Basically, at the time of writing it was the month with Hallowe’en in it, and I hate to waste a perfectly good theme. So without further ado, allow me to welcome you to Hopeless Reimantic Presents! In this column I’ll be going in-depth into the works of specific authors who are in – or cross over into – the romance genre. In the spirit of the season, I thought we’d take a look at the stuff of nightmares: let’s talk about Laurell K. Hamilton. More specifically, let’s talk about Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, one of the weirdest and most controversial series I’ve ever interacted with.

I had no idea this existed until right this second, but it actually sums up a lot of these books pretty well. (Via Marvel Wiki.)

First of all, a slightly complicated preface. Before I ever picked up an Anita Blake book I knew quite a lot about them, and while I’d like to stress that I’m here to talk about the books and not Ms Hamilton herself I feel like I’ll be remiss if I don’t at least give a quick summary of some common controversies surrounding the series and its author.

I first became aware of Laurell K. Hamilton via Anne Rice. Well, not Anne Rice herself, but the now-infamous Anne Rice Author Tantrum, which I arrived at a couple of years after the fact and consequently saw linked to…Laurell K. Hamilton’s similarly poor handling of criticism (link to a Wikispace article, as the original blog post has vanished).

Hamilton isn’t quite as vitriolic in her I Can’t Believe Not Everyone Likes My Book-ness, but she’s still pretty irritatingly condescending, although I do agree with her that if someone’s taking their book up to you so that you can sign it, then opening with “I hated this one and what you’ve done with the series” is kind of poor form.

She’s since made a name for herself on Twitter for calling her critics sexually frustrated, jealous wannabes, and a name for herself among readers and other writers for not handling criticism well and shamelessly inserting herself into her books. The LKH_lashouts community on LiveJournal keeps a nice catalogue of her various posts, blogs and misdemeanours, and I’ve been on it all day, which might explain why my brain is starting to feel too heavy for my skull.

As a lot of you probably aren’t familiar with what makes the Anita Blake series so divisive in the first place, I’ll give you a quick, neutral description to start us off (don’t worry, we’ll get to the incoherent ranting later). The Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series started out as a kind of monster-of-the-week dealio, with some romance in it but not a huge deal. The romantic – and sexual – content of the books got a lot more page time as the series went on, and the tenth book in the series, Narcissus In Chains, saw a metaphysical event turn Anita Blake into a succubus who needs sex to survive.

Subsequent books are arguably more “paranormal erotica” than anything else, and the last time I checked in with Ms Blake she was in a polyamorous relationship with five guys and happy as a clam. This, and the fact that a lot of the events of Anita Blake’s love life seem to mirror the author’s, have led to accusations that Laurell K. Hamilton is using Anita to brag about how much sex she’s having, and have turned a lot of readers off the series.

The upshot of all this is that this time three months ago, your intrepid romance novel enthusiast knew of Laurell K. Hamilton and had formed a pretty strong impression of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter books – but had never actually picked one up. So when the call came around for horror-themed posts for autumn and winter, and I decided to take them on, I was…nervous, but excited. Here was a series with a strong female lead which had lost popularity as the erotic content had upped and the quality of the writing had deteriorated – the stuff of feminist bad-porn-lovers’ wildest dreams, right?

All that given due consideration, I wanted to approach the series with an open mind, but I didn’t want to actually buy any of the books because a) this isn’t somebody I want to give money to and b) there are approximately bleventeen of the damned things and I don’t have a job. I put out a call on my social medias for donations to the cause.

Three weeks later, I had seventeen Laurell K. Hamilton books. And with various deadlines coming up? I had a week to read them in.

Some would have panicked. Some would have faltered. Some would have done several noisy circuits of the living room, sobbing about the hilarious injustice of life. Some would have said, “Well, that’s okay, I don’t have to read all of these, I’m not that much of a masochist”, picked out a selection, and called it a day.

I did all of these things except the last one. Here’s how I got on. The following are my initial notes:

Initial thoughts on LKH: The Anita Blake series is not as bad as I thought it would be for the reasons I was told I would hate it, but it is creepingly terrible in ways I didn’t really anticipate.

Day 3 of LKH immersion. Eyes gritty. Legs heavy. Some subcranial tenderness. Seem to have “What Does The Fox Say” stuck in my head.

Laurell K. Hamilton Immersion Week, Day 5. Sore throat, some muscle ache. Have been reading some of the earlier books, which are much better even if I don’t like murder mysteries that much. I’m sad that her deep love of stuffed penguins seems to be worn away by all the sexy sexy sex she starts having in a book or so’s time. What happened to Sigmund, Anita? Did Sigmund mean nothing to you? Developing protective feelings for all penguins.

LKH Immersion Week, Day 6. I…I just don’t even know anymore, you guys. Just leave me alone. I’m going shopping for leather.

By the end of the week I’d contracted a stomach virus, although the medical jury is still out on whether or not this was a symptom of my burgeoning lycanthropy. The next full moon isn’t until December 17th, so I guess we’ll find out then.

This is going to be a difficult bit of analysis to write, because – well, I read seventeen books, you guys. I’m having to be extremely choosy about which books I quote and why. Maybe I’ll upload a list of Supplementary Supportive Material, but, um, I wouldn’t count on it.

Broadly speaking, dear readers, here’s the thing: I didn’t hate these books the way I was expecting to.

Look, fourteen-year-old me assumed I’d hate these books because they were a self-insert Mary-Sue-type series that ended with the main character having far too much ridiculously improbable sex and being the best at everything. Fourteen-year-old me was also scared of non-monogamy, kind of selective in her feminism and a lot more judgmental. Fourteen-year-old me would probably have written this bit of the article in a far more entertainingly vitriolic manner.

Unfortunately, you’re stuck with twenty-three-year-old me, and twenty-three-year-old me doesn’t have a problem with any of these things on principle. Look, okay, self-insert Mary-Sues aren’t my cup of tea, and I can see why a sharp rise (hurr) in sexual content in a series which basically had no sexual content at all for the first four books might turn readers off – but those two facts don’t make either of those authorial decisions inherently wrong.

For all her flaws (and she has many – and I’m not just talking about the fun kind of flaws that make a character seem real, either) Anita Blake has some nice bits of refreshingly feminist outlook. One of the best story arcs in the series comes in Danse Macabre, when she has a pregnancy scare. She talks it over with all of her partners, one of them says he’ll stay at home and raise the baby so that she can keep working, and another says he’ll marry her:

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Richard, is that all you think it takes to fix this? Marry me so the baby won’t be a bastard, and it’s all better?”

“I don’t see anyone else offering marriage,” he said.

“It’s because they know I’ll say no. Every other man in my life understands that this isn’t about marriage. It’s about the fact that we may have created a little person. And we need to do whatever is best for that little person. How will marrying anyone make this work better? … What do you think having a baby will do to me, Richard? Do you think just because I have a baby I’ll become this other person? This softer, gentler person? Is that what you think?”

– Laurell K. Hamilton, Danse Macabre, pp. 162-164

Whatever else I think about Anita Blake the character, I wholeheartedly rooted for her throughout this story arc. Would it have been unrealistic for her to keep being a federal agent who has all the sex and also a baby? Sure, maybe. But this is a fantasy series and clearly delineated as such, so if that’s too much suspension of disbelief for you then allow me to refer you to Scott Lynch.

Regarding the non-monogamy…well, there are not a lot of mainstream series that won’t even touch non-monogamy with a bargepole, and twenty-three-year-old me quite likes the normalisation of non-mono and monogamous relationships here. What I’m basically trying to say here is that if Laurell K. Hamilton wants to chronicle her sexy adventures as Badass The Vampire Slayer (And Harem) and people want to read it, I’m honestly okay with that. I wish she’d be more honest about what her books are (she seems to do a lot of If You Don’t Like It You’re Just Too Mainstream For My Awesomeness-ing), but – whatever. Fine.

However. The fact that I didn’t hate these books for the reasons I’d assumed doesn’t mean that they in no way made me want to tear my own eyes out. Unfortunately this article is skittering dangerously close to its word limit, so stand by for Part Two, in which I attempt to explain why cleanly and concisely but inevitably deteriorate into wordless, feeble sobbing.

Can’t wait! See you then.

• Check out other Hopeless Reimantic columns here!

In the dim and distant past, I edited an original anthology of horror stories called Skin of the Soul. Most of the stories were new (there were two reprints) and all of the contributors were women. What sparked my decision to do it was an all-male horror anthology published a couple of years earlier to much acclaim: Prime Evil, edited by Douglas E. Winter, was a showcase for “the masters of modern horror”, and Winter’s introduction was dedicated to the argument that horror is not a genre but an emotion, to be found throughout all literature,from high to low.

I agree; I don’t care much for generic “horror”, even if I prefer it to generic “romance”, and although I’ve written a lot of horror stories, and most of my novels have some element of horror in them (one, Lost Futures, published as horror in the US, was nominated for a science fiction award in Britain) I’m not that comfortable identifying myself as a “horror writer”.

The writers Winter invited to contribute to his anthology included nearly all the big names of the time (Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker) but also lesser-known writers (Jack Cady and Paul Hazel). Even the introduction, pointing to the many sources of horror in the mainstream, gave a name-check to just one woman writer throughout literary history.

Who was this paragon? You might guess Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Edith Wharton, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Joyce Carol Oates… but no, the solitary example the editor chose was “…the best-selling novels of V.C. Andrews.” (I did wonder if he knew her first name was Virginia rather than, say, Victor.)

So I was horrified – not in a good way – by this compilation of horrors, and daydreamed about selling my own anthology, inviting a list of excellent writers to contribute, writing my own erudite introduction about great horror fiction of the past. If anyone pointed out that all of those writers were women, I’d act surprised, pretend it was just the luck of the draw, these were the best stories submitted and naturally the examples I chose were my personal favourites.

I certainly did not set out to deliberately exclude men; there were lots of good male writers, but now that I came to think about it, not many of them wrote horror. I mean real horror, genuinely well-written and original, not that childish gross-out stuff, not those tired generic clichés, not dreary old male fantasies, but the kind of thing I wanted to read, because, after all, it only counts as horror in my book if it fits my definition… and I reserve the right to change the rules whenever I like.

Over years of going to conventions, and reading and writing and reviewing (even teaching classes) in the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror, I’ve noticed how much time is devoted to definitions of genre. Any genre. Once you start putting labels on books, you must justify the inclusion of one and the exclusion of another. This is science fiction, of which I approve, while that is merely fantasy. (I remember Charles Platt defending his choice of interviewees for his first Who Writes Science Fiction? – Kate Wilhelm was the only woman, and she was interviewed in tandem with her husband – but, he explained, Ursula LeGuin had refused his request, and he couldn’t think of any other woman who wrote what he considered to be proper science fiction.)

“Literary” authors are given a pass time and again, not tarred with the genre brush (it’s “magic realism” or “speculative fiction”) and it pops up in discussions and reader reviews all the time: “I don’t call this horror.” “This is all about atmosphere and character and not scary at all.” “Maybe works as literature, but not as horror fiction.” “Vampires wouldn’t do that.” Etc.

Critics may praise authors who “push the boundaries” or subvert expectations, but these are the very actions that can make the dedicated genre fan feel cheated, and respond angrily, as if when they ordered chocolate ice cream, they’d been served a bowl of extra-hot chilli.

When, more than twenty years after the publication of Skin of the Soul (“which proves indisputably that horror fiction is not a male preserve”, or so said Clive Barker in 1990) , I find that women are still fighting that old battle, still having their contributions to horror ignored or forgotten, I wonder if this isn’t – at least partly – something to do with definitions and expectations of genre. And with who is defining it, and why.

Myself, I’ve never limited my reading to one type of fiction, and I don’t write novels that fall neatly into a narrowly defined slot, either. (Maybe this is my problem!) There are some readers for whom genre fiction is comfort food, and they don’t want any nasty surprises when they’ve snuggled down to read – even in a genre celebrated as the purveyor of nasty surprises. Maybe, for some readers, it doesn’t count as horror unless the author plays by certain rules, unless the story is purveyed via the male gaze, and the name on the title page does nothing to break the illusion that we’re all boys together in this clubhouse.

• Lisa Tuttle is an acclaimed author whose achievements include winning the International Horror Guild Award, a BSFA Award, and most recently the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
• The novel The Silver Bough is just out in a new paperback edition from Jo Fletcher Books.
• www.lisatuttle.co.uk

Last week, Paul Cornell (comics, TV and novel writer) stated that, in a bid to get more equal gender representation on Science Fiction and Fantasy convention panels, he was going to stand down from any panel that wasn’t 50/50 or near as and invite a woman to take his place.

Cue an awesome shitstorm of vitriol and support. The main thrust of some feminists’ arguments I’ve heard against this, and in some cases against Paul personally, is that this was ego boosting, man-on-a-white-horse, mansplaining wank and we don’t need it.

Sorry, sisters, but we do. Let’s take a look at the arguments.

1. ‘This looks like it’s a man to the rescue of women, showing us in a submissive and passive light, needing us to be thrust into the spotlight by a man with agency.’

Um, yes. You know why? Because sexism has been so ingrained in SFF over the years, back when it was a male-dominated genre, this is actually our starting point. Editors get fewer submissions from women regarding horror, fantasy and hard SF, the subgenres that are often most applauded by critics (also mostly male). Publishers put fewer women forward for convention guest spots, and female authors themselves look at the gender make-up of panels and step back. I think women haven’t stood up en masse to rectify this because it became the norm. We told ourselves ‘SFF is sexist, so they don’t notice women’ and forgot that arguably – especially when you take account of urban fantasy and paranormal romance – there are more of us in the genre, and hey, we sell more copies. We have as much right to be at those cons, doing those signings, making our voices heard, as the feted men do. SFF convention organisers have shoved women on all-women panels, told us to talk about ‘women in SFF’ and then told us that’s the debate and equality will shake out of that. It won’t. I think, somewhere along the way, we forgot to band together and tell SFF and con organisers to go shove their sexism. Maybe this will help.

2. ‘We don’t need no man sorting this out for us.’

See above. We do. It sucks. That’s the frikkin’ point. SFF wasn’t listening when we were raising our voices. I wish, I fervently wish, that when a woman makes a point about gender inequality, it wasn’t explained away as being a ‘women’s issue’ and therefore marginal and easy to ignore. It shouldn’t be. This is about equality – which affects you, regardless of gender. Yes, it sucks that the world takes notice when a man does something. No, it shouldn’t be this way. But it is. And maybe, just maybe, if we join hands and do this thing together without drawing gender lines ourselves, in a few years, it won’t be this way anymore.

3. ‘This casts the woman who is invited to speak as an also-ran, putting her immediately as a runner-up to the man stepping down for her.’

Yes, it does. And I think this does mean that Paul may have to change his approach, perhaps so that he and other people (male or female, it’s 50/50 for all) ask the con organisers to disclose the gender balance of the panels they are being invited on, and then, if it’s out of whack, suggest another male (or female) author to readdress the balance. This way, your fans still get to see you on a balanced panel elsewhere at the convention, and there doesn’t have to be any theatre or drawing of attention to an act of substitution.

But, and I want to be really clear about this, just because Paul suggested something that isn’t 100% ideal for women, doesn’t mean we have to throw out the entire idea. The theory is good; we just have to look at the best way of putting it into practice. We don’t need to get into an uproar because the first suggestion wasn’t the best approach – it’s not carved in stone.

My point is: this is a starting point. We’re gonna have to be big girls and suck up some of the stuff we don’t like to help make a change that we desperately want. We have to be pragmatic and proactive, because the status quo wasn’t changing with us doing nothing or shouting about it in forums and on blogs. We shouldn’t be jumping on this suggestion and saying it’s all tosh because it can be seen as patronising – can we please get past that and look at how the entire situation that this is trying to fight against is worse?

Paul’s proposal may not be perfect. But out of it is growing a 50/50 movement that a lot of women and men are getting behind. We’re asking people to talk to cons to check out their gender balance before they say yes. We’re asking women to promote themselves more. We’re asking readers to look at their shelves and see if they read mostly female or male authors, and to try adding a different gender to the shopping cart next time they buy books. I’m hoping that feminists can look at the big picture here and see that we are struggling to bring visible equality to SFF – and that along the way, we’re going to need equal input from all genders to do it.

• Lizzie is the publicity officer for the British Fantasy Society but considers herself ‘rogue’ when it comes to the 50/50 campaign, so content is her own and not the BFS’s. She prefers fantasy books and science fiction TV, and believes that books are a viable form of currency.

1. I made that one up, but it’s a valid question. Why?

The big issue appears to be around whether or not “LARP is sexist”, which is difficult to deal with because that’s a lot of games and a lot of players to tar with the same brush, whichever way you paint them. It is also, as one commentator pointed out, a little bit hard to seperate LARP and LARPers from the real world (where we all live), which IS sexist. Some of those sexist values are going to seep in, no matter how hard we try. And people do try. I talk to a lot of gamers and game designers about things I think they’re doing which might be seen as sexist, and a lot of the time those (rare) occurances are not being done on purpose. This doesn’t excuse it, but it does rather empower people who give a shit to improve things by talking about it more, and raising problems where they find them.

I think it’s really important to separate the design of a game (what it was intended to do) from the experience of playing it (how it feels to do it). This way, we can look at where and how a game may or may not succeed on being Not Sexist; after all, there’s a difference between a game being inherently sexist and those who play it sometimes behaving in ways which are sexist. I would argue that most LARP games are not desgined to be sexist, but that there can be sexist elements that occur within gameplay and that it is the responsibility of the player base as a whole – men and women – to root this out and set it on fire with extreme prejudice, as follows:

Get your fucking sexism out of my hobby. Now.

*Ahem*. Now, to business.

Live Action Games: an Action-Drama Love Affair

The subtitle for this is “why my cupboards are full of kit, costume and rubber swords for various pretend people”.

My own personal experience of playing has been very positive. LARP, for me, is about storytelling, play-acting, and a permission to explore different personas and world-views which I don’t normally get access to. I can also wear cool costumes, have magic powers and fight Epic Battles. That fact that I am a woman does not bar me from any of those things, although I would be lying if I said it didn’t colour my gaming experience.

I’ve played sexist characters, such as a matriarchal tribal leader in Maelstrom who assumed that anyone of importance was female. I’ve played characters who were victims of terrible, awful sexism; I’ve played downtrodden and abused prostitutes. I’ve also played characters who used their looks and feminine charms to their advantage. Conversely, I’ve played characters who would consider such actions ridiculous and to whom a sword or a well-placed word was the correct tool to use. I’ve even played characters whose gender and sexuality was, for the purposes of the gameworld, almost entirely absent, such as a human slave in a world where humans are uniformly seen as cattle to their orcish, elvish and dwarvish overlords – my gender was as important to the other characters as the gender of a table.

In short, I’ve played around a lot with gender and sexuality, and LARP has been a big enabler in exploring those roles. My one “bad” LARP experience revolved entirely around the race of my character, rather than her gender, and in fact the person who delivered that bad experience was female. In my experience, men who LARP tend to be more concerned with not being sexist than men in day-to-day. Perhaps because the man who leers at me whilst I’m at a bus stop does not fear me striking him down with a fireball. Or perhaps – optimistically, but possibly, maybe – the chap who LARPs has a much broader experience of women being in charge than men in real life.

So, what does LARP have to offer women? First, a bit of a health warning.  “Women” is a broad category which we at BadRep Towers want to avoid using in a way that assumes all women want the same things. They don’t. Fortunately, in LARP, as in life, there are options. Even more fortunately, there are often more options in LARP than there are either in life or in most fantasy and science fictions. One of my major complaints about the FSF genre is that we create these amazing make-believe worlds but then populate them mostly with men. All too often women characters are whores, witches or princesses – prizes to be won or challenges to be overcome. Check out the piece fantasy author Juliet McKenna wrote for us on the subject. LARP lets you, the player, take control of these stereotypes and challenge, subvert or even explore them. You can become your own hero in a fantasy world. Which means you get to tell your own story how you want.

Making LARP Work For Women?

I have also written, crewed and managed live action games. A quick rundown includes Odyssey, Winter in the Willows, Victoriana and some local systems, so I’ve got experience behind the curtain, as it were. I have noticed that I am in the minority. The vast majority of games are written and run by men – it’s much the same with anything nerd-based. I’m never quite sure why this is the case with LARP, given that young girls are almost magnetically attracted to games of Let’s Pretend and Dressing Up Boxes. I think that these little girls end up doing drama and the few boys that like dress-up (who often can’t do drama on account of it being seen as “girly”) created LARP to allow them to run away to a field, where no-one else could see them, and play dress-up. This is backed up by the fact that I often see young teenage boys at LARP events, but rarely young teenage girls. Any, even slightly more, scientific study into this would be appreciated.

With all due credit to the guys behind the Games Operations Desk (GOD – geddit?), there is absolutely a perception of the hobby as being profoundly white and male. This is not their fault. Let me repeat this: this is not their fault. What absolutely is their fault is any time when a game feels lacking in opportunities for women to enjoy it, and connect with the game as much as men. The absolute best way to work this out is to look at some game websites and then play the games.  Here’s what to look out for:

• Game Background – This is the blurb that tells you about the game and the gameworld. It’s like the back cover of a book or DVD. Gender-aware games should include both male and female example characters in their background documents so women players can see that there are parts for them to play. Pronouns are your friend – there should be instances of “he” and “she” – or my personal favourite, “they” and “their” – I like pronouns that include everybody. Game blurbs often include artwork and photographs, which should have a good selection of all kinds of characters; male, female and sometimes neutral. If the blurb doesn’t, or if anything makes you feel “put off” because of how they have described themselves, then don’t play that game. If you’re feeling brave, email the game designers and tell them why: I’ve done this and the response was very positive, including instances where I’ve received follow up emails from other game designers going “are we gender-aware enough, can you help?”
• Character creation – this is the way in which you pick what sort of a person you will play, and it is almost always the same for men as it is for women. There are rarely, except in games which have a specific built-in sexism (few and far between), situtations in which a woman cannot play a certain type of character. Unlike me, aged 6, trying to participate in a game of cops and robbers with the boys who lived next door, being “a girl” does not stop you from picking up a gun. Refeshingly, I have never seen a character creation form with a section for “gender” which then negatively impacts my options if I select female. Women are fighters as much as they are wizards, healers, leaders and politicians. I’ve also played in lots of games where women have chosen to play male characters, and vice versa.
• There are all kinds of games; try several. There are big games and little games, games in fields for the weekend and games in a room above a pub for an afternoon. There are high fantasy games with magic, and gritty, realistic games with guns. Games for ten people and games for a thousand. There are games about fighting, games about battles of wits, games with long, complicated rules and systems, and games where you turn up and improvise your way along. LARP is becoming more and more a space to try out new ideas and new ways of playing around, many of which have their backgrounds more in theatre and performance than Games Workshop. There will probably be something that suits you.
• Ask Other Women Who Play. There are, when you get into it, a surprising number of women who LARP. The common perception is absolutely still that it’s ‘a male hobby’, but the reality is different. There are also a large number of women, like myself, who are very active and vocal in the hobby, and equally active and vocal about getting other women into the hobby. Ask us which games you might like.

Sarah writes about designing and creating games and live performance over at sarahcook.net and is unapologetic for this shameless plug.

Photos by disturbing.org.uk.

Weird tales, well told

For one thing, her stories are more original, imaginative and accomplished than much of what is served up to young fantasy readers. The reason I reached for Red Spikes a few nights ago is because I wanted to be transported. I wanted a way out of my worries, and in her short stories Lanagan places you in an (often unnervingly) immediate, vivid and visceral other place.

She’s economical with the detail she gives you, winding her descriptions around dialogue or a protagonist’s thoughts rather than self-consciously setting the scene. The situations and societies she presents feel solid, brutally so at times, without you needing to be told what colour the sky is. The story is about the situation, not the setting, if you see what I mean.

And those situations are genuinely unusual, strange and surprising. You can set your story on the third moon of Azkablam and still make it clichéd, formulaic and dull as ditchwater (famed for its dullness). In Red Spikes and another collection, Black Juice, a girl watches her sister killed in a tar-pit as punishment for murdering her husband, while elsewhere in a circus-y dystopia two anti-clown vigilantes carry out a hit. A girl in a paper dress graduates from Bride School, and a boy finds some tiny figures of a bear and a heavily pregnant armoured queen who grow and come to life in the night. Naturally, he is enlisted as midwife.

Lanagan’s stories are bizarre, and even when you’re in more familiar terrain they’re often told from an unusual point of view. In Black Juice a village is periodically attacked by terrifying underground ‘yowlinin’ monsters. So far, so Tremors. But the tale is told by an ‘untouchable’ outcast, treated as a monster herself, who saves the life of the boy she loves only to be rejected. However, UNLIKE the Little Mermaid, she doesn’t wimpily dissolve into seafoam, but sees him for the coward he is and strides away into her future.

These synopses have probably given you a clue that as well as being strange, Lanagan’s stories are often pretty dark. And if you think Harry Potter is ‘dark’ you may be in for a shock: the first few chapters of her novel Tender Morsels include child abuse, incest, forced abortion and gang rape.

Tender Morsels

Here’s a review that describes why I think it’s a remarkable work. But it is distressing. Briefly: 14-year-old Liga lives in the usual cottage-on-the-edge-of-the-dark-forest with her father, who repeatedly rapes her. When she becomes pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion. He dies, but she discovers she has become pregnant again. She has her baby and lives alone in relative peace in the cottage until some boys from the nearby town come to find her and sexually assault her. Liga despairs, takes her baby daughter to a ravine in the forest and tries to kill them both, but they are magically saved and wake in what seems to be a parallel world in which she is at last safe. The townspeople have been replaced with kind, two-dimensional versions of themselves, and in this world there are no men. It seems to be a heaven that Liga has created to protect herself and her daughters (she has another baby). But as her daughter grows up the membrane between their protected world and the world Liga left behind starts to grow thin, and the story becomes a reimagining of the traditional fairytale of Snow White and Rose Red.

Of course, when it was published Tender Morsels met with a fair amount of controversy, but I agree with Lanagan when she says “I guess I’m not a big fan of corralling sex, death and war into the adult world and then giving children a terrible shock when they realise their existence.” Besides, there is nothing graphic, titillating or exploitative about the descriptions of the abuse suffered by Liga in the novel. One of the things the book is about is how people take refuge and heal from trauma.

Women in fairytales

It’s also about fairytales, and women’s lot in them. Asked in this interview why she was drawn to the Snow White and Rose Red story, Lanagan said:

Mainly I was annoyed by what the Grimm Brothers had done with Caroline Stahl’s story, that is, rewritten it to deliver a very oppressive message to girls and women: At all costs, however beastly your menfolk’s behaviour, remain nice, kind and always willing to come to their aid. This kind of message is not uncommon in the collections of transcribed and revised folktales of the 18th and 19th century, and it’s distressing that those versions are often mistaken for the root stories – although they still sometimes contain the germs of the originals, they are very much products of their times and societies.

So, the irritation was the main thing, but then I couldn’t resist a story that had such a great character as the ungrateful dwarf, the kindly bear and the three bemused women, trying to make good lives for themselves in an ever stranger world.

Like Angela Carter, Lanagan seems to be interested in the rawer, messier, less moral incarnations of our familiar fairytales, but where they differ is that Lanagan’s story fully inhabits the folkloric style where Carter’s versions are self-conscious and ironic.

The final thing I love about Lanagan’s stories is that they’re full of GIRLS and WOMEN! All kinds of different ones! With different personalities! And they do things! In Tender Morsels there are two witches, both distinct and full-developed characters, with powers and flaws and everything. The novel deals with violence against women, but also with women’s sexuality and desires.

I can’t say I’d recommend them to help you get to sleep, but Margo Lanagan’s stories offer strange worlds to be explored.

“That’s pretty geeky,” laughs the guy in the pub. “I bet you don’t get many girls doing that!”

I sigh inwardly. I’ve just outed myself as a Live-Action Roleplayer, and although he’s never heard of it before, my drinking partner instantly knows that all larpers are young, socially awkward, computer programmers, and male.

If you don’t know what larp is, it’s often somewhere between Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft and amateur dramatics. We dress, act and speak as our character – so mages cast spells using vocals, and combat is resolved using specially-made “safe” weapons to hit each other. Sound silly? Damn right, and a great deal of fun too.

I’ve been larping for 16 years, and although many systems and genres exist, I mostly enjoy standard “fantasy” settings, with warriors, wizards, trolls and the like. A game might be 8 friends playing in a local wood, or several thousand at the largest of the weekend fest events.

Rules and Regulations

What’s it like larping as a woman? Well, there’s the rules, for a start.

The rules of a system cover combat mechanics, magic systems and character creation. Superficially, for the past 15 years these have been gender neutral. In every system I have played, skill sets are available to any gender – a woman can play a battle-hardened warrior, just as much as a man can play a one-hit healer.

Larp is a physical sport, and other restrictions have far more impact upon your character choices than gender. L has been larping for nearly 20 years. “If you don’t have the physical ability, you are far more restricted from playing a tank than if you are a woman,” she says. “In my experience, what affects somebody’s ability the most is personality: a combination of being larger than life, able to take initiative, play your character, and be part of a team.”

As well as the rules, game creators invent the world into which characters must be placed, and these can come with social prejudices. Usually these are fantastical (“We hate the unliving!”) but a few reflect more real-world issues. For example, a society might be defined as “matriarchal”, such as many of the Drow from the Lorien Trust events, or the Tritoni from Profound Decisions‘ Maelstrom system.

Is this a problem? Perhaps. Cultural distinctions add flavour to a game, but by singling them out, other cultures risk being tarred as “patriarchal” by default. But players who don’t wish to interact with these issues in their games can usually opt out.

“I’m fine with Maelstrom, where there are a couple of cultures with strongly ingrained gender roles,” says R. “I can simply avoid playing a member of either culture and there is still a lot of game available. I don’t want to stop other people roleplaying gender politics just because it’s not something that interests me.”

Young, Geeky Men

Larpers should be used to stereotypes – as we’ve already established, we’re all single, misanthropic male students, yes? Well, no. Larpers are doctors, lawyers and teachers (and, yes, students and computer programmers). We often started as students, but most of my University friends are still larping, and are happily partnered (usually to each other).

And today, “male” is definitely right out. Women play at every level, both as players and game organisers, designers and plot writers.

We have our own stereotypes. We’re familiar with the Metallica Warrior (rock t-shirt, black jeans, £80 sword) and the Drunken Bum (turns up, drinks beer, smokes rollies).

Women in larp face stereotypes too. The most persistent is the “Healer Girlfriend”. She only came because her boyfriend insisted she’d enjoy it. The description is damning – you aren’t a proper character. Worse, your actions are only defined by a man, and you just exist to enhance his weekend (and act as a trophy for him to parade, of course).

R, who has been a key player and organiser in her local group for many years, agrees. “The stereotype is certainly sometimes accurate, but I don’t think it’s fair because applying it is patronising and dangerous. Even to people it does apply to.”

Healer Girlfriends do exist, albeit briefly. “I effectively started at the Gathering as a Healer Girlfriend,” says L. “In my experience, one of two things quickly happens; either she gets bored and stops playing, or she finds her own game.” L found her own game, becoming one of the most renowned characters – and players – on the field. To call her a Healer Girlfriend now would be laughable.

Another trope is the “Shelf” – the larper in a corset, often generously endowed, and invariably flaunting cleavage for (predominantly) male attention. Characters might resemble the likes of Ce’Nedra (from David Eddings‘s novels), or Tika Waylan (from the Dragonlance books) – or some less salubrious counterpart. Are these roles compatible with calling larp a feminist-friendly sport? Personally, I’ve always struggled with this. Empowerment does not equate to equality.

Ultimately I must have faith in those who choose to play these parts. We have a responsibility to resist stereotypes, and expect more from our fellow players. In film, the corset-wearing pretty girl is too often a bit-part to the male lead, but no larper writes a character in order to be part of the scenery. In your head, this story is all about you. There’s a place for these heroes, and a panoply of other characters, pleasant or otherwise – I could count on one hand the characters I’ve played that I wouldn’t detest if I met them in real life.

Real Life

Ah yes, real life. We tend to let our hair down at events. Late at night, you’ll find more than a little drinking, carousing and singing of some shockingly ribald songs round the campfire. That said, larp events are, for most, a safe, welcoming, accepting place to be.

“I generally find male larpers polite and gentlemanly,” says P. “I don’t remember any instances of sexist behaviour, but then, I don’t feel particularly vulnerable to that type of abuse, and particularly these days I feel confident to challenge it or ignore it. The main sexist type of behaviour is a tendency towards protectiveness, but I don’t find that offensive.”

“I have had someone try to stop me doing heavy lifting during setup and takedown because it’s a ‘man’s job’.”, says R. “That’s hardly related to larp. It’s a piece of sexism ingrained into society in general, which does need a kicking.”

Things have changed over the last 10 years, says P. “The proportion of female to male larpers has improved a lot in that time and changed the dynamics in the field.”

Larping men seem more liberated. The Gathering is one of the more child-friendly events; of the parents I counted this year pushing prams or herding toddlers, nearly a third of them were men. (Think that’s not good? Try counting the same thing in your town centre tomorrow). When there’s no social difference between genders, there’s no pressure for women to “stay home” whilst the men go out and fight the battles. We draw our characters from fantasy, but women aren’t relegated into playing The Arwen.

Playing Your Part

In larp, you must physically represent – physrep – your character. Costume, weaponry and armour is available to turn anyone into a warrior or a wizard. However, a tall, balding, overweight man can put on a pair of pointy ears and call himself an elf, but he’ll be a tall, balding, overweight elf none the less.

Does this restrict a woman’s game? In other forms of gaming, there’s nothing to stop you playing a character of another gender, but this is much harder in larp. Effectively portraying another gender takes more care, physically and socially, than most larpers are able to put in over the course of a weekend in a tent. The easy option is to go “panto” – fake breasts and falsetto, or badly-drawn beards and that testicle-airing stance of the “man”. Such characters make me wince. They rely on stereotypes – invariably negative – that are almost always drawn from our out-of-character world. Not only offensive, but immersion-breaking to boot.

That isn’t to say that gender-reversal can’t be done well – it can. But for the most part, a woman can only play female characters. Does that really matter? I don’t think so. All larpers make sacrifices over what they can play – the overweight can never play svelte, the clumsy can never play jugglers, the tone-deaf can never play bards. P says she has never felt restricted in her character choices by her gender. “Physical ability has been a much bigger restriction for me,” she says.

I Love Larp

Writing that last paragraph made me remember why I love larp so much. There are so many other things we can play. The recluse can play a talented diplomat; the coward can play the hero. And more pertinently, women can play characters with real power. There is no glass ceiling. A woman playing a warrior will be judged and accepted not on her gender, but on how well she can wield a sword and shield. In Profound Decision’s Odyssey campaign, when a woman was elected Autocrator of Carthage – a bloodthirsty and vengeful nation in-game – nobody gave a damn about her gender, merely whether she could deliver us the victory we so deeply craved over our arch-nemeses, the foul dogs of Rome.

So what does it matter if you can only play women? If you’re judged by your actions, not your gender, not a jot.

Introduce yourself as head of a guild, and you will rarely see that condescending attitude so common in the real world that shouts, “Gosh, and you’re a woman as well! How very clever.”

Take up a battleaxe, gather your spell cards, ally with your foes and betray your friends. There’s a thousand others in this field who don’t care if you’re male, female or neither. Sharpen your wit, hold the line, and cross swords, for they’ll show you no quarter.

*

• Al has been larping since he fell in love with the hobby at University fifteen years ago, and to his continuing surprise, never grew out of it. He is currently attempting to bring up his kids to be free of gender expectations, as well as awesome swordfighters.
• Illustrations by Miranda