InsaneJournal

Now, to explain:  In a lot of ways, Elf Queen of Shannara qualifies as being my first real fantasy novel.  I'd read LOTR at the time(I first read Narnia a year or two later) but it didn't completely register.  At that first reading, the only characters who really registered for me were Eowyn, Boromir and Faramir.  The problem should be obvious.  (Rereading it years later just before the movies, I appreciated the series and other characters a lot more.)  I saw EQoS at the store and bought it, and I loved it and completely fell for the lead, Wren.  Of course, since it was book 3 of the series(I was 12[if very, very close to 13]!  I didn't realize they could be series without numbers on the sides!) I was a little confused.  But then I went back and read the rest of the series, and realized that what I had thought were the secondary heroes were actually the main heroes, and that while Wren was still a main character, she was the most minor of the main heroes.  In the end, the only other one I really fell for was Walker Boh(hello, penchant for anti-social grumps who do the right thing anyway!)

So I read the rest of the Shannara books, and I kept reading them until recently, long after I realized Brooks really wasn't that great an author, and really only wrote Tolkein knockoffs about the Ohmsford farmboys saving the world every few generations.  Aside from Wren and Walker, a few of the Creel and Leah sidekicks were pretty cool, and Brin had a lot of potential, but her book ended up mostly being about her brother's inferiority complex.  The only other character of his that I really fell for was Grianne, who I loved almost as much as Wren.  I recently learned what happens to Grianne and now the only Terry Brooks books I own is the Talismans of Shannara series, and only for Wren and Walker.  We will speak no further of Grianne, unless you want wrath.

But as I was reading along, I came to a realization:  All Brooks really cared about was his Ohmsford farmboys, none of whom are anything remotely special.  Sure, they were ok enough, but I barely remember any of them.  The good characters he created along the way seem to be accidents, aside from Walker.  Then came The Realization:  he didn't care one way or the other about Wren.  Outside of EQoS, he seemed to forget about her half the time, and despite the fact that SHE REDISCOVERED AN ENTIRE RACE AND WAS THE GREATEST RULER THEY EVER HAD, he could barely be bothered to mention her after that.  Why?  Because she was a girl, and not genetically an Ohmsford.  and if you aren't an Ohmsford farmboy, you're second class in Brooks's world.

Of course, I've encountered other, more appreciated, and yes, even better versions of Wren's character type, but Wren was THE FIRST, and so she's always had a special place in my heart.

Jubilee is a little different, because loving her hit me and hit me hard, partly for very personal reasons.  Many of you know this and many don't, but to keep a long story short:  When I was 12, my mother was hit by a car while out walking with my father.  She wasn't expected to live out the night, and when she did, they didn't know  if she'd ever come out of the coma, and they wouldn't know how much brain damaged she'd suffered until she did.  She came out of the coma not long after, and some months later, had recovered enough to come home, though very different.  During this time, my father decided new hobbies would be good for my younger brother and I, and since we liked the X-Men cartoon and had liked comics himself when he was our age, he decided on that one.  (My brother decided he was too cool for comics when we were teens, BTW.)  And there was Jubilee.  An orphan girl, just a little older than me(and then when I was her age, she got deaged...)  What stuck out to me about Jubilee was that she had tons of angst, but always suppressed it, at least partly so people wouldn't worry about her.

(And I will now digress a little bit for a pet peeve.  When a male character has a lot of angst, but represses it and tries to be cheerful and helpful, he's called an angsty woobie.  When a female character does that, she's called boring.  When a male character wears his angst on his sleeve and everyone notices it, he's called an angsty woobie.  When a female character does it, she's called a whiner.)

(Back to the point.)

But beyond that, Jubilee wasn't perfect, she wasn't superpowerful, she was an outcast by virtue of being young in a place where she was surrounded by adults who cared about her, but most of whom didn't have time to really pay attention to her.  All the other teen heroes were superpowerful and had tons of friends and were on teams with other teens, or fought solo.  Jubilee...wasn't.  She just felt wonderfully...normal, to me.  And then a couple years later, I discovered the internet, and learned that most people disliked her, found her dull, or didn't want to bother with her, primarily because she had the gall to not be Kitty Pryde, a character she has absolutely zero personality traits in common with.  Both the youngest X-Man?  Yes.  Both Wolverine's sidekick?  Yes.  But as characters they weren't remotely alike, and their relationships with both Wolverine and the X-Men as a whole weren't remotely alike.

And there you have it.  The girl unappreciated, ignored, and treated as being less important because she's a girl, and the girl unappreciated, ignored, treated as being less important, and yes, hated, for not being another character.  Hello much of the last 15 years of my life.