Male Roles Vs. Female Roles in Fiction: Discussion/Analysis/Troperwank

I liked Got G, but Gamora was seriously mishandled and shoehorned into the role of The Chick when she really isn't in the source material. For one, in the current run she's pretty sexually assertive and so wouldn't have been flustered at Quill hitting on her. I think it might have been better if she'd played along for a bit and then shut him down hard.

Plus she was damseled far too often throughout the movie, significantly weakened, and her role as the character most invested in Doing What's Right seemed insanely out of character for a famed and ruthless assassin. This last thing is an execution problem. It's not a problem that she's pushing the lead to Do What's Right, but she should want to Do What's Right because it's smart or the pragmatic thing to do instead of doing the right thing because her heart grew three sizes that day.

Which is again making her The Chick because the Chick's job is to be The Heart.

I agree with you Morven but I believe there is a difference of perspective here.

I understand that if in a story there are say, three guys and one girl and the author goes to lengths to give a convoluted story for the girl to be there then it is still tokenism, but simply rationalized.

However I am mostly refering to stories that put characters that are meaningless and fulfill some sort of social, or otherwise obligatory quota.

E.g. Tauriel in the Hobbit movies, where she's clearly a bolt-on "We need a girl in this!" and could be deleted without impacting the rest of the story?

I still think they could have handled that better if they just made half the dwarves female.

I am afraid I have not seen the hobbit movies. I could not comment on that, I am sorry.

I would've loved it if they'd cut Legolas entirely and left Tauriel as the face of the interventionalist elves. Also cut that goddamn bullshit love story. We don't need a fucking romance in every movie, and female characters can be used for more than just hackneyed romance subplots.

They couldnt use the dwarves because they needed a hot girl.

One place where it is shoehorned and to the detriment is the Percy Jackson movies.

In the books, Grover, the satyr, is white. In the movies, not only do they make him black, but they make him a jumping and jiving black character. In the books, Grover was the heart of the group, not the comic relief. So that didn't even make sense.

The book also makes the motions that Grover is white on purpose, not the sidekick in a buddy cop film. Considering Grover is a Greek creature, him being white isn't that big of a deal when the actual heroes are very diverse and come from many ethnicities.

Where I think Percy Jackson goes wrong is they have the Harry Potter side effect where it's the same three white people and the forced crush between Annabelle and Percy is just going through the young adult formula.

Contrast that with Symbiotic Titan where the boy and the girl really are just friends and don't have any romantic connection, but rather build a familial connection.

I don't think there is anything wrong with adding characters for the purpose of diversity.

The problem is when writers get lazy and forget to make the only women/minorities in your story actual characters.

edited 21st Jan '15 8:25:37 PM by DrStarky

Basically the problem with the Hobbit movies.

I'm reading the Reckoners series by Brandon Sanderson. From the description it sounded pretty tropey as fuck, especially with the nerdy teenaged everyboy protagonist who is "marked" through his parentage becoming a total action hero badass at the expense of an already present badass Action Girl. But the execution is actually pretty decent, and said Action Girl gets a lot more development in the sequel that fleshes her out without defanging her in the greater scheme of things. So altogether not bad.

The Hobbit is especially glaring in this regard because they don't even have the excuse of not wanting to interfere with the source material too much; they also added Legolas to the story despite not being in the source material, then proceeded to have him do tons of things. Every scene with Legolas doing something awesome could have been Tauriel and it would have been no less accurate to the book.

edited 22nd Jan '15 10:47:05 AM by TobiasDrake

Polygon asks if gaming's great women characters can be written by men.

...Urge to kill...rising...

That begs an explanation.

I saw this post/article once that said that men could write women well, but they'd have to try twice as hard to do so. It was so long ago that I've forgotten most of it and I doubt I could find it very easily again to post here. Unless here was where I found the article?

Anyway, yeah, men can write women heroes well. But quite often they choose not to and the best way to remedy the representation problem is to get more women involved in writing the stories. Can't really figure out if men or women write better great women heroes until there's more equality in who's writing the stories, I think.

the one thing about that game, Life Is Strange , that bugs me about it in the article, is the creators decision to have the characters start as archetypes. I've seen the 'archetype characters grow and become more well-rounded' route of character develop before, and it sounds more like its a crutch for the writers than anything else.

but as for the topic of the article itself, it brings up an interesting point of game makers 'making idealized version of themselves', which I can say definitely has a bit of truth to it. video games as a medium allow for a more personal experience, in that the player is interacting with them. it allows players to put themselves in it with customization, but also lets the designers put a lot of themselves collectively in how it is presented.

Plus, for me personally, as someone trying to get into the industry, one of the reasons is because of how little of myself/my interests I see in my favorite medium, and wanting to fix that.

Let's have a game.

We take some pieces of fiction we are aware of, either be it because we like them or not, and evaluate how well each one us thinks that fiction does from a Sexism front. (You can cover something someone else already covered too)

Here is my picks and evaluations of them.

• Code Geass:A young prince gains a mysterious power, with it, he aims to destroy his homeland and kill his dad.
  • Pros: Varied female characters.
    • Quite a few of the girls are quite badass.
  • Cons: Some can also be Distressed Damsels and/or suffer from The Worf Effect.
    • Fanservice up the wazoo.
  • Overall: Average.

• Fullmetal Alchemist:Two young alchemists set out on a quest to fix their bodies.
  • Pros: All the female characters are excellently written,
    • Most of them are not very sexualized, with the obvious exception of Lust,
  • Cons: It fails the Bechdel Test,
    • It does the "Only female of the Capital Sins is Lust" goof we discussed a while back in the "Male and female roles" thread, it doesn't helps that Lust herself is more an object of Lust, rather then an actor of Lust, unlike the other Homunculi.
    • The author herself once stated "Men should be muscular, and women should be vavoom".
    • Overall: Great.

• The Persona series:A buncha highschoolers obtain the power of summoning a manifestation of their psyches, with it, they save the world.
  • Pros: The female characters are all written realistically, as well as well-developed and reasonably competent.
    • Some of the games of the series have female protagonists, sometimes they are either just as important as the male (Persona 2 and Maya and Tatsuya) or, in the case of SMT If...(Which is basically Persona 0), are actually canon over the male protagonist,
  • Cons. That whole fiasco with Satomi Tadashi and Tamaki.
    • One of the female protagonists (Aigis) is pretty much defined by her love for one of the older male protagonists.
    • The Romantic S Ls can be seen as a "Sexual Conquest".
    • In Persona 3 the player is railroaded into entering into a romantic relationship with any of the girls, this means he can and will cheat on all of them.
    • The game has a tedency of punishing you by reversing the romantic S Ls if they see you cheating on them, this is not the case for the Female Protagonist where the worst that can happen is this
  • Overal: Good but still has some problems.

• The Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha games :A high-schooler who was trained since childhood to become a devil summoner gets charged of defending Tokyo from Super-natural threats.
  • Pros: They are.. likable enough, depending on how tolerant you are.
  • Cons:Kaya, the main girl in the first game and practically the cornerstone of the plot, is one huge Distressed Damsel of the kind that would make Princess Peach wonder about her security.
    • Tae, a side character in both games, is an homage to that old stereotype in silent movies of women who tried to be competent and indepedent and yet always needed the male hero's help, with accompanying Unfortunate Implications.
    • Nagi, Raidou's kouhai as a devil summoner, is an immature and weak action girl in training, this wouldn't be so bad, if it was not for the fact that every other male character in the game is already tough by the time the story starts.
  • Overall: Not very well.

• Devil Survivor:A bunch of highschoolers are are caught inside a lockdown of the Yamanote Line when demons attack now they have to learn to harness these powers in order to survive.
  • Pros: Various female characters.
    • There is healthy selection of different personalities amongst them.
    • They are all fairly developed.
  • Cons: Yuzu, the main female character of the game, is a The Watson who is always complaining about the state of the Lockdown and wants desperately to escape, and if you do that the game sends you to the worst ending.
    • Midori, another character, is a rash and reckless cosplay girl who tries to use her newfound powers to help people but, thanks to the fact she never bothers to explain anything, only causes the common person's paranoia towards herself to get worse, thus causing distrust amongst Demon Tamers and making the situation in the lockdown even worse.
    • Haru is a singer with suicidal tedencies who believes herself for being responsible for the Lockdown, she is the target of several Escort Missions, and her usual reaction for her being rescued is to flirt with the main character.
    • Amane and Izuna are... fine, I guess.
  • Overall: Okayish.... I guess?

I will make more later.

What's everyone's take on Femme Fatales in general, especially in terms of how they're characterized as using their sensuality to get an advantage over their male opponents?

I equate them to the Draco in Leather Pants phenomenon, only in a different context. Mostly because everyone is aghast that women like the evil guys despite being EVIL, but no one questions a guy who does the same thing to the Femme Fatale.

@Saint Deltora

Good call:

- Girls Und Panzer: Highschool girls play a profoundly ridiculous-yet-awesome sport called "Tankery", which involves fighting each other in WWII tanks.

Pros: Effectively an all-female cast, no creepy fanservice for a school anime, characters are well-rounded.

Cons: Moe is a dubious concept in itself, and GuP is very moe-heavy.

Overall: A-

- Sharpe: Sean Bean defends the British Empire from assorted foreigners in general and the devious Frogs in particular.

Pros: Sharpe's wife, la Aguja, is fairly badass, as is la Marquesa in her own way.

Cons: All other female characters are either devious whores, disposable women who are raped or murdered to show how nasty the bad guys are, Damsels in Distress, and the formula for a badass woman is "rape and revenge".

Overall: D. This template fits almost any Bernard Cornwell novel

—-

Femme Fatales have the Madonna/Whore complex out the wazoo. They're also often an irritating halfway-house for creators to say: "Look, a badass female character with agency, I can't be sexist", even if the character is a classic wicked woman in every other interpretation.

edited 27th Jan '15 2:40:40 PM by Achaemenid

Exactly what makes 'fanservice up the wazoo' a con? Code Geass has fanservice for both sexes pretty much in equal ammounts. There is a reason why the manga adaptation of the series was Shōjo, the more mech focused spinoffs were Shōnen, and the Nunnaly focused spinoff was Seinen. And the Fujoshi love the show more than Otaku.

edited 27th Jan '15 5:27:57 PM by Memers

Fanservice is bad because it encourages "yay, scantily-clad hot chicks (or dudes)!" instead of actual characterization. You can do both, but the more time you spend on one, the less time there is for the other. There's also the problem of things like unrealistic standards of beauty, though how much of an issue that is in something as highly-stylized as anime is up for debate. Saying "but they do it for both genders" doesn't make it less bad, it just makes it more even-handedly bad.

Speaking of unrealistic bodies, I noticed that men and women in some tend to have almost the same body types. I am not sure if that occurs in real life but why do they have perfect ten bodies?

Also I don't trust "fanservice for both genders" because often times that just means putting a dude in a codpiece, and equating them to breasts.

Troperwa-what?