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Talking About Archetypes 13 - The Maiden with Dr. Philip Chase
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 ต.ค. 2021
- The thirteenth video in a short discussion series with @Philip Chase about archetypes, tropes, and aspects of fantasy narrative.
This time we briefly discuss the archetype of the Maiden following on from our discussion of the Crone as part of the Maiden, Mother, and Crone archetypes that are so frequently found in Fantasy.
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Other Videos in the Series:
Other Videos in the Series:
01: Magicians and Sages: • Talking About Archetyp...
02: Jesters and Rogues • Discussing Fantasy Arc...
03: Introduction: • Talking About Archetyp...
04: Lovers and Caregivers • Discussing Fantasy Arc...
05: The Innocent and The Creator • Discussing Fantasy Arc...
06: Ruler and Explorer • Talking About Archetyp...
07: Follower and Hero: • Discussing Fantasy Arc...
When AP said “the animated film Shrek,” I knew this was gonna be a great episode
Some children's films are surprisingly smart... others, not so much.
Tiny, tiny world we live in...
Here I am, typing this from the City that saw the original "The Maid (of Orleans of course xD)" burnt at the stake while under English control >_>
Fascinating subjects, you two!
You put into words things that one may find hard to articulate when it comes to the evolution of the depiction of female characters in Fantasy!
Joan of Arc is a fascinating example, Niflrog, especially since we see a historical person being merged with the Maiden archetype, making it difficult to tell where story takes over from "reality."
As well as contrasting the English vs. French opinions about her.
By the way, everyone -- we skipped number twelve in this series on purpose. It's the famous but elusive "Void" archetype. 😁 We did warn you all that we'd have a hard time counting after ten . . .
Awww crap. It is your fault, you know that, right? You need to put the numbers on the thumbnails AND in the titles for me to understand.
No one will notice. The next one we will title 12 and it will seamlessly slot into the timeline.
@@ACriticalDragon Ha ha! It’s perfect because it gives me the perfect opportunity to harass you. 🤣 Next time I’ll enlist Cookie Monster, Elmo, and the Count to sing a little jingle that recites the number we’ve reached in the series. 😁
@@PhilipChaseTheBestofFantasy you are an evil man.
@@ACriticalDragon 😁 😈
@@PhilipChaseTheBestofFantasy Or a Schoolhouse Rock.
No blushing maidens here! Thanks for another fun discussion, my friend. I think this was a good one - let’s do some more!
Do some more... maidens???? I don't think that is what you meant, sir. More discussions of archetypes, yes.
Thankfully A.P. got there before me to point out the ambivalence of your statement. 😁
Let's say it was a better episode than the previous one.
@@ACriticalDragon Can there be any doubt as to my meaning? I am as pure as the Innocent, after all. Some people, on the other hand, readily see naughtiness . . .
@@PhilipChaseTheBestofFantasy Well, let me quote you: "There are no blushing maidens here". That really leaves only the the other, naughty variant.
@@brush2canvas849 Ha ha! Fair enough! I always know I’m in trouble when someone begins with, “Well, let me quote you . . .”
Thanks Team Fantaballs for another wonderful installment.
Some of my favourite takes on The Maiden:
Nona - Mark Lawrence Book of the Ancestor trilogy
Shae - Fonda Lee The Green Bone Saga
Aviendha - WoT
Great suggestions. Thanks, Nick.
This reminded me of the movie Dragonslayer. Where the hero goes to save the virginal princess from being sacrificed to the dragon. Which I found amusing since there was a lot less dangerous option to making her an 'unsuitable' sacrifice.
I just want to throw in a comment of appreciation for Paolini's Inheritance cycle. Throughout the first book, Eragon's "reward" is set up to be Arya. She is literally his dream girl. But, when he tries to court her, she immediately calls him a child.
sounds like Crokus and Challice in Gardens of the Moon.
@@marsrock316 A lot like it actually
You already know I enjoy this series of discussions, and today I want to thank you for always including my favourite series'. Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings, and the Daughter of the Empire trilogy co-written by Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist. It gives me a pleasantly smug feeling to know that I came to love these books well before I knew they were also critically considered to be well written.
The Belgariad series, is dear to my heart, as it was my gateway series into fantasy (and my children's and my niece's), and I think it lays the groundwork for young readers of the fantasy genre perfectly. How else to enjoy a subversion of a trope, unless you've seen that trope exactly to the formula? How else to recognize a trope done outstandingly well, when the first time you saw it was the accepted standard? The entire series is a primer to epic fantasy.
I look forward to episode.... 12. 🤣
Hi Derri, always a pleasure to hear from you and I am glad that you are enjoying the series of videos. Eddings was a gateway to epic fantasy for me too, and I even used his work in my PhD due to the fact that he executed tropes and archetypes so well. Much of his writing may appear cliched now, and certain aspects of it have not aged well, but it is still an interesting corpus to examine in terms of popular fantasy.
It's a surprise but I can't think of anything that you have left off in this one.
As good as always gentlemen It's a blessing to hear you on every subject.
I am very glad that you enjoyed it. But I am positive that you can think of a few things we left out, it is such a huge topic after all. Thank you for watching and for coming back to watch more videos. I do appreciate it.
Have you read anything by Karen Maitland, especially The Company of Liars? It's more historical fiction with fantasy elements, but i think it plays with the gender, maiden and crone tropes.
Enjoyed this very much, thanks!
I am afraid that I have not. I will have to look up the book later. Thanks for the suggestion.
Sorry becomes the Harlot through her excess in death and killing > le petit mort.
Her mirroring with Chalice becomes even more interesting in later books.
The horror/comedy movie Cabin in the Woods also does something interesting with the Maiden - mixed in with the whole cliche horror teen group.
It is very fortunate we've mostly moved on from the Maiden being an object of purity to _be_ protected, to the Maiden being an agent of their own purity.
It was so clever in Cabin in the woods to set up the virgin as one character when in actuality it is the stoner.
That conflation of innocent/virgin and maiden that Cabin in the Woods plays with is so heavily reliant on people being aware of the stereotype and the trope of horror films.
@@ACriticalDragon So true AP. And they tell you the truth from the first moment you meet Dana. She just got out of an affair with her professor. The tropes overpower the information the film makers plainly give you. Awesome stuff.
And to be fair, the whole movie is reliant on the watcher knowing at least a couple of the dozens of tropes and other horror movies referenced 😉
It is no wonder that I love narratives that deconstruct or play with tropes in a knowing fashion. I greatly enjoyed Tucker and Dale versus Evil.
And interesting contrast comes with Sansa and Arya Stark, who both follow wildly different trajectories. They both have to sacrifice some childhood innocence to come into power, eventually, in one way or another.
Hi Jeroen, Martin has some really interesting examples in ASoIaF. I think someone else pointed out the really nice examples of Margaery, Cersei, and Olenna, as the tripartite structure.
This was excellent! I’m amazed how “sex positive” Malazan Book of the Fallen is considering when it was written. I barely learned about that term a couple of years ago, and I think the movement has helped soften the ways women (in real life and literature) are pigeonholed as either the pure virgin or evil seductress. I think the female archetypes are also not very kind to women who choose not to have children, especially in old age: the kind grandmother or ugly crone.
Hi Johanna, that is one of the aspects of the novels that I am always surprised that people struggle with. Erikson rarely draws direct attention to it but the series is fairly non-judgemental when it comes to sex and sexual attraction. For books written and conceived in the late '90s and early 2000s they depict a world in which sex and gender do not have the same concerns, taboos, and strictures that our own world seems to propagate, and for the most part are free from the moralistic, puritanical view sex is often depicted with in Fantasy. It is one of the big movements in fantasy in the last 10 years that I am glad is becoming more mainstream and commonplace.
So, where does Ublala Pung fit into all this?
He is an innocent, not a maiden.
There’s Paul, going for the low-hanging fruits.
@@PhilipChaseTheBestofFantasy I think you beat me to it...
@@Paul_van_Doleweerd I’m just as innocent as Ublala. 😇
@@PhilipChaseTheBestofFantasy Well, I could be rude and answer my own question with Shand, Rissarh, and Hejun, but I won't.
Also, we might mention Immacolata from Clive Barker's Weaveworld...
I haven't read much Barker, at least not since I was a teenager.
@@ACriticalDragon Come to think of it, she is better referenced in the prior discussion of maiden/mother/crone.. don't mind me, it's Monday. 😬
@@ACriticalDragon Damn, missed the "wasn't that only last week" joke. 😂
I love to see women in a more modern role in the fantasy books I've been reading lately - especially Malazan. And Erikson doesn't have a giant sign that screams "look at all my great female characters and how equally they're being treated," which makes it even better. He's not looking for pats on the back. His world just... IS. Sometimes it feels like authors kinda hit you over the head with virtue signaling... and while that isn't always bad, it's not necessarily great either.
Sorry I rambled a bit on this one 😅
The distinction you make is an excellent one, when someone writes to redress a wrong as they see it they can make it very overt and pointed, and it can be a great approach, or they can normalise the new approach which treats is as already accepted and should be the new norm. I greatly enjoy the fact that both Erikson and Esslemont attempt to normalise gender parity as the base line.
There is room in the genre for all sorts of approaches, but I do appreciate it when authors simply do the thing and integrate it into the story as if it is incidental, even when it is incredibly important.
«Guy Gavriel Kay has left the chat…»
Hey guys totally unrelated but A.P have you watched Dune yet and did you convince Steve that it is in fact good?. Unless you thought it was bad. If you saw it that is...
I'd like to see a Steve and AP review; or a threeway with Philip.
Damn, phrasing really trips you up...
I watched Dune and I really quite enjoyed it. Philip and I will be discussing it.
Yet again, it is such a pleasure to start my day with you two! :)
And now I am going to say something that will likely be unpopular. And that's that I have always been somewhat conservative in my personal approach to gender roles and that I don't mind the trope of the maiden in need of saving. Provided this isn't the only thing that she does and that it's a choice on her part, not a limitation. Probably because at some point in life every woman has moments when she feels the need to stop struggling and just be rescued, if only for a while. After all, which woman hasn't felt the joy and safety of a strong male shoulder providing support? This is in no way a case against women that save themselves. I am only saying that I don't completely resent the idea of the damsel in distress. I know that a brand new idea can't be born unless the old one is deposed, but we seem to be living a time when the traditional is entirely demonized. A few weeks ago a friend of mine went to some fashion event where they had one bridal day among other things. And she was so glad to see that the dresses were short and coloured, and not what people would think of as a bride dress. To which I replied that they probably didn't have anything for me in that case, since my preference is quite traditional in this area. She expressed her surprised that a strong woman like me wouldn't enjoy this sort of fashion. She had no response for me when I asked why is the traditional wedding dress ugly out of nowhere, and why enjoying the traditional has to make a woman nothing but a meak, helpless victim of the patriarchy. I know, somewhat off topic, yet it connects with the rejection of the old.
And on that note, of the old and the traditional and the woman saving herself, there is one story that has been on my mind quite a lot lately, and it's the story of The Princess and the Pea, by Hans Christian Andersen. The story says that a young girl knocked at the gates of a castle one stormy, rainy night, claiming to be a princess and asking for shelter according to her rank. She also had some explanation for why her clothes were poor and she was alone, but I can't remember it now, something about being robbed in the forest, I think. The king wanted to make sure that he doesn't insult a princess, but he didn't want to pamper a commoner either. So he asked his wise old nurse to find a solution. The old woman stacked ten feather mattresses one upon the other. Then ten feather pellows. And then ten feather quilts. And under them all, she placed one pea. In the morning she asked the girl how did she sleep, and the girl said that it was terrible, that there was something very hard in her bed. I remember the young child I was when I first heard this story thinking "such a wickedly wise girl, how she outsmarted the nurse!" But then she went on to show how her body had been bruised all over. I liked it then. The idea that this princess was so fragile that something so small could bruise her body. As I grew up, I began to realize that the equating of nobility and self worth with fragility and vulnerability was something deeply troubling. The concept that the easier you are to wound, the nobler you are is a dangerous one. Especially if you grow in a hard world. So while this princess did save herself, I didn't quite like the manner in which she did it. Perhaps in this case a prince to prove her identity would have been a better solution :))
And yes, I do hate the idea of the pure, un blamished, innocent virgin. There is a small dialogue, I think in the Bonehunters, where I think Stormy and / or Gesler ask Quick Ben about why is a virgin's blood so prized in maigc, and if a virgin man's blood would be as valuable as a woman's. To which he replies that there is power in blood, and it has nothing to do with being a virgin. That's just a rumour that mages let circulate in order to prevent people from bleeding each other. That, if anything, the blood of someone who has come into his / her age, sexually, has even more potency. I could have cheered when I read that paragraph. I probably did the first time. This worshiping of the pure, especially the sexually innocent, is such a frustrating limitation! Which is why I love so much Erikson's argument of innocence versus ignorance and how you can't get rid of one without losing of the other, and the argument he weighs: is it better to be innocent and ignorant, or to lose ignorance in favor of wisdom, yet lose innocence in the process.
Sorry, off topic again. All in all, I love this series of videos
Hi Claudia, thanks for the really interesting comment. I think that you would agree that if a character is solely defined as the damsel in distress and that is all the character is, that is a weak character. It is not that you can never have a female character need rescuing, it is just when that is all that character is there for it can become somewhat tiresome. Lois Lane in trouble again, oh my, how ever did that happen. The female character ends up simply being a plot point for the male character arc rather than being treated as character in and of themselves.
So it is not necessarily that all female characters have to be X or Y, but rather that moving away from the rather carboard cut out plot contrivance that is Damsel in Distress marks an improvement in the representation of female characters within the genre. At least to my mind.
@@ACriticalDragon Without a doubt. I agree with you 100%. What I was trying to point at is that lately I have seen an extremization of the reverse of this coin, not only in fantasy or literature, but in the general approach to life, where anything even remotely resembling traditional or patriarchical is treated as a social crime. Like the "how can a woman like you like the classic bride dress? You are too strong a woman to enjoy that old school imposition of patriarchy!" kind of attitude. Or "really? A woman like you enjoys cooking?" Because we all know that only a submissive, firghtened little mouse of a woman can enjoy something as traditional role defining like cooking. Or being rescued every now and then ;) I would probably hate a female character that does nothing but be rescued as much as I hate the virgin. So we are in agreement on that one. I suppose my problem is with extreme atittudes, regardless of the direction.
And that is the problem when the pendulum swings too far in one direction in an attempt to correct a swing that went too far in the other direction. Hopefully it all evens out in the end.
Talking about Eddings, he is even more explicite in the Elenium series in this trope. Princess Elhana is a virgin trapped in a giant diamond. Sir Sparhaowk save her and then marry her. on the other hand Elhana's aunt is a ninphomaniac who seduces practically every anatagonist, who were a pious priest and an honorable knight before meeting her. Also The goddes Aphrael appear like an innocent child but when she want she is an extremely seductive woman, and she "guide" Sparhauwk and Elhana to the marriage in order to incarnate herself in their daughter.
I think the key is to not go in trying to create a strong female character. The key is to write a strong character who just happened to be female.
Philip: We are moving away from a patriarchal society that seeks to control female sexuality.
Texas: Hold my beer.😞
As we have seen, one of the major themes running through the Malazan world is how traditional views, the past, and historical events and beliefs, can have an immediate impact in the contemporary setting, for good or ill. "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it"
@@ACriticalDragon It is disheartening to feel the zeitgeist moving forward positively and to have another point of view anchor that movement. In the end all things are changing constantly. Stagnation is an illusion that is tempting for some to hold on to.