Designated Girl Fights

Do you guys like to use them? I remember writing one in my now non-canon nano wrimo story last year. Not the best example of one, but hey, my first ever.

The only girl on Nightmare team got isolated and had to fight off a bunch of people, and it came down to a struggle with some blonde.

Though now it seems really narmy here and there in hindsight. I was really into it at the moment though.

From the work itself:

All in it's nano wrimo crappy glory!

Have any of you guys ever written a designated girl fight scene? what do you guys think of them in general?

No, and I don't like them. Combat, when it occurs, is a gender-neutral affair in my 'verse; no pushing off the female fighters to the "designated girl fight"

Hmm...I don't particularly care about this trope. There are three competent female fighers (and one commander ala Balalaika but that's irrelevant) and they fight males because there aren't that many girls to begin with.

Oh, and I fucking abhor catfights because they are so fetishized nowadays.

=(

Well I like to use them to show that my main female character is not the typical stereotype faux action girl and the real deal, by completely destroying them.

Then again my female characters have been known to do this to men too, but in this instance I purposely set it up woman vs. woman.

edit: was mine there fetishized? i hope it wasnt >.>

edited 25th Oct '11 11:23:46 PM by jasonwill2

I don't think yours was. Btw, that seemed like a very high quality for a nonow thing.

I tend not to have woman combatants at all, with the exception of my current thing. But there's only one woman in that, so she gets to go to town on guys and have the same done to her. There's none of that "wouldn't hit a girl" crap, everybody's trained not to underestimate any combatant.

That's only because I took out the really narmy part in there. The ellipses show where it was.

edited 25th Oct '11 11:36:00 PM by jasonwill2

I think I will end up having to do a few of these since the male protagonist can't fight for shit and his eventual powers are still totally unhelpful, yet his female compatriots have no such issues.

But yeah, catfights are just silly.

edited 26th Oct '11 12:25:53 AM by OuthouseInferno

There are, as far as I can tell, two reasons to have a Designated Girl Fight.

The first is because of the mindset there's something "wrong" with depicting male-on-female violence (see also Wouldn't Hit a Girl, as someone mentioned earlier). To my mind, this is, bluntly, sexist, and I will have no part of it.

The second is to have Cat Fight Fanservice. My response to that is the same I give to all other kinds of fanservice: screw that (no innuendo intended).

Does this mean that I won't have female characters fight other female characters at all? No, that would be stupid. But I have no respect for Designated Girl Fight as a trope and I will never use it in anything I write, except under literal pain of death.

You pretty much speak for me. I hate Designated Girl Fights. I have no problem writing about a guy and a girl fighting, and I have no problem writing about the guy winning if that's what logic and the plot dictates.

I had an adult male punch a preteen girl in the face. Later he went on to repeatedly stab another preteen girl and traumatically amputate several fingers.

Then there was the time where he fought two women in quick succession, running one of them through repeatedly and blasting a hole in the other's torso large enough to stick your head through.

Or that time where a woman knocked him, over, turned to fight another woman, and got a blade through the left buttock and out the stomach for her trouble.

Granted only the last two died as a result of what Samuel did to them. Granted the kids were Combat Cyborgs and thus their injuries were never serious for them. But at least some degree of Combat Pragmatism is an article of faith in the works I write. People will unhesitatingly exploit whatever advantages they've got. The only solid rules about how brutal and dirty people will get are the ones in their own minds and the rules of engagement.

And as a Gender Is No Object setting for Samuel at least, the rules in someone's mind about fighting dirty tend to reflect temperament rather than anything to do with their opponent.

In Night Life the issue hasn't come up, but with everyone wearing power armor (or being an insane artificial biomechanoid) it's unlikely anyone would even recognize an opponent's gender to begin with.

edited 26th Oct '11 1:43:59 AM by Night

@nrjxll: very much agreed. I think some people in this thread are confusing the Designated Girl Fight trope with any situation in which you have two women who fight each other.

Though I think in some cases it's more that it's the Designated Sidekick Fight, if both sides have a female sidekick.

In order to have designated girl fights, I'd have to have fights. Characters who're attacked in my stories usually don't realize they've been attacked before they lose (and the ones who do realize it are usually powerful villains who then utterly humiliate the less-than-powerful heroes.)

edited 26th Oct '11 2:35:57 AM by feotakahari

Nah, typically, my female characters are competent and fight guys on an even plane all the time.

I did one time end up in a pseudo-designated girl fight, but that was actually because of the way the pairing up of people for that fight went (I only had two pairs that needed to be that way for story purposes, and randomly picked the rest). Also, that story had a cast that was more female than male, on the heroes' side, so such a thing wasn't exactly unexpected.

I don't have women fight women just for the sake of it. That would be idiotic.

Does it count as a designated girl fight if said girls are two of the strongest characters in the story and actually fight properly? Or if it's a sparing match with a friend?

By strongest I mean, if one side fields one the other side is pretty much forced to field the other.

edited 26th Oct '11 4:05:07 PM by PhoenixAct

It has never occurred to me to purposefully use a designated girl fight.

Borghild's fight against the other Valkyrja does come to mind, though.

It's also the only one in the story that she lost besides the battle that took her life a long time ago.

edited 26th Oct '11 6:27:37 PM by annebeeche

...I've done designated guy fights...

Well I'll be a bit of a non-conformist: I actually like catfights quite a bit, but I do get the hate towards the Designated Girl Fight.

As long as it's well executed, it doesn't matter to me who fights who.

In my fic, I have a kind of Designated Girl Fight coming up, but it's more of a 'designated genjutsu/melee expert fight', and I've actually replaced several of the Designated Girl Fights in canon Naruto. I don't think that slavishly following the principle is good, but neither is completely avoiding it; both imply some sort of double standard. I just have people fight each other who make sense in context.

I think everyone has agreed with that - Designated Girl Fight is not just "female characters fight each other". Trying to avoid that would be every bit as stupid as the opposite.

If I were to do one, I would make sure that it would be just as brutal as any other fight, with the looser more than likely ending up on the ground bleeding heavily enough to fill up the damned great lakes.

What you said.

I thought the only qualifying parts was that it was intentionally set up that two girls fought 1 vs 1, as opposed to it coming naturally.

I'm going to be averting that really blatantly when Jason literally curb stomps a female mercenary.

It's not pretty and purposely misogynistic.

But due to plot considerations I may have to pull out a couple of plot strings in there >.> It has a potential for a major plot tumor.

edited 27th Oct '11 11:58:02 AM by jasonwill2

Why would a guy beating a girl have to be misogynistic?

It absolutely doesn't, but it certainly can be depending on context.