Thank you. *blushes* Your idea about the real villain being some kind of demon that feeds on (specifically) women's misery would fit right in too. This type of story usually doesn't make it quite that blatant, but there's often some contrived explanation for why various magic-powered creatures have to dominate/hurt/enslave/preferentially kill women, like the horrifically uber-patriarchal werewolves in the Mercy Thompson series and the "male badass warriors/female cloistered broodmares" set-up of the Black Dagger Brotherhood and the "Brides of Dracula" nonsense in the Anita Blake books where a lot of bitchy jelly haters get turned into vampires and 90% of vampires of both sexes are Depraved Bisexual stereotypes but the ultimate form of magical/psychic enslavement is something that only male vampires can do to female victims (except for Anita, who can do it despite being neither male nor a vampire because she's just so much better than all other female and/or living beings). Your misery-feeder idea takes what is already implicit in the texts (that a lot of these supernatural phenomena are caused by forces that specifically hate women) and makes explicit.
Also, I've been thinking that this stuff provides some fridge logic for how Ms. Snowflake is so often the Only Girl In The Room even though the surrounding human society has been through three waves of feminism and the supernatural creatures are so much stronger than any human that even the beefiest purely human guy wouldn't be able to fight them using brute strength. Women are disproportionately avoiding jobs in the "vampire slayer/magic detective" field because a woman who goes into that field is actually in much more danger than any man who does the same kind of work-- not because she's fragile or weak (physical differences between the sexes are insignificant compared to differences between vampires or werewolves and ordinary humans) but because the creatures she'd have to have contact with would treat her like a Designated Victim rather than a professional doing her job.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2013-05-24 09:05 pm (UTC)Also, I've been thinking that this stuff provides some fridge logic for how Ms. Snowflake is so often the Only Girl In The Room even though the surrounding human society has been through three waves of feminism and the supernatural creatures are so much stronger than any human that even the beefiest purely human guy wouldn't be able to fight them using brute strength. Women are disproportionately avoiding jobs in the "vampire slayer/magic detective" field because a woman who goes into that field is actually in much more danger than any man who does the same kind of work-- not because she's fragile or weak (physical differences between the sexes are insignificant compared to differences between vampires or werewolves and ordinary humans) but because the creatures she'd have to have contact with would treat her like a Designated Victim rather than a professional doing her job.