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.
Mostly because they’re all in a lineage that really kicked off with Alice. Almost all of the texts mentioned have conscious intertextual cues to Carroll’s work.
Which is interesting because Carroll was inspired by MacDonald’s Phantastes (male protagonist) to write his book
The male equivalent would be A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but you know what, I can’t think of what other big stories that inspired, though I remember reading that it was a very influential book at the time.
Gregor the Overlander is similar in concept.
The Dragon and the George is an older book with a male protagonist. Also Magic Kingdom for Sale by Terry Brooks.
Sold
There have been a fairly large number of similar stories, though they are largely confined to the SF/Military Fiction/Historical Fiction/Alternate History sphere (and there’s a heck of a lot of overlap between those fandoms). Off the top of my head, the following are similar in premise:
“Lest Darkness Fall,” by L. Sprague de Camp, wherein an archaeologist is sent back to Italy in the 6th century;
“The Man who Came Early,” by Poul Anderson–a deconstruction of these, since the engineer who goes back to viking times in Iceland is unable to actually make any of his stories a reality;
The 163x series, by the late Eric Flint, wherein a whole town is sent back;
The entire “popadanyets” genre in Eastern Europe, primarily Muscovy but to a lesser extent known in other Slavic countries. There are lots and lots of books in this genre, but the general gist of most of them is “modern or Soviet military formation is sent back in time to a famous historical event (literally any time is possible–I’ve seen book covers with tanks rolling against Egyptian chariots), kicks lots of ass.” Also has a fantasy variant where “modern or Soviet military formation goes to world of elves and magic, kicks lots of ass.”
This reminds me of the existence of Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, a portal fantasy which is also the source of the Law versus Chaos idea in DnD and Michael Moorcock.
A Kid in King Arthur’s Court