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

This is OTC. We do try to keep the conversation here on topic. Not rambling on about other tropers or topics.

Does this apply to fans who insist that there is one way to interpret a story?

Not necessarily. There's a term for that in film criticism, but I can't remember it right now. However, I have noticed that A LOT of fans of series like GTA5 enjoy arguing that it's satire when it very clearly is not.

I feel the sad puppies are being blamed for the vote brigading at the Hugos more than they deserve, this is the third time they've tried challenging what they percieve as the status quo, and I think they would've failed yet again were it not for the Vox Day led rabbid puppies. Which brings to mind the idea that bigger assholes do inspire more people to vote.

What is it then?

edited 26th Aug '15 7:05:39 PM by vandro

Not satire?

.... I have no idea what is being discussed right now, can I get an explimation, sorry.

What exactly is GTA V supposed to be satirizing though? Like I can kinda see it with some characters but not the whole game.

A parody? A caricature?

Eh, like I can almost see it but at the same time it plays too many problematic things at face value with no irony for me to really think it's a proper satire.

@Imca: Not sure what everyone else is talking about, but I was talking about how creators and creative teams sometimes have a habit of denying responsibility for themes, plots, characterizations and other elements that may reflect poorly on their social, cultural or political views. This typically manifests itself as an argument that certain conventions must be obeyed within a fictional world despite that world being, you know, not real and totally under your control.

@Vandro: I don't know anything about that, but if you're a sci-fi/fantasy author and you think social justice advocates are taking over the medium to insert political viewpoints into the field, you need to read the bulk of sci-fi and fantasy that has been published over the past 200 years.

edited 26th Aug '15 7:18:25 PM by Aprilla

That specificly, what and what?

Maybe, but the word I would use is "amplification", which is closer to caricature in practice.

Here and here.

Basically it was an argument started about a gauntlet of writers who felt that there is too much pressure to infuse diversity and political themes into science fiction and fantasy literature. It's a heated issue, but much more than it needs to be.

edited 26th Aug '15 7:26:46 PM by Aprilla

Pretty sure that's partly why the genre was even invented. So you could talk about an issue or a group of people without actually talking about the issue or that group of people.

Satire tends to be VERY fantastical in nature.

edited 26th Aug '15 7:27:01 PM by blkwhtrbbt

I myself am not contesting the mere undisputable fact that SFF more than any other genre cluster is riddled to the brim for political themes, what I think is that there is misguided feeling of exclusion in their plight, that should be spent on making another award or convention that thanks to rage is misspent on fighting the politics game.

Sure. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, one of the first works of science fiction ever written, was a fairly clear critique of late 19th century Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution and the darker side of man's desire to create (and his refusal to face the consequences of creation).

While I don't fundamentally disagree with the idea that these genres are used as a proxy for social commentary, many people use the genres to circumvent rather than confront the issues they're discussing. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't depending on the context. Some examples that come to mind:

1.) Allegories about racism that have green flying spider people while all of the human explorers/space marines/scientists/whatever are white guys with one hot chick for some reason.

2.) Allegories about non-traditional gender roles and taboo relationships that are really just author fantasies about having sex with lots of beautiful women.

3.) Lots and lots of stories with chosen one/messiah archetypes that are somewhat cliched celebrations of libertarian/anarchist utopias.

4.) Stories about killer robots, kaiju monsters and extraterrestrial misunderstandings that are metaphors for Cold War anxieties.

None of these themes are necessarily bad, but the problem with many modern authors is that they've either lost touch with or never understood the very political nature of SFF. I'm also not advocating that we all write huggy liberal stories where there is no violence and everyone is a non-white LGBT character. That's a strawman argument that has been fanning the flames of the debate. The problem is that a lot of authors don't take ownership of the worlds they create, however status-quo-driven those worlds may be. Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is a controversial military sci-fi novel that arguably embraces nationalistic jingoism, military dictatorships and fascism, but even relatively conservative writers like Heinlein were quite open about the values they were communicating.

Some of these guys today are trying to ignore political subtext because it means confronting potential problems in their own works. It's like saying Animal Farm was a book about talking pigs.

Sure, but some works of satire are quite grounded in reality. In some cases, the sense of familiarity and ordinariness is part of what drives whatever social commentary the work is trying to convey. Satire can go either way, using exaggerated tropes to mock an issue (Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock) or pronounced understatement meant to give the appearance of calmness or civility (Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal). The former is a mock-heroic epic that uses grandiose language to convey a sense of ridiculousness about the self-important aristocracy while the latter uses matter-of-fact, gentlemanly language to illustrate how horribly easy it is to endorse an inhuman social policy given the proper rhetorical mechanisms.

edited 26th Aug '15 7:59:29 PM by Aprilla

I was thinking more along the lines of Candide and Gulliver. Proposal was so subtle that many folks who read it took it a face value and were horrified by it. Candide and Gulliver's travels were much more... transparent.

Okay. I think that makes more sense.

We're drifting off-topic, and while I would bring up more gender-specific discussions about satire (Bayonetta, Kill La Kill), that's awfully familiar ground for us.

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers seems to have shades of satire in a vein similar to Sucker Punch, which was part of the reason why I brought up how satire can be conveyed through fantastical settings or mundane ones - or a fusion of both in the case of Sucker Punch.

I actually enjoyed both movies, but many other people think they're pretty trashy. I want to cut Spring Breakers some slack because I believe that Korine is being sincere with some of the themes he's conveying, though "satire" is not quite the word I would use to describe it.

My running theory is that the movie is about ephebiphobia and gynophobia; the terrifying thought that beautiful young women on vacation can be so shameless in their destructive activities. It runs along a wavelength similar to Gone Girl, though Gone Girl is perhaps a clearer indictment of constrictive gender roles that encourage unrealistic relationship standards. And like Gone Girl, Spring Breakers uses tropes like Fanservice and The Ingenue ^note  I further argue that Spring Breakers is, in its purest form, a massive deconstruction of this one trope from start to finish. to disarm the audience and force them to confront the assumptions they had walking into the story. Again, not quite satire, but more along the lines of Deconstruction, at least as we identify it here on TV Tropes.

edited 26th Aug '15 8:30:41 PM by Aprilla

The Stepford Wives, Valley of the Dolls, Y: The Last Man and anything by Robin Cook?

edited 26th Aug '15 8:45:45 PM by Euodiachloris

On the one hand, quite another GRRM's girls kick ass in a world that tries to keep them down. On the other hand, all his girls in a relationship are vindictive and jealous. Sometimes lethally or fatally so.

Game of Thrones is a pretty shitty show when it comes to treating women well or with any sort of agency though.

The books are much better.

That's what I keep hearing. On their own, I enjoy the show, but the book fans keep telling me that the women aren't being translated to the visual medium very well. Gabrael told me that Kal Drogo is much more receptive and respectful of Daenerys' personal boundaries whereas the show version has him acting brutish and imposing during their sexual intercourse.

It's an awesome series, but I can see how many people find the book-to-show translation frustrating.