What Are The Best Barbarian Lady Characters In Fantasy Books?

Yuri and Aya are my new book boyfriend/girlfriend. I really like them because Yuri is this really gentle and dominant person and Aya is just so eager to please and vulnerable. I haven’t read many couples in this genre who are so fully realized and have desires that go beyond just sex. I can really see how their relationship would linger with you even while you’re reading their story and make for a really great and relatable fantasy.

What is interesting to note is that this type of character is depicted differently in various sub-genres. In Mafia dark romance novels the strong heroine is either part of the mafia family or has been brought into the fold and becomes very powerful as she becomes entrenched in the business of the main character. Examples of this would be novels like ‘Bound by Honor’ by Cora Reilly in which our heroine is a very strong character from the start who is part of the infamous Chicago Outfit. In Bully novels the strength of the heroine is in her ability to withstand the torture of her boyfriend(s) and survive without losing her spirit. The strong heroine in these types of novels also may play out the role of revenge for her tormented past. Science Fiction or Alien dark romance novels are also filled with strong female protagonists. In these stories the strength of the heroine is in her ability to be clever, resourceful and to make ends meet in order to survive in a foreign, even hostile environment. What does not work for these types of novels is for the female lead to be a blank slate. She needs to be brought to life and be more than the object of the male protagonist’s affections in order to be deemed highly recommended by readers and authors alike. The setting and context of the novel may change, but the one non-negotiable element of these dark novels is the strong heroine who is more than just a one dimensional character.

I wanted more of the same urgent, high-stakes energy after finishing that game, and so far The Wandering Inn is delivering best. It’s not a survival game, but it captures the sense of being totally out of one’s depth in a fantasy world rather well. The LitRPG elements are scary in a good way. The system is not a help, but rather a looming threat which the characters have to work around using whatever power they can scrape together. The book is a huge investment of time, but it pays off in terms of tension, and that tension comes from a place of great vulnerability. The protagonist is not vastly overpowered for her world, and she is struggling to survive in a world that is novelty-driven. That struggle, and the depth and occasional horror of the world she lives in, is what makes this book comparable to the game I just finished. So while The Wandering Inn is not a survival game, it does have a similar focus of trying to survive in an often hostile world, as well as community building, and has a similar emotional core to a underdog overcoming impossible odds with sheer determination and grit.

If you like Sanderson's work, some other good choices for authors are Brent Weeks, Brian McClellan, and Will Wight. Also Charlie Holmberg, if your tastes are slightly more feminine.

I’ve seen tons of people online wax poetic about how much they love fanfiction for really popular fantasy novels, and honestly I can see why. For one, the A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) fandom is HUGEnormous, and so there are thousands of stories about Daenerys and Jon Snow, as well as all sorts of original character/dragon rider pairings. But most particularly, within that huge and dedicated fanbase, there are also tons of really passionately-written novel-length fics that follow the many, many characters in the series through all sorts of scenarios, not least of which is the huge pool of political marriage tropes. I went to Archive of Our Own and searched for the tag “Arranged Marriage” within the A Song of Ice and Fire category, and oh. My. God. There are some seriously, seriously well-written novels there. These writers are operating completely within the parameters of the existing story, and thus are able to be totally immersed in the world and its politics, to craft scenarios that feel completely natural to the characters and the universe in which they reside. And the best part? It’s free. You can read them for yourself, and can see for yourself the incredible amounts of passion and love that the writers have put into these stories.

Oh, the novels of Renaissance romance are just so beautifully, magically crafted to contain so much passion and politics and poetry. One of my absolute favorites of all time has to be The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, which, yes, is rather outside the mainstream of typical romance novels in being very dark indeed. Yet it is such an utterly fascinating and so very intense novel, and this particularly in terms of its exploration of the power of love. Written as it was by a playwright (of another epoch), the novel offers a powerful sense of drama, and remains as forceful and as moving as ever. As for arcadian romance, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit by John Lyly is another absolute treasure, above all for the dialogues which are so full of wit and of sparkle. For a more grounded exploration of the tortured conflicting feelings of love, however, it would be hard to think of anything better than Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. The rather cardboard characters in this sprawling, rather idealized novel of a half-dozen or so love stories all involving rather knight-like shepherds are so beautifully and imperiously mapped out against the backdrop of a completely fictional idyllic rural context, with all their conversations consisting of the sharpest and wisest repartee, and their glances at each other swimming with hidden meanings. Another different approach to the romance novel of the Renaissance era is found in ‘Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit’ by John Lyly. Most readers would consider it to be outside the genre of romance yet there are many great dialogues regarding the complexities of love and friendship. For something totally different, maybe one of the most celebrated poems of the Renaissance era would be ‘The Faerie Queene’ by Edmund Spenser. Written as an allegorical romance featuring knights, damsels, enさ chantresses and fantastical quests, it is a magnificent read with lots of romance woven throughout the very moral tales of the imaginary land of Faerie. Yes, it is written in a very rich and dense language but after a while you can fall into its rhythm and be transported by a mighty wave of beautiful poetry. I love Renaissance romances, including their imperfections. The great love stories of the past are not as neat as modern tales with happy endings. Rather, they are fraught with the agony and politics of love and contain many unpredictable human interactions. Every time I return to a book I have read before, I discover something new about the human experience and the time period in which the author lived.

Wow! Just listing out those titles makes me want to go watch them all! So if you’re looking for something intimate and real, I recommend starting with The Duke of Burgundy, followed by The Handmaiden, a beautiful and twisty thriller. Then there’s Gone Girl, a classic psychological thriller and a big hit. Last but not least, there’s The Love Witch, a campy and stylized retro adventure. The 4 main styles of erotic cinema are The Heartfelt, The Cinematic, The Popular, and The Quirky. So depending on which of these styles resonates with you the most, you can then go and search for more examples of that style within The Heartfelt, etc. Many great films of this nature are not in English and can be found with subtitles. Not every category has 100 great films, so even if a film does not completely fill out every category listed above, it can still be worth watching for that one strong element in relation to the film’s other primary purposes.

My favorite “bad guy” would have to be the mirror-world version of himself from a failed timeline. This entity was born of endless loss and the bliest attitude, making it the ultimate failure state. Fighting himself in all senses of the word was really the peak of this story for me.

I’ve quietly been adding every single title from this thread to my ‘Plan to Read’ list on Anilist. Thanks so much for the great discussion – my weekends are now booked for the foreseeable future.

What about classic horror-fantasy? Clive Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart is very short but is extremely potent in its exploration of pleasure and pain and beings from beyond the dimensions of human experience. In fact most of his work, including the several Books of Blood is very much horror-fantasy of a very mythic and very physical kind. There’s a lot of dark fantasy there too. Looking at the root of the genre, prior to the category of grimdark, will often turn up the rawest material. Those stories of old were attempting to unsettle the reader or to awe them, much like Miura did with his work.