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

"Knows more about the case because they're a prosecutor and have special advantages" applies to every prosecutor. Even Godot, a rookie prosecutor who doesn't even have offscreen victories to give him cred and who proceeds to get constantly walked on by Phoenix, can claim that much.

"More knowledge and experience" doesn't count for much when her presentation is that of an impetuous child. Her most distinctive character trait is that she's an immature brat. She began her career at 13 and is only 17 when she goes up against Phoenix. While impressive on paper, the result is an extremely childish character who is constantly throwing temper tantrums and assaulting everybody with her whip at the first sign of things not going her way.

And again: While she may get a good punch in here or there, she does nothing but lose every single time she enters the courtroom - which is rarely, as she has the fewest cases of any Prosecutor to the point of being denied participation in the finale of her own game. Edgeworth swoops in to steal her thunder, and she spends the bulk of it recovering from a gunshot wound.

Franziska simply doesn't get to reach the heights of rivalry that other characters do, because the games aren't interested in letting her.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 19th 2024 at 9:02:53 AM

Those are indeed good points, and I do agree Franziska has those problems but based on my criteria I asked for she still does fulfill what I asked for.

That said, the points you bring up do lead to another discussion regarding this trope. Regarding how women are treated in that role that would get a male character treated better.

Like you bring up how Godot never actually won a damn case and has some pretty sexist beliefs as a character. Remember that scene where he talks down to Franziska and gets away with it?

And is generally taken more seriously than her?

I do, yes. As far as the franchise is concerned, Franziska is just Edgeworth's bratty kid sister. She's treated more or less as an accessory for him. She showed up to seek out vengeance for Edgeworth's defeat, failed, and then spent the rest of her career being wrong near Edgeworth so that he'd have opportunities to correct her bad logic.

The way the games treat Franziska is not unlike the way the later games treat Athena. Creative team just seems woefully disinterested in letting women drive their stories - Even though those stories are so frequently about women.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 19th 2024 at 9:12:16 AM

Yeah, now that you mention it, I do agree with that. It's weird because like Athena has one of the best cases in the series IMO, and I feel like they could really do a lot of great things with her if they tried harder.

And yeah, Franziska is treated as an accessory despite having the criteria I asked for. They are unwilling to go all in with her being a rival but at the very least she fits the criteria I asked for.

Now the question becomes "does she become good at the role"? Well it depends, I personally think for the duration of her being a rival, she was pretty fun to argue logic against, both in Justice for All and Investigations.

WAIT! I just remembered Justine Courtney. She IS Miles' rival for the second game. Huh.

Not Sebastian, he's an idiot.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Feb 20th 2024 at 1:17:33 AM

The following examples don't fit all your criteria, but here we go.

................

1-The closest example I can think is the anime adaptation of The Jungle Book (almost unknown in the West) and the relation between Mowgli and Lala.

Lala is a female wolf and the granddaughter of the tribe's leader. She dislik Mowgli at first, and spent the first quarter of the anime mocking him, competing against him and telling him that he didn't belong in the tribe.

Lala is motivated both by childish competition and also by a grudge, because Mowgli wolf father was the reason why Lala's father left the tribe.

Lala has the advantage over Mowgli at first because ...well she is a wolf, and he is a human child.

But later, Mowgli managed to invent his iconic Boomerang, and he far surpassed Lala as a hunter; he also saved her life many times from situations where she almost died because of her brashness.

Since wolfs mature faster than humans, she quickly grew up, from her childish behavior, and became good friends with Mowgli, later marrying his wolf brother.

.................

2-Another semi-example will be Zoro childhood friend  Kuina  in One Piece, during his training in swordsmanship, Kuina defeated him in every match they had.

The "competition" ended when Kuina died in an accident, letting Zoro be devastated but inspiring him to become the world's greatest swordsman to fulfill a promise he made to her. 

But this is all flashback material, and Zoro is The Lancer and not the protagonist.

..................

3-In American Media? Aside from Zuko and Azula previously mentioned, I can't think of many examples right now.

There was the second movie in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians duology, with the character Clariss ? I remember her and Percy being rivals during the training, and then she was selected to go on the heroic quest of the movie.

Edited by jawal on Feb 20th 2024 at 5:10:01 PM

Clarisse from the books definitely counts. She's also a bully and doesn't have a crush on Percy, like, say, Helga from Hey Arnold.

There's this video I watched recently about the Kristen Stewart Snow White movie from 2012. There's a part (starting from @20:05) where the video takes a moment to note how modern films have put more focus on how men abuse women and less on how women hurt other women.

Thoughts on this? I don't quite think this is true myself and while I enjoy the rest of the video, I feel this complaint is downplaying the importance of showing how the patriarchy hurts women. The video does bring up how certain female characters have a misaimed fandom like Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada but that is a separate issue and not exclusive to female characters.

Could be off-base here, but is this significantly easier if you reverse the genders? I feel like works tend to pair rivals of the same gender or defang the rival somewhat early on or both. I couldn't come up with much for either exercise.

Different gendered rivals are a bit rare in comparison to same gendered rivals, even less so if there isn't some form of romantic entanglement at the end. I only have a few in mind. May in Pokémon had 2 male rivals, Drew and Harley, where Drew was acting as May's Gary Oak and Harley acting more like May's annoying nemesis, in that May usually has the upper hand compared to Harley, but he usually pops in regularly to annoy and demean her. Sakura from Card Captor Sakura had a major rival in form of Sayaoran Li, who regularly competed with her to claim the various cards, before she inevitably became the victor and he became her trusted ally when they had to convert all Clow Cards to Sakura Cards.

@windleopard

I never noticed that before. It does feel like it is one sided and it could have expanded on that point.

Edited by GAP on Mar 10th 2024 at 11:18:46 AM

Sorry, could you elaborate?

I was referring to how the patriarchy affects men as well as women.

Men tend to compete with men and women with women. That reflects real life. Especially in romance, but it can also be in careers. That a man would compete with a woman in a career, is a relatively new thing. In a hunter gatherer society, the men are the hunters and the women are the gatherers, broadly speaking. When economic specialization resulted in jobs, most people didn't really have careers. For example, a medieval female scribe (and yes, those existed) would have competited with men for work, but most workers were agricultural workers, and the upper class women either didn't work, or didn't have to compete with men.

This continues with status competitions today. Women and men have different paths to gain status. For example, a woman's status is more determined by her appearance, than a man's.

In Man of Steel, there is that rivalry between two side characters. The Air force guy and Zod's lieutenant.

In Cobra Kai, I remember Samantha starting out better than Robby.

There is anthropological data that there wasn't a generalized sex division for hunting in the paleolithic (colloquially called the Stone Age) era. Women and men in general both engaged in both hunting and gathering, since at that time, most hunting was not strength related, but based on tool usage, cooperation, and endurance more than anything. When you're doing subsistence labor, anyone who could do it, will do it. I think most divisions of gender usually occur once there is something resembling class hierarchy, where the higher you go in class, the hierarchical structures start to become more pronounced and profound, so the further up the chain you are, the further your roles are defined and differentiated. And in a patriarchy, if men suddenly enter into once predominantly women's roles, more often than not, it's the women that are kicked out, rather than men acting subservient to women (computer programming as an example or how men in nursing make more than women, despite being the minority).

I think hierarchy comes from specialization. Although, in surviving primitive societies there are hierarchies, it just might not be as formal. I know there was a Filipino culture where women hunted, but they used weaker bows and hunted smaller game in comparison to men.

As far as men earning more money than women. It doesn't always work that way. I think men entered programming at the time when it started to pay more. I have worked a lot of jobs where most of the employees are female. The men have an advantage, but I don't know if that results in higher pay, and most of the time my supervisor has been female, even if the big boss is male. None of the jobs that I have done have been high earning or competitive though.

Like, 90% of the discussion about feminism doesn't apply to me, and is purely academic.

Edited by ry4n on Mar 19th 2024 at 11:58:58 AM

For subsistence farming at least there's a gendered divsion of labour because of the harsh realities of trying to have 8-10 kids (because they keep dying young). A woman who is going to be pregnant for 10-20 years isn't going to that much heavy labor on the field (though i should note, since farming is heavily seasonal work, during peak seasons this probably happened). But you still need to take your flax or wool, spin it, turn it into fabric and turn the fabric into clothes. You can absolutely keep your eyes on a bunch of kids while also doing these sorts of tasks around the house.

After all, the industrial revolution started not with milling grain or plowing fields, but by making it a LOT easier to produce fabric.

So there's definitely a synergy between men doing most of the work on the field while women do most of this other work in the home (along with making or processing food, which was not easy in a pre-refrigerator, pre-freezer, pre-electric equipment world either!). You can spin thread at home, but the field isn't going to plow itself in your living room.

Of course, its always incredibly frustrating when stories or games try to make this an impossible-to-subvert reality when in reality, farm work is very much run-or-stand-still work and if the need was there, women would absolutely have jumped in to help during a particularly important moment.

Also more recent research with hunter-gatherers suggests we definitely did a lot more gathering than hunting.

Women did, and still do a lot of farm work, especially during harvest. There is a lot of physical that men can do better, but that women can still do. In my experience, men get assigned the heavy lifting, but a lot of the heavy lifting isn't that heavy.

I also find that very believable with the gathering, and there was probably some gardening in there too. Hunting is about seizing the opportunity.

Edited by ry4n on Mar 19th 2024 at 12:06:41 PM

Articles I've read on Western medieval peasant life, women work the fields nearly as often as the men do, unless they're old, late into pregnancy, or have young kids that need regular attention. If they're without kids, early into pregnancy, or their kids are old enough to fend for themselves, they would be out in the fields doing farm work as well. In those time periods, there isn't really a nuclear family of husband, wife, and kids taking over a singular plot of land for themselves, they would be groups of families working the land for a manor, so duties are divided according to need and current capability, and kids are often included once they're old enough (around 5-7). Peasant life though still gendered in some manners, are a lot more egalitarian than stereotyped to be, mostly out of necessity.

I think I even heard that some men spun, but probably lower class men. Spinning was the typical women's work.

Farm work can vary. For example, during a harvest time there is a lot of work to be done in a short time, but other times of the year, there might not be much. So especially young unmarried women might work in the fields during harvest time, but do other work during the rest of the year. Also, some tasks might be divided by sex.

Yeah, the nuclear family is kinda a new idea. The important unit was the household, which could include extended family and probably had some sort of servant. Even a poor peasant such as a cottager, might have servants.

My understanding is that there is a difference between garden-style agriculture, where societies have more female participation, and keeping large animals, where patriarchal societies tend to arise.

Though in steppe culture at least, gender relations were / are a bit more balanced even though men did indeed do most of the herding.

I guess when you live in harsher conditions you can't afford to waste time and energy on setting up a patriarchy.

It's a handy justification for more equal roles in a post-apocalyptic setting too. When your daily life consists of scrounging for food and other supplies while avoiding zombies or mutant giant scorpions or something, anyone trying to insist on traditional gender roles isn't going to last long.

Edited by M84 on Mar 21st 2024 at 3:48:24 AM

You should see images of grannies carrying a ton of wood over here. Or the classic vase of water over the head.

In steppe culture you also have a lot of mounted activity occurring, I think that’s an area where we’ve always seen a different gender split then you see with traditional heavy labour.

It’s also worth remembering that farm labour isn’t only the heavy manual work of ploughing and hoeing. There’s a 1,200 bc tomb mural from Egypt that shows a man directing the plough (pulled by a pair of oxen) while his wife follow behind planting the crop seeds. Women are also seen in records to have been involved in the time-sensitive and labour-intensive work of harvesting and threshing because you need every set of hands you can get.

Stepping away from the records a moment we have to consider that with multi-generational families you’re logically going to see labour assignments based on physical capabilities break down on age grounds before gender grounds. So an elderly grandfather with a persistent injury (say a damaged leg) is going to be the better choice to do low-intensity labour than a young women (married or unmarried).