farla

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.