Lady Business

There are Blyton books where a tomboy girl rides a horse to school! And ones where a girl rides horses in the circus. And there's the 'who is the best tomboy out there' contest in later books of Famous Five, which is both soo odd and sooo cool. I'm just not sure how well the writing would hold up...

Oh and Reese, it's one line, quite early on. I just saw it as I was adding in quotes and...it had been one of those weeks you know, where the dominant narrative appears too unthinkingly dominant all around you.

As for MPD I really think it's the dominant adherence to the dominant narrative and the 'dude learns a lesson from something that has rather serious implications for another' aspects of that trope that are bothersome, but as you so wisely said they're not the full sum of that trope. Like take 'Looking For Alaska', there's the traditional dude/girl split and the Miles defiantely learns and grows a lot, as a result of Alaska being unstable and the tragedy that follows. But there's also a whole lot more to that story and a whole lot else to Alaska. She's a person, not just a lesson, or a development tool for young dudes. And while I don't think you can discount her tragic lesson teaching part, it seems so sad to write her off as just that.

And I guess there's an element of individual reader judgement. Like sometimes the dominant narrative is just too much in that particular book and everything goes out the window with it. Sometimes it's something you can compartmentalise and examine, without getting rid of everything else. I'm not very good at compartmentalising within specific character tropes, rather than just within wider narratives, but your post made me want to try harder with my analysis.

Also oo, oo interesting 'I suspect Rosoff was saying something very specific about how that kind of idealisation is not actually gender-dependent but something that happens between humans.'