#surely the number of aroace female science nerds who publish fiction isn't THAT low is it?

[ectojester]

Why did Jazz kiss Svoboda at the end? Did that feel completely out of left field for anyone else?

Him kissing her made some sense, he had dropped enough innuendos at that point to make his interest in her believable enough, but at no point in the book did she seem to express any mutual attraction to him. Her behavior around him seemed more like she had completely slotted him in the "friend" category (completely forgetting that she was wearing nothing but one of his shirts when he stared at her? C'mon.) Surely this isn't just me right? It seemed like she considered him a friend. She expressed disgust at the idea of having sex with him or kissing him multiple times. A spur of the moment "I didn't kill hundreds of people" kiss, sure, maybe, but the non-bet at the end implied that they hooked up after the book ended.

Is it because there's some unspoken rule where female protagonists aren't allowed to be single at the end of a book unless its in widowhood? Is it because Jazz (for some reason) has an unfounded reputation of promiscuity and someone (the author, the publsiher, idk) felt her victory would not be complete without a shag? Is it because one of those people felt Svoboda needed to be rewarded for being a good friend to a pretty woman? Was it a bad way of conveying that she had trauma with her previous groomer boyfriend that led to an inablility to maintain platonic relationships with men? I am so confused, why did that happen?

Hopefully it's not just me, because at no point could I have predicted that she would ever see Svoboda as a sexual prospect, let alone actually persue him. Lowkey disappointed that the book called Artemis is about a smart, independent woman who does not actually appear to have any female friends and does, in fact, have an apparently romantic subplot, unlike Weir's books about men :/

And while we're on that, Jazz appears to only have three relationships (a stretch, more like vague acquaintances) with other women in the entire book, and two of them are antagonistic. We don't even hear about any female friends from work, childhood, or even the bar she frequents, but we do hear about her previous boyfriends. This books technically passed the Bechdel test with Jazz and Ngugi talking about ZAFO, but man, it sure doesn't feel like it

#artemis andy weir #artemis #someone please help me understand #there were other parts of the book that i really didnt like but i can get into that later #overall it WAS an entertaining read but after the PHM i guess i just expected more #can someone PLEASE introduce me to good scifi with well written female characters that AREN'T romance novels? #is that really too much to ask?? #surely the number of aroace female science nerds who publish fiction isn't THAT low is it? #surely theres at least one male scifi author who can write women convincingly right???