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

Designated Female/Male At Birth, I believe.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Yep, that's right. It's to distinguish sex from actual gender. So... I guess AlleyOop is trying to imply that trans male fans have fantasies that often line up with stereotypical cis female fantasies, and the same for trans female fans with cis male fantasies? I've never noticed a correlation like that, but I could believe it exists if it has to do with what people that look like each gender are taught to strive for as children.

edited 24th Oct '17 7:28:20 PM by IniuriaTalis

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at, at least based on what I've seen of fandom via observations of places like Tumblr, Twitter, and AO 3. Although I admit the people I'm looking at may not be necessarily representative of trans men as a whole (and if it ever sounds like I'm going too far and stereotyping trans people please let me know so I can back off) it is pretty common among the trans men in the fandoms I frequent at least, the large following centered around Lance from Voltron Legendary Defender being a prominent recent example.

When it comes to trans women I haven't noticed overt trends, because the ones I've encountered who are open about their gender identity tend not to participate as actively in the shipping heavy parts of fandom, though the ones who do tend to enjoy Action Girl protagonists.

I do suspect that in at least some of the instances where trans men consume media similarly to cis women it may have to do with the way people are externally socialized into gender roles from early on, regardless of actual gender identity. Again there's nothing inherently wrong with these kinds of fantasies, but it might say something about the perniciousness of sexism and the way society treats children differently based on their external attributes from an impressionable age. Or since a lot of these trans men are gay it might say something about Boys Love Tropes.

edited 24th Oct '17 9:51:16 PM by AlleyOop

So I was re-watching NBC's Chuck. I still like it but time has not done wonders for it in many parts. I'd say the increasing sexualization of female characters over time borders on comical but I can't bring myself to find anything funny about it at all (you can tell this was produced by the guy who directed the Charlie's Angels movies). But what is really disconcerting is how once the relationship becomes official, Sarah seems to become... I don't want to say faux action girl but it just kind of feels like she's less capable to make Chuck look better. The fourth season first episode has her being kidnapped (while wearing a ridiculously short skirt because of course she is), the same season has her almost dying from poison and we have the being kidnapped and brainwashed into turning on Chuck in season 5. I don't know why but these really seemed to stick out to me. Maybe it was because I was kind of used to Chuck being the one in distress so often that when it started to happen to Sarah more I kind of found it bothersome.

I've been hesitant to rewatch either Chuck or Firefly because of what I know about Adam Baldwin in real life, but what you note is something I had some awareness of when watching the show and why I don't think I ever saw the last season or so. Although at the time it was more of a losing interest than detective sexism.

But yeah, definitely on the same page, Sarah started out as a very competent and somewhat gritty character and while there was always some fanservice, the humor was more the disconnect between who she was and the role she was playing, coupled with elements of Becoming the Mask. I think the point at which I was turned off from the show was whenever it turned out that Sarah's former spy contacts/team members were all glamorous model types and the episode was all about broad humor and of course fanservice. Like I'm not one for grimdark really and the show was never that, but at least at the outset, the spy stuff was more along the lines of Black Widow or Agent Carter, rather than Charlie's Angels.

And I also agree with the above being coupled with Chuck being powered up at her expense. Although understandable or at least inevitable, probably was a mistake to have him pick up combat skills and not just his Intersect memories (coupled with his own intelligence)

Edit- Rereading your post and I see that someone behind the Charlie's Angels movies was actually connected with Chuck. I was more being rhetorical and was being somewhat charitable in thinking more of the original tv show than those movies.

edited 31st Oct '17 8:56:14 PM by Hodor2

Another thing that I couldn't help but notice is that the only time the show was interested in calling attention to the not-so-glamorous side of the intelligence gathering field was when it got in the way of Chuck and Sarah hooking up. Like their's an episode as early as season 1 where Chuck meets a villain who was taken from his family as a child and made into a CIA asset and cut off from the rest of the world til he escaped. Chuck pretty much brushes this off. Then in season 3, when Chuck has to make a guy involved with Fulcrum go underground the show plays it as a horrible tragedy because Sarah is afraid she's losing the man she loves.

I recently finished the rise of tomb raider. I can say she certainly does not regress in terms of development. What is the case is that a combination of things happened. The first being that whole adventure is what makes her realize what her father was saying is true and results in her focusing on his research.

There is also her guilt over people dying on that adventure and it being her fault. The fact that a lot of people in the first game stopped talking to her apparently. So minus Jonah who does stick around to support her and try and be a voice of reason in regards to her obsession when it appears that it is leading to dead ends. You get a sense of how she was if you listen to the therapy logs.

The ending gives a feeling that she has grown into the person most would know her to be. Especially since the ending has her going forward with the search for more ancient artifacts of power for herself not for her father.

"When I offered to make Norea my third back-up girlfriend she just glared at me and started throwing things at me.." Renee Costa

Forgive me for asking this here. I didn't know where to properly ask this question: Is it a problem if you have a female character doubt herself as a woman, even moreso as a human being, because of problems with her body?

I had this in mind after watching the second episode of the Bubblegum Crisis prequel OVA AD Police Files where the antagonist of the week was a female high-ranking employee in a company vying for a promotion position was losing it to a male rival who made a vicious lie that her menstrual cycle will be a problem when working, with her becoming a cyborg for better working efficiency. The modifications worked to the point she formed her own company. Her former rival came to her new company and proposed to her. They married, then the man cheated on her with a unmodified prostitute, claiming "Real women really are better, after all!' The woman murdered him and began a murder spree against prostitutes since

edited 15th Nov '17 11:30:52 PM by HallowHawk

It might depend on execution. Judging from your post, the show you saw didn't handle it so well.

Are we supposed to feel sympathy for either character? I mean, sure, she has bad stuff happening to her, but in the end she throws that away anyway.

On its own, it's not wrong to have a character doubt herself. It's potentially an interesting character flaw or development point. It's all about how it's done. However, when it comes to anime, whenever the phrase "as a woman" (or man, for that matter) is used, it's almost always about some kind of sexist gender roles and conforming to them. Usually, for women, about being attractive (which in itself is often summed up with having big boobs), being able to keep house, and take care of children. For men, about providing income and protecting your girlfriend or family.

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I'm not really sure where is the best place to talk about this given we don't really have a thread about adaptations or about Dracula, but I guess this thread or the general sexism thread might be the closest to an appropriate thread. Now, getting to the point, I watched Bram Stokers Dracula earlier today and, having read the book, and watched a few other adaptations (including the series, a musical and a few other film versions), I'm thinking it's kind of weird that most of the adaptations of the book create a romance between Dracula and Mina (sometimes adding a reincarnation plot where Mina is a new life of Dracula's long lost lover/wife), given that in the book, Dracula is pretty clearly a rape metaphor (there's also some problematic elements in the character related with xenophobia but getting into that detracts from the point I'm trying to argue and might be off-topic for this thread). I can make three observations from that:

• To start: Is the "whitewashing" of Dracula's relation with Mina related to him turning into a protagoinst in modern works? Probably yes, and then which comes first, Dracula as protagonist or rape turning into a consensual relation^note or a "consensual relation" that's still kinda rapey but treated as legitimate romance by the work?
• This relationship, in the whitewashed version, is still creepy in that Mina is still treated as if she should be with Dracula just because he want's her. Her relation with Johnatan is ignored, any problem she might have with Dracula raping, killing and turning her best friend (Lucy) into a vampire is swept under the table.

So, yeah. This is kind of a very problematic relationship.

1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV

I find that common with many kinds of vampire relationships, and is more about the modern vampire myth than about genders. Vampires in those stories often have some kind of mindcontrolly abilities, and what should be creepy is usually portrayed as sexy, because that's what vampires are. Or sometimes some kind of demonic being with similar abilities. Frequently part of rape fantasies and similar.

Pretty much any previously villain character is whitewashed when they're turned into a protagonist. Villains can be just about as awful as the creator can imagine, but protagonists, while they can be very anti-heroic, are still bound by some kind of relatability or sympathy. For pure villains who originally didn't have many, if any, positive traits, that requires whitewashing, whether just deleting those villainous traits, pretending they're not actually that bad, or ignoring they're there for the sake of the plot.

One thing to keep in mind is the "deleting" part. Adaptations are usually not 100% true to source, and have original content. That means you can't judge the characters based on how they appear in the source material, especially if that introduces contradictions. Sometimes it can be left out of the literal adaptation, but there's nothing that contradicts it, which means it's essentially left to the audience to imagine what they want.

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I'm not sure. I'm not asking for adaptational fidelity, I'm more interested in understanding the implications of the change (why do we as a culture turn rapists into heroic characters? why does the relation between Dracula and Mina change in popular culture into them being treated as lovers? and so on).

I suppose what I'm trying to ask is "why do people look at this rapist and go 'this guy deserves to become the hero'?" or at least why do people not think much about him being a rapist when considering if he should be turned into a heroic character.

1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV

Well he is based on a historical figure to a certain degree. vlad the impaler to be exact.

Vampire in general come with brainwashing people to convert or drinking people of their blood. That is usually one of their skill sets to make the drinking of blood from their victims easier.

"When I offered to make Norea my third back-up girlfriend she just glared at me and started throwing things at me.." Renee Costa

and yet dracula have Been pretty much cut from is inspiration, to point is his own chararter, which is kinda problemátic considering vlad was....well, the impaler.

And literary vampires have always this element of sexuality with them, at first it was cover because victorian sensitivity but now is very open: they never age, have this gothic aperience and they can be rich, also as the night lose is conotation of evilness, vampire become more seductive.

If anything I will said twilight is the maxim expresión of that, Being just a vampire Fantasy.

edited 18th Nov '17 8:37:28 PM by unknowing

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

Largely because they don't look at him and think, "rapist".

They think of how vampires are portayed as charistmatic and alluring, and since those are positive traits, he must be (or at least could be) a positive character. All Girls Want Bad Boys plays into it a fair bit, along with the components Evil Is Sexy and Evil Is Cool. There's also a hefty bit of leather pantsing going on.

To some degree, turning villains into protagonists is about curiosity. People are interested in seeing what goes on in the mind of those who walk off the beaten path. As a character, you already have someone with enough flaws to go around, so there's plenty of character development to delve into. Or just follow them around and see what they do out of morbid curiosity.

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For what it's worth - Vlad Tepes is a Romanian national hero, who drove the Saxons and Turks out of Wallachia and established it as a sovereign state, whose cruelty is often looked at as rationally necessary for that purpose.

I'm not saying that's an historically accurate viewpoint; I just want to point out that if, for example, some writer had been inspired by Winston Churchill to create an entire archetype of horror villains, it would affect our perspective on his accomplishments versus his atrocities through a similar lens.

And, correspondingly, there are non-literary and non-sexual reasons why someone might look at a fictionalised Vlad Tepes and say "he could be an antihero".

edited 18th Nov '17 8:55:55 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

That second episode of AD Police Files is nuts.

I liked it better when Questionable Casting was called WTH Casting Agency

There's also the fact that his reputation has been somewhat exaggerated because a lot of the sources were - to the surprise of actually nobody - Siebenbürgen Saxon (got their power curtailed by Vlad), Ottoman ('nuff said) or Hungarian (something something Matthias Corvinus).

So yeah, a lot of people had a vested interest in portraying the guy in the most horrifying way possible.

edited 19th Nov '17 8:47:32 AM by DrunkenNordmann

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

It's one of the reasons why we don't allow evil tropes for real life people. It's always about someone's perspective, which will be biased one way or another, and what we're really interested in is how they're portrayed in fiction. What I said before about characters in adaptations not matching the source material is even more significant when it comes to fictionalisation of real people.

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My two cents Re Dracula:

I kind of suspect that a lot of it has to do with Jonathan Harker being (deliberately) written as kind of priggish and conventionally middle class, especially early in the novel. While I figure it was intended due to a combination of him being an Audience Surrogate and for Dramatic Irony purposes as the audience realizes something is wrong much sooner than he does, it plays into him being a Hate Sink and impacts how Dracula and Mina's "relationship" is presented in various adaptations. And connected to that is some reaction against the Victorian sexual mores and xenophobia of the novel.

One thing I find interesting is that relatively common scenario of Mina being the reincarnation of Dracula's wife. While I don't know what book or movie was the first to do that, it struck me that this detail is probably derived from the original Mummy movie, which itself borrowed a lot from Lugosi's Dracula movie,except for that detail. So kind of a Recursive Adaptation thing there.

"I'm not saying that's an historically accurate viewpoint; I just want to point out that if, for example, some writer had been inspired by Winston Churchill to create an entire archetype of horror villains, it would affect our perspective on his accomplishments versus his atrocities through a similar lens. "

Sure, but here the thing is Dracula is almost enterely removed from the historical chararter, something very few historical expy can get away with it and I think because Vlad was little know until now and he is so far remove in scale and time is easier to see tepes as something "diferent" from dracula.

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

So the recent episode of Once Upon A Time has drawn some ire for use of a very old, very troubling storytelling device: female on male rape using magical methods https://www.themarysue.com/once-upon-a-time-rape-problem/

In the episode in question, we discover how new-universe Hook conceived his missing daughter. Hook encounters Rapunzel, who implores his help in freeing her from a tower she is being held in by the witch Gothel (obvious Tangled shout out is obvious). Hook successfully retrieves the flower and brings it back to Rapunzel and they have sex. Except it isn't Rapunzel, it's Mother Gothel in disguise. This results in the birth of a daughter. Why did Gothel do this? Because she can only leave the tower if someone of her bloodline takes her place. Hence the child concieved by rape by deception.

this is especially troubling given that this marks the third time this show has had female on male rape. The first occurred in season 1 where Regina rapes Graham by using his heart to control him and in season four, Zelena has sex with Robin while disguised as his dead wife Mariam (whom Robin didn't know was dead). Both Zelena and Regina went on to have redemption arcs with their rapes of Robin and Graham unaddressed. The show also has drawn criticism for the numerous toxic relationships like Belle/Rumpelstilskin and it's issue with not understanding consent as addressed in this article http://fangirlish.com/once-upon-a-times-problem-with-consent/

To be fair while said action is questionable based on the requirements you don't have much in terms of options of In getting a means of leaving the tower.

Considering the other actions of Regina and her sister that is not exactly their worse crimes committed. Especially considering Regina has a vault full of hearts close to the size of her mother's to the point she doesn't even remember the people she removed them from.

"When I offered to make Norea my third back-up girlfriend she just glared at me and started throwing things at me.." Renee Costa

I have never understood the people who think Harker is that boring. He beheads Dracula with a kukri. What more could you ask for?

I've heard this "Victorian sexual mores" thing before and I don't get it. Dracula breaks into women's homes at night to force himself on them. He's not "the handsome foreigner trying to seduce our women", he's "the vile rapist who broke through a window to assault our women". And sure, there's some xenophobia there in his being foreign (though honestly, Van Helsing's presence at least partially undermines the idea that the book is all about xenophobia), but what of it? He's still a rapist and the efforts by so many later writers to make him into some sort of romantic hero separated from his true love are disgusting. "Rape is bad" is not a Victorian sexual more, it's a universal reality, and romanticizing a rapist is just gross.

That's without even getting into the fact that the end result of that sort of adaptational idiocy is that most film versions of Mina are notably more sexist than the book. In the book there's a whole subplot about how the men concealing information from Lucy and Mina gets the former killed and badly endangers the latter. It's only after they start trusting Mina that they're able to defeat Dracula. In contrast, these "romantic" film adaptations turn Mina into a brainless twit who will only be okay when she accepts that Dracula knows what's best for her.

Some day someone is going to accurately adapt that book, and when that happens, I will be very happy.

edited 21st Nov '17 8:44:36 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar