Once she was off stage, I took stock of what we knew about her: that she was a girl, that she was small, that she was pretty, that she had a cough, that she liked dogs, where she was born–the dog detail being the most interesting, but not enough to make me feel like I knew her–or to make me care whether she gets saved. Indeed, the most compelling reason she needs rescuing seems to be–that the boy who’d been auto-protecting her will fall apart without her. It hit me then: this girl isn’t a character. She’s a symbol.
And then I realized what was really going on here–in much the same that adult writers sometimes write children and teens and symbols, rather than characters, there are still male writers out there–and occasional female ones too–who write women and girls as symbols, rather than characters.
The girl in this book isn’t merely scrawny and not much of a fighter–she’s a symbol: of vulnerability, of things that need saving. Having individual characters, male or female, being vulnerable is not in itself always a bad thing, but they really do need to be characters first, or else–to this reader, at least–the tale feels like a bit of cheap emotional manipulation, not like a real story.