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[farla]

I think more people would be turned off by the fact that she constantly reviews others' stories for no other reason than to enforce her own OPINIONS as if they were fact [[WallBanger(i.e. insulting people for capitalizing the names of Pokemon)]], flaming anyone who even slightly disagrees with her (quite literally, she often tells people who disagree with her that she wants to see them burn), and just trolling in general. And she does this on a LOT of fics. Even on quality stories. This tends to backfire, as most reviews on her own stories tend to be retaliatory flames. It's like what would happen if Uwe Boll finally put out a good movie. It could be the best movie ever, but he's put out so much crap, and been so arrogant towards pretty much everyone over the years, that no one would actually care how good it was. She's not a bad author, but she IS a bad person, and that tends to turn people off even more than the quality of the work.

Oh, TvTropes rec page, never stop being so awesomely hilarious.

(Also, I'd like to point to this as Exhibit #45678 of why I tune out people saying I should be nicer. Telling people not to capitalize pokemon is insulting them!)

Comments

[farla.livejournal.com]

Because it's so horribly weighted in favor of men being the normal gender. Anything with female protagonists gets kicked into 6+, while their examples of "equality" involve all-male protagonists and mostly male casts. The low numbers fall over themselves to make excuses for why all male characters isn't necessarily sexist, but all the upper numbers are bitching about feminazi mistreatment. (Note also the upper levels all describe particular settings, while the lower ones are how the characters are actually treated.)

I mean, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6 breaks the series' tradition of male protagonists with Joelyne. Seriously? There's an entire damn "tradition" of male protagonists but they eventually get around to including a girl so it's gender equal? And FMA, really? Horribly imbalanced casts are considered equal if they're mostly male, while anything with more women is considered unbalanced.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, I see. I didn't look at the examples, so...ugh. :(

Should I call them out on that? I have an account and I can talk on the discussion page if necessary.

[farla.livejournal.com]

It needs a complete rewrite from top to bottom, because it's not just the examples but the basic setup (the examples just make it obvious how broken the scale is) and from other pages any changes would get fought tooth and nail. There's a couple people with an ax to grind so much any overtly feminist-flavored page has qualifiers about the poor men, and any honest version of the scale would have to acknowledge that the majority of stories are weighted toward male characters and that this isn't equally bad as a handful having female protagonists.

[charizamdc.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure why we need it to be set up male-equal-female rather than unequal-equal, really. That's what the title led me to assume would be there in the first place.

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's because the fact a tiny handful of stories portray women positively or have more of them than men is exactly as unjust, if not more, than the fact most stories are about men. I saw the original proposed version of it (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=82pfhao5xsnbl0q95adqd2g3) and it was even more of a clusterfuck. When most of your description is bawwing about feminazis, you shouldn't be allowed anywhere near sexism tropes.

[(Anonymous)]

...Ugh.

Still, though, surely there's *something* I could do?

[farla.livejournal.com]

I guess you could try to make it suck less, but really I think it needs to get purged and redone from the ground up. And even if you got a decent page it'd require constant policing to keep people from putting their favorite shows in the equals area or putting all shojo in the sexist-toward-men sections, or writing endless justifying edits for the 1-4 shows.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that's probably beyond my troping capability or persuasive skills. :( I could probably leave a post calling people out on it on the discussion page or Repair Shop forum, and see where it goes from there.

Or perhaps you could once NaRe is over? I'm sure you're better at arguing than I am...

[farla.livejournal.com]

I have my hands full futilely policing other places, I draw the line at wiki arguments.

And even if you could get everything established perfectly, it'd still degrade into wank and stupidity. Every example in the lower numbers of outright sexism that's less than FATAL levels would either get argued to death by its fans or the level itself would get edited until it was described as neutral. And I don't think there's any way to explain that the "female characters get portrayed as more competent than male ones" examples isn't actually sexist against men so much as sexist against everyone, and - yeah there's just no way to get it to work. The only working system would be to cut treatment and just do it by ratio because that's objective enough you could keep the stupidity under control.

[(Anonymous)]

You're actually misinterpreting the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure example; there's a separate entry for it under level 4 that acknowledges that only part 6 is a level 5, not the entire series.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Having a female main character doesn't mean it's gender equal. This is why the page needs to be nuked from orbit. Gender equal means even ratios and treatment, not that it sucks less than something worse.