but even reveling in or glorifying it which I found pretty repulsive no matter what the Ironborn culture is like. Also the Ironborn storylines are incredibly uninteresting to me but that’s beside the point, it completely ruined the character for me by seeming to celebrate rape culture.

On the subject of writing a fantasy book where women are forced to accept a lesser role to men, I have to confess to being guilty of that. What I was trying to create was a society that had moved from a previously liberal, quite egalitarian regime to an oppressed one where not only sexism but discrimination in all forms, particularly amongst different races and species was rife. The point for me was to represent a world and a people where a great many if not most of them knew that the logic behind the discrimination was ridiculous but the all too powerful religious and divine (yes, petty over-involved Grecian style Gods in this one) had decreed it to be so. Yeah the Gods really suck in my book.

What I wanted to do was present the reader with situations where they knew, and many of the characters knew, that many of the barriers of discrimination they were facing were completely absurd, to the point that they would begin to hate the very institutions that proposed them. The difficulty is the world events that forced the importance of the Gods’ favour to come to the forefront, but it was a deliberate attempt to revile readers as to the stupidity of discrimination and predetermined gender roles. Of course the story eventually takes a course of rebellion against the Gods amongst other things, but I was, entirely un-originally trying to draw the attention to sexism and discrimination in general by engaging directly with them.

In fairness, I’m not a professional writer and I have no real intentions to publish my trilogy and besides the few interested friends I have, I don’t expect anyone to read them. I just wanted to contribute to the debate, what are your thoughts?