re: What are your thoughts on the feminization of fantasy?

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Many many many of the characters turned out to be Lesbian or Gay.

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Sounds like a Mercedes Lackey book I read decades ago.

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it seems lately that almost all lead characters in fantasy, whether written by a male or female, are women.

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I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy the past few months and thought about this as well. I don’t hate it, but in a lot of them the main protagonist was female. I kind of feel like women are more likely to be readers than men, so female authors and female heroes are more commonplace now. It’s whatever. A good book is a good book.

The reading public especially for fiction is overwhelmingly female. Science fiction is the outlier where there are 39 male reads for every 19 female readers, but the breakdown in fantasy is 23 male reads for every 25 female readers, which is still a high number of male readers for any other genre. But it makes sense if you are an author and writing something to have a lot of female characters because your goal is to sell books

The entire publishing industry is dominated by women right now.

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What are your thoughts on the feminization of fantasy?

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To me, there are three aspects to this:

1. Female writers writing fantasy
2. Authors writing fantasy for females (whether romance, scifi, etc)
3. Authors writing "woke" crap (ie: writing primarily to proselytize their social ideology, not to entertain or pose questions to the reader that makes them think)

Points 1 and 2 are natural and normal. Hickman and Weiss' Dragonlance series is a great example of point one, for example.

Point three is the problem. There's an audience for that and they are more than welcome to it, the issue I think most have problems with is that this is being pushed more into the mainstream.

What do I mean by "woke" within the context of feminization in fantasy? I mean the watering down of content to feed the guilt of those trying to make up for the oppressions of the past by over-compensating through diversity-washing everything they can. That over-compensation due to over-sensitivity makes them feel guilty if anything made by non-minorities (whether new or old) does not contain at least some minorities.

A great example of this is the decision by Wizards of the Coast that the drow race was a racist construct. This stance is, of course, ridiculous as blacks exist in the D&D world just as they do here in reality (see Chult in Faerun for example). Drow are even a different species.

These "woke" types can't separate fantasy from reality so they push their reality onto fantasy.

The good news is that there's plenty of fantasy out there for those who don't need nor want DEI as a focal point of whatever they are reading.

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Really hate it in moves. 90 pound wet girl kicking special forces dudes arse.

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There is a pretty huge difference between fantasy series doing this and a movie based on the real world.

In a fantasy book it can be completely normal depending on the magic and races in the books. It's kinda silly to me to push real world capabilities of females on to fantasy world females. The entire point of fantasy novels is that they are different worlds.

If you don't like female leads that's fine and dandy, different strokes for different folks. But not liking it because you are comparing it to real world scenarios is weird to me.

I mean, I'm always going to relate more to a well written male character for the most part, but I enjoy well written female protagonists as well.