The Hero's Gender

There once was a workshop I attended where I brought a nearly finished manuscript for a novel called Sandcastle, unsurprisingly utilizing many elements of the Hero’s Journey as its foundation (because, you know, most stories do). Overall it was praised, but there came a day when it came under immense criticism for the most bizarre reason: the secondary lead, Helen, wasn’t the protagonist. Cyrus was. I was told to rewrite it and give Helen far more agency, that it should be her story. She had as much agency as a secondary hero could, but it wasn’t enough. This was, in retrospect, simply because she happened to be the female lead.

It was at the same time when I attended a lecture claiming that Hermoine should’ve been the protagonist of Harry Potter, because, you know, Girl Power. Being the jackass in the room that I can be (don’t deny it), I pointed out that Hermoine wasn’t because Rowling wrote Harry to be the hero. Period. Rowling was/is a raging feminist, mind you.

But there’s more than that. The irony of my workshop experience is that the other novel I was workshopping at the time that became one of my Master’s Theses featured a female hero (still does, Dunia Cane—pictured).

But here’s the rub: men and men are not interchangeable.

Put a girl in a man’s fundamental story arc and something’s off. Likewise if we put a man in a woman’s fundamental arc. It reads fake, because it is. Many of the “replace man with woman” films that have rewritten our classic heroes (Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones, even the disastrous 2016 Ghostbusters, etc.) are plunging their companies into ruin are doing so because they are fundamentally a lie. Nature tells us these two are different, and we find these false inversions repugnant on a deep level, because they can never reflect the created nature.

Helen could never have been the lead of Sandcastle because the story was a masculine arc, and no matter how tom-boyish the character was, girls want and seek and fear and are driven by different things than boys, and always will be.

The hero can absolutely be a girl, but the story won’t work simply by gender swapping. The story has to fit the character, and characters still have to be “true” to reality, whether a human or Vulcan or Krogan or elf or jedi or even an android.

Or a Polynesian con artist…