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

I still remenber shamploo of ramma 1/2 and I forget how some steriotypes like mysthical and exotic chinise woman can be said to be transport from japan to america.

Edited by unknowing on Nov 13th 2019 at 6:13:50 AM

Would it be a stretch to say that Japan's not-so-great relationship with China might play a role in it?

Japan and China very much see each other as, well, "The Other". For many, many reasons.

I still find myself shocked by how much my otherwise very nice paternal grandmother despises Japanese people as a whole (she lived through a time when they occupied her home), though she is at least able to be perfectly friendly and civil around my cousin (on my mother's side it should be noted) and his Japanese wife and their mixed race daughter.

Edited by M84 on Nov 8th 2019 at 12:38:36 AM

It remind me of south park episode of tolerance and have a chinise men in a resturant who REALLY hate the japanise and viceversa.

It seen almost oddly prophetic in light on how tiny disguided hate between both nations show this days.

I think most of east Asia hates each other really. The hate ball is mostly on Japan's court because of their past imperialism.

It's honestly fucked up because if you tried to show the Japanese war crimes in ww2 in a film or something, people would think you were being racist/exaggerating immensely, but no, they were just that bad.

I've mentioned before in other threads that East Asia can be described as a neighborhood where everyone despises each other but maintains a front of civility to outsiders.

It doesn't help that in East Asia nobody (by which I mean nations as a whole) ever apologizes.

Edited by M84 on Nov 8th 2019 at 8:46:03 PM

Its been a shitty past century for them.

Part of the issue being that a lot of the conflicts never quite ended so much as stopped.

Going back to RE 4, my first thought wasn’t Leon or Ada, but Ashley. And she’s not so much a “badass femme” as she is an escort mission that lasts the entire game.

Which made me realize something. Are there any games with the reverse scenario? A protagonist who has to be female, protecting a supporting character who has to be male? Closest I can think of is River City Girls, which is a reversal of games like Double Dragon and River City Ransom.

Does Lollipop Chainsaw count?

Edited by GoldenKaos on Nov 8th 2019 at 1:20:44 PM

Probably, but that game is... Kind of baffling. It manages to be both very sexist and male gazey while also being fairly empowering, and I don’t quite know where it lands on the scale of feminist games.

Does A Plague Tale: Innocence count? You're an older sister protecting her kid brother.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Nov 8th 2019 at 9:23:27 AM

Lolipop Chainsaw basically functions squarely in the realm of Poe's Law, IMHO. It is a send-up of sexist game objectification. It's a mostly upbeat horror movie with a Lighter and Softer heroine that with a little dialed down (good luck in that game) isn't too removed from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer clone.

The problem? Well, honestly, you can't really send up game objectification and sexualization because....well, with Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball there's nowhere further to go. The satire just looks like everything else.

A similar thing happened with The Slumber Party Massacre It was written and directed by women as a send up of the misogynist slasher movies of the time with copious nudity as well as a drill-based villain.

It's just...well...the satire looked like everything else at the time.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 8th 2019 at 9:59:36 AM

I think that explains why I had an adverse reaction to Kill La Kill back in high school. My friends all said it was a great satire on how women are depicted in anime, but all I saw in it was the exact same stuff that put me off, only amped up even higher.

I wish that, instead of making satire of some of these things, people would be more willing to just... avoid the shitty tropes. Try to actively change things instead of contributing to them in a tongue in cheek manner.

Mind you, Lollipop Chainsaw also hit on something interesting in the fact that Juliet Starling is gleefully sexualized...without malice. This is something that some people have analyzed and I found interesting. Basically, yes, she's sexy and male gaze but there's no attempt to shame her for it or treat it as taboo.

A similar thing was brought up with Kaylee in Firefly. She's the Nice Girl and Girl Next Door while also being gleefully sexual and unashamedly so. The fact that we needed a Madonna-Whore Complex aversion to the point of it being notable says a lot about gender roles in genre fiction.

Your response reminds of this.

Satire seems to be a delicate thing. It's more than just having the thing and, well, is often more than just making a joke about it.

I might be wrong, I haven't slept well.

Edit: I have heard it described before as being about willing to do what you please regardless of the attentions of everybody else. My memory, again, is very fuzzy.

Edited by fredhot16 on Nov 8th 2019 at 11:22:57 AM

I think that people really need to more closely examine Mel Brooks’ work before they start satirizing things. With Brooks, there’s no question that he’s mocking nazis and racists. The way they’re framed, the absolute absurdity of how they behave and how other characters respond to them... Nobody can look at Blazing Saddles and think that the racists are depicted as anything other than complete buffoons.

Mel Brooks actually stated that it was dangerous to treat Nazis seriously because the thing about them was that if you argue that they could take over the world or were a bunch of efficient geniuses, you propagate the appeal they have to the sick assholes who want to be evil bastards (i.e. fascists) but if you drill home that they are a bunch of imbeciles playing with dynamite (which they were) then you can maybe kill their ideology once and for all.

Werner Klemperer (Colonel Klink) had a similar statement about them.

Rogert Ebert had a third thing about this, which is the fact that portraying racists as evil wasn't actually enough to portray them negatively. The Klan and other hate groups appeal to people who are fine being criminal monsters to begin with. Otherwise, it wouldn't appeal to them.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 8th 2019 at 12:37:36 PM

Problem with that is that eventually if that at some point come as trivializing the matter in order to make yourselves look good, specially because at times the need to make super duper absolutely clear that you will endorse something kinda reduce everything to just a caricature far remove to the thing they were in the first place.

That is why I having a hard time acepting the idea of kylo being a mockery of edgy alt right fans as good thing because a) is not a comedy, meaning it come as annoying rather than clever and b) at some point it just sound bad mockery being pass as cleaver because the subject in question is relevant or aceptable target

Re: Kylo Ren being a loser

I'm not sure that's meant to be social commentary as simply who his character is. Not all story beats that have real life relevance are meant to be a statement overwhelming their place in-universe.

He's a school shooter wannabe Edgelord. It's not meant to be funny but tragic.

Considering by the time it was relase and other decision like having a black male and a woman to defeat him.....yeah, you cant mistake by antyhing else to be a commentary on the rooting for the empire fans.

Thoughts on the Heroic Seductress trope?

Is there a problem with using sex as a weapon when you're a spy? I mean, it's a thing in real life.

Yeah, could you elaborate on which parts of it are noteworthy? It happens in real life, therefore it happens in fiction.

I guess I wanted to know if it could be viewed as a progressive idea, namely for female characters, to have that as a trope or is it just another way of sexualizing women.

It probably varies. As long as the Heroic Seductress isn't the most common or only heroic archetype for female heroines, there's nothing inherently too iffy about it.

It's not the best one certainly, but it's a step above roles that deny the agency of female characters altogether.

The writers also have to take care not to portray the seductress' willingness to use sex as a tool as a bad thing. She shouldn't be portrayed as being worse than, say, James Bond who frequently does the same.

It also helps if the seductress has other facets to her character besides being a seductress.

Edited by M84 on Nov 13th 2019 at 8:22:52 PM