From Tumblr: Anon Ask - About feminist themes in A Bed of Thorns

[nym_wibbly]

At what point did you decide to make feminist themes in Bed of Thorns? I mean before you started or later as you wrote it?
~ Anonymous

I didn’t! I filled out the corners of Belle’s life with the other women who seemed naturally to occupy the space. Given that they live in a feudal society where men are in charge and do the sword-fighting (a world based on OUaT’s first half-season, basically, where Snow was the exception not the rule), the themes surrounding equality came up naturally. Belle’s not so much on a feminist trajectory as an individualist one. Most of her ‘feminist’ ideas have come via Rumple - a man who’s lived long enough to spot repeating patterns and see what mundane, self-defeating nonsense most people get up to every day of their lives. He’s mastered that to the point of being able to exploit it - he’s lost a lot of the illusions that limit the thinking of the people he deals with.

It’s news to Belle that sexual pleasure is a thing, but it’s obvious to the point of a bemused “duh” to Rumple that she should get just as much of it as he does - that her body belongs to her, not her husband. It’s not a moral stance on his part - he’s just lived long enough to outgrow his upbringing, his preconceptions about status (and then to shackle himself with new ones that he’s made up all by himself while taking his defensive position against the world.) He pretty much thinks everybody is awful and a threat to him if he doesn’t strike first, which is equality of a sort.

Wren wears a veneer of social conformity, yet occupies the “village witch/mad-woman/divorcee” role in the story and appears subversive at times, when she’s actually just doing her best to help specific individuals in a far-from-satisfactory world. Regina is, at this point in her life, everyone’s puppet, while believing she’s emancipated and powerful as hell. Even though she makes such a bold, superficial statement of her vast independence and power, of being a woman in authority because of her magical ability and claim to a throne, she’s still Rumple’s pawn, having been her mother’s before that, and then Leopold’s miserable trophy-wife. There are women in the story who are victims - Lotte, Tullia and Flora each have a very different, very negative experience of male-slanted power in the world they inhabit, and handle the resulting problems in very different ways.

A Bed of Thorns is a story about women, that’s for sure, but it’s an intimate snapshot of Belle’s life, love and personal growth rather than any kind of deliberate statement. It’s like finding her secret diary - something she never really meant to be seen by anyone but herself. It’s an exploration of power of all kinds, because Belle is at a point in her life where she’s beginning to explore that level of philosophy and practical application for herself, and in a position to see power being used and abused all around her. Rumple’s offered her a position where she’s free to reject boundaries, but she’s hugely empathetic to the people who are stuck in other lives. She’s a strong and intuitive observer. If you write about an assortment of women living in a male-dominated, medieval-esque society, today’s real-world feminist issues and themes are bound to come up as a natural consequence of the subject matter.

I don’t have a feminist soapbox, but I do think we need to write more stories about well-fleshed-out women, as well as demanding that media makers do the same. They don’t have to be idealised people to be worth exploring - powerful, emancipated, strong, capable; they just need to be explored fully as warts-n-all women, depicted with honesty. That’s not to shoehorn in our own agenda, not to lecture or instruct the audience, not to make a point or a statement about anything we observe - just to say “wow, that character is terrific, I must explore her life in intricate and loving detail, because she feels real to me’. Let the character’s statements make themselves, through their experiences, whoever they are and wherever they happen to land on the gender spectrum. That’s what I do, anyway.