Tropes and Cliches

World Building: Gender Roles.

Y'all though I won't talk about this. didn't you?

What are gender roles? Well, it's something society defines. So depending on where you live, it will vary a bit. So this will be both a history lesson and discussion, because it's a lot more common than you think, it's just not something you talk about.

So to begin, let's start with the history of gender roles. There is no right answer when it comes to when it come to be. Why? Well according to my history teacher, when you live in a group of about 40 people( more or less) everyone need to work. At some point in time women stayed at camp while men hunted. Why is this, you wonder? Well, pregnancy. At some point in time they realize you'd become a hazard of some sort, so that happened. It didn't really become full blown gender roles until after civilization become more established in the Neolithic era, ( rough 6,000-2,000 BCE[side note: I use BCE or before common era  and CE or common era, as it was taught to me for the longest  so if you see be go back and forth with this and BC/AD, please bare with me]). Now the actual roles will vary for many reasons, one being where you're at.
For most cultures in the world women had little say in what does on in their community. Now when you get to places in Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas this changes. Why is this? Well, we have a lot of factors at play. How the work is divided( if they were even allowed to work outside the home), religion( and that clusterfuck of complications), and the overall the culture itself. So what does that have to do with stuff like movies and video games... let's take a dive into that.
So in an earlier chapter I spoke of the Five Man Band. So you have the Big Guy aka the Tank of the group. Normally this role is filled by a male character, but it's possible for the Tank to be a girl. Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender is the perfect example of this. She's very powerful as she was the one who created metalbending....and SHE"S BLIND ( more on that later). What does that have to do with gender roles? Well going back to the Tank being a girl, while uncommon, it's possible. When it comes to writing female Tanks, people tend to take male Tanks and rewrite them as girls, which can work...until they some dumb shit like "Stop acting like a girl". With Toph, she's a Tank that can insult you in everyway imaginable. 

Let's look at Avatar The Last Airbender a little more and The Legend of Korra. In ATLA, we are first introduced to gender roles in the very first episodes and this continued for a while. When we first meet the Kyoshi Warriors, Sokka was shocked because they're an all female group. Avatar Kyoshi trained a group of women to protect themselves from rough men, left and came back to properly teach them, using many weapons with the main one being her signature metal fans. In the Water Tribes, specifically the Northern Tribe,  those who could waterbend were divided. Women were healers while men fought. It wasn't until Katara came and challenged this that anything changed. Because let's be real, if I was on the battlefield a healer would be great but they're all women and the women had to stay home. In Legend of Korra, we don't really get this,but in season 3, Mako and Bolin's grandmother commented that Korra was "very muscular for a woman". It speaks volumes on what she thought what a woman was supposed to be like.

We see gender roles in media as a reflection of where they take place at or supposed to take place. ATLA and LOK take place in a world influenced by East Asian, Oceania, and Artic/Subartic Native culture, so it's a reflection of that. But how? Well let's look back at the Legend of Korra as that's a bit simpler to explain. Every culture has an ideal man and woman, and I'll even share a quick video from the "100 Years of Beauty" series. With ATLA it's a bit more complicated. The Water Tribe draws inspiration from the Inuit-Yupik culture. Within it, men hunt and women stayed home and prepared the meat and skin from that hunt. They're culture has this thing about disobedient/ headstrong women ending up like Sedna who controls all the creatures they eat, because she ran off with a stranger who was a birdman, and her father tried to save her but couldn't so he cut off her fingers( which became the seals and other creatures) and she became this half seal goddess or as most white like to equate, a mermaid. ( I say this because a lot of writing that involves looking at another culture and their cosmology/theology/mythology ( just pick one) they tend to try to compare it with the Christianized world they're from due to the fact that not everything translate well when it's being explained...I'll explain it more in another chapter). So with logic, every nation had ideal men and women and beauty standards. 

Let's move on to something non-ATLA/LOK related and look into the world of Assassin's Creed. The main complaint from many people is that there weren't a lot of female assassins...and then they got Aveline de Grandpre, and complained about that( probably because she's a woman of color but let's just ignore that). And then we gor Evie Fryer, followed by Amunet aka Aya who founded the Brotherhood, Kassandra, and possibly Eivor ( not sure if they're male or female canonically). But let's fall back to that complaint. Now there's nothing saying females could not become assassins as you could recruit females. My thing is that who is permitted is based on where they're at and the roles they play. A female could very well become an assassin but could play the role of courtesan or a nun...and then kill a target. 

What does any of this have with writing and world building? A lot of things. For starters, how one is treated based one's gender is a thing. Think about. In a city where one gender is the only ones allowed to learn, how would that shape your character(s)? Because there are some places like that now. What kind of stuff were they taught? What are their values ?

Historically speaking, there are cultures around the world where men and woman had equal power with in their community. In some cultures family names comes from one family but political affiliation comes from the other.

In other words....RESEARCH!!!! That will help in the long run. And don't just use the internet. Ask people of the community you want to use as inspiration as they can tell you what you need to know if you ask nicely.