Grrl Power #1003 – There’s two of… uh, both of them
Yeah, it’s no surprise that Dad was the larger influence on Sydney. More on that soon.
Lots of talk about genetics under the last page. And yes, I know brunette hair plus blond hair doesn’t necessarily equal dirty blonde, or dark blonde or light brunette or whatever Sydney is, but really, a lot of traits tend to skip generations. My paternal grandfather’s pinkies both tilted slightly inward on the last joint. My dad doesn’t have that, but I do. (It’s fairly slight, it makes no difference when wearing gloves or typing, in case you were thinking I have crazy pinky claws or something.)
The purple uniforms aren’t so weird looking, are they? I know some people were like “Purple dress uniforms? Ehhh…” I just wanted the team to have a unique color from the other branches, and yellow and orange were definitely off the table. Granted, they’re a dark, desaturated purple. English doesn’t have a lot of words to describe desaturated colors, which is a shame, because I think a medium-light desaturated purple is one of my favorite colors. There’s just no word to describe it. There are words for non-primary colors like “gun-metal blue” but even those have a much larger range than “yellow.” What some people call gun-metal blue are straight up violet, so if I google some paint swatches and say “mauve” that could be anything from pale orange to peach to lilac to periwinkle to fuchsia. Honestly I think having only like 9 solidly defined colors is a real failure for English.
Speaking of books, is anyone aware of a series in which the MC get transported to a world/time that’s hugely patriarchal, like 1500’s Europe or another world where women are uneducated baby machines/homemakers, only the MC is a woman who’s an ex-Army Ranger or a Valkyrie or even a bio-weapon super soldier or a cyborg or something? I think that would be fun to read. If it was well written. If it was just a series of “Women can’t drink beer in this bar” -One Fight Scene Later- “We were ignorant men! Thank you for showing us how wrong we were! Please drink all the beer you want!” then that would get boring quick. It would still be gratifying to read probably, but not 400 pages of just that. I’m thinking more of the requisite scenes in Isekai books where the MC invariably shows off some odd advantage they have like being 50% stronger than the typical denizen of the destination world or learns their language in two weeks or whatever. And I don’t mean like a story where a woman does math then gets chased out of town for being a witch, more like a horde of orcs attacks, and the men won’t let the women help defend, and they start getting their asses handed to them, then the ex-Valkyrie grabs a spear and annihilates the orcs like they’re 1 Hit Dice monsters and she’s a Tarrasque. Those scenes are always fun to read. I’ve just never seen it done with a female protagonist.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update: I spent all weekend on the vote incentive. It’ll be done this week, I promise.
This month’s vote incentive guest stars Lana of Spying with Lana. One of my own secret agents, Pixel, is trying to assist, with various levels of success and… nudity. Well, in the Patreon versions. The Vote Incentive will give you a pretty good idea of what might go down. Here’s a dedicated post in case you want to comment.
Check out Spying with Lana. Their current vote incentive features a certain gold-plated glamazon. Also it’s a funny comic with tons of skin.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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TYPO: I must admit I’ve being curious about Sydney’s parents. === Either ‘I’ve been curious’, or ‘admit to being curious’, I assume?
All the MC”s in the Power of Ten series on Royal Road are female arse-kickers, although I’m not sure if their rapid improvement rate in that matter is what you are looking for.
You’ve come damn near to nailing Weber’s Safehold series.
There are some differences, of course. And one fairly huge twist. But it’s damn near spot on to your ‘wish list.’ And Weber is a hugely popular, hugely successful author, so I doubt you’d find any issue with the “well written” requirement.
The description reminds me of “Lord Kalvan of otherwhen” which is a story about a modern engineering student who buys a bunch of modern garden seed packets, accidentally falls into a time machine, and gets stuck in Poland in the early 1130s, just a few years before the Mongol invasion. The people with the time machines find some reason I forget to help him instead of killing him and make sure he gets outfitted with a ‘magic’ sword and ‘magic’ horse.
So in the course of preparing to fight off the invasion, he winds up building enough stuff and has to establish the infrastructure to build it, that he effectively founds an empire. One of the features of his style is that women are actually paid when they do their jobs, and he doesn’t keep them out of the army.
That was “The Cross Time Engineer” series by Leo Frankowski. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen was by H. Beam Piper and it features someone jumping into a parallel-universe version of Pennsylvania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Stargard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Kalvan_of_Otherwhen
I’ve just remembered another series by another of my favorite authors:
Modesitt’s Spellsong series.
Female protagonist in our modern world gets transported by a spell into a patriarchal, medieval tech world where magic is real and is done via music. She was summoned because a side in a war wanted a powerful sorcerer to assist them in their war. She is a singer and college level music teacher who of course knows nothing about magic and has to learn to use it according to the rules of the world she had been thrust into if she hopes to survive.
There’s no physical ass kicking done, she is a normal sized woman in our world and if I recall correctly a large but not Amazonian sized woman in the new one. She doesn’t punch anyone out, but does manage to withstand some fairly brutal wounds. All her ass-kicking is done via her singing, which again is how magic is done in this setting.
The series starts with her as the protagonist and moves on to her protege and adoptive daughter.
For this series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellsong_Cycle
And for the Weber series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safehold
And now that I’ve remembered and thought about the Spellsong Cycle, a significant part of the storyline kind of jumps out at me in regards to Dave B’s first Enhancer novel, and which will almost certainly also apply to his forthcoming second novel:
Anna (the protagonist) is a middle aged woman, a divorcee with at least two children. She has at least one son and one daughter, and I think she has two daughters but it’s been a while and I do not remember exactly. Anna misses them, as you might understand for a character thrust into an entirely different universe with no way to call (no phones, and different universe, so her cell plan doesn’t cover that kind of a call lol) her kids or anyone else she’s left behind. She goes to extraordinary lengths, at a fairly huge personal cost, to establish communications with one of her daughters back on Earth. Doing so is extremely draining, even more so than is ‘normal’ spell casting. But this is human – Doing something that is risky and costly for a purely emotional reason.
One of my criticisms about Enhancer was that the protagonist is an almost complete unknown to the readers. We literally (in the actual sense of the word) learn more about the lives and backgrounds of several of the other characters than we ever learn about the actual protagonist of the novel. We never learn about anyone he loved and left behind, for example. I don’t recall him ever pining for anyone or anything back on Earth. Sure, he was a convict and was serving a prison sentence, but that doesn’t mean he can’t miss a family member or a friend or a girl he’s lost by being transported to this world of dinosaurs and aliens. Surely he called people when he was able, or wrote letters, right? I mean, you’d do this if you were in prison and this was your only means of communication with the outside world, right? You’d miss the girlfriend that you tried to keep in touch with even thought you were in prison, right? The mother who wrote you letters every week? The good friend who tried to keep in touch even thought he wasn’t very good at it? These are human attachments and human situations. Not many people would go “Whelp, here I am in this new world. Time to forget everyone I ever knew and everything about Earth and my old life, because that’s how heroes do things!”
Let’s see if we learn a little more about whatever his name was and the life he was ripped away from in this new novel! Will he actually think about Earth, his old life and the people he loved and left behind, or was he a loveless loser who had no ties at all to regret having lost, and so spending all his time thinking about the hot alien trim that he is forming into his harem makes perfect sense?
Inquiring minds want to know!
On le modesitt jr. : i would also give some novels of the recluce cycle a try, especiall angels fall (if that is the right translation)
The protagonists are usually men , but the story is about two high tech factions , one led by men from a hot homeworld and one dominatly by women from a cold world.
From both factions some/one spaceship gets transported ghrough an anomaly to a world that is rather medival and some crewmember got magic in the transfere.
The male dominated faction came centuries before the female one.
When the femalf dominated spaceship gets stranded there, they are mostly female soldiers, a male weapon officer who becomes a traitor , some other male officer that dies early and the main protag who is an engineer and trys to bring tech to the world.
The Female leader starts to build a matrachial culture on that planet, but while they always stay a minority they preserve by technological advantage and often being better trained fighters
Kinda sounds like Allan Dean Foster’s “Spellsinger” series, except it’s a guy named Jon-Tom
… OK, panel 4 is some trippy s**t man!
Speaking of books, is anyone aware of a series in which the MC get transported to a world/time that’s hugely patriarchal, like 1500’s Europe or another world where women are uneducated baby machines/homemakers, only the MC is a woman who’s an ex-Army Ranger or a Valkyrie or even a bio-weapon super soldier or a cyborg or something? I think that would be fun to read. If it was well written. If it was just a series of “Women can’t drink beer in this bar” -One Fight Scene Later- “We were ignorant men! Thank you for showing us how wrong we were! Please drink all the beer you want!” then that would get boring quick.
This is pretty common actually. The thing is, women might’ve been treated as property and third-class citizens for ages (read Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” for a semi-satirical take) they almost always had more agency and rights in most European countries, definitely most of the middle-east (until fairly recently) and even China where the culture has been pretty misogynistic for quite a while; the trope that women weren’t allowed common day-to-day things like drinking beer or whatever. WEALTH was the primary determinant of what anyone, male or female, could do, and the social status connected with that wealth. Nobility is basically just a few centuries of embedded filthy lucre and some in-family inbreeding.
Social mobility also varied wildly by time, place, and starting-point. Women were sometimes, in Europe anyway, able to become powerful if they weren’t nobility, by taking on the role of men, explicitly or in disguise.
There’s also a fairly large number of “standout” women through history. Some of them are documented in the Rejected Princesses blog.
https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses
In 1500 it’s more complicated during the reign of Francis I of France (115-1547) his mother Louise of Savoy was his first political advisor until her death in 1531..
and Catherine de’ Medici took the reign of france between 1559 and 1573 …
During Henry III reign between 1573 and her death in 1589 she became a rowing diplomat enforcing her son authority in France.
And in Great Britain during the second half of the 16th century it’s the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) not exactly a meek and submisive girl.
Ok feminine condition is better in the 21th century but womens with proeminent role existed in europe.
The protagonist of I’ve Been Killing Slimes For 300 Years And Maxed Out My Level is very respected by the inhabitants of the near by village but they don’t realize she’s the most powerful person in the world and nobody else has heard of her before she punches out the dragon.
while not a woman being disrespected directly, in (That Time I got reincarnated as a slime) every new group they encounter massivly underestimates or even reacts with anger and disgust at the idea of a slime as being a powerful leader as they are traditionally very weak monsters.
I can also site Inuyasha with Kagome occasionally dealing with this, and there is a web toon I’ve seen advertised where a modern high schooler ends up possessing a feudal japan noble woman that has some hints of this theme.
that said, I can probably mention a few different series where a woman has had to deal with being underestimated because she is a woman but not as the central theme throughout the series, a number of anime will have this at some point Lina Inverse in Slayers gets it on occasion, including people mistaking her for a kid, not unlike Sidney in that regard.
I’ve heard of Having no Filter, but that was ridiculous!
Syd’s dad…. why do I get the feeling he is biased on Jack Septiceye? I even read his lines in that Irish voice of his.
The CLOSEST (in my experience) universe like you described Dave, is The Saga of Tanya the Evil.
Good isekai.
Sounds like Sydney’s meds will need adjustement at some point……………
Akira music!
Sydney Scoville Sr. Is apparently a cover identity for Oliver Queen (dude looks like the comics/cartoon green arow)
What’s “Malesuada”? I only found “malaise” and “Vikings”
Oh man, Sydney’s mom and Arianna mind-melding like that reminded me of when my parents met my sister’s future in-laws. It was actually my sis and BIL’s (Ross) college graduation. When it was over, his family and our family were going out for dinner. Dividing up into the cars, I wound up driving with my mother, his mother, and my aunt and uncle (who lived in the college town). My mom started to his mom, “oh we just love Ross, he’s such a nice young man, so caring and considerate, yadda yadda.” Ross’ mother replied, “oh well we just love Jill, she’s such a sweetheart, so much fun when she comes to visit for holidays, we just love her to pieces.” There’s about a 3 beat of silence and both mothers, perfectly synchronized, blurted out “we gotta get them married!” I turned to my uncle, who was riding shotgun, and said, “oh man, they have no idea just what is about to hit them!” 2 kids and more than 20 years, they’re still going strong. But it seems like Arianna and Laura just found their kindred souls and Sydney seems like she should be seeing Danielle Corsetto’s Doom Kitty from GWS.