the verisimilitude of violent women
Here’s an interesting post by thriller writer Seeley James about writing thriller novels with a female protagonist.
I’ve given a great deal of thought to the same topic in writing THE GHOSTS, in particular for the fight scenes involving Caina. She’s in excellent physical condition and very well-trained and experienced, but she’s not very large, and sheer muscle mass counts for quite a bit. And as the linked post points out, a heavyweight boxer facing an equally skilled lightweight boxer will almost always win. So Caina’s goal is to disable or kill an opponent as quickly as possible, preferably before the opponent even realizes her presence. Fighting fairly means something has gone horribly wrong.
(Note that the next paragraph has mild spoilers for the DEMONSOULED series.)
This turns up in DEMONSOULED as well, particularly with Molly Cravenlock. Her Demonsouled heritage gives her superhuman strength and speed, along with the ability to teleport over short distances at will. So she is a very effective fighter. But when she loses that ability to teleport, or meet someone with the power to match her, she’s in big trouble. At the end of SOUL OF DRAGONS, an opponent uses the Glamdaigyr to block her ability to teleport, and quickly overpowers her. Or at the end of SOUL OF SORCERY, when Malaric acquires Demonsouled powers, he is able to overpower her.
A lot has been written about the realism of women fighting in fantasy, but let us be honest here – if you are writing about magic and people with superhuman powers, you have ordered realism taken out back and shot. However, the trick for writing is not realism but verisimilitude. It doesn’t have to be realistic, just seem realistic. You want to write in such a way so that if one of your characters is a superpowered female fighter, the readers say “oh, that makes sense in the context of the story” instead of “WTF is the author smoking?” or, even worse, “WTF is the author smoking to make him lose all knowledge of physics and basic human biology?”
-JM