What are some of your favorite women characters in fantasy novels? What makes you like them so much?

What are some fantasy novels with the best intimate relationships? What makes you think so?

Personally, my two favorites women characters also are involved in my two favorite intimate relationships in fantasy.

Belbe from the MTG novel Nemesis
&
Sappho from Sappho of Lesbos

Both of these female characters are incredibly complex and I couldn't help but crush on them... Belbe especially. The intimate relationships they have with are also very complex and show a type of depth that I think is hard to find in novels.

Bella Swan and Anastasia Steele.

Okay, I don't really read fantasy, or much at all, anymore.

I did like Ayla in the Earth's Children series. Mostly because of the depth of the character's history that we learn from the age of five, her building in survival skills and attempts to understand human relationships in the later books. Though she does suffer from becoming a bit of a Deus Ex Machina/Mary Sue in the later ones. I guess you could imagine someone with a life that difficult would have learnt to cope in many situations, but it's hard to imagine one person inventing half of the neolithic breakthroughs and having the solution to every previous unencountered problem.

Bah, the series should have ended on the high note of the third book.

Brienne of Tarth from ASOIAF, Sansa Stark as well. Polar opposites.

Idk who Brienne of Tarth is... I haven't read any of the books. Is Sansa the red-head?

Read... Fantasy?

The last fantasy novel I read was Lord of Souls and that was only because it was TES.

Viridiana Sovari from The Night Angel trilogy, her character is very different from your conventional character in that role. (It's hard to explain, I highly recommend those books though )

I think I put it down on around chapter 15 from the first book. I don't think I've been introduced to her yet. I shouldn't have bought the giant omnibus.

Elspeth & Kerowyn from the Heralds of Valdemar series (and Kethry, and Tarma, and any number of other characters written by Mercedes Lackey)

hmm, does sci-fi count?
Friday from Friday by Heinlein
Killashandra Ree from the Crystal Singer series (and again.... any of a dozen other female protagonists by Anne McCaffery)


Because they're capable, talented, and generally confident.




...I have a hard time picking specific favorites, in any category. I have a bunch of characters, novels, movies, games, singers, songs, etc that I really like. Hard to narrow it down any further than that.

The last Fantasy book I read was LOTR.

The author of Starship Troopers?


Ouch.

Hm. I'll admit the amount of fantasy literature I've gotten around to is relatively low (I'm much more familiar with fantasy movies and games, video- and otherwise). Of course, I've read Tolkien plenty, and I think I'd be hard pressed to find one I like more than Luthien - she's someone I find it easy to identify with, or at least aspire to be like. You'd think the lesser fantasy authors who are so quick to copy him would also copy the active, interesting female characters who aren't just stereotypes or hangers-on for the men who are the real focus of their stories, but it's not like that's even the most obvious of their writing problems.

Elsewhere... hm. Eilonwy from the Prydain Chronicles is the only one I really liked that I can think of off the top of my head, but of course that's in my very limited experience. Maybe Bradamante from Orlando furioso if we want to include the medieval stories that led to fantasy as well, though she's kind of a minor example even then - mostly I'm just impressed that an interesting woman knight actually showed up in medieval literature at all, the period may not have been as bad for women as many of the stereotypes assume but it wasn't exactly anywhere near our time as equality goes either.

As far as intimate relationships... none of the books I've read have been very good at that, really, for either meaning of that term...




(Do the in-game books from the Elder Scrolls series count? Because I'd add in Barenziah in that case.)

God those books were awful.

Eh... they were mediocre. I could at least tell the characters' personalities apart, which is a good sign, but I couldn't quite engage with them enough to be interested in what they might do next, so in the end I couldn't bring myself to finish them. Thus why Annaig doesn't show up in my list.

I don't really read much from the fantasy genre myself. I get my fill of that sort of stuff from shows and reading mythology.

That said, Brienne of Tarth and Arya Stark are both great characters.


Err....Is this a book I haven't heard of? Sappho was a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho from whom we get the term Sapphic(a somewhat outdated term for female homosixuality; obvious, lisbian comes from Lesbos as well), and I tried finding a fantasy book called that, but can't.

Kitiara Uth Matar from Dragonlance. She is strong, independent, feisty, but also has a soft side.

It is a book you haven't heard of. lol.
It's called Sappho of Lesbos copyrighted in 1964, written by Jefferson Cooper. I bought it at a local bookstore thinking that it was just another 60's sleaze novel (I collect 60's sleaze novels), and I was pleasantly surprised. It is about the historical character and her relationship with a man named Pharon from Athens. The story is mostly fictional, as we don't really know if any of it happened or not, and it also incorporates mythology into it. I absolutely love the book because it addresses so many complexities with an excellent amount of depth for a forgotten paperback erotica. The main question it tries to answer is whether or not true love is between a man and a woman or something that can only be found between women, but at the same time it also presents other questions revolving around loyalty to state, to nation, to culture, whether or not religion has any legitimacy, etc. It also has some high-quality descriptive passages, and none of the love scenes are bland and boring.

I once read a fantasy book, there was about one sentence in it that mentioned a female cook at an inn. I liked her best, because she never said anything, never did anything, was never mentioned again and stayed in the kitchen where she belongs.

Catherine from the Myst series. Her and Atrus also make a really good pair.

Yep.