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

Not to mention Kislev.

"There was once an age where love was honorable, or so I heard"

I want to discuss the tale of the Knight of the Lion, Ywain (AKA, Owain, Whose sword hand probably doesn't tingle) because I read a Comic-Book Adaptation from my local library.

Ahem, the book is about a knight in King Authur's court who in order:

• Kills the guardian of a supernatural fountain.
• Decides to stay here and attends his funeral, upon which he was smitten with the wife of the man he'd slain, Laudine.
• Decides to woo Laudine to successful results (with the help of a servant named Lunette) until Gawain temps him with the opportunity to go on some adventures.
• Leaves for a year with Gawain (her terms) and overstays that period. results were predictable and a divorce ensues
• Goes mad, finds a lion, saves Lunette from execution (I'd say the Burn the Witch! aspect was more secondary given that her powers were only shown once), save quite a few seamstresses from a demonically-run sweatshop and crafts the Secret Identity of the Knight of the Lion after stopping a giant (before going to stop the execution)
• Later, The Knight of the Lion and Lunette manage to arrange a meeting with Laudine and Lunette has the latter make an oath to reunite the Knight with the woman to scorn him in exchange for him defending her kingdom.
• And finally once that oath is made, Ywain reveals his identity as the Knight of the Lion (and by excention that the lady that Laudine was trying to reunite with him was herself). A panel in which explicitly mentions that she was trapped.

The result. A Knight managed to kill a man and get his widow to marry him...twice. An interesting tale to be sure, but I can see the discord between the time of of Camelot and how.

I want to know haw other Arthurian tales depict men and women in general after reading this.

edited 14th Oct '17 3:45:22 PM by MorningStar1337

" why no Indian Subcontinent?"

Im surprise there isnt any imperial guard regiment based on indian military, those guy were badasses.

And about albion in warhammer...is weird, there is information about them but unlike many other fantasy setting, this guy are bareluy in bronze age and look fairly primitive and backwards,they pretty much "that place" were ir rain all the damn time(so much there is pretty much swamp elementals) and the island become a battlefield for every damn faction in the game.

you can blame GW for a lot of thing, but they dont have provincial bias...

This came up in another thread, but I felt it would be more appropriate here.

Why is the new Lara Croft merely a victim just because she reacts as a normal person would to being attacked? Courage isn't the absence of fear but the ability to overcome fear. This seems to be something I've noticed with female characters, even ones that aren't damsels in distress. If they don't respond to their circumstances with a quip or toss of their hair, they're considered weak for some reason.

It’s because the equivalent male characters do respond with a quip.

The problem isn’t that female characters have a normal human reaction, it’s that only female characters (or male characters we are meant to look down on) have a normal human reaction. In a perfect world we’d have male and female characters that are emotionless robots and realistic humans, but the few emotionless female characters we have are being taken away and turned into normal humans when nothing similar is being done to male characters.

Personally, I'd prefer if more male characters reacted like normal human beings in media. Then maybe more guys in real life would realize that hey, it's okay to cry. It's okay to admit you're afraid. Bottling that shit up, trying to look tough...it's not healthy.

edited 18th Oct '17 3:47:30 AM by M84

Wasn't the whole point about Lara Croft's reactions in the reboot that she wasn't the hard-boiled adventurer yet the old series portrayed her as?

Turns out that if you didn't have to constantly risk your life before, you're not that prepared for it.

The closest male example I can think of to compare Lara to would be Jason Brody from Far Cry 3. He's an ordinary college guy who ends up fighting for his survival against ridiculous odds and coming out on top. However, while Lara more or less remains a normal person albeit with shell shock, Jason devolves into a psychotic Blood Knight.

Are they? Because from what I've seen, "snarky action girls who aren't phased by anything" are more the norm than the exception these days.

Women have been asking for better female lead characters for a while. I found a letter in Detective Stories Weekly from April 8, 1939 where a self-described ''militant feminist" asked for more competent female leads, as there had only been one in the last year's issues, and she'd relied too much on her male sidekick.

I get that. But the issue isn't with new Lara's competence. It's her personality that people seem to object to.

Isn't it kind of gender equal, though? People whine about male and female heroes showing emotions. Male heroes who show emotions are wusses who don't deserve to be heroes, and female heroes are weak and therefore sexist portrayals.

On the other hand, male heroes who don't show emotions are just boring stereotypes with no depth, while female heroes who don't show emotions are perfect Mary Sues who probably are just reskinned male characters anyway.

What I want is female heroes who're over the top or funny/silly, kinda like Doomguy or Cortez.

The male example that's typically brought up in this discussion is, I guess, John McClane from Die Hard. He's still a police officer, mind you, so he's not a full-on Non-Action Guy, but while dragging his bloody feet in agony after having them torn by pieces of broken glass he's still nothing like the typical action hero of the time. He's also pretty dysfunctional as a father and a human being, but this was of course before being emotionally damaged became "cool" for action heroes.

What it comes to Tomb Raider (2013), I wasn't too bothered by Lara's new portrayal in the game. Sure, it's a tad extreme in how much pain and suffering Lara has to go through before she starts to get a handle of things, but later on it's not so bad. Also, the moment when Lara starts kicking ass and blowing shit up with her newly acquired grenade launcher in order to save her friend, is made all the more awesome due to the hell that she had go through before it.

I was more bothered by the knowledge that Lara doesn't really get too much better in the sequel. Now, I haven't actually played the second game myself so I can't really say too much on what it did or did not do well, but what I've gathered from Steam reviews and such is that people are not too happy about how much Lara still struggles with her new role as an action heroine in RotTR.

If this is indeed the case, it's very disappointing because the reason that makes origin stories compelling to us, even though they turn our favorite heroes to bumbling amateurs, is the knowledge that these characters will eventually go on to become the heroes we know and love. There's nothing particularly interesting about seeing Batman dress himself in a crudely made mask and proceed to get his ass kicked by petty crooks in Batman: Year One, but what makes it interesting to us is us knowing that the guy who just got his ass handed to him will eventually become one of the greatest superheroes of all time.

This is why the final scene at the end of Tomb Raider, where Lara gets to use her iconic dual pistols for the first time, feels so satisfying: because we're led to believe that Lara has with it fully transitioned from the weak and nerdy archaeologist to the strong and confident action hero that is Lara Croft.

edited 18th Oct '17 11:03:20 AM by Paradisesnake

If what they say about the sequel is right, then the sequel sounds pretty realistic.

I have not played the second game but, I would imagine the transition from nerd to action hero is not going to take one game realistically, to be honest. I would wager she is a lot more capable then she was in the first game where she was rather lucky in some of her situations.

That is the great thing about games where you have dialogue options. In those type of games, there is usually a stoic choice, emotional choice, sarcastic choice and sometimes a choice that is not friendly.

The key word here is "eventually". It isn't something that will be done over night. Besides Lara's issues aren't lack of confidence in Rise of Tomb Raider. It's that she's become obsessed with her father's research at the exclusion of everything else.

Terms "realism" and "realistic" lose a lot of their meaning when used in the context of a video game about an Adventurer Archaeologist who fights supernatural monsters while dual wielding pistols. I can tell just from the muted color palette that a more realistic take was something the creators were going for, but the genre Lara Croft (both the character and the series) is rooted in is still inherently unrealistic.

Having fantastic elements and relying on realism are not mutually exclusive. The setting maybe unrealistic but the characters don't have to be

I think a term that's useful here is verisimilitude (the appearance of being true or real.) thus even if a setting doesn't perfectly adhere to reality (and most settings don't) it can still try to appear realistic. So whether or not a character is behaving in a realistic manner is IMO an issue that can exist independent of a setting's more fantastical elements.

edited 18th Oct '17 1:07:40 PM by Fourthspartan56

A Song Of Ice and Fire is fantastical, but its society and people are realistic.

That's actually already well-trod ground. In the original Tomb Raider 1, there are only three or four human enemies in the game. Each one is a boss fight, and after the first, Lara has a moment of shell-shock where she realizes she just took a human life for the first time. It shakes her for a few moments, but she swallows it down, puts it behind her, and resumes being a one-dimensional badass.

The main source of contention, when you get right down to it, is that Lara switched genres. In the earlier games, Lara was very much an Action Hero. In the newer games, she's an Action Survivor. She used to be James Bond, but now she's Nathan Drake. She lost a level in badass in order to make her a more human and relatable character, and this is a problem for some people because there aren't a lot of female Action Heroes as it is so when one gets stripped of her badass credibility, it hurts female representation.

See also: Samus Aran.

edited 18th Oct '17 3:09:08 PM by TobiasDrake

I am pretty sure a lot of the deaths through the adventure effected her including the main antagonist saying the two of them were the same so I wouldn't say she was like every action hero.

*eyebrow twitches*

Please do not make me have to go over the issues with "realism" in ASOIAF, especially with its gender roles, again.

Please.

This is a thread about gender roles in fiction, if you want to then fire away

edited 18th Oct '17 4:24:42 PM by Fourthspartan56

This is a bit tangential to the current discussion (I have no opinion on the Tomb Raider example since I haven't played the reboot), but:

The important thing about "realism" in stories is that it's not about what's literally true in our world, but what feels true (or in other words, an emotional truth instead of a literal one). There's plenty of examples of people writing things that literally happened into scripts, and it doesn't actually feel real to the audience or the people reading it. The real world informs our understanding of emotional truth but it isn't the end all be all.

And for my money, suspension of disbelief has never applied to human nature itself. Having characters that don't feel real stretches suspension of disbelief a lot further than aliens, demons, or superhumans do.