I’ve been thinking about how portal fantasies - you know, where a character travels through some sort of portal into a fantasy world - often have girls as their main characters. Alice falls down the rabbit hole, Dorothy gets tornadoed to Oz, Coraline crawls through the secret door to the Other World, Lucy is the first Pevensie to go through the wardrobe, Wendy specifically is invited to accompany Peter to Neverland.

I know this is r/books but this trend seems to extend to movies too. Pan’s Labyrinth, Spirited Away, and Labyrinth all have girl protagonists. I’m having a hard time even thinking of boys in portal fantasies. Bastian (Neverending Story) is one, although the movie version doesn’t really show him portaling until the sequels. I guess The Pagemaster (1994 movie that maybe just rips off Neverending Story?) could count. And the other Pevensies and Darlings accompany their sisters through the portals, but they’re secondary to the girls.

I wondered if anyone here had any theories about why portals seem to draw in so many girls. I have some of my own but I’m curious what others think.

  • packedsuitcase@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    One of my favourite series is a series of portal (and reverse portal) fantasies, and the author (Seanan McGuire) actually addresses this specifically in Every Heart A Doorway:

    Boys are “too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

    In general, I agree with the poster who said that it’s because women have more in general that they need to escape. But when I read this passage it stuck with me, because it named a trend I hadn’t noticed until then.