Title text: No, we actually do have a woman who’s basically part of our fellowship. She lives in Rivendell, you wouldn’t know her.
There are, technically, more scenes where two female characters interact but
this made me laugh lol
Yeah they forgot about the scene where the mom put the kids on the horse in Two Towers! I think that’s it though.
One of many reasons why I completely agree with the decision to swap out Glorfindel for Arwen. Disappointed not to see him but I get it and agree.
How can he say that? Legolas is like right there.
It took me an awfully long time to realise that Legolas was played by Orlando Bloom, that Bloom was the name of that guy from Pirates of the Caribbean, and that that guy and Legolas were the same. In my defence I was around toddler age when the LotR films came out. It must have been a great time having LotR and Harry Potter plus other fantasy being put out.
The 2000s were a pretty great era for film and tv. LOTR and HP as you said, plus the first couple of Spider-Man movies with Toby McGuire, X Men, and the Star Wars prequels were very exciting, albeit disappointing. TV was great then with Lost, Jack Bauer, and House in full stride. And the Matrix! Holy fucking shit man, you’ll never understand being in the theater opening weekend and seeing Trinity beat up those cops with bullet timing for the first time. Whole theater lost its shit, we’d never seen anything like it.
I feel like that was the end of the era where there were some core anchor shows and movies that EVERYONE saw. Now there’s just so much content on so many platforms, and big budget movies and tv shows are intentionally bad (google fan baiting) so the culture is changing. Who knows where it’ll go from here.
I’m hearing a lot about cancellations. The growth of AI doesn’t bode well for quality. But I’m hoping the pay-dispute is settled favourably between workers and companies.
Did you hear about the Eragon series that’s supposed to be due? It was confirmed some time ago.
Love me some xkcd
“Why are there no women or children in this band of medieval warriors? Social and societal division of labour, what’s that?”
The idea that female medieval warriors only exist in fantasy is made up by misogynists to gate keep female representation.
Here is a list of named women that participated in battle. Keep in mind that this is just the tip of the iceberg given the erasure of women in history
Joan of Arc Eleanor of Aquitaine Æthelflæd Artemisia I of Caria Zenobia Matilda of Tuscany Margaret of Anjou Tomoe Gozen Grace O’Malley Isabella I of Castile Fu Hao Teuta Joanna of Flanders Lozen Jeanne Hachette Caterina Sforza Khawla bint al-Azwar Lagertha Sikelgaita Mavia Dihya Isabella of France
If you want women in your fantasy novels, why not - it’s fantasy.
Let’s be real though - sexual dimorphism is very pronounced in humans, and the women you listed were absolutely the exception. Militaristic societies overwhelmingly used men for fighting, if only because women were too valuable for their ability to bear children.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of women throughout history, but they don’t have to have been physically fighting in wars for that to be the case.
People like you forget that the vast majority of men have never participated in war. Most men, like women, subsisted on manual labor.
Your ‘sexual dimorphism’ claims are a tale as old as time made by prejudiced anthropologists with the same pompous attitudes about gender. See this NPR article to get your facts straight.
None of this changes the fact that we are taking about fantasy, where female representation is deemed more far fetched by misogynists than the existence of elves and magic. Something that has literally never existed before somehow has more credibility and reason to exist than female combatants who have actually existed.
This is the state of gatekeeping in the fantasy genre. If you think that there isn’t a problem, you are part of the problem.
LOTR is not set in the medieval period. Its a made up era with made up cultures and made up magic. And if you’re going to get all Thermian argument about it, LOTR lore has many female warriors.
