If I could sum up the Mocklore aesthetic, it is this: girls in boots, saving the day, with their friends. Those were the books I most wanted to read, and I am glad I added more of them to the world.
Girls saving the day with their friends still describes a lot of what I write now, though I don’t tend to get as excited about descriptions of the boots they wear while they’re doing it.
A big part of what I craved was the satisfying narratives I found in other, more female-oriented genres—teen romance, chick lit (this was the era of Bridget Jones and her sisters), friendship drama, family sagas—only I wanted that with swords and magic and flying sheep, too. I wanted stories where girls weren’t just tolerated or allowed in via special circumstance; I wanted stories where girls were powerful and present, and able to take that for granted. The best way to create those stories in fantasy fiction seemed to be to borrow heavily from genres where that was the norm.
We talk more these days about women in fantasy: about female warriors and the princess archetype; about what is problematic and what needs to be worked on; and about the fantasy we want to read in this world.
We talk about practical armour, about challenging gender essentialism as well as racist tropes, and colonialist values (Intersectionality! Always important). But still, the female characters who are most valued in the fantasy genres are those who succeed in traditionally masculine roles. We clap when women in fantasy wear trousers, pick up weapons, get muddy, get violent. We want our Furiosas and our Sarah Connors, our General Leias and our Ghostbusters. Arya Stark had a willing, enthusiastic fandom from the start; Sansa Stark’s fandom had to fight to be heard.
I wouldn’t create a character in chainmail lingerie today, I think—it’s not a trope that needs to be be perpetuated or reclaimed. I’m quite happy for the practical armour movement to wash over our genre (hell, I was fighting for it then; I remember writing an earnest essay to the cover artist of Liquid Gold, justifying why Sparrow’s armour needed to be sensible and cheesecake-free). But in the 90s, when I was discovering fantasy fiction for the first time and the fantasy bookshelves spilled over with cover art of women in fetishwear so absurd as to be hilarious, you couldn’t escape it. My favourite is still a Dragonlance cover that depicted women standing in the snow, wearing fur boots and fur bikinis. To keep out the cold, you know? Hell, at least they were allowed to wear boots.
Those boots clearly made an impact on me. When you saw sexy lamp glamour girls on the covers of fantasy fiction, boots were often the only practical item of clothing they were allowed. Sometimes a cloak, as long as it wasn’t fastened properly. Is that why my Mocklore stories are undeniably boot-obsessed? It’s as good a theory as any.
Bounty came about because I asked myself the question of what kind of character actually wear midriff-baring chainmail voluntarily. Those pulp fantasy covers—and the characters that inspired them, going back to the randomly beautiful glam-babes who wandered attractively through the Robert E Howard and Fritz Leiber sword and sorcery stories, not to mention the very limited options for female characters in traditional RPG gaming modules—were always about the male gaze, not the person inside the chainmail cheesecake. What is she thinking? Why did she choose to put that outfit on that morning?
Xena was a major influence on me, and I can see that influence in these Bounty and Delta stories in particular, written years after the original Mocklore novels were published. Xena emphasised practicality, function, capability. Yes, the opening credits gave a slow pan up Lucy Lawless’s curves cinched in tight by a black leather corset, but every single episode demonstrated her strength and competence. She didn’t need to wear layers because she was better than anyone else—she regularly beat up warlords, and sometimes gods, without breathing hard. Likewise, Gabrielle walked around everywhere with her abs on display (a costume development that occurred gradually as the character grew up in age and confidence), the Amazons wore monstrous costumes over their casual ‘tribal swimsuits with props’ aesthetic and then there was terrifying Callisto in her shiny metal bikini.
I realised some time ago that my problem with the hyper-sexualised portrayal of women in fantasy art (and superhero comics too) is less the skimpy/skin-tight costumes and more the presentation of body language—when the women in those costumes are drawn as strong, confident and athletic instead of pouting, twisting and arching their backs, 80% of my objections melt away. Xena offered that—even when the women wore wildly impractical fantasy outfits, they walked around like they were wearing business suits or gym clothes. Ready for action. Taking no bullshit.
Also, the women were allowed to be funny, which I adored about that show. There has never been another action franchise like it. If the much-touted remake ever comes to be, I will be fascinated to see how the 21st century reshapes the Xena narrative for a new generation, and super fascinated to see how the characters are dressed.
These days, the fantasy stories I write are a lot more about what is inside people’s heads, and less about what everyone is wearing, which might have something to do with the fact that since parenthood struck (especially since I had my second child), I’m barely able to assemble an outfit beyond jeans and a t-shirt. But feminine gender performance through touches of glamour is something I do enjoy, despite my lipstick ignorance. I wore nothing but skirts (mostly velvet) for most of my twenties, I use jewellery as armour when public speaking, and I’m fascinated by people who use fashion and other aesthetic choices to create a dramatic effect. (Nails, I can do nails)
Likewise, I’ve always loved what I call ‘fantasy with frocks’ and the use of costume in historical drama. One of my favourite things about the Game of Thrones TV show is the astounding costume design that reflects family loyalties, politics, plot points and history—the artist who designs and hand-stitches the embroidery for some of the most significant outfits is a genius. Clothes are important!
Women have always used clothes as social and political tools—look at how Elizabeth I cemented her image as an untouchable goddess figure through makeup and fashion.
When Julia Gillard became Prime Minister of Australia, I raged about how much the media called attention to her appearance, her hair, her shoes. But I also noticed that yes, she did change—she became more professionally styled, and we saw it happen, because how could it not?
All through her Presidential campaign, men told Hillary Clinton she should smile more.
In the years since I first picked up my Mocklore quill, there has sprung up a whole new Hollywood subgenre—the fairy tale romantic comedy. From Shrek and Ella Enchanted through to the more recent Once Upon A Time, Enchanted and Mirror, Mirror, we see the archetypes of fairy tales turned on their heads, but we also get to remind ourselves that there has always been a fantastic genre entirely revolving around girls having adventures, women being fierce villains, and kick-ass ballgowns.
Fairy tales are always often about clothes. The power of the right dress, to transform or disguise you, to change your destiny. It wasn’t just Cinderella putting up with that bullshit (and repurposing it for her own needs), it was Donkeyskin’s frocks and Rapunzel’s hair and Snow White’s lips. Fairy tales are about beauty and virtue, but they’re also about how women are looked at and perceived by others.
These days, when filmmakers tell Snow White’s story, they put her in trousers (or in the case of Mirror, Mirror, a fetching pair of culottes), they turn her into a willing bandit, and they make the prince work harder for his happy ending. Ever since Princess Fiona showed Shrek she had sick martial arts moves, 21st century princesses have been expected to kick butt WHILE looking fabulous. But fairy tales were always magical stories that revolved around girls, and their fantasies, even in the days when Snow White was wanly singing about wishing on a star, and Cinderella didn’t want anything out of life but a new dress and a party.
Girls and magic and swords and banter are still pretty much what I want out of a story today, as long as they have good solid boots to rely on, and loyal friends
at their backs. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
Essay - “The Boobs, the Bad and the Broomsticks”
from Pratchett’s Women: unauthorised essays on the female characters of Discworld
Terry Pratchett is one of those writers that you can see noticeably improving and honing his craft as he goes. One of the aspects of his writing that improved massively over the years was his treatment of female characters, and I always meant to stop at some point to figure out exactly how it was that his portrayal of women changed and developed over several decades.
I started reading the Discworld books in the early 90s, when Small Gods was the latest release. This meant that I read all the books before that in (mostly) the wrong order, and all of the books after that in (mostly) the right order. So it took me some time to figure out what was going on with Pratchett’s women, and to wrap my head around the chronology.
The first ten books of the Discworld series are problematic in their portrayal of female characters, particularly the younger women. I certainly don’t think this was intentional on Pratchett’s part, but an unfortunate result of the fact that in these early books he was largely parodying fantasy worlds and tropes, and only just beginning to develop the Discworld into something more substantial and complex. You can certainly see from his novels that Pratchett was very much aware of some of the dreadful sexism in his source material, and that he was often writing female characters in direct response to problems he saw in the fantasy genre.
His apparent intentions to point out the silliness of the portrayal of women in fantasy, sadly, often backfired.
In these early Discworld books, we find Pratchett mocking the semi-clad, bosomy fantasy women who traditionally reward the handsome hero with their sexy selves. He did this at first by creating semi-clad, bosomy fantasy women who a) say bitchy things to the (not handsome) hero in the hopes that no one would notice they are still a cliché of the genre and/or b) amusingly fail to fall in love with the protagonist but instead choose to reward a less obvious male character with their sexy selves. Examples of this phenomenon include Bethan in The Light Fantastic, the glamorous priestess who is cross about being rescued from a temple but chooses to hook up with the aged Cohen the Barbarian instead of giving Rincewind a second look; Conina in Sourcery, the glamorous warrior woman who chooses to hook up with the nerdy Nijel instead of giving Rincewind a second look; Ptraci in Pyramids, who is totally hot for Teppic and vice versa, until they discover they are siblings and he promptly hands her an empire and his best friend; Princess Keli in Mort who goes for the dweeby wizard (finally a hot girl with a taste for wizards, as long as they’re not the protagonist!) over Mort; and finally Ginger of Moving Pictures and Ysabell of Mort, who are constantly bitchy to their respective guys, but ultimately choose them.
I should admit at this point that when I was fourteen and reading the Discworld novels for the first time, I adored Conina and Ptraci and Ginger and totally wanted to be just like them when I grew up. I look back on that now and shudder, just a bit. Teenage self, how about we aspire to be something other than a Josh Kirby cartoon character?
And oh, Josh Kirby. There’s that, too. Even when the writing in the Discworld books challenged and questioned the roles of female characters in fantasy, the covers were reinforcing the clichés so hard that the boobs of the heroines could be classified as lethal weapons in their own right.
Pratchett writes a lovely paragraph in The Light Fantastic (1986), only his second Discworld novel, in which he describes Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan, a barbarian warrior. He expands at length about how in other fantasy worlds she would be dressed in a lurid but impractical costume, but in fact she was wearing some quite sensible armour. Have a cold shower, chaps, the woman is appropriately attired.
This elegant and witty piece writing is completely sabotaged by the fact that the cover art, as with all Discworld covers for the first couple of decades, depicts Herrena bursting out of a tiny postage stamp bikini with enormous beach ball bosoms. This is a character who only appears for a page or two in the entire novel, and thus can only have been included on the cover in order to raise the number of scantily-clad breasts to four.
Sadly, that is what I see now when I look back on my favourite Discworld heroines of my teen years—good intentions that simply didn’t go far enough. The girls got to look pretty and make the occasional witty line, but they didn’t get personalities that ran deeper than their bra size. (Also, it has to be said, they all pretty much had the SAME personality, which was Difficult+Snarky+Beautiful.)
There were some exceptions. Lady Sybil, in Guards Guards (1989), is an unusual romantic interest in that she has a fully defined personality, gets lots of witty lines that aren’t particularly mean, and is an equal match for the protagonist, Commander Vimes. She’s also a woman of mature years who is not lithe and pretty, and thus escapes much of the usual ‘I am standing here in my fur bikini being ironic about the sexist portrayal of women’ depictions of early Discworld women. She was developed more substantially later on, but this was a good start.
Then there were the witches. After two books which featured the same hapless wizard running away from trouble and occasionally colliding with astoundingly sexy women who didn’t want to sleep with him, Pratchett turned his attention to feminist issues with Equal Rites (1987), a book which tackled one of the most problematic ideas with which he had saddled his world: that magic was segregated by gender, men becoming wizards and women becoming witches, both types of magic being almost entirely different from each other. In Equal Rites, a girl is born with the magic and destiny of a wizard, and with the help of her mentor witch Granny Weatherwax, has to fight the system to be allowed into the Unseen University instead of simply settling for being a witch.
My teenage self hated this book.
Which is bizarre, because it sounds exactly like my sort of thing. But I think we’ve already established that there is a big difference between my teenage self’s reading tastes and my own.
The problem was that my teenage self was reading my way through the backlist of Discworld books in the wrong order, and having read the blurbs, I had completely fallen in love with the concept of that one. So I saved it for last. By the time I got to it, my expectations were through the roof, and I resented that it was not the book I thought it was going to be: it was about a child, not a teenage girl or adult woman (yep the fact that it wasn’t Conina-Ptraci-Ginger in a wizard’s hat seemed like a flaw to me at the time), and while the best thing about the book was indeed Granny Weatherwax, I had already read her being far more awesome elsewhere, and she seemed a pale shade of herself without Nanny Ogg or Magrat to grate against. I later revisited Equal Rites more than once, and came to terms with it, though I never really learned to love it. Still, it hardly matters now that it is the least interesting book that Pratchett ever wrote about witches. Given it comes third in a series of nearly 40 books, that’s good news. He got better.
Despite my lack of love for Equal Rites, I was disappointed over the years that while the Discworld was legendary for cameo appearances and continuing characters, we never returned to Esk’s story. No matter how many times we visited the Unseen University, she wasn’t there. We never saw how she turned out, and never got to see her as an adult. Until, of course, the Tiffany Aching book, I Shall Wear Midnight (2010), which also features cameos from Nanny Ogg and Magrat. I Shall Wear Midnight felt very much like a satisfying line was being drawn under the saga of the Lancre witches, and having that unexpectedly delightful resolution about Esk made me want to go back and revisit the other witches stories, from the beginning.
Thanks to the wonder of unabridged audiobooks, I reintroduced myself to Wyrd Sisters (1988), and immersed myself utterly in what is still, I believe, one of Pratchett’s most effective standalone books. You can praise Reaper Man and Small Gods all you like; I’ll take a Witches book over those two every time. Finally, Pratchett stopped satirising fantasy and started looking further afield for material
to poke sticks at. And he decided Shakespeare would be his first port of call! This glorious work amalgamates the best and worst aspects of the plots of Hamlet and Macbeth, producing one of my favourite fictional double acts of all time: Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. Also, for the first time, he created a young female character (Magrat) with the same ruthless, complicated comedic touch that he usually brought to Rincewind, Mort and his other male protagonists.
Magrat isn’t a sexy treasure with which to reward the hero (or someone other than the hero). She’s a real person, warts and all, and her voice is every bit as compelling and sympathetic as it is nasal and long-suffering.
The three Lancre Witches, maiden, mother and crone, (listen to them argue about which is which!) are a masterful creation. It doesn’t matter what the plot is, any excuse to see them riff off each other, poke holes in the pomposity of the universe and then save it at the last minute, is a genuine pleasure. The surprise in coming back to Wyrd Sisters is just how good the plot is—how cleverly the Shakespearian elements weave together, into an elaborate comedy of errors. Indeed, all of the Lancre Witch novel plots tend to be about stories, and about the way stories work in a world of magic. This meta-element raises them into being far more than amusing romps with complicated sentences (which I think is a fair description of all the Discworld books before Wyrd Sisters).
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 107
