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A very long post about female characters.
So between mainlining half the MSPA forums and watching old kid's shows with my brother, I've been thinking a lot about characters.
A while back I downloaded Beast Wars, which I have fond memories of, and wanted my brother to watch while he's still young enough to appreciate it without the aid of nostalgia. Beast Wars has one female character, Blackarachnia (one other female character exists for a short while, but "exists" is about the limits of her characterization). Anyway, she's my favorite character in it.
Blackarachnia spends a good chunk of the series on the bad guy side, which like most of the bad guys means "on her own side" half the time. She's not particularly well handled, tending to get portrayed as weaker than the others overall (exact powers vary wildly among all characters by episode), but she's intelligent and fun. She occasionally flirts with male characters on either side for her own advantage and this is actually treated pretty neutrally - female characters being defined by sexuality is not really the most progressive thing ever, but at least it's not condemned and actually works. And the flirting is during the non-firefight bits - in the fights they shoot at each other, rather than her being pathetic and having to rely on that to protect her.
Anyway, another new character is introduced, Silverbolt, who crushes on her more consistently than the other characters, and they are adorable. Bear in mind my usual response to romance in media is nuke from orbit. Let me sum up their relationship:
Silverbolt: I like you.
Blackarachnia: I can use this.
Silverbolt: The fact you are letting me help you means you like me, right?
Blackarachnia: You just keep telling yourself that.
Silverbolt: <3
Blackarachnia: Hey, go steal this stuff for me.
Silverbolt: Now do you like me?
Blackarachnia: Also, go steal this for me.
Silverbolt: Now do you like me?
Blackarachnia: Yeah, you're cute.
Silverbolt: :D
Blackarachnia: Now go steal this for me.
The thing is, this is probably not the quite the intended reading. Beast Wars writing is pretty sloppy and has periodic OOC moments, so you sort of have to pick which collection of behaviors you like best for the character. (And Silverbolt's whole "no she is a lady and must not be harmed" bit is...problematic, and you sort of have to deliberately rationalize that away as him having a crush on her particular and using that as an excuse) She's got enough positive points that I like what happens most of the time and blame the writers for occasional twists I disliked.
She has a lot of terrible issues as a character - like I said, she's generally treated as one of the weakest characters and spends most of the show getting bossed around by other male characters, even if she does constantly turn on them. (And Silverbolt is consistently able to get the drop on her, with a number of scenes where he's grabbed her. You can interpret this as "Blackarachnia knows he's just going to monologue about how awesome being good is and isn't treating this as a fight", but that's not really backed up by body language, which seems at best pretty irritated by the turn of events. And is in fact basically the same as her body language all the other times she's grabbed and held close to male characters which happens a hell of a lot and comes with rapey undertones.) But while she's defined based on her sexuality and physically weak, the show never makes a point of condemning any of this (even the skeevy grabbing never came off as "because she is a slutty tease" that I noticed), and although she's often the weaker combatant this is at least treated as her being on the weaker end of the scale rather than being a damsel in distress. Which is a lot of qualifications, but I still really like her.
Also, there's this whole exchange where he's all "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE JOIN US WE HAVE COOKIES AND I LOVE YOU" and she's all "NO GO AWAY" and he's all "YOU DON'T REALLY MEAN THAT!" so she aims a gun at him, at which point he's sure she won't shoot, so she shoots him, which I had pretty much waited my whole life to see.
But the thing about female characters like this is that I generally want them to get screen time because yay favorite character, but assume sooner or later they're going to be ruined because what I like about them is mostly accidental. Blackarachnia manages to just barely avert this by dint of the show ending, and her handling during the last period of the show already showed ominous signs. The generally reviled next series of Beast Machines pretty much confirms this. I don't even need to get into actual characterization here, it can be summed up by saying that while other characters had different sounds for rage/attacking/shock, she just had one, girly screaming.
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I went to see How to Train Your Dragon, which I'd been intending to ignore. To understand where I'm going with this, let me recount the first time I saw a trailer for this:
CGI...so another story about A Boy, then. I wonder if women won't exist this time or if they'll be the stupid girlfriend?
Ten seconds later: It's stupid girlfriend.
It's really that predictable.
Yes, the dragon was great, Hiccup was entirely tolerable, everything involving actual naturalistic study was wonder - OH GOD IT'S THAT STUPID GIRL AGAIN.
My mother raised the argument that it wasn't that bad because one of the twins was also a girl, which is kind of a step up from only one girl, which is the sort of tokenistic attitude that is part of the problem.
I absolutely loathed her. She didn't really deserve my resentment because she was an entirely passable character for the first half of the movie, and isn't a character for the second half, but every time she showed up I wondered when her abilities would become meaningless, which ruined any chance I had of enjoying it. See, if a female character displays skill, either the male character will surpass her or that skill will turn out to be unimportant. Since fighting dragons turned out not to be important, I correctly guessed that her being great at it would end up being completely irrelevant.
There's an interesting sort of meta to her building resentment - no matter how hard she works the main character keeps surpassing her (I want to say by cheating. It's really a matter of him doing things differently, and I am normally all in favor of characters figuring out a different way of doing things, but - they're being judged on one ability that he never gains and uses a cheat to avoid and no one ever even acknowledges this), so finally she follows him to figure it out. She's a much better fighter than he is, but she still loses because he has a dragon, and then she loses all personal agency to only care about him. (To not even get into how Hiccup only seems interested in her because she's hot. But how dare bitches not care about him for his inner brilliance.)
If the story hadn't had a girl, you could treat Hiccup's gender as irrelevant. Every time she appears on screen she reminded me this wasn't true. I resent the hell out of this. I resent it more because I know I'm supposed to be grateful that she got to be a good fighter, even if it's only because the movie made sure that being a good fighter was completely fucking irrelevant.
It might seem unfair to treat one female character as reflecting all women ever in that work, until you recall that generally they're the only women in the work. Hiccup's mother is dead and doesn't even get a flashback - despite the fact that the movie is trying to portray a gender-equal culture, OBVIOUSLY his badass parent is a guy and OBVIOUSLY the blacksmith/dragon-fighting teacher is a guy. The kids themselves are "gender balanced" in the sense that there are two girls out of six, one of whom is there as half a twin set. There's also some generic old wise woman and women scattered throughout the crowd scenes. The twin is probably the best portrayed of the lot, since her gender is mostly irrelevant, yet to call her a side character would be an insult to side characters.
I'd actually have liked it better if things hadn't been gender neutral, because it's much easier to say "so the Vikings are sexist, no girls" than "so everything is equal, it just naturally works out this way".
Incidentally, the opening to the movie had a bunch of trailers, including some CGI owls. The owl speaking had a female voice! OMG AN ACTUAL FEMALE PROTAGON...okay, now she seems to have vanished and there are a lot of male voices. Consultation with my brother established that the original book had a mixed group of protagonists, ie, was going to end up being about boys again.
Then I watched that. And while it wasn't as awful with female characters as How To Train Your Dragon, it was still very much a Movie About Boys. The main conflict is between the main character and his brother. Their sister was just there for them to sell out/rescue as determined by their relative morality scores. The old legendary fight is between two guy owls. The tiny owl girl is portrayed okay in and of itself, but it's still tiny owl girl who needs protecting by braver boy owl. Basically it would have been fine had she not been the only main female character, but she was. When the evil female owl showed up I thought she looked cool, but immediately guessed a) she would not be in charge b) she'd be in a relationship or married to the guy who's actually in charge c) she'd be built up as scary but not actually do much in the final fight. I was right about all of that except c, she turns out to fail in every single fight scene rather than just the final one and doesn't even get the level of armor the grunts do.
And you know there's the whole female-power-is-evil-and-corrupting thing, and she's so evilly seductive, unlike the good owls who also have a guy in charge, but he makes the decisions himself instead of giving all the power to his wife. No, his wife knows her place.
And of course the band of main characters becomes boy protagonist, tiny girl, boy owl, boy owl, ineffectual female nurse snake who really served no purpose. Because "girl" is one of the set deviations from the norm, so any other character who has a different quirk has to be male.
That said it was just typical gender stuff and not the near total exclusion I've come to expect from CGI, so it's a pretty big improvement. Basically it was close enough I could pretend the gender balance was coincidental and rewrite in my head that the evil female owl was actually a lot stronger as befitted her awesomeness and just having a very very very long string of bad luck.
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We also watched Gargoyles a while back, which had the whole good/evil female thing going on. What's really frustrating there is that both characters are actually really cool...but the evil one just randomly does stupid stuff, or worse, she's right and everyone insists she's not anyway. In summary:
Her: The humans just hate us more when we help them and we're not safe living with them.
Him: I'm sure they'll realize we're friends soon.
Her: They just attacked us!
Him: Stop! We have to be nice so they'll be our friends!
(Humans kill their whole group except a handful who hid. She joins up with the remaining groups, who are slowly whittled down until there's only one left, and finally everyone but her is dead.)
A thousand years later:
Her: So our whole species save your timedisplaced group and me is dead. Because humans killed them.
Him: I'm sure they'll realize we're friends soon.
Her: EVERYONE IS DEAD.
Him: Any day now.
Her: DEAD.
Him: I can't wait to be friends with humans!
In case anyone was confused about the fact she's wrong and evil, her eyes glow red when she's mad while everyone else's glows white. And her name is Demona. Subtle.
You could maybe argue this is a function of it being a kid's show, but the main male villain is pretty awesome, while half her time is spent being jealous her boyfriend's rejected her. We stopped watching a bit after when she falls in love with the boyfriend's clone who's secretly by which I mean pretty transparently using her and then trying to get her killed but she's too stupid to realize because she's ~in love~. There's also this infuriating implication that she's sort of to blame for the gargoyles dying out - it's kind of like, you know how in shows, when the main character group meets up with some other group sometimes there will be a female leader to show that the world is gender equal and girls can totally be in charge, only of course things have gone worse for that group to show how the protagonists are so awesome/lucky, so it comes off as women all suck as leaders?
Yeah, the fact the only time we see gargoyles have a female leader is when they're practically extinct and she's pretty much in charge because no one else could be, and the rest of the group is weirdly bitchy to her and acting like she's not a respected leader, and the overall feel is she's just not doing as good a job as a real male leader would. She's trying to keep them alive in the face of incredible adversity and instead the narrative seems to be saying she's incompetent, I guess because otherwise it'd make the main character leader guy seem less awesome.
It also gets into the whole Madonna/Whore thing, because there's one good human female character, who evil!ex!gargoyle spends a disturbing amount of time targeting personally, and they're both kind of fighting over the leader gargoyle guy. So basically there's the Good Girl and the Evil Bitch. Also, as is custom, the good girl is the weaker normal one. She's more a badass normal than damsel in distress, but she's still normal and needing saving a lot. (Later there's distressingly sueish incompetent daughter girl too, but she's part of a general clusterfuck of writing problems.)
I think Demona also the only one with the distinction of fucking herself over with a closed timeloop. Particularly impressive given everyone else's closed timeloops are all flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, while she has years to see events coming true exactly like she was told, but she's female so just goes into denial about it I guess.
What's particularly frustrating about her is she was generally right and usually had pretty good plans followed by inexplicably fucking herself over for no reason. So I really liked her as a character and felt the narrative was being unfair, which only made watching it more frustrating.
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I finally sat down and watched Avatar. (The good one, not the blue elf kitty one.) And it's really, amazingly good. Midway through the first season I was shocked to realize that Katara isn't a startlingly well developed supporting character, she and Aang are honest-to-god costaring, it's her brother who's the supporting character. And she keeps having crushes on boys and this is treated as okay and no big deal. Even when she has a crush on the boy who turns out to be evil!
Then there's the second season, which is just awesome. Full stop.
Then the third season...it sort of starts to go downhill. The episodes themselves are kind of jumpy, which likely made me less forgiving, but I didn't much like the ideas as well as execution. The late-stage character development of Sokka is probably a totally reasonable thing, but came off as if it wasn't okay to have him be in the background and he had to be awesome too. He's also the only character who just suddenly gets a SUDDENLY I AM AWESOME upgrade, everyone else had to work for it. And the addition of Zuko to the group unbalanced the dynamic badly in favor of the boys. And I know what they meant with Azula, and that they only had so many episodes left, but wow that went into bitches-be-crazy territory fast. (And then there's Hana, the least effective waterbender ever. Moon! Blood! Female power is secretly evil and seductive and corrupting! Also pathetic and weak and merciful fuck you can kill a whole damn tree but the best you can do with blood is make people walk around WHY ARE YOU NOT JUST KILLING THEM)
Part of the problem, which isn't at all their fault, is there are so damn many bad female tropes. Like the final battle with Azula - good mothering woman beats evil crazy bitch. I'm sure someone thinks that's more progressive than her losing to her brother, so someone: shut the fuck up I hate you. Because for one thing, by that point in the fight it'd been established Zuko was going to win and for another how the hell did you miss that 90% of all fights involve the females getting matched up because they're not "real" combatants, and 99% involve it being so the proper woman can show she's better than the evil one?
Oh, and the whole lotus blossom thing means that a good chunk of the final episodes is spent watching badass old guys beat up everything, which as a bonus made me do a quick recap of the season and realize that yeah, oh fuck, it's true that when they met "badass person" it did end up being a guy, didn't it?
The whole thing is really, really good, but that just makes it so disappointing when it stops being quite as good.
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Also watched did blue catgirl elf Avatar finally. Midway through the movie I commented that they'd better not kill off the helicopter pilot since she was the only female character left and I stand by this statement. The blue catgirl the main character is banging is cute, but I am not convinced she's sapient.
Scientist woman and helicopter pilot women were pretty cool before they got killed, though.
(Also merciful fuck. People who were involved in complaining that it was racist, you guys did not across anywhere near how insanely awful it actually was.)
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Years ago I read one of the Wild Card books at the library. I was reminded of it recently and went and downloaded the whole series to read.
I mean, it's by (well, edited by) the Song of Ice and Fire guy! Which should be required reading for anyone who says they can't have female characters because it just wouldn't make sense in the setting. I love that series.
I want everyone involved with the Wild Card books to die horribly. Everyone. Even you, random person who was just in charge of formatting.
The idea is this: There's this alien virus that gets lose and fucks with your DNA. Mostly, it kills you. Sometimes it doesn't and leaves you horribly deformed. On very rare occasion, it gives you an awesome power. This is totally random, which is why the majority of characters with powers we meet are male and the female characters who are lucky enough for powers get...well.
In fact, here, let me sum everything up fast:
One character gets super incredible powers from sex.
One character gets the power to turn into whatever you most want to have sex with.
One character gets super incredible powers from killing people during sex.
One character gets the power to kill people during sex.
Quick, guess who's male and who's female!
Let's keep playing.
One character is a generational one who inherits their power from their famous hero parent.
Guess which is the girl.
One character's superpower is looking really hot with wings.
One character's superpower is healing.
One character's superpower is copying the minds of other, smarter people which she can't even fucking use to make herself smarter they're just sitting there in her head to be consulted FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU did I mention she ends up going crazy because yeah she totally does.
One character's superpower is activated by getting raped.
Oh, uh, there's also a female character whose power is animal control. She's living as a bag lady and is kind of batshit, but that's something, right? One character with...glorified empathy basically.
The first group of superpowered people has three guys and one girl. Girl is the mind-copying power. Guys have the power of flight, power of being fucking superman, and the power of getting people to do anything he wants.
Oh, and there are these aliens who show up and pretend to be Wild Card mutants. Both guys by amazing coincidence. Even though one is actually a hermaphrodite. But still a guy.
The alien guy who accidentally released the virus is in a relationship with the woman who's only power is to house the minds of smarter, more important people who are male. Congress decides to grill her and she's about to blurt out something bad so the alien guy grabs her mind to stop her, and she's already so messed up this breaks her mind and she just goes totally crazy. You know what, fine, okay so far.
Alien guy visits her in the mental institution. He thinks he could maybe fix her and can still sense her original mind inside, but it'd be HARD readers and anyway he's getting deported and it's not like he's friends with FUCKING SUPERMAN or has SUPER MIND CONTROL POWERS so he has no way of getting her out or anything, so...he just leaves her there to rot. But he's so sad about it and is so very very miserable while he spends the next few decades whoring around Paris and getting very drunk. You can tell he's sorry by how he spends his time drunk. Instead of fucking fixing her. But who cares about her, he's SAD. She ends up dying in the institution and so he goes and drinks more, the poor guy. (Oh and later it turns out he got one of the women he had sex with back then pregnant and they had a daughter. But the daughter is dead. But she had a son! And he's the one who Alien Guy then has to find. Because we didn't have enough boys with superpowers.)
By later books there start being female characters with actual powers, but they're all incompetent. The male character whose power is changing how much things weigh is way more effective than the female character whose power is water. To be clear here: yes, her power is fucking water, the substance that is all over the fucking place and that people are made of and YES she can explode people's heads and YES she still is fucking incompetent anyway. There's a female character who can phase through things. She spends her book being protected by some flatscan badass guy.
Oh also there's a joker women who doesn't have powers but looks weird. She's an information broker with a habit of making people who can't pay for the really expensive info sleep with her. Despite the fact she could just find a guy and pay him to sleep with her for a fraction of the amount that info's worth, and the fact she's not even hideously deformed, she just has invisible flesh but plenty of time is spent on how shapely her body is (because we wouldn't want main character guy to have to sleep with a porker or anything!).
And - there's this really nasty little trope I've been noticing, where some pretty and in control female character will be somehow invalidated because she's actually ugly underneath. First crystallized in the Dresden Files, where the main character gets into an argument with a pretty female vampire and ends up chucking a sunlight spell in her face, which peels off her skin to show that underneath she's hideous. And he goes on about how this is so humiliating and how this is her true self, and then how he's such a Nice Guy that now that he's hurt her and forced her to tell him what he wanted he'll let her pull together again and not mention it. Even though he knows and she knows he knows, but he's a gentleman about the fact she's a hideous unworthy bitch. So basically, he punches her in the face to humiliate her, not so pretty now bitch, but he's nice enough to let her wash the blood off and fix her makeup again once she tells him what he wants, isn't he a saint.
Anyway, translucent woman is very refined and in control and has a British accent. Then later on we're told it's actually a fake accent, and then during their trip round the world she gets called out for it at a televised banquet party in England. Haha, it's funny because she got publicly humiliated! Which she deserved because she acted like she had some sort of pride or self-worth, the dumb bitch.
And while the fucking alien bastard may be the most enraging example of women having no say in their relationships, it's standard practice. One character's this super telekinetic. He gets into a relationship with a woman and it turns out she also caught the wild card virus, but she has no actual power. But! If two people with the virus have a kid, the kid has the same disease, complete with the 99% chance of death or horrible disfiguring mutation. And he knows she likes kids. Does he:
a) Tell her this so she can make the choice herself.
b) Realize adoption or even sperm donors would prevent this.
c) Lie to her and say he doesn't care about her so she'll break up with him and marry someone else.
And we're supposed to feel bad for him. No. Fuck him.
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So anyway.
Then there's Homestuck. The four main characters are gender balanced, with more peripheral characters tilting toward male the further from the main plot they get. (The exiles we meet eventually end up balanced as well, although we start off with a male character and the final female character shows up well after the rest and is least characterized of all of them.) If Jade, as predicted, ends up using her grandfather to prototype, or Bec, then the sprites will end up at the same 1:3 ratio of the parents. (While I think using her dreamself for a secondary prototyping is kind of lame, I sort of hope it happens just to avoid this.) And it's pretty easy to see how this happens - most default archetypes are male, and if you're dipping into references to other media, you're mostly going to end up with guys. And the fact default and male are interchangeable means that entire groups, from imps to denizens, end up being considered male unless explicitly stated otherwise. You have to really push to keep things at 50%. (And you're not necessarily going to be rewarded much for it - the almost completely male intermission results in a lot of slash.)
Anyway, this gets into a broader problem with balance. Homestuck isn't perfectly balanced, but that's an unfair criticism of it. It's that you can find example after example of stuff horribly biased in favor of The Very Important Boys, but you'll rarely see any similar imbalances in favor of girls. The best it gets is nearly balanced stuff like Homestuck or Avatar, and also leads to stuff like this, where I'm looking at media in terms of exact ratios, because there's nothing wrong with having more boys than girls, or having boys get more focus, but because it's always like that...
Problem Sleuth, before that, has an even more unbalanced cast, because tropes/archetypes. What's actually kind of weird is how much female characters feature anyway. It's kind of sad that something where the only main female characters are alt versions of the males and defined as being crazy broads has better portrayal of women than most things aiming for it.
I just got the PS book so it'd be interesting to dissect this, actually.
Less pleased with the fandom, although it's certainly better than a lot of them.
It's kind of a corollary to what I was saying about Blackarachnia and her having a larger role in the show - female characters who are portrayed well in the source I want to keep away from fandom, because the more they interpret and further they move from canon the more likely it'll end up at the standard tropes and kill everything I like about the character.
I was actually originally thinking it was maybe good the Black Queen was killed off, because although I wanted to see her more I was terrified the author would do something to mess her up (because I am stupidly attached and it seemed pretty obvious that most of the appealing interpretations had nothing to do with canon, not because he seemed like a bad writer) so keeping her development to fanon seemed safer. Really misjudged that.
Speaking of fanon, the fanfic versions of this are...well, interesting.
Like I said, the cast is really balanced. We've reached the troll arc, which means six girls and six boys, and it seems like there's a pretty even use of the cast. I suspect it's not actually quite even and I'm unconsciously giving extra weight to the girl-only fics simply because I don't see them as often, but it's far better than most fandoms I've skimmed.
There's been a bunch of fandom pushes to write more about female characters that I've largely thought were stupid, and this seems to confirm it - people do write about girls, but there have to be girls. If you tell people to write about girls in the Star Trek movie, you have three female characters, one of whom dies and only one of which has any screentime, and one possible femslash pairing.
(I followed a rec for a kidfic in Nu!Trek and it's all chugging merrily along until SUDDENLY UHURA SAYS SHE CAN'T BE IN A RELATIONSHIP NOW THAT SPOCK HAS A KID. It's out of absolutely nowhere, because every other character is insanely supportive, so I scroll up and yup, it's K/S. It isn't even so much that Uhura's being unreasonable (though it's definitely forced to a degree) as it is everyone else is bending over backwards to help out because it's a fluffy story like that so the one female character is the only one acting like this. The author did a really good job and definitely treated Uhura with far more delicacy than normal for a ship rival, but...she's the only real female character in the entire damn canon. They added in a minor female OC and did try to have Uhura show up a bit more and namedropped the other living female character, basically, did everything they could, but with the canon as it is, either you have Uhura as a main character or you don't have any female main characters.)
At the same time, fandom is hardly innocent. Homestuck fandom...well, Jack's been pretty thoroughly leather-pantsed and there's a a definite sharp split in how the Black Queen gets portrayed.
And you can really see the seams when it comes to OCs. There's this OC-heavy fic I was reading and I got a couple chapters in before I realized that there were no women. Then later on there's a reveal that a bunch of the OCs were actually canon characters, so it makes sense they'd all be male. And then a second later I realize this doesn't at all explain why every. Fucking. Single. Side-character. Is. Male. Then a little while later I start wondering where the Queens are, and oh god it gets worse. Oh, and we learn Jack is teh strongest evar!!!!! all by himself even without the ring because he is just so damn awesome, and he totally kills the Queen by just stabbing her in the back with a sword, only it makes sense see because the Queen is so stupid and vain that she just didn't get that Jack was a threat!!!! No, that's really what the explanation was.
And I'm following the RP stuff on and off, and just from the tiny fragments I hear, it's a pit of fail. The main sburb one that comes up involves the Black Queen being an evil manipulative mind-rapey bitch, with a lot of giving her power to the male players so they can serve her instead of actually fucking fighting, and obviously the characters are going to end up backstabbing her, and then the White Queen was a crazy obstinate bitch who they had to get out of the way to save the Prospitians. And this new set of exiles has just shown up on formspring and...
Well, they're mostly male of course. And the female Snowman is once again the second in command, and this time it's because she's ~in love~ with the male boss character (because he's hawt and anyway why would she want all the ~responsibility~ of being in charge) so her purpose in life is to help him get his goals. And there's also this character who's a misgendered queen, so the king ordered a replacement queen (because obviously the king is in charge) and then the replacement queen is a BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH who cuts off his finger to prevent him from killing her and taking the ring, and ends up getting murdered by one of the players he's in communication with because the bitch deserved it obviously, while he totally forgives the king for setting this whole mess in motion and doing nothing to stop it the whole time. But the king is sorry about it now and it seems they'll end up together or something. Yay for transgender relationships built around demonizing women I guess? (EDIT: Jesus. Fucking. Christ.)
Basically you leave people to their own devices for five seconds and it's right back into Failtown.
But at the same time there's plenty of people writing good female characters. It's really just the same balance problem as before - no one's writing stories about how The Girls Are The Bestest Most Important People Ever, it's a three way split between reasonable balance, overfocus on boys and surprise misogyny.
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I downloaded this manga (Ai wo Utau yori Ore ni Oborero) I heard referenced through a demotivator, where both the main characters are crossdressing, and wow is it a mindfuck. A really, really frustrating mindfuck. The girl character is tall and looks like a boy and reserved, and the boy character is short and looks like a girl and hyper. So it looks like it's going to be reversing the standard romance tropes. Only the girl character is weak and easily beat up and the boy character is a badass, and the girl is scared of the relationship and the boy is the one pursuing her. So I'm seeing weak unsure boy/strong assertive girl only it's only because the boy is actually a girl and the girl is actually a boy, and arg! God fucking dammit Japan.
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I am not sure where any of this is going.
See, sometimes the solution is to take out the girl. Because if she's not there she's not getting fucked up. But then there are other things where I'm mad about the lack of girls (I am apparently the only one in the world who didn't enjoy Up because I kept getting kicked out of the story every ten minutes.) and plenty where I enjoyed the character while still ultimately disliking the media over the portrayal.
(And part of this is just...so many terrible female tropes. Even if there's nothing technically wrong with it, when you attach a gender you change the way everyone reads it. There are all sorts of things that a neutral for a guy but weak when they're female. And it's really hard to push back against some of those enough to establish that no actually what you meant was... Especially because a lot of people don't even realize it happens. They're just so ingrained. I was trying to explain what I was doing with a story, and even when I was saying it out loud, explicitly explain what I was going for, the responses I got kept falling back into the same assumption traps I was trying to avoid.)
Going to see what I can do to unbalance my own stories, though.
A while back I downloaded Beast Wars, which I have fond memories of, and wanted my brother to watch while he's still young enough to appreciate it without the aid of nostalgia. Beast Wars has one female character, Blackarachnia (one other female character exists for a short while, but "exists" is about the limits of her characterization). Anyway, she's my favorite character in it.
Blackarachnia spends a good chunk of the series on the bad guy side, which like most of the bad guys means "on her own side" half the time. She's not particularly well handled, tending to get portrayed as weaker than the others overall (exact powers vary wildly among all characters by episode), but she's intelligent and fun. She occasionally flirts with male characters on either side for her own advantage and this is actually treated pretty neutrally - female characters being defined by sexuality is not really the most progressive thing ever, but at least it's not condemned and actually works. And the flirting is during the non-firefight bits - in the fights they shoot at each other, rather than her being pathetic and having to rely on that to protect her.
Anyway, another new character is introduced, Silverbolt, who crushes on her more consistently than the other characters, and they are adorable. Bear in mind my usual response to romance in media is nuke from orbit. Let me sum up their relationship:
Silverbolt: I like you.
Blackarachnia: I can use this.
Silverbolt: The fact you are letting me help you means you like me, right?
Blackarachnia: You just keep telling yourself that.
Silverbolt: <3
Blackarachnia: Hey, go steal this stuff for me.
Silverbolt: Now do you like me?
Blackarachnia: Also, go steal this for me.
Silverbolt: Now do you like me?
Blackarachnia: Yeah, you're cute.
Silverbolt: :D
Blackarachnia: Now go steal this for me.
The thing is, this is probably not the quite the intended reading. Beast Wars writing is pretty sloppy and has periodic OOC moments, so you sort of have to pick which collection of behaviors you like best for the character. (And Silverbolt's whole "no she is a lady and must not be harmed" bit is...problematic, and you sort of have to deliberately rationalize that away as him having a crush on her particular and using that as an excuse) She's got enough positive points that I like what happens most of the time and blame the writers for occasional twists I disliked.
She has a lot of terrible issues as a character - like I said, she's generally treated as one of the weakest characters and spends most of the show getting bossed around by other male characters, even if she does constantly turn on them. (And Silverbolt is consistently able to get the drop on her, with a number of scenes where he's grabbed her. You can interpret this as "Blackarachnia knows he's just going to monologue about how awesome being good is and isn't treating this as a fight", but that's not really backed up by body language, which seems at best pretty irritated by the turn of events. And is in fact basically the same as her body language all the other times she's grabbed and held close to male characters which happens a hell of a lot and comes with rapey undertones.) But while she's defined based on her sexuality and physically weak, the show never makes a point of condemning any of this (even the skeevy grabbing never came off as "because she is a slutty tease" that I noticed), and although she's often the weaker combatant this is at least treated as her being on the weaker end of the scale rather than being a damsel in distress. Which is a lot of qualifications, but I still really like her.
Also, there's this whole exchange where he's all "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE JOIN US WE HAVE COOKIES AND I LOVE YOU" and she's all "NO GO AWAY" and he's all "YOU DON'T REALLY MEAN THAT!" so she aims a gun at him, at which point he's sure she won't shoot, so she shoots him, which I had pretty much waited my whole life to see.
But the thing about female characters like this is that I generally want them to get screen time because yay favorite character, but assume sooner or later they're going to be ruined because what I like about them is mostly accidental. Blackarachnia manages to just barely avert this by dint of the show ending, and her handling during the last period of the show already showed ominous signs. The generally reviled next series of Beast Machines pretty much confirms this. I don't even need to get into actual characterization here, it can be summed up by saying that while other characters had different sounds for rage/attacking/shock, she just had one, girly screaming.
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I went to see How to Train Your Dragon, which I'd been intending to ignore. To understand where I'm going with this, let me recount the first time I saw a trailer for this:
CGI...so another story about A Boy, then. I wonder if women won't exist this time or if they'll be the stupid girlfriend?
Ten seconds later: It's stupid girlfriend.
It's really that predictable.
Yes, the dragon was great, Hiccup was entirely tolerable, everything involving actual naturalistic study was wonder - OH GOD IT'S THAT STUPID GIRL AGAIN.
My mother raised the argument that it wasn't that bad because one of the twins was also a girl, which is kind of a step up from only one girl, which is the sort of tokenistic attitude that is part of the problem.
I absolutely loathed her. She didn't really deserve my resentment because she was an entirely passable character for the first half of the movie, and isn't a character for the second half, but every time she showed up I wondered when her abilities would become meaningless, which ruined any chance I had of enjoying it. See, if a female character displays skill, either the male character will surpass her or that skill will turn out to be unimportant. Since fighting dragons turned out not to be important, I correctly guessed that her being great at it would end up being completely irrelevant.
There's an interesting sort of meta to her building resentment - no matter how hard she works the main character keeps surpassing her (I want to say by cheating. It's really a matter of him doing things differently, and I am normally all in favor of characters figuring out a different way of doing things, but - they're being judged on one ability that he never gains and uses a cheat to avoid and no one ever even acknowledges this), so finally she follows him to figure it out. She's a much better fighter than he is, but she still loses because he has a dragon, and then she loses all personal agency to only care about him. (To not even get into how Hiccup only seems interested in her because she's hot. But how dare bitches not care about him for his inner brilliance.)
If the story hadn't had a girl, you could treat Hiccup's gender as irrelevant. Every time she appears on screen she reminded me this wasn't true. I resent the hell out of this. I resent it more because I know I'm supposed to be grateful that she got to be a good fighter, even if it's only because the movie made sure that being a good fighter was completely fucking irrelevant.
It might seem unfair to treat one female character as reflecting all women ever in that work, until you recall that generally they're the only women in the work. Hiccup's mother is dead and doesn't even get a flashback - despite the fact that the movie is trying to portray a gender-equal culture, OBVIOUSLY his badass parent is a guy and OBVIOUSLY the blacksmith/dragon-fighting teacher is a guy. The kids themselves are "gender balanced" in the sense that there are two girls out of six, one of whom is there as half a twin set. There's also some generic old wise woman and women scattered throughout the crowd scenes. The twin is probably the best portrayed of the lot, since her gender is mostly irrelevant, yet to call her a side character would be an insult to side characters.
I'd actually have liked it better if things hadn't been gender neutral, because it's much easier to say "so the Vikings are sexist, no girls" than "so everything is equal, it just naturally works out this way".
Incidentally, the opening to the movie had a bunch of trailers, including some CGI owls. The owl speaking had a female voice! OMG AN ACTUAL FEMALE PROTAGON...okay, now she seems to have vanished and there are a lot of male voices. Consultation with my brother established that the original book had a mixed group of protagonists, ie, was going to end up being about boys again.
Then I watched that. And while it wasn't as awful with female characters as How To Train Your Dragon, it was still very much a Movie About Boys. The main conflict is between the main character and his brother. Their sister was just there for them to sell out/rescue as determined by their relative morality scores. The old legendary fight is between two guy owls. The tiny owl girl is portrayed okay in and of itself, but it's still tiny owl girl who needs protecting by braver boy owl. Basically it would have been fine had she not been the only main female character, but she was. When the evil female owl showed up I thought she looked cool, but immediately guessed a) she would not be in charge b) she'd be in a relationship or married to the guy who's actually in charge c) she'd be built up as scary but not actually do much in the final fight. I was right about all of that except c, she turns out to fail in every single fight scene rather than just the final one and doesn't even get the level of armor the grunts do.
And you know there's the whole female-power-is-evil-and-corrupting thing, and she's so evilly seductive, unlike the good owls who also have a guy in charge, but he makes the decisions himself instead of giving all the power to his wife. No, his wife knows her place.
And of course the band of main characters becomes boy protagonist, tiny girl, boy owl, boy owl, ineffectual female nurse snake who really served no purpose. Because "girl" is one of the set deviations from the norm, so any other character who has a different quirk has to be male.
That said it was just typical gender stuff and not the near total exclusion I've come to expect from CGI, so it's a pretty big improvement. Basically it was close enough I could pretend the gender balance was coincidental and rewrite in my head that the evil female owl was actually a lot stronger as befitted her awesomeness and just having a very very very long string of bad luck.
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We also watched Gargoyles a while back, which had the whole good/evil female thing going on. What's really frustrating there is that both characters are actually really cool...but the evil one just randomly does stupid stuff, or worse, she's right and everyone insists she's not anyway. In summary:
Her: The humans just hate us more when we help them and we're not safe living with them.
Him: I'm sure they'll realize we're friends soon.
Her: They just attacked us!
Him: Stop! We have to be nice so they'll be our friends!
(Humans kill their whole group except a handful who hid. She joins up with the remaining groups, who are slowly whittled down until there's only one left, and finally everyone but her is dead.)
A thousand years later:
Her: So our whole species save your timedisplaced group and me is dead. Because humans killed them.
Him: I'm sure they'll realize we're friends soon.
Her: EVERYONE IS DEAD.
Him: Any day now.
Her: DEAD.
Him: I can't wait to be friends with humans!
In case anyone was confused about the fact she's wrong and evil, her eyes glow red when she's mad while everyone else's glows white. And her name is Demona. Subtle.
You could maybe argue this is a function of it being a kid's show, but the main male villain is pretty awesome, while half her time is spent being jealous her boyfriend's rejected her. We stopped watching a bit after when she falls in love with the boyfriend's clone who's secretly by which I mean pretty transparently using her and then trying to get her killed but she's too stupid to realize because she's ~in love~. There's also this infuriating implication that she's sort of to blame for the gargoyles dying out - it's kind of like, you know how in shows, when the main character group meets up with some other group sometimes there will be a female leader to show that the world is gender equal and girls can totally be in charge, only of course things have gone worse for that group to show how the protagonists are so awesome/lucky, so it comes off as women all suck as leaders?
Yeah, the fact the only time we see gargoyles have a female leader is when they're practically extinct and she's pretty much in charge because no one else could be, and the rest of the group is weirdly bitchy to her and acting like she's not a respected leader, and the overall feel is she's just not doing as good a job as a real male leader would. She's trying to keep them alive in the face of incredible adversity and instead the narrative seems to be saying she's incompetent, I guess because otherwise it'd make the main character leader guy seem less awesome.
It also gets into the whole Madonna/Whore thing, because there's one good human female character, who evil!ex!gargoyle spends a disturbing amount of time targeting personally, and they're both kind of fighting over the leader gargoyle guy. So basically there's the Good Girl and the Evil Bitch. Also, as is custom, the good girl is the weaker normal one. She's more a badass normal than damsel in distress, but she's still normal and needing saving a lot. (Later there's distressingly sueish incompetent daughter girl too, but she's part of a general clusterfuck of writing problems.)
I think Demona also the only one with the distinction of fucking herself over with a closed timeloop. Particularly impressive given everyone else's closed timeloops are all flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, while she has years to see events coming true exactly like she was told, but she's female so just goes into denial about it I guess.
What's particularly frustrating about her is she was generally right and usually had pretty good plans followed by inexplicably fucking herself over for no reason. So I really liked her as a character and felt the narrative was being unfair, which only made watching it more frustrating.
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I finally sat down and watched Avatar. (The good one, not the blue elf kitty one.) And it's really, amazingly good. Midway through the first season I was shocked to realize that Katara isn't a startlingly well developed supporting character, she and Aang are honest-to-god costaring, it's her brother who's the supporting character. And she keeps having crushes on boys and this is treated as okay and no big deal. Even when she has a crush on the boy who turns out to be evil!
Then there's the second season, which is just awesome. Full stop.
Then the third season...it sort of starts to go downhill. The episodes themselves are kind of jumpy, which likely made me less forgiving, but I didn't much like the ideas as well as execution. The late-stage character development of Sokka is probably a totally reasonable thing, but came off as if it wasn't okay to have him be in the background and he had to be awesome too. He's also the only character who just suddenly gets a SUDDENLY I AM AWESOME upgrade, everyone else had to work for it. And the addition of Zuko to the group unbalanced the dynamic badly in favor of the boys. And I know what they meant with Azula, and that they only had so many episodes left, but wow that went into bitches-be-crazy territory fast. (And then there's Hana, the least effective waterbender ever. Moon! Blood! Female power is secretly evil and seductive and corrupting! Also pathetic and weak and merciful fuck you can kill a whole damn tree but the best you can do with blood is make people walk around WHY ARE YOU NOT JUST KILLING THEM)
Part of the problem, which isn't at all their fault, is there are so damn many bad female tropes. Like the final battle with Azula - good mothering woman beats evil crazy bitch. I'm sure someone thinks that's more progressive than her losing to her brother, so someone: shut the fuck up I hate you. Because for one thing, by that point in the fight it'd been established Zuko was going to win and for another how the hell did you miss that 90% of all fights involve the females getting matched up because they're not "real" combatants, and 99% involve it being so the proper woman can show she's better than the evil one?
Oh, and the whole lotus blossom thing means that a good chunk of the final episodes is spent watching badass old guys beat up everything, which as a bonus made me do a quick recap of the season and realize that yeah, oh fuck, it's true that when they met "badass person" it did end up being a guy, didn't it?
The whole thing is really, really good, but that just makes it so disappointing when it stops being quite as good.
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Also watched did blue catgirl elf Avatar finally. Midway through the movie I commented that they'd better not kill off the helicopter pilot since she was the only female character left and I stand by this statement. The blue catgirl the main character is banging is cute, but I am not convinced she's sapient.
Scientist woman and helicopter pilot women were pretty cool before they got killed, though.
(Also merciful fuck. People who were involved in complaining that it was racist, you guys did not across anywhere near how insanely awful it actually was.)
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Years ago I read one of the Wild Card books at the library. I was reminded of it recently and went and downloaded the whole series to read.
I mean, it's by (well, edited by) the Song of Ice and Fire guy! Which should be required reading for anyone who says they can't have female characters because it just wouldn't make sense in the setting. I love that series.
I want everyone involved with the Wild Card books to die horribly. Everyone. Even you, random person who was just in charge of formatting.
The idea is this: There's this alien virus that gets lose and fucks with your DNA. Mostly, it kills you. Sometimes it doesn't and leaves you horribly deformed. On very rare occasion, it gives you an awesome power. This is totally random, which is why the majority of characters with powers we meet are male and the female characters who are lucky enough for powers get...well.
In fact, here, let me sum everything up fast:
One character gets super incredible powers from sex.
One character gets the power to turn into whatever you most want to have sex with.
One character gets super incredible powers from killing people during sex.
One character gets the power to kill people during sex.
Quick, guess who's male and who's female!
Let's keep playing.
One character is a generational one who inherits their power from their famous hero parent.
Guess which is the girl.
One character's superpower is looking really hot with wings.
One character's superpower is healing.
One character's superpower is copying the minds of other, smarter people which she can't even fucking use to make herself smarter they're just sitting there in her head to be consulted FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU did I mention she ends up going crazy because yeah she totally does.
One character's superpower is activated by getting raped.
Oh, uh, there's also a female character whose power is animal control. She's living as a bag lady and is kind of batshit, but that's something, right? One character with...glorified empathy basically.
The first group of superpowered people has three guys and one girl. Girl is the mind-copying power. Guys have the power of flight, power of being fucking superman, and the power of getting people to do anything he wants.
Oh, and there are these aliens who show up and pretend to be Wild Card mutants. Both guys by amazing coincidence. Even though one is actually a hermaphrodite. But still a guy.
The alien guy who accidentally released the virus is in a relationship with the woman who's only power is to house the minds of smarter, more important people who are male. Congress decides to grill her and she's about to blurt out something bad so the alien guy grabs her mind to stop her, and she's already so messed up this breaks her mind and she just goes totally crazy. You know what, fine, okay so far.
Alien guy visits her in the mental institution. He thinks he could maybe fix her and can still sense her original mind inside, but it'd be HARD readers and anyway he's getting deported and it's not like he's friends with FUCKING SUPERMAN or has SUPER MIND CONTROL POWERS so he has no way of getting her out or anything, so...he just leaves her there to rot. But he's so sad about it and is so very very miserable while he spends the next few decades whoring around Paris and getting very drunk. You can tell he's sorry by how he spends his time drunk. Instead of fucking fixing her. But who cares about her, he's SAD. She ends up dying in the institution and so he goes and drinks more, the poor guy. (Oh and later it turns out he got one of the women he had sex with back then pregnant and they had a daughter. But the daughter is dead. But she had a son! And he's the one who Alien Guy then has to find. Because we didn't have enough boys with superpowers.)
By later books there start being female characters with actual powers, but they're all incompetent. The male character whose power is changing how much things weigh is way more effective than the female character whose power is water. To be clear here: yes, her power is fucking water, the substance that is all over the fucking place and that people are made of and YES she can explode people's heads and YES she still is fucking incompetent anyway. There's a female character who can phase through things. She spends her book being protected by some flatscan badass guy.
Oh also there's a joker women who doesn't have powers but looks weird. She's an information broker with a habit of making people who can't pay for the really expensive info sleep with her. Despite the fact she could just find a guy and pay him to sleep with her for a fraction of the amount that info's worth, and the fact she's not even hideously deformed, she just has invisible flesh but plenty of time is spent on how shapely her body is (because we wouldn't want main character guy to have to sleep with a porker or anything!).
And - there's this really nasty little trope I've been noticing, where some pretty and in control female character will be somehow invalidated because she's actually ugly underneath. First crystallized in the Dresden Files, where the main character gets into an argument with a pretty female vampire and ends up chucking a sunlight spell in her face, which peels off her skin to show that underneath she's hideous. And he goes on about how this is so humiliating and how this is her true self, and then how he's such a Nice Guy that now that he's hurt her and forced her to tell him what he wanted he'll let her pull together again and not mention it. Even though he knows and she knows he knows, but he's a gentleman about the fact she's a hideous unworthy bitch. So basically, he punches her in the face to humiliate her, not so pretty now bitch, but he's nice enough to let her wash the blood off and fix her makeup again once she tells him what he wants, isn't he a saint.
Anyway, translucent woman is very refined and in control and has a British accent. Then later on we're told it's actually a fake accent, and then during their trip round the world she gets called out for it at a televised banquet party in England. Haha, it's funny because she got publicly humiliated! Which she deserved because she acted like she had some sort of pride or self-worth, the dumb bitch.
And while the fucking alien bastard may be the most enraging example of women having no say in their relationships, it's standard practice. One character's this super telekinetic. He gets into a relationship with a woman and it turns out she also caught the wild card virus, but she has no actual power. But! If two people with the virus have a kid, the kid has the same disease, complete with the 99% chance of death or horrible disfiguring mutation. And he knows she likes kids. Does he:
a) Tell her this so she can make the choice herself.
b) Realize adoption or even sperm donors would prevent this.
c) Lie to her and say he doesn't care about her so she'll break up with him and marry someone else.
And we're supposed to feel bad for him. No. Fuck him.
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So anyway.
Then there's Homestuck. The four main characters are gender balanced, with more peripheral characters tilting toward male the further from the main plot they get. (The exiles we meet eventually end up balanced as well, although we start off with a male character and the final female character shows up well after the rest and is least characterized of all of them.) If Jade, as predicted, ends up using her grandfather to prototype, or Bec, then the sprites will end up at the same 1:3 ratio of the parents. (While I think using her dreamself for a secondary prototyping is kind of lame, I sort of hope it happens just to avoid this.) And it's pretty easy to see how this happens - most default archetypes are male, and if you're dipping into references to other media, you're mostly going to end up with guys. And the fact default and male are interchangeable means that entire groups, from imps to denizens, end up being considered male unless explicitly stated otherwise. You have to really push to keep things at 50%. (And you're not necessarily going to be rewarded much for it - the almost completely male intermission results in a lot of slash.)
Anyway, this gets into a broader problem with balance. Homestuck isn't perfectly balanced, but that's an unfair criticism of it. It's that you can find example after example of stuff horribly biased in favor of The Very Important Boys, but you'll rarely see any similar imbalances in favor of girls. The best it gets is nearly balanced stuff like Homestuck or Avatar, and also leads to stuff like this, where I'm looking at media in terms of exact ratios, because there's nothing wrong with having more boys than girls, or having boys get more focus, but because it's always like that...
Problem Sleuth, before that, has an even more unbalanced cast, because tropes/archetypes. What's actually kind of weird is how much female characters feature anyway. It's kind of sad that something where the only main female characters are alt versions of the males and defined as being crazy broads has better portrayal of women than most things aiming for it.
I just got the PS book so it'd be interesting to dissect this, actually.
Less pleased with the fandom, although it's certainly better than a lot of them.
It's kind of a corollary to what I was saying about Blackarachnia and her having a larger role in the show - female characters who are portrayed well in the source I want to keep away from fandom, because the more they interpret and further they move from canon the more likely it'll end up at the standard tropes and kill everything I like about the character.
I was actually originally thinking it was maybe good the Black Queen was killed off, because although I wanted to see her more I was terrified the author would do something to mess her up (because I am stupidly attached and it seemed pretty obvious that most of the appealing interpretations had nothing to do with canon, not because he seemed like a bad writer) so keeping her development to fanon seemed safer. Really misjudged that.
Speaking of fanon, the fanfic versions of this are...well, interesting.
Like I said, the cast is really balanced. We've reached the troll arc, which means six girls and six boys, and it seems like there's a pretty even use of the cast. I suspect it's not actually quite even and I'm unconsciously giving extra weight to the girl-only fics simply because I don't see them as often, but it's far better than most fandoms I've skimmed.
There's been a bunch of fandom pushes to write more about female characters that I've largely thought were stupid, and this seems to confirm it - people do write about girls, but there have to be girls. If you tell people to write about girls in the Star Trek movie, you have three female characters, one of whom dies and only one of which has any screentime, and one possible femslash pairing.
(I followed a rec for a kidfic in Nu!Trek and it's all chugging merrily along until SUDDENLY UHURA SAYS SHE CAN'T BE IN A RELATIONSHIP NOW THAT SPOCK HAS A KID. It's out of absolutely nowhere, because every other character is insanely supportive, so I scroll up and yup, it's K/S. It isn't even so much that Uhura's being unreasonable (though it's definitely forced to a degree) as it is everyone else is bending over backwards to help out because it's a fluffy story like that so the one female character is the only one acting like this. The author did a really good job and definitely treated Uhura with far more delicacy than normal for a ship rival, but...she's the only real female character in the entire damn canon. They added in a minor female OC and did try to have Uhura show up a bit more and namedropped the other living female character, basically, did everything they could, but with the canon as it is, either you have Uhura as a main character or you don't have any female main characters.)
At the same time, fandom is hardly innocent. Homestuck fandom...well, Jack's been pretty thoroughly leather-pantsed and there's a a definite sharp split in how the Black Queen gets portrayed.
And you can really see the seams when it comes to OCs. There's this OC-heavy fic I was reading and I got a couple chapters in before I realized that there were no women. Then later on there's a reveal that a bunch of the OCs were actually canon characters, so it makes sense they'd all be male. And then a second later I realize this doesn't at all explain why every. Fucking. Single. Side-character. Is. Male. Then a little while later I start wondering where the Queens are, and oh god it gets worse. Oh, and we learn Jack is teh strongest evar!!!!! all by himself even without the ring because he is just so damn awesome, and he totally kills the Queen by just stabbing her in the back with a sword, only it makes sense see because the Queen is so stupid and vain that she just didn't get that Jack was a threat!!!! No, that's really what the explanation was.
And I'm following the RP stuff on and off, and just from the tiny fragments I hear, it's a pit of fail. The main sburb one that comes up involves the Black Queen being an evil manipulative mind-rapey bitch, with a lot of giving her power to the male players so they can serve her instead of actually fucking fighting, and obviously the characters are going to end up backstabbing her, and then the White Queen was a crazy obstinate bitch who they had to get out of the way to save the Prospitians. And this new set of exiles has just shown up on formspring and...
Well, they're mostly male of course. And the female Snowman is once again the second in command, and this time it's because she's ~in love~ with the male boss character (because he's hawt and anyway why would she want all the ~responsibility~ of being in charge) so her purpose in life is to help him get his goals. And there's also this character who's a misgendered queen, so the king ordered a replacement queen (because obviously the king is in charge) and then the replacement queen is a BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH who cuts off his finger to prevent him from killing her and taking the ring, and ends up getting murdered by one of the players he's in communication with because the bitch deserved it obviously, while he totally forgives the king for setting this whole mess in motion and doing nothing to stop it the whole time. But the king is sorry about it now and it seems they'll end up together or something. Yay for transgender relationships built around demonizing women I guess? (EDIT: Jesus. Fucking. Christ.)
Basically you leave people to their own devices for five seconds and it's right back into Failtown.
But at the same time there's plenty of people writing good female characters. It's really just the same balance problem as before - no one's writing stories about how The Girls Are The Bestest Most Important People Ever, it's a three way split between reasonable balance, overfocus on boys and surprise misogyny.
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I downloaded this manga (Ai wo Utau yori Ore ni Oborero) I heard referenced through a demotivator, where both the main characters are crossdressing, and wow is it a mindfuck. A really, really frustrating mindfuck. The girl character is tall and looks like a boy and reserved, and the boy character is short and looks like a girl and hyper. So it looks like it's going to be reversing the standard romance tropes. Only the girl character is weak and easily beat up and the boy character is a badass, and the girl is scared of the relationship and the boy is the one pursuing her. So I'm seeing weak unsure boy/strong assertive girl only it's only because the boy is actually a girl and the girl is actually a boy, and arg! God fucking dammit Japan.
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I am not sure where any of this is going.
See, sometimes the solution is to take out the girl. Because if she's not there she's not getting fucked up. But then there are other things where I'm mad about the lack of girls (I am apparently the only one in the world who didn't enjoy Up because I kept getting kicked out of the story every ten minutes.) and plenty where I enjoyed the character while still ultimately disliking the media over the portrayal.
(And part of this is just...so many terrible female tropes. Even if there's nothing technically wrong with it, when you attach a gender you change the way everyone reads it. There are all sorts of things that a neutral for a guy but weak when they're female. And it's really hard to push back against some of those enough to establish that no actually what you meant was... Especially because a lot of people don't even realize it happens. They're just so ingrained. I was trying to explain what I was doing with a story, and even when I was saying it out loud, explicitly explain what I was going for, the responses I got kept falling back into the same assumption traps I was trying to avoid.)
Going to see what I can do to unbalance my own stories, though.
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With Avatar-Not-Blue-Cat-People, I'm fairly sure there were supposed to be four seasons (water-earth-fire-conspicuouslackofair) but Executive Meddling over at Nickelodeon made the creators go NO IT ENDS NOW. Or so I heard.
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Hm, that's much more charitable than the explanation my brother and I were kicking around, which is that they didn't have a full plan for season three and does make a degree of sense. BUT THEN WHY SO MUCH FILLER? WHY?
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I feel pretty good about AtLA's female characters, though. Toph is just pure badass. Azula's descent into crazy I don't feel that good about, but I do like that Zuko and Katara had to work together to beat her-- even crazy, they couldn't take her one-on-one. I do agree with you on the lack of badass old women. With the new Avatar series coming up, I was hoping that Toph would show up as the requisite badass old person but the creators apparently said that there would be no old characters returning. >:(
I would have liked to see Mai and Ty Lee better developed since that would have filled out the character roster more nicely. Mai in particular wasn't very interesting that I can remember.
Sooooo something something Toph is awesome.
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I was disappointed we never found more air bison, but then apparently the creators said Appa is the last one so I'm kind of glad that they didn't have time for that in the show. Ambivalent about Zuko's mom, I really wanted to see her, but I did kind of like that not all plots were wrapped up, it gives the sense of a broader universe left, especially since it seemed like her subplot wouldn't have been done well in the short time they had.
Mai was kind of a blank character. And her late-stage backstory didn't make much sense. She works well for as a more minor character and I did love how assertive she could be but I can really see why everyone was shipping Zuko with Katara instead. But Ty Lee was absolutely adorable.
And Azula was so awesome. I even liked Crazyzula even though I hated how rushed it was, that it happened because of her daddy issues and that it was yet another example of all power and no dick makes women go crazy!!!! Because even when she's crazy she can still KILL YOU WITH FUCKING LIGHTNING.
Brother and I were kicking around fixes for the third season and they pretty much all resolved around Azula. "Azula gets jumped by everybody at once and has to surrender, because she is smart and knows of course they can't hurt her since she surrendered, and now Zuko's Fire Lord but he knows his sister (who he isn't able to beat on his own) is there ready to stage a coup if she gets half a chance ever, and oh what about if Azula, instead of wanting Daddy's love and attention decides to make her own bid for the throne because she blames him AND Zuko for her mom leaving, so when they show up on the day of the black sun she does the whole fleeing then but then she's all "oh no please don't hurt me I'll tell you where he is" like she was back in the Earth Kingdom and they rush off, and they beat the Fire Lord with Zuko's help, and he wonders how they got there and they're like "Oh, we beat Azula and she told -"
And then the Dai Lee are everywhere (and Azula is SO SAD they got there too late to save Daddy so sad really) and Azula's in charge and her subsequent insanity has actual time to happen (and Zuko has an actual reason to join with them instead of just OH HAI I GUESS I WAS BEING TEH EVULS BEFORE OOPS?) and
and it would be a really long fic that I don't have time to write but I wish I could read.
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I could never figure out why Azula goes crazy over being told she gets to rule a chunk of the world, just not the whole thing yet, no matter how many times I heard people repeat the explanation. Especially because Azula never seems to give a damn about making Ozai like her, and she's obviously much better at running the war. She was even willing to give the credit for her kill to Zuko just in case. Zuko's the one with daddy issues.
But mommy issues? Azula has got to have put the pieces together about how Mommy disappears and Granddaddy dies right after Daddy is told to kill Zuko. Mom obviously loved Zuko more or else she'd have stayed with Azula. (And there's got to be resentment because it all happened when Dad couldn't keep his stupid mouth shut) And if you want Crazyzula? Imagine her breakdown after she becomes Fire Lord and still can't find her mom. Where's her mom? Why isn't her mom showing up Dad's gone! Is it because Zuko's gone? MAYBE IF SHE KILLS ZUKO MOMMY WILL FINALLY LOVE HER BUT WHAT IF THAT MAKES MOMMY HATE HER? HOW DO YOU SOLVE PROBLEMS WITHOUT MURDER????
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Anyway, huh, I totally agree about most canons and fandoms. I know a rp group of mine is having trouble with our latest list of available characters because while our players are easily a third to a half female, the female characters in the series we're drawing from are mostly laaame and underpowered and rare. So we're stuck with a lot of characters included solely because 'they're female and we need to get our ratio up'.
Looking back at my childhood like
Then all the tomboyish girls I knew turned into girls and wanted to act like female characters in media and it was weird. Not to mention once you get to the young adult or adult sections of the library, plucky heroines become much rarer and usually stupider and need to be saved and romanced by strong men. I still love Tamora Pierce because despite various faults and some plotlines based around 'girl proving herself as good as the boys', her stories are reasonably balanced and the gender-balance works with the setting and no character is characterized solely by 'being female' or alternatively with 'this is feminist literature so girls can't be feminine or they are weak and enforcing the patriarchy!'
One thing I like retrospectively about my NaNo is that when I was first making the jump from outline to writing, I realized that due to some other related stories I was more interested in at the time, I would have to change the sex of my outlined protagonist from male to female. So I did. And changed no personality traits whatsoever and almost nothing of the plot except a few minor romantic subplots with little screentime or importance. I'm not sure if I would suggest envisioning a character as being one gender then changing it later in the planning stage as a method for other authors, but it can help create characters with characterization independent from their gender.
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Mai and Zuko's relationship was really well done. It didn't even define her, exactly, since she still has a life outside it's just one that doesn't much matter. I don't know, it's hard to explain? Basically she's still a person outside of it even though she's not a well-developed character.
I really think girls writing female main characters should be the normal thing...it never fails to creep me out when someone says they can't write girls. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it has to do with when someone starts writing. For all people bitch about fanbrats, I do kind of like that their first impulses tend to be to make the story about a girl, while the people who say they can't write girls tend to be older adults.
Back when I was a lot younger I read something analyzing girl heroines and it made the argument that there's this very narrow gap of ones just below puberty where the girl is old enough to have agency but young enough to not be responsible for anyone. Basically your plucky heroine can't be older than around twelve. Any older and she's either responsible for younger kids or she's busy pursuing a guy. At the time I was just like "oh, that's interesting I guess" because I was at the age when that was what I was reading, and I didn't quite grasp that it meant stuff was going to start sucking when I got older.
Which is one of those nice things Tamora Pierce averts come to think of it. I really liked the books of hers I read. They're not really the deepest but they're good wish fulfillment fantasy.
I'm not sure if I would suggest envisioning a character as being one gender then changing it later in the planning stage as a method for other authors, but it can help create characters with characterization independent from their gender.
I really wish more people would do that actually! There are lot of stock types that I find meh where if you flip the genders suddenly they become interesting. (Mostly to female characters, but there's a number of times where the male flip would also be cool.) This is possibly because I'm shallow, but I love seeing rule63'd fanfic interpretations of characters.
(Your mileage may vary, though. There was some wank about how YA realistic fiction has a lot of girl characters (because god forbid ANY subgenre of literature have a lot of female main characters, what about the BOYYYYYYYYYYS) and in it someone referenced that a friend had to switch their main character's gender to female, and how it ruined the story because now the main character was a whiny bitch. So, either some authors can't help but write in their preconceptions when they're told to change the gender, or some readers' interpretations reverse as soon as you add that 's' onto 'he'.)
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Funny purplekitte should mention this as I did that with one of my fanfics, actually. Originally one of the supporting characters was male, but then I decided to change a lot of the plot and changed the character to female. Their personalities are the same, but I had more fun writing about her. I guess the thing is the personality I gave the original male character is the typical kind and I don't see too many females portrayed like that.
I should mention that female character is actually Officer Jenny, but hey, there are a million of them so you can make one of them not be a robot.no subject
It occurs to me that the show's handling Officer Jennies, in contrast, is very much how not to do this - instead of "police officers, and they happen to be girls" they're "girls, and they happen to be police officers". I mean I didn't hate them but they were always pretty blah to me.
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I think the betrayal kicked her off and the rest was a rapid decline due to the knock on effects of said betrayal and Ozai leaving, namely that she has no-one she considers even close to an equal or peer to talk to and hence no real reason to moderate her behaviour, and the enormous power she's just been given only gives her less of a reason to give a shit. She's basically more herself - more alone and more powerful - than she's been at any point, and her personality is inherently unstable.
I kind of inferred, given how large a theme the emptiness of power is in S3 with both Sozin and later Zuko, that Azula didn't find being fire lord as amazing as she thought it would be (I guess I could see Ozai's devaluing it as a part of that - I'm not really in the fandom, so I've not heard that before) and that ultimately she can't force people to obey her, and certainly not to love her.
I don't think it's especially strange for her to become more of a paranoid megalomaniac in the circumstances.
Especially because we know Azula's an awesome firebender, while Ozai's the second son who gets the job by process of elimination, why is he some super unbeatable guy?
Yeah, that's definitely a thing; they're very similar, but Azula's always seemed a little more ambitious, sharp and... well, we didn't see anything to suggest Ozai was very good at firebending at all, really. I always assumed they envisioned a less dragonball-y 1v1 ending, with Ozai being difficult to defeat for reasons other than his personal skill.
On the other hand, I really like how fucked up their family is, and it's much easier to have Azula go nuts; Ozai's crazy in many of the same ways, but he's had longer to hide it behind a patrician facade. I guess I'd say he's more stable and mediocre in his insanity.
One thing I really think they could have done better is the lead-up to the burning of the Earth kingdom. I mean, I could definitely see Ozai looking for a way to use all this power he's about to get, getting a bit drunk with it, but the execution is a bit unconvincing.
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I always assumed they envisioned a less dragonball-y 1v1 ending, with Ozai being difficult to defeat for reasons other than his personal skill.
I would guess the original ending was something completely different. There was a lot of sudden talk at the second half of season three about how only Aang could beat Ozai for it to stick, which seemed to be coming from opposite land (Zuko, if you or your uncle beat him in what is apparently acceptable practice for Fire Lord succession and voluntarily withdraw troops, everyone will hate and mistrust you. Aang, if you step in and beat the crap out of their current leader so they have no choice, everyone will totally trust Zuko's doing it out of a legitimate belief in peace once he takes over. Yes. This makes so much sense) And then the rights to the Fire Lord throne are determined by a duel to the death ANYWAY, but now it's a great idea because it's more valid to have a fight between family members than an outsider doing the fighting? Plus, Aang wins by...going into the Avatar state, as was suggested and shot down early season two.
I mean, I could definitely see Ozai looking for a way to use all this power he's about to get, getting a bit drunk with it, but the execution is a bit unconvincing.
What should have happened was something about the Earth Kingdoms rebelling, maybe incited by learning Aang is alive, where some sort of mass show of force would work to scare everyone into never trying that again, rather than that the people weren't completely miserable. It's like he ran out of puppies to burn or something.
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Mainly I think it's just that the effects of her friends betraying her take a while to become apparent.
Zuko, if you or your uncle beat him in what is apparently acceptable practice for Fire Lord succession and voluntarily withdraw troops, everyone will hate and mistrust you. Aang, if you step in and beat the crap out of their current leader so they have no choice, everyone will totally trust Zuko's doing it out of a legitimate belief in peace once he takes over. Yes. This makes so much sense
Yeah, it doesn't really work because the only (exclusive) potential problem, that other nations think it's just one more family feud for power and nothing will change, would, y'know, be basically instantly resolved by Zuko withdrawing his troops.
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Yeah, it doesn't really work because the only (exclusive) potential problem, that other nations think it's just one more family feud for power and nothing will change, would, y'know, be basically instantly resolved by Zuko withdrawing his troops.
What's worse is, the Fire Nation were the only ones whose opinion really mattered here, they were the ones winning. There's no need to convince the Earth Kingdoms, they're unable to fight and they're getting what they wanted. The problem would be the Fire Nation not viewing Zuko as legitimate or not going along with the orders to withdraw because they think Zuko's being forced by the Avatar. Given they believe in resolving things with fire duels, I can't see them as having a problem with the royal family determining who's in charge through a fight, but outsiders doing it? Bad.
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Male!Azula would have killed like 50% of my squee, as unfair as that is. Avatar was pretty much the Azula-is-awesome show as far as my brother and I were concerned. And either we'd have lost girl Mai and Ty Lee in the process or they'd have been there getting ordered around by a guy and completely reversing the whole feel of the threesome.
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MAYBE SHE COULD LIE TO ZUKO ABOUT PLAN A BEING KILLING HIM LONG ENOUGH TO TRICK HIM INTO GETTING LOCKED IN PRISON. THEN THEY'LL BOTH BE TOGETHER AND MOMMY WILL HAVE TO COME BACK. ZUKO ALWAYS FALLS FOR WHATEVER SHE SAYS AND THEN MOMMY WILL BE SO PROUD SHE DIDN'T RESORT TO SIBLINGCIDE TO SOLVE HER PROBLEMS.
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It's kind of validating, for me personally, because — and you're going to laugh, but that's fine, you should, it's ridiculous — I think I have sort of this underlying insecurity about the fact that my writing tends to skew female. Like, I remember in middle school, I was talking to the only other girl in my class I knew who did creative writing for fun. I mentioned that I only ever seemed to write from the perspective of girls and most of my stories were populated mostly by female characters, and she said, "Oh, it's the opposite for me. My writing is all about the testosterone." And it's really stupid, but from that point on, before I'd ever seen anything of hers, I always had this feeling that she was a more mature writer than I was. Isn't that bizarre? I must have internalized that Real Fiction is about men. At age fourteen.
I actually really liked Hama, though the problems you point out with her are definitely legitimate. I sort of assumed that she could do what she did to plants to people, that was what those scenes with the flowers and the tree were meant to imply: that that sort of thing was what was going on in her underground dungeon. But we didn't see it because a.) she wasn't actually trying to win against Katara and b.) there's a limit to how much crap even Mike and Bryan can get past the radar. It's entirely possible, though, that this is just me interpreting the source in a way I find appealing but that isn't necessarily well-supported, like what you've admitted to doing with Blackarachnia. Also I somehow failed to pick up on the moon-blood-female-seductive-BAD thing. Which, again, the problem isn't so much what it is as what it invokes, and what it invokes is a trope with a long, horrifying history. By that point in the series the moon had a well-established place in the mythos as a (female) source of power for waterbenders. And actually, now that I think about it, I'd like to hear your thoughts on Yue.
And you can really see the seams when it comes to OCs. There's this OC-heavy fic I was reading...
Okay, what? What the fuck? I've been more and more selective lately about what fic I'll read for Homestuck, so I managed to miss this one. What is it called?
I was actually originally thinking it was maybe good she was killed off...
I think you dropped an antecedent here. It took me ages to figure out that you weren't talking about Blackarachnia from the last paragraph.
Jack's been pretty thoroughly leather-pantsed
Okay, this mental image is the funniest thing ever, especially given how he is about clothes.
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I liked Hana herself, she was willing to do bad things she thought were necessary and up until the final confrontation seemed like she wasn't cartoonishly evil, she could still be nice to people who were part of her in-group. And the bit about wanting to preserve the Southern waterbending (which was the one that allowed girl waterbenders), and her knowing stuff the Northern master hadn't... And yet she's corrupting, and the final confrontation is like she's soiled Katara by forcing her to do it instead of the power being something to be proud of. And all for a power that frankly sucks.
(The reason it doesn't seem bloodbending can be used as actual water is that if it could she should have ripped it out of the rats and hacked her way free, rather than spending ages more mastering the ability to make them move around. Agreed that, in fairness, it's a kids' show. And also they couldn't rescue the people if they'd been turned into withered husks.)
I liked Yue. My only problem was I couldn't figure out why she was getting married to the jackass when we were never shown what benefit it gave him and he seemed certain it would go ahead no matter how much of a jackass he acted like. Her death made sense and it was really more of a replacement than a sacrifice, so of course they needed a female character to die because otherwise the new moon spirit wouldn't be female. It even felt like sort of a counter to how patriarchal the culture was, that in the end it was Yue and the moon spirit who actually mattered when it came to beating the Fire Nation, no matter how many male waterbenders they had.
The fic was Catalyst. It was up on AooO but it's been taken down for some reason, older chapters are still in the fic directory. The older chapters weren't so bad (just the slow realization that hey, why are all the soldiers male? and what are the queens doing?), it's the flashback ones that came next where we find out what happened to BQ (the bunny disappears before he can use it, so she chucks him out the window, but he climbs back in and stabs her before she noticed, because she's dumb like that, then he monologues at her for a bit (because it's not like she's at all capable of fighting back) then he actually kills her, then the rest is all OC infighting who are all coincidentally male) and then WQ (who is still leaving for some reason, even though in this version Jack never gets to attack Prospit, and then the king realizes she doesn't need to leave, only he DOESN'T FUCKING TELL HER BECAUSE HE THINKS SHE'LL BE BETTER OFF LEAVING AND SO HE MAKES THE DECISION FOR HER), only her ship gets hit by Jack's as he tries to flee Derse because it got blown up, so she's dead too, although Jack and the rest are fine of course, because god forbid any character with a vagina live.) WQ's death is after the Veil gets messed up, so she should have been respawned like the king, but unless AM was somehow her she wasn't (and even if AM was, AM's male, so that's not really dealing with the core issue here).
...and now I want to either find an excuse to make Jack wear leather pants or to complain about being made to wear them...
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Those are good points about Hama and Yue. I don't think I have anything more to say on the subject of Avatar, but here, have a rec for a completely superb Azula-centric fic about yin energy and awesome old ladies and correcting imbalances.
Oh, okay, I remember Catalyst! I decided it was boring and dropped it before I realized it was all OMCs, though, looking back, it being all OMCs was probably why I found it so boring. I also saw the first flashback chapter and had to roll my eyes at Jack getting the drop on the Queen without a "trump card," which was a shame because I really liked the explanation about the bunny.
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...and yeah, that bit about the action movie roles alone was a shock. I think movies are the worst about this, so it's not a surprise people who are more familiar with those will be dipping into bad tropes.
EEEE fic goddammit I have to go to sleep!
I really liked the opening chapters when it was just worldbuilding and AM running around, then the more characters were introduced the more samey they felt, and the fact they were all guys just reinforced that. By the final chapters it was more like The Story Of Why Jack/The MC Was Totally Awesome And Also Justified. And...it kind of makes me long for fangirl apologia, because at least that admits there was a problem. Once they're revealed they pretty much all become assholes, and it's like, wait, why are we rooting for them to get off Skaia?
(What's particularly annoying there is that it wasn't even necessary, it's a problem arising from something introduced, and there was another plot device, the malfunctioning ring, that could also have been used.)
Totally unrelated but...
(Anonymous) 2010-11-16 03:02 am (UTC)(link)http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CharacterDerailment
and
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrollFic
Also a fanfic recommendation, but I believe you've already seen that one. Wheee!
Re: Totally unrelated but...
Oh yeah
(Anonymous) 2010-11-16 03:36 am (UTC)(link)Ursula K. Le Guin had a race of hermaphrodites in her Hainish Cycle who were all referred to with male nouns and pronouns in The Left Hand of Darkness. In her Coming of Age in Karhide, which takes place in the same universe with the same hermaphrodites, said race is now made reference to using female nouns and pronouns.
My proposition: use gendered pronouns completely randomly!
Screw the clarity, we have pronouns!
Re: Oh yeah
And on top of that, the mewtwo have a worshipful sort of view of Mew, who's female and seen as the mother of their race, but at the same time see themselves as different from her. And they reproduce via cloning. So the connection between Mew and Mewtwo is a big deal, while canonical Mewtwo is equals with the other mewtwo and there's no distinction between any of them. As the only two species who get pronouns as far as the mewtwo are concerned, it makes sense for Mew to be "she" and themselves to be "he".
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(Anonymous) 2010-11-16 03:56 am (UTC)(link)It just bothers me that gender matters now. I mean, I've always hated it when there were a lack of female characters and an all male cast, but now it really bother me that people get upset because the cast is uneven. People will ignore the content of the story in favor of gender roles and that's horribly frustrating.
I'm female and I almost always use a female protagonist. In fact, I adore female characters, but it's troubling to know that feminism is leaking into my literature so heavily that my characters are loosing identity in favor of gender ratios. How come Watership Down is being attacked for its lack of a female cast and books like Hush, Hush and Marked are not recieving any criticism for its horrible portrayal of females and terrible writing to boot?
I know a lot of people freak out when a female character has reoccuring flaws and this pisses me off beyond belief. I mean, I love flawed characters, male or female, so the fact that people get so pissed off about character flaws in a girl enrages me. Character flaws, when used sparingly and correctly, show how much a creator has put into that character. I wish people would stop complaining about flat female, then turn right around and bitch about her flaws. THAT'S WHAT MAKES THEM GREAT.
And don't get me wrong. I agree with you wholeheartedly. It's just such a burden to know that women are being tossed aside in our media and that great literature can't be enjoyed because of such simple things as gender. The entire thing is disheartening. Depressed and in need of sugar, I end this message with one thought: There need to be more lesbians in literature.
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Why does a serial killer mean you can't portray strong women? They're a serial killer, I assume they'd still succeed even if their victims aren't universally weak and stupid. And I assume other women exist outside of being victims because, you know, they're half the human race and your story must have other characters than just the one serial killer and the people they're killing.
And why would changing their gender destroy your characters' identities? It really shouldn't be that big a part of their personalities, that's kind of the point here.
It's not that gender has suddenly started mattering. If gender hadn't mattered, people wouldn't consistently write mostly or entirely male casts and write the few female characters there are terribly. All that's happened is that a problem that was already there is being pointed out.
How come Watership Down is being attacked for its lack of a female cast and books like Hush, Hush and Marked are not recieving any criticism for its horrible portrayal of females and terrible writing to boot?
I have not heard that criticism, the criticism wouldn't make sense because Watership Down's starting cast has a reason to involve male rabbits and they end up meeting female rabbit characters as soon as they enter a mixed group. And people do criticize horrible portrayals of females too. Hell, scroll back up. Wild Cards had plenty of female characters and that's what I hated most. Most of this post was about particular female characters, not gender balance.
that great literature can't be enjoyed because of such simple things as gender
Seriously, no one is saying this. The issue is overall patterns.
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(Anonymous) 2010-11-16 04:56 am (UTC)(link)Actually, Watership Down was criticised because the female rabbits were used for mating purposes and nothing more, apparently. Another example as to why I don't like hardcore feminists criticizing literature. It's always such a tiny aspect against the big picture.
And I'm not talking about you directly. I'm talking about how some people judge based on gender rather than the story. You know, have one character that's a housewife or something and apparently it's a terrible thing, despite there being several strong female characters throughout the story line. Housewife=/= weak character/weak female.
In other words, I'm not directly addressing your post so much as complaining about feminist ideals that are being twisted by psychos and used against good literature. I'm just rambling, as seen by the horrible display of organization throughout my message.
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I would really like to see that actual criticism of Watership Down, because there were female characters in the books. Also, you can always find one person to be wrong about something. Unless it's commonly believed, it's not "hardcore feminists think", it's just someone who didn't read the book.
You know, have one character that's a housewife or something and apparently it's a terrible thing, despite there being several strong female characters throughout the story line.
The issue is generally that the one female character who's a housewife is the only one or that her being a housewife is held up as being just as important a contribution as the actual important things other characters do.
The majority of characters in media are male. The majority of main characters in media are male. The majority of powerful characters in media are male. The majority of characters with agency in media are male. The majority of female characters that do exist are terrible for one reason or another. I really think that's a bigger deal than that someone somewhere misread Watership Down.
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In any case, I enjoyed this post a lot and agree pretty much entirely with your breakdown of the issue.
Since I was little, I've always had a tendency to make characters male by default. I figure that's mainly because most of the characters I read about were male, and I'd imagine that's the case with most other girls who default to male characters; I don't have any statistics to prove it, but I have a feeling the girls who default to writing female characters when they get into fandom are often the ones who read less and have it less ingrained in them that books are about boys.
After becoming more aware of gender issues, I've been making an effort to stop and try genderflipping before inserting a character, and that's been a very positive experience; everyone should try it. One of the reasons female characters tend to be so flat or useless or otherwise problematic is very likely that they tend to only exist when the writer specifically thinks, "Now I'm going to make a female character." If more random characters would just truly, organically happen to be female, that would help the problem enormously, I think.
(And part of this is just...so many terrible female tropes. Even if there's nothing technically wrong with it, when you attach a gender you change the way everyone reads it. There are all sorts of things that a neutral for a guy but weak when they're female. And it's really hard to push back against some of those enough to establish that no actually what you meant was... Especially because a lot of people don't even realize it happens. They're just so ingrained. I was trying to explain what I was doing with a story, and even when I was saying it out loud, explicitly explain what I was going for, the responses I got kept falling back into the same assumption traps I was trying to avoid.)
This is so true it aches.
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In my case I read a lot, but I read mostly books with female leads or mixed casts. The first books I can remember were the Oz series, which my parents read to me when I was three or four. The first books I read on my own were series like The Boxcar Children and Narnia where you had casts of two boys and two girls, which was what I came to think of as the "default," and what my earliest attempts at creative writing imitated.
Another thing I tended to do when I was very young was mentally rewrite books as I read them to give the (female) characters I identified with most larger and more active roles, sometimes by swapping them into scenes that canonically featured the male leads. Looking back on that makes me wonder if the Mary Sue phenomenon might largely be a reaction to young girls not "seeing themselves" often enough in published fiction. Boys by and large don't have to write Sues because they can just identify with the awesome, larger-than-life male heroes abundantly available to them. I certainly don't agree with the parties arguing that criticism of Sues is inherently misogynistic, but like Farla said, for young girls making their first forays into creative writing, it actually seems like a healthy tendency.
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I guess I had the idea from a really early age that it was boys vs girls and I had to support my side. I didn't really care what was going on with the boys unless they had some particular trait I either felt somehow reflected me, but I'd take things about the girls personally.
...I am not really sure why. Eh, I'm just going to blame daycare.
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It's kind of like there are three different Azulas. When we're first introduced she's cool but really high strung and prone to losing her temper if things don't immediately go her way. Then there's the one that chased the Avatar and took the city, who's super competent and in control. Then there's the one at the end, who does the whole "omg Dad named me Fire Lord :D omg but he is going on to become phoenix king D: D: D:". Which, I think, is part of what makes her crazy flip bother me so much, if the Azula who cared about titles and couldn't handle power had existed earlier I'd have disliked the trope but it wouldn't have come off as "female characters always X when Y" but "this character X when Y because of Z existing traits". The fact a character who previously was controlled and could handle power suddenly lost it just because made it come off as women just not being able to handle power.
I don't have any statistics to prove it, but I have a feeling the girls who default to writing female characters when they get into fandom are often the ones who read less and have it less ingrained in them that books are about boys.
That sounds plausible. I'd even venture a third factor - books with no girls in them vs badly done girls. I'm not sure which one causes which...much as I hate the badly done ones, it seems likely that having the token girl character makes girls more likely to write something similar only with the girl getting focused on, because it at least makes it so there's a space for girls in a story, but then again my worst reactions to female characters tend to be in book form, while even badly handled ones in other media I tend to like.
This is so true it aches.
There's actually this on and off debate with Homestuck characters about this, sort of.
It sucks because there are some character concepts I like but can't stand seeing done with female characters because the context warps so badly. Like the RP Queen I mentioned. If a male character was mindfucking the characters, it'd be...the best way I can put this is from a position of strength. Like, he'd be doing it because it was actually a good idea, not because he needed guys to do his fighting for him, and it would be less a delusion and more an unbreakable spell. It's like, it's treated like a lot of female characters manipulate not because they're good at manipulating but because they're bad at other stuff. And it's really hard to pinpoint here how much is actual player fail and how much is me assuming that's what they meant because that's what people always mean, and reading the stuff I'm complaining about into it in the first place.
It's not exactly impossible to have a female character that works here - actually FMA's Lust was a good version - but only if she has some extra trait to make her stronger, like also being a good fighter in her own right. Just chessmaster girls end up weak, even when their male counterparts would be fine.
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Yep, unfortunately. The other side to it is sometimes I think about genderflipping a character and can't do it. In a male character it's 'I can see why that guy is in charge even though (or perhaps because) he's the less bloodthirsty one', which in a female character would be 'why is anyone pretending the Girl is in charge when she's clearly a spineless, weak, shrinking violet.'
Or 'the slut' versus 'the guy who scores a lot.' Always, always, always it's the man who sleeps around and gets forgiven and the woman who's virginal and monogamous or she's EVIL. People have no trouble following me when I talk about a male character who has an open-marriage-turned-harem, but then I get the weirdest looks when I mention his wife is thinking about sleeping with/dating another friend of theirs who's on the edge of a mental breakdown and could really use the help and attention. Lord help a woman who does what male characters do all the fracking time in the canon.
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Ugh, yeah there's not much you can do there.
And people get really weird about sex. I just saw a bunch of surprise slutshaming over a character who may have slept with the general of a country as part of securing a military alliance, when she was married to one of the soldiers back home. A soldier who was probably doomed if she didn't get help and who she loved enough to turn down dictator-guy's repeated offers of marriage.
Meanwhile general guy betrayed her, got the guy killed and is forcing her to marry him through torture if necessary, after which he's probably going to kill her like he did his previous wives.
Equally bad, clearly. The bashing was countered when people pointed out it was strongly implied she hadn't slept with him...which shouldn't have mattered, and the author shouldn't have needed to introduce both that and the marriage at the same time. (...at least they weren't calling her a slut when they thought she was unmarried? Progress?)
I think the only solution is to just keep writing characters doing this until people get used to it, but it means sacrificing any of the stories where you make the attempt on the alter of Do Not Get It.
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what why is that lurker talking how strangeIt all seems really...I don't know, obvious, when you're actually spelling out the evidence in writing and giving detailed examples, but people always roll their eyes at me when I complain about how imbalanced genders and gender roles tend to be in movies/tv shows/children's cartoons/advertising/every fucking thing ever so it's nice to find someone putting all those frustrations into nice eloquent words. I'm not terribly familiar with any of the examples you mentioned save How to Train Your Dragon (which I really did enjoy if only because there was no obligatory dance montage at the end as per standard animated fare) but the criticisms are more or less what I'd expect in each of those works from what I do know.
It's just so grinding that appreciable, well-rounded female characters—at least, more than one at a time—only seem to be available in books where it's the the main selling point of the plot, like in Tamora Pierce works. But if I point out to my friends that a particular TV show or movie, for some inexplicable reason, only has one female (if that) in the main cast, and that she's got no depth to boot, they take it as a personal attack. Or they just brush off the criticism as unimportant. Or they think that I'm just being prejudiced against the work for something that doesn't matter.
Anyway, most of that is pretty much a redundant rehash of what you've already said, but again, I'm really glad that you took the time to write it out. Thanks for making me believe I'm not a crazy nazi-feminist for caring about this stuff, because seeing it in words just kind of cements that yeah, it makes sense to feel that way.
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Oh, and because people tune you out if they think you're just objecting on feminist principles, phrasing it as "I'm bored of this character type" sometimes works. Being bored of something that you've already seen is more forgivable, it seems.
But this is one of those things that it's really hard to get across to people. It's something that takes a while to sink in, and if people don't want to see it, they won't.
(And when you want to point out the problems with specific casting...it never ends well. Discussing any of the last couple movies I saw with my family ended with arguments.)
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But I'll try the "character type" bit; about 80% of the time it's true anyway regardless of gender so it ought to kill two birds with one stone.
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I can deal with disagreement, but it never even goes that far. It's just...dismissal.
Huh. I rarely have that problem, but then I treat arguments in a rather bulldoglike fashion. Perhaps being more insulting about the creator and their abilities would get attention better?
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(Anonymous) 2014-08-27 09:52 pm (UTC)(link)