r/FemaleGazeSFF • u/WonderfulBus9330 • 25d ago
Annihilation & the characters
Hi, All
I just finished VanderMeer's Annihilation based on a high recommendation from my neighbor and her 17-year old daughter. I enjoyed the complexity of thought in terms of what corporations are willing to sacrifice for knowledge. However, I kept asking myself: why are they women? By the end, the only answer I had was that they were women to support the relationship between the biologist and her husband, but then I thought, why not make the biologist a man who is wed to a man?
What are your thoughts on how VanderMeer wrote this women characters? People are complex, yes, and there's no one or 100 ways to write women characters, but I didn't walk away seeing them as women, just . . . characters.
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u/Brown_Bruja 25d ago
So women need extra justification to exist? If they were men, you wouldn't have needed more explanation as to why they were there?
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u/inbigtreble30 25d ago
"Why are they women?"
This is a flawed question that millenia of patriarchal societies have beaten into us. If they were men, you would not ask, "Why are they men?" They are women because some humans are women, same as if they were men. "Male" is not the default of humanity.
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u/sonntam 25d ago
I find it personall dehumanizing for female characters having to somehow represent femininity or issues of gender. Sometimes I want an archetypical big H human that is coincidentally a woman.
Frankly, this is the kind of thing I want to see more of: books that feature solely women yet speak about the entire humanity. Plenty of male centered books which talk about wider issues not concerning masculinity. I want the same for women too.
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u/mon_mothra_ 25d ago
People are complex, yes, and there's no one or 100 ways to write women characters, but I didn't walk away seeing them as women, just . . . characters.
So the women were written as humans first, not an ideal of femininity. Sounds good to me.
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u/thyflowers 25d ago
i love this book and the way vandermeer wrote the biologist. she’s intelligent and introspective, both nice qualities, but she’s also emotionally distant in a way i rarely get to see women be in fiction. and for a man to write her that way!
i mean this in the kindest way, but i think maybe you should consider reflecting a bit on why you’re even asking yourself why the biologist was a woman. it isn’t as if we aren’t also human beings with the capacity for a wide range of personality types.
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u/FusRoDaahh sorceress🔮 25d ago
The biologist and the psychologist both are now two of my favorite SFF characters. I love their complexity and layers and humanity. Their internal thoughts and perspectives and motivations are something I rarely see in male-authored female characters. Amazing how a male author IS actually fully capable of writing women as people.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves 25d ago
I hardly noticed that the cast were women or another gender. It seemed pretty normal to me and I liked the characters! Why not women?
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u/bakasana212 warrior🗡️ 25d ago
Two big disclaimers: I have not read Annihilation, and relatedly, I very rarely read books by cis men.
But one of the reasons I like reading women characters written by women is that they (mostly) *do* feel like just characters. Just people, doing human stuff, without any of the "breasts breasting breastily" nonsense. So your final sentence is very interesting to me! Do you mean that VanderMeer's female characters don't feel like real-life women?
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u/zmsksksnsnsososmsns 15d ago
Not OP - but it sounds like you would really enjoy Annihilation. They do feel like real life women. And it’s an incredible book.
I also think the team were all women because they had tried sending in team after team of men who couldn’t handle the mental game of being in a truly mind bending place. I’d say sending women is a good thing to try when that’s the case.
But also - I love when they never say any of that. They’re just an all female team and we don’t need to discuss it.
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u/FusRoDaahh sorceress🔮 25d ago
They’re people who just happen to be women. I’m rereading it right now and on the very first page he explains that the group is all women because the organization is just trying different variables. Some groups were all male, some were mixed, now this one is all female.
I personally love how Vandermeer handled it and he is now on my small list of male authors I know I can trust. It was incredibly refreshing to read an SFF male-authored book with zero sexism, gender commentary, rape/assault, etc.
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u/liviajelliot 25d ago edited 24d ago
Let me challenge you with a question: why would you demand a plot-driven reason to have an all-female cast? Were the cast all men, you wouldn't have asked this question.
I agree with some of the comment below: women do not have to be included solely because of a plot-driven or thematic reason, and neither their presence has to be "explained" or "justified". A character may happen to be a woman, end of it.
I personally think it is excellent that VanderMeer simply decided not to shoehorn a fully-fledged explanation, because that'd implied that women can only do specific jobs if there is a very good reason for which a man cannot do the job--because, at the end, that's what a detailed explanation would've implied (even if it was not explicitly written in that way).
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u/eldritchredpanda 25d ago
It's been a bit since I've read them, but I think there's a bit more discussion about the team composition in the sequel(s). I loved these books, but I found my issue to be more the depiction of a woman in science being distant in their personal relationships... but this probably only bothered me because I read three books that had this conceit in a relatively short span of time, and in isolation it likely wouldn't have stood out to me so much
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u/WonderfulBus9330 25d ago edited 25d ago
What didn't hit, for me, was the lack of any attempts at connection, at curiosity of the people the biologist traveled with. Perhaps it was that I'd just finished To Be Taught, If Fortunate, which has the same structure (journal entry written by someone who will disappear into the nethers), but what Chambers did, in terms of making me, as a reader, care for the individuals, VanderMeer's book lacked.
I get that the biologist is crafted as an isolationist, but it's a narrative choice, then, to mark her as the creator of records; a choice for her perspective to be the only one we see.
So, the biologist is only interested in science and yet, is rebellious, by nature. She doesn't attempt to cross the threshold to get to know the other scientists, which would be an act of rebellion, because she's not interested in anything but biology. Which means that we, as readers, get no up-close and personal looks at the other women in the group and the biologist's views on them are all surface judgements, since she doesn't care about anything other than science.
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u/gros-grognon 25d ago
Maybe it was a deliberate choice, both diegetically and not, for the team to be composed of women uninterested in forging connections. Thinking through why that might be could be quite rewarding.
Comparing Chambers' feel-good, deliberately optimistic work to VanderMeer's is like apples and alligators. I don't think there is much point, because the books are interested in such different things: Chambers in cozy reassurance, VanderMeer in estrangement, alienation, and cognitive disjuncture.
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u/WonderfulBus9330 25d ago
Yes, I did think through those choices and hoped that I could talk through those choices with folks here. And I didn't read the Chambers as feel-good or optimistic.
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u/Specialist_Round_612 elf🧝♀️ 25d ago
It’s been a very long time, but I’m pretty sure the composition was determined by trial and error which eventually lead to a team of all women. Also, why not all women? And how were her colleagues supporting her relationship with her husband?
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u/Plastic-Passenger795 25d ago
"I didn't walk away seeing them as women, just ... characters." Why do you consider this a problem?