Men in TBP

Since a lot of people haven’t been keeping track of my work, I’ll start at the beginning and talk about The Birthday Present and Millhaven Castle, my first publication. This actually works great with my plans to talk about guys in my stories, because TBP is chock full of them. If Lucy is removed as mostly a placeholder, like my heroines usually are, then the story has about a 95% male population. Basically it’s about a bunch of guys who run into this girl and have to decide what to do with her. This is because some other guy, long in the past, had a huge, mysterious fight with yet another guy who now runs the entire world. This story is set in the future.

TBP is quite male-dominated. Lucy isn’t quite a puppet—she is consciously accepting of her father’s mission, to the extent she understands it—but she’s so focused on fulfilling it that she’s a pretty limited character. The moral actions all come from guys, including her father in the past. We have three boys who seem to be teenagers, a middle-aged military commander who is partially deaf and completely clueless, some scientifically-altered soldiers who can’t think for themselves, a very shadowy man in the past who helped create this culture and now wants to change it—and a remote, rather creepy man who is a thousand years old and rules this society from afar.

TBP feels like a pessimistic story, but actually the men in it treat Lucy pretty well. They are harder on themselves and often fight with each other, or perform subjugation activities like Aure with the altered soldiers who don’t have independent wills. Lucy’s father seems a bit selfish in sending her out with a one-note mission that is questionable, but it’s he and Aure who have the real issues going on with each other. The boys are generally protective of Lucy even when it will get them in trouble.

So I’d say the guys score well, though that seems strange given the story’s tone and atmosphere. If there’s a problem, it seems to come from women. Lucy generates the whole plot and creates a lot of trouble by following her father’s strange orders, and her aunt is shown more negatively than her uncle. So perhaps I should post on Lucy later, although she is hardest to describe of any of my characters. 

​And there will be more updates.