Marie Lu’s works often have female protagonists with more masculine based characteristics and male protagonists with more feminine based characteristics. Ultimately illustrating Marie Lu’s take on gender nonconformity. The cultural norm surrounding gender is that females should be feminine and males should be masculine. The use of a gender nonconformity in Lu’s works serves to convey that the woman can have masculine traits and that men can have feminine traits; Expanding character depth.
In the novel “Legend”, Marie Lu establishes a gender non-conformitive approach through the protagonists June Iparis and Day Wing. To begin, Lu skillfully highlights the gender nonconformity of June Iparis through her masculine femininity. June Iparis holds a lot of traits that would be considered masculine such as her explosive temper, her intelligence, and her logic and deduction skills. Specific examples of these show on page when her intelligence through her ability to find the cause of her Dean Secretary's injury, saying,"" On page when Lu shows Junes logic and deduction skills by June's deductions of Day.
To continue, Lu skillfully highlights the gender nonconformity of Day Wing through his feminine masculinity and emotionalism. Additionally Lu shows Day’s femininity through his description as "beautiful" rather than typical ways of describing a man such as handsome. Lu also shows Day’s emotionalism through descriptions from Life After Legend, a short story about the events in the epilogue of Champion from Day’s perspective in which Day is very sentimental and emotional towards June.
A similar message is conveyed in Lu’s novel “Warcross” In which main characters Emika and Hideo represent Marie Lu’s gender non-conformitive approach to writing characters. With Emika being a skilled hacker and bounty hunter presenting very traditionally masculine associated qualities and skills such as determination, strength, independency, agility, and combat skills. While Hideo presents some masculine presenting traits such as intelligence, He presents more feminine based traits such as his sensitivity, empathy, creativity, and a nurturing nature.