Elfquest Re-Read, Fire and Flight: A Maiden’s Place

[swan_tower]

(This is part of my Elfquest re-read. There will be spoilers.)

I mentioned in my last post the cultural exchange between the Wolfriders and the Sun Folk, two very different societies. One of the differences between them comes to the forefront when the earthquake sends the zwoots stampeding toward the Sun Village, and the Wolfriders head out to try and turn the herd away. Leetah is shocked to see Dewshine going with them, saying “But it is not a maiden’s place to –” She can’t even muster a justification for that incomplete thought, and Dewshine shrugs it off with a laugh, because she sees no reason she shouldn’t ride in the hunt.

I didn’t notice, until this re-read, that the first half of Fire and Flight doesn’t back up Dewshine’s attitude nearly as much as I assumed. At the time of the holt’s burning, there are seventeen Wolfriders: nine men, five women, and three children (two male and one female). The raiding party that rescues Redlance consists of Cutter, Skywise, Treestump, Strongbow, One-Eye, Scouter, and Pike — all the men of the tribe save Woodlock and Redlance himself. The same group goes to face down the human leader, and the raid on Sorrow’s End adds Woodlock, who otherwise sticks to his usual role of the peaceful stay-at-home dad. (Redlance, another pacifist at heart, stays behind because he’s badly injured.) None of the women participate. It isn’t until you get the story of Madcoil that you see the women riding out: Fox-Fur, Brownberry, and Joyleaf are all with the hunt, and the group that finally takes out Madcoil includes Clearbrook, Nightfall, and Dewshine.

Now, I could actually see an in-story reason for this. The Wolfriders have a serious birthrate problem (about which more in a future post); the six who died in Madcoil’s attack left only four children behind. The tribe after that has only five women of reproductive age, and one juvenile girl. It would actually make sense if they were in a more defensive posture, protecting the women so the tribe as a whole won’t die out. But nobody ever says anything about that, which makes me wonder: did the Pinis change their minds a couple of issues in and decide to give the female Wolfriders a more active role than they originally planned? Or did it simply take them a while to get past their defaults like they meant to? It isn’t just that the women don’t take part in the various war parties. They also get very few lines early on — though to be fair, neither do most of the men — and when the fire starts, Scouter cries to One-eye that “Mother needs us! And I must save Dewshine!” The overall impression is one of much more conventional (i.e. passive) femininity.

But that’s just the first few issues. I actually love the women of this series; there are so many of them, and they’re very different from one another. Nightfall is not Dewshine is not Savah is not Leetah is not Winnowwill is not Kahvi. It takes time for that to develop — in this first volume, Nightfall and Dewshine are the only female Wolfriders to get much page time — but they’re all distinct personalities, with different qualities and flaws. It’s an excellent illustration of how avoiding the Smurfette problem also helps you dodge other pitfalls of writing female characters: when there isn’t just one, she doesn’t wind up being a statement on Women As a Whole. Leetah’s sheltered and peaceful ways are what she is like, not a reflection of her entire gender. Nightfall is fiercer than her lifemate, but that doesn’t mean all female elves have to be Amazons. Rainsong is happy to sit at home trying to solve the birthrate issue single-handedly — or rather double-handedly, because gentle Woodlock is right there with her. If anything, Leetah’s comment to Dewshine feels like 1978 intruding on the story: nobody in the Sun Village is the type to ride into the face of a stampede, except for Rayek. Gender might be a factor, but to me it seems secondary to general Sun Folk attitudes about such behavior.

Which honestly makes a fair bit of sense, for the type of society this depicts. The archaeology post will come later, but hunter-gatherer societies tend to be fairly egalitarian, and while I’m not as familiar with horticulturalists (small-scale farming, of the type we see the Sun Folk doing), I know you don’t usually get major social stratification and specialization until you develop much larger-scale societies than any of the elf tribes have.

I also want to note that I very much appreciate the way the story handles the trial of hand, head, and heart — or rather, the implications of it. Both Rayek and Cutter make the mistake of thinking that winning the contest means winning Leetah. But as she points out to both of them, the purpose of it is to settle their rivalry with each other — not her actual choice. She has a chance to choose before it begins, and can’t; after that, what the victor receives is the right to talk to her without the other one interfering. In Leetah’s own words, she is not “some trinket to be handed out as a prize.” That’s a point many stories miss, even today.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[senmut]

Excellent points, all of them.

[swan_tower]

Thank you!

[sholio]

This is pure guesswork on my part, but just based on the way the first few chapters of the series read, my guess would be that they either hadn't really thought about it and realized a couple of chapters into the series that they were shortchanging the women, or always planned that the tribe would be more egalitarian, realized that the text didn't back up the intentions, and started changing things. Either way, I don't think the women being sidelined from the action in the early issues is an intentional writing choice (even though it DOES make cultural sense for a low-birthrate population like theirs) so much as unconscious cultural defaults coming to the fore.

I also feel that the first story arc in general, especially the Cutter-Leetah-Rayek storyline, displays a lot of tells that the Pinis were starting from a stock pulp-fantasy storyline (barbarian kidnaps bride; suitors fight over her) and figuring out the worldbuilding as they went along. Obviously they'd done tons of groundbuilding beforehand, too -- the world was already pretty well developed when they started, and I don't recall anything that's directly contradictory to what comes later; they just built on it. But thinking about the broad strokes of the storyline, it kinda feels like they started out with this stock plot and a lot of general ideas about the world, and then had to work through the implications of all of those ideas as the first few issues took place. Like, for example, getting from the general idea of "elves don't discriminate based on gender" to actually having fight scenes in which the women are depicted in the same way as the men are.

I think if they'd had the world as well fleshed out in the beginning as it is by the second story arc, the series probably wouldn't have started with Cutter flinging Leetah across the back of his wolf and carrying her off -- can you even imagine if he'd done that to a female Wolfrider; Cutter you total dink. In his defense, I guess he'd literally never met other people he wasn't related to by blood or tribe-bond before, so it's not like international diplomacy or even how to relate to people he hadn't known all his life was a thing for him growing up. Anyway, I think the whole Cutter-Leetah-Rayek storyline in Fire and Flight is based on gender and relationship assumptions that later turn out not to really fit with how elves work, and while the series does a good job of basically spackling over the misfit between that particular plot and the increasingly well-developed picture of elf society -- and keeps it fun enough that the disconnect doesn't really matter -- that mismatch is still present and is part of what makes the early issues feel a little rougher around the edges than the later ones.

(I should note that all of this is written without having actually read the series in years. Though I'm definitely planning to read along once I get a chance.)

... all of that said, however, I didn't have a clue at the time I first read it how forward-thinking this series was on the gender roles of the characters -- and race, like you said in an earlier post. I read it for the first time when I was grade-school aged, and got into X-Men at the same time (which was also pretty egalitarian in the '80s with the female team members and diverse team), so to me it just seemed very natural that it would work that way. The thought never occurred to wee!me that I wouldn't have had those reading options a mere decade earlier.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

On the Dreamwidth version of this post, someone pointed out that there's a short story in Hidden Years that retroactively works with this issue: Bearclaw decrees that he's not going to risk his life-bearers against the humans anymore. Mind you, hunting can also be hella dangerous -- but the Wolfriders do have good bows, so it isn't hard to reconcile that with Bearclaw's order.

With regard to the early plot, it might have been the Pinis getting more nuanced as they went along, or it might have been them deliberately giving their audience an easily-digestible story out of the gate to get them hooked? We have no way of knowing, of course, and it might be a bit of both. But I could see Fire and Flight playing things simpler on purpose, to counterbalance the fact that it was an indie comic with weird-looking elves and so forth. Build a fanbase; then get complicated.

You could be right, though, that the series just does a good enough job of spackling over the early cracks that I wind up seeing it as pretty solid. I mean, yes, Cutter acts like a complete jackass -- but he's also a) what, twenty-three years old?, b) just been hit over the head with the Recognition club, and c) in the middle of a raid whose entire pattern is "grab whatever you think looks good." Also, he probably has mild sunstroke. :-P So basically, while he acts like a complete jackass and would never have treated a female Wolfrider that way, I can come up with plausible reasons for why he does it -- reasons that are consistent with overall canon, rather than having to mentally tag it as "early days so just pretend it makes sense."

[sholio]

Yeah; I think it's really impressive, honestly, that the worldbuilding not only hangs together, but hangs together well from the very beginning, even though it was written serially over a number of years and they'd never (as far as I know) done anything of the sort before. This was their first project that didn't stall out somewhere in the planning stages, and it was really well put together. Like you said, there's really nothing that doesn't have a plausible explanation in terms of the overall canon, even when some of it is mildly inconsistent with the thrust of later worldbuilding.

Oh, this:

I actually love the women of this series; there are so many of them, and they’re very different from one another. Nightfall is not Dewshine is not Savah is not Leetah is not Winnowwill is not Kahvi.

YES. Another thing I didn't have the critical-reading skills to appreciate as a kid is that the female characters represent such a vast array of different personalities and approaches to living life: the ones who put being a wife or mother first, the ones who prefer to do the warrior thing, the mystics, the baddies.

There's a page in the Elfquest Gatherum that impressed me a lot as a budding young artist, a model sheet for the female elves' faces in which each has a very distinct face/nose/eyes, so they're instantly recognizable from any angle and never suffer from the "same face" problem that so many artists in comics and animation have, especially with female characters. And that helps them stand out as individuals, too.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

One of the things I'll post about later is how instantly recognizable the characters are, even when they're tiny silhouettes in the background. It isn't just faces; it's bodies, too.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Or for next generation elf contrast: Venka vs. Tyleet.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much so. Also Ember, for that matter.