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Topic : Re: Is it bad to have no gender variety? The majority of stories, movies, shows, comics, and other media I've read or seen have a pretty even split between men and women, and that's fine, I don't - selfpublishingguru.com

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You have to think about why you have the characters be female. There is a premise in writing known as Chekhov's Gun, where every detail mentioned must be important and feature resolution. This can be in the following:

Is this detail relevant to the overarching story?
Is this detail needed to advance characters and their motivations?
Is this detail necessary to show the thematic and allegorical elements of the story and it's world?

If whatever detail you want to put in won't be used in that way, then it's probably not important to include. If you are worried about being labeled as something because of a detail, and you can't deal with the potential pressure of that, then leave it unspecified. I've heard it said that anime characters don't look Japanese when animated because it's implied based on the audience, so they don't have to specify. Using the same logic, unless it is critical to the story, characters, or themes, leave details and such unspecified.

Not to write for you, but here are some examples where it wouldn't be sexist to include sex as part of the characterization:

Plot: Lord of the Flies. While the story itself is about the conflict between savagery and rules, the story focuses around young, impulsive boys because it's highly unlikely for the same behavior to occur in a group of 40-50-something women.
Characterization: Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. Gender is used as both a plot device and helps define characters and their limits to power. Male characters tend to be stronger and more destructive, especially the antagonist and protagonist, with the caveat that they are also much more impulsive. There's a sub-class of human that is actually killed at birth if they are male because they are too impulsive for the power they wield. Women, while not possessing as much depth to their strength, tend to have a larger breadth to their power and think of outside-the-box methods to use it. The key to why it doesn't come off as cliché when reading it (since I know it sounds like typical fantasy tropes) is that the characters are more than their gender, and while many of them behave typical based on that, it's the other experiences that either reinforce or destroy that baseline notion.
Themes: I wasn't able to find something specific, but this also has to do with your worldbuilding. Gender is traditionally used to show power disparity, as are elements like physical size, aura, and personality traits. So, go to town and make a whole, tightly-knit well-defined universe, then place your story inside of it.

Examples of what not to do:

Shoe-horn female characters in to satisfy a quota. Don't shoehorn any kind of characters into your story unless it makes sense, that's just common practice. I don't know about what archetypes/tropes your characters are falling into, but since you are writing a story that happens to have 80% female characters, and not a story for the purpose of having 80% female characters, you should be fine.
Make you characters behave in a way that is contrary to their characterization just to be different or challenge the norms in writing. Going back to Lord of the Flies, it wouldn't make sense for hormonal, impulsive, boys that have just been stranded on an island with no supervision to create a functioning, technologically advanced society where they all get along perfectly fine. If you have characters that need to behave a certain way at a certain time, but not other times, build in some form of trauma (the easiest way) that would make them behave that way. As an example, Rising of the Shield Hero features a young heroine who's parents were killed by a three-headed dog. So, despite wanting to help her friend and doing everything up to that point to do so, she runs and hides after being attacked by a two-headed dog. She fights only after realizing that by fighting, she can prevent more kids from losing their parents like she did.
Don't throw away the themes for the sake of the story you want to tell. Instead, build your story around the themes. For example, Sword Art Online is built around the premise that their is little to no difference between a well-done virtual world and the real one. It even goes so far as "if you die in the game, you die in real life." These stakes get thrown out immediately after you find the plot armor. the SAO: ALTERNATIVE OVA is better at this since it's a character study more than an action show, so you can look to that for done right/done wrong with the same premise

While those aren't the only examples, they were the first ones I though of while writing this.

TL;DR: If you aren't going to use a detail, leave it to the audience's discretion to determine what the characters are/aren't. If you are going to use the detail, incorporate it organically and use it to forward the story arc, character arcs, or thematic arc of the story.


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