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

@M84: Hey, we also lack on fictional female mass shooters.

Mas shooter is very recient so to speak and most if not all of them are white males, hard to beat that.

Spree shooters are not actually that new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman

But they're now a phenomenon.

They aren't really on the rise in a significant way, statistically speaking. At least not since the Seventies.

The main difference is media coverage. Nowadays you find out about a mass shooting within seconds of it happening thanks to social media. But back in the day, it wasn't uncommon for mass shootings on one side of the country to receive no coverage in the news on the other side of the country. And forget about it getting mentioned in the news in another country.

Edited by M84 on Oct 25th 2019 at 1:38:59 AM

Yeah Carrie is interesting because she was basically the fictional equivalent of a mass shooter before mass shootings really started taking off.

Also about the Siberian earlier yeah she was a projection created Dr. Manton and was made to look like his daughter. That's why I only said technically because she is a projection. Their is likely other female huntress styled serial killers in that setting but I can't remember any of them by name other than Shadow Stalker whom was heavily implied if not flatout stated to act like that before she got caught.

I will said some stephen king novel have become more important now than ever.

Misery is intersting because is ws pretty much toxic fandom before toxic fandom become what they are, if misery would be update(Which I doubt it because much of the plot hinge on it) I can see Annie being in forum yelling a treating to murder people over and over.

Carrie....well, sure she look like a mass hooter but I guess is also because is one of the biggest codifier of teen are cruel and school bullying, I guess narrative were mo sympathic to it back them.

Just look Korn sound thoughless in which it end with the boy vomiting to the all people in the party, the whole "revenge at them" was pretty popular.

Stephen King notably does have would be school murderers in It as well.

Much less sympathetic.

From what I've seen this movie has become something of a cult classic for gay and bisexual women. One take I saw is that there is some Reality Subtext to the way Jen's body is exploited and turned into something evil by the band members who sacrificed her which connects to how Megan Fox's sex appeal was exploited by men in Hollywood.

You could do a lot of discussions about many elements of that movie.

Carrie was ahead of her time. Serial killers are out and spree shooters are in now, so Carrie being a spree shooter instead of a serial killer just means she's hip to a more modern crowd than her slasher counterparts.

Because is a sort of slasher/monster movie made for gay and bisexual so to speak.

I just finished reading the first 6 issue arc of Richar K. Morgan's Black Widow run from 2004. It's a pretty good series showing off Natasha's skills as an espionage agent as well as an exploration of her past as a Red Room agent. It also features some not-so-subtle (and I don't say that as a bad thing) discussion on the way women are expected to present themselves to men and how Natasha is underestimated even despite her well-known skills. And an interesting retcon.

This run reveals that when the Black Widow program was being developed certain elements of the Russian government were rather paranoid about the idea of highly-trained women in the field so a control system was created to keep them in check. The Red Room created a biochemical agent that would stop the Black Widows from attacking anyone who was sprayed with it. It turns out that Fury stole the formula for this agent and used it to engineer Natasha's defection.

Also the main villain is the CEO of a cosmetics company who is trying to market the formula that slowed down Natasha's aging and wants her and the other Black Widows dead to keep the patents on the formula. Given the criticisms of that industry it is in no way a coincidence that such a villain was used for a villain for Natasha.

Thoughts?

I feel the "defection via cosmetics" idea was the worst of a very interesting series of ideas, though it also is the place where it says the Black Widows were sterilized by the Red Room. That wasn't Joss' idea.

Does anyone have noticed that deities of currently living religions get treated more like forces of nature and gods of dead religions get treated like fictional characters? .-.

Like, the two days old argument you had kinda reminded me of how folks don't like pointing out that Job's story from bible is all about god and Satanael dicking over him just to test his faith(and he just gets replacement family later on as if that makes it better, then again I guess his family DID get to heaven, but that just raises more questions) since Christian God kinda gets the "mysterious ways" defense.

It's part of why I don't like doing it to older religions.

Mind you, as blasphemous as it is to Orthodox Jews, I feel like the Book of Job had a different Aesop before someone changed it. It reads very much like the story is MEANT to end with God saying, "Sometimes life is crap and you will not be rewarded in life for being a good person—you have to just do it." Then, for whatever reason, Job gets rewarded lavishly.

Am I alone in this?

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 26th 2019 at 3:45:56 AM

Another thing I notice is that living religion gods get the "that is just allegory or metaphor" or "That is blasphemous/fictional take on God by author" explanation while dead religions get have all stories treated as part of same canon regardless of who was original writer of the story and why.

I dunno, I think that we actually do see many evolving as well. As our knowledge grow we get the Roman/Greek/Egyptian differences per age.

I mean, analysis other culture is a good thing but it have to be carefull because it fall into a reductionism of "they were problematic by virtue of no being us" with "us" as sort of end goal civilization should have.

Also as sometimes we kinda analyse older religion as it was cristianity who have a sort of canon were all people read it while before it was pretty loose, there was like 20 diferent zeus who tend morph into the one we know today.

Tim Miller, the director of Terminator: Dark Fate has given his opinion on why he felt the other Terminator sequels didn't do so well:

I think there are some deeper reasons to it than that, personally.

Evidently Linda Hamilton being present in the new Terminator hasn't stopped it from bombing.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Nov 4th 2019 at 8:49:17 AM

Miller directed Deadpool, so that might have something to do with his reverence towards casting over substance. Ryan Reynolds legit made the Deadpool franchise. He fought tooth and nail to get it off the ground, and deserves every ounce of the credit given to him.

Linda Hamilton is not Ryan Reynolds. This is not her project. It's Cameron's. Cameron insisted that you gotta have Hamilton because he's an 80's filmmaker. He comes from an era where films were strictly considered vehicles for star power.

My rebuttal is, "Linda Hamilton is awesome but so is Sigourney Weaver and that didn't keep two of the Alien movies from being shit."

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 4th 2019 at 7:44:03 AM

I will said the problem with terminator is that after Genesis hars reception they go back to the ideal concept of time travel terminator and companion and I feel there isnt much to do with the concept that haven't being done already.

In fact I found this retret to true concept a cheap way to gain trust with the fan, not much diference of Star wars aping a new hope after the blunder of the prequels.

Terminator 3 was an experiment in trying to do what worked for Terminators 1 and 2 again.

Terminator: Salvation was an experiment in trying to flesh out the boring future war that exists merely to be a framing device for the original film's time travel shenanigans.

Terminator: Genisys was an experiment in just going hog-wild, abandoning formula, and going in a completely different direction.

Terminator: Dark Fate is an experiment in treating the franchise as a vehicle for star power rather than a story unto itself. "It's all about Linda Hamilton. We give Linda Hamilton a minigun, boom, people will love it."

All of these experiments have thus far failed, on account of the unfortunate fact that Terminator just isn't a premise that can be easily continued. It's about a very specific set of circumstances that happen to a very specific set of people under very specific conditions.

The whole idea of the Terminator was a concept that was good for exactly one film. No more, no less. Cameron somehow managed to milk a second out of it, but that was nothing short of miraculous. Trying to keep piling more films onto it is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

Normally I'm against the logic of "This movie shouldn't be sequeled", because it's usually talking about things like Men in Black or Ghostbusters. Films about organizations. Movies that take place in a playground of supernatural elements that could absolutely have more stories told in it.

But Terminator is not one of those films. Terminator is about a robot from the future who wants to murder John Connor specifically. There's just not a lot of leeway there for franchising out.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 4th 2019 at 12:59:51 PM

I dont think is miraculous, the films is pretty much a monster chase not dissimilar to Jason or other monster movies, specially in the firs film with have a more horror bend where the Monster(terminator) goes against the final girl without killing any other boring stuff in the middle.

The second movie just kinda repeat the first thing by movie the chararter: suddenly is a liquid terminator chasing a young boy, put arnold as hero(meaning he can be cool) and BAM, you have the second movie.

I will said terminator kinda suffer for becoming more and more action with each movie, forgetting that horror bend of how unstopabble the terminator is.