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

Yeah, she didn't sleep with him to get a story. She slept with him because mmmm hotness.

That's not any better. It's the same problematic depiction of female reporters in fiction.

An article on how the MCU depicts male obesity.

A Retired Badass (or retired athlete) getting fat is pretty much shorthand for “gone to seed” in a lot of media, and yes, it seems to be male-specific.

Edited by Galadriel on Dec 7th 2019 at 10:00:32 AM

edit. Sorry, posted in the wrong thread.

Edited by windleopard on Dec 7th 2019 at 7:49:08 AM

I think that should be in politics but, wow, that is bullshit.

the issue here abut being male specific is because well....they are more males heroes, so far we only have natasha, who now is dead and capitan marvel who is going YOLO in the galaxy kicking kree ass.

Natasha dying was not problematic because she's back in a movie like always intended to be.

Heroes die and return in superhero movies.

Something I wanted to share regarding Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I'm gearing up for my third run through it, which is a Kingdom run, and that means I'm going to have to again deal with Sylvain, a character in the Kingdom faction. And I'm honestly kind of nervous to be around him again, in a way that feels strangely educational.

Let me explain. I want to share my story of how a video game made me feel sexually harassed.

Three Houses lets you pick your gender. When that happens, I usually make a choice for which gender I want my character to be based on what better suits the story in my opinion. But I tend to lean female because there aren't enough leading ladies in video games. If it truly doesn't matter what gender the Dovahkiin or Commander Shepard or whoever is then there's no sense in not adding a new tick to the much more scarce Female side of the representation chart.

So for my first run in Three Houses, I chose female. For subsequent runs, I remained female because I thought a female Byleth fit in very nicely to the story. But there is a snag, and that snag is named Sylvain.

I chose the Alliance faction, but the game lets you recruit characters from other factions. I was excited to recruit anybody I could, so I would constantly pester every student, month after month, to join my group. The game places you in the role of a teacher and I dove right into it with an enthusiastic fervor.

Most students have some reservations about changing classes. You have to meet a certain expectation in both your stats and your proficiency with their favored subject matter. But then there was Sylvain. Sylvain immediately joined my class without hesitation. I was so excited. "Cool! I've already got my first recruit! I wonder who this guy is and what he's about?"

Oh, I found out what he's about.

Sylvain is the son of a noble family and next-in-line to inherit his family's title. And he haaaaaates women. Hates them. Sylvain is a dedicated misogynist who frequently talks about how very little he thinks of women. He's totally convinced that all women are just schemers trying to marry him for his title. And he acts on his misogyny by womanizing; he tries to take sexual advantage of any woman he comes and then dump them for the next.

Sylvain is the worst. And because I was a woman, he saw opportunity to do the same. I am honestly convinced that the reason he leapt at a chance to join my class was because of my gender. It wasn't because he wanted me to teach him. He wasn't impressed by my abilities. He had zero respect for my actual abilities as an educator. He just wanted to nail a sexy teacher. And that, just by itself, is a very gross and uncomfortable feeling. But it got worse. Oh, did it get worse.

Fire Emblem games have a profound shipping mechanic, where characters who spend a lot of time around each other build relationships and can even develop romances. Three Houses was designed with an expectation that you'll want your character to hook up with one of the other characters (which, given the teacher-student thing, is SUPER GROSS. What the actual f*ck, Nintendo?!).

There is a point in the game where a ball is held to celebrate the winter holiday. There's a special location that couples visit to share a wish together in this big whole tradition thing. The game asks you ahead of time who you'd like to meet there. I picked "F*CKING NO ONE, EW EW EW" as my option. I mistakenly believed that the game would respect my wishes.

So the winter ball comes. Big celebration, fancy festival. I did a fairly chaste dance with my House's leader Claude because he asked me to dance and he's a cool kid. That happened in cutscene but I was fine with it; I was the "Cool Teacher" and this was an entirely formal affair. It wasn't romantic, the way the Goddess Tower is. And Claude's a cool kid, so letting him have some brownie points by scoring a dance with Cool Teacher was fine in my book.

Then my character stepped out for some fresh air. Now, what's directly outside the chapel where the ball is held? The goddamn Goddess Tower. It's fine, though, I thought. I told the game I didn't want to meet anybody here. I'd probably get a little scene of myself relaxing. Maybe chat with the mystery plot-entity that lives in my brain.

NOPE.

Because I hadn't selected a character to meet at the Goddess Tower, the game picked someone for me. And it chose Sylvain.

I stepped out for some fresh air. I just wanted to be by myself. And suddenly he's here, working double time to get in my pants. Sylvain's pouring his manipulating heart out, drowning me in an ocean of inappropriate come-ons and insincere speeches of undying love.

I legit felt cornered by this asshole. I had repeatedly made clear that this behavior is not acceptable, and now I was trapped. There was no way to escape this situation and all I wanted was for him to stop talking and go away. I told him I'm not interested and that he needs to leave, and his actual response was to declare that he will dedicate his life to becoming "worthy" of my love.

Like. He legit could not comprehend that I said, "No." Firmly and unambiguously said, "no." This complete shithead instead heard, "Do a bunch of arbitrary shit for me and then we can have mad sexytimes." Like, the idea that he and I would never have sex because he is my student and that is super inappropriate was literally inconceivable to this goddamn motherf*cking asshole.

I was finally able to convince him to GO AWAY, and he had the audacity to ask if I wanted to walk back to the ball with him. From the Goddess Tower. Yeah, I see what you're doing, f*ckwit. I again told him as firmly as the game would allow me to go away and leave me alone, and he finally left.

And I just sat. I put the controller down and sat. Until that point, I'd been having a lot of fun with the party, but Sylvain had ruined the whole virtual night. There was a bit more left to do, but my heart wasn't in it. I just wanted to go to bed and forget what had just happened. I wrapped up the evening, saved my file, turned the game off, and just had a long think about how it made me feel to be so alone, so isolated, with this relentless douchebag that wanted to put his dick in me and wouldn't take no for an answer.

That was an experience. Absolutely not comparable to real stories of sexual harassment and assault from real dudes to real women, not even in the slightest. But for me, a guy who will never experience what that's like, being harassed by Sylvain in this way felt really eye-opening.

I was able to play out the rest of the game by shoving Sylvain into a corner of my party window and never paying him any mind again. If I don't talk to him, he'll leave me alone. He's not part of the Alliance, so he doesn't exist in cutscenes; if he never gains Support XP and I avoid him at the monastery, then I never have to see his stupid face again.

But now I'm setting up to play a Kingdom file. Sylvain is part of the Kingdom. He exists in cutscenes. And the prospect of having to be around him again is weirdly terrifying. Even knowing that there is a limit to what the game will allow him to do, I'm legit afraid of being alone with Sylvain. It's a feeling I've honestly never had before.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 9th 2019 at 9:42:09 AM

Huh. So Nintendo, almost definitely unintentionally, found a way to let cis guys know what it’s like to feel preyed upon by creepy men.

Gives me a decent reason to avoid playing that game at least. There’s no way I want to be reminded of my own irl experiences with those kinds of guys.

That's a thing that I've seen happening a lot. I still can't get over the Persona 5 thing for example.

Yeah. It's pretty gross

Could be a Japanese thing. They're more tolerant of the Dirty Old Man trope being used for comic relief, for example, up to using sexual harassment for comic relief even in works written by women.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Dec 9th 2019 at 5:16:42 PM

Regarding this particular Double Stardard. I feel Japan and "The West" are pretty much the same.

The main difference IMO? Western fiction treats it as Hot, Virile and Triumphant but ephimere, "Yeah, Mike fucked his teacher! What a man!". Japanese fiction treats it as cute "Akito will marry her, who is nice of him because she otherwise would be alone!".

YMMV which is worse but certainly neither is close to healthy

Edited by KazuyaProta on Dec 9th 2019 at 12:24:37 PM

Kinda, inf act is kinda the only joke they have with old men in general.

Huh, never thought that "if you don't pick option, you get the option with highest affinity so far" could lead to disastrous situation ._.

Anyhoo, not sure about Japanese version(you never know with translated games what part of good writing was in original and what wasn't), but I feel like at least with western version Sylvain is meant to be one of jerk characters. Like when he is being falsely sincere, he feels as slimey as hell to the point main reason why his supports don't go beyond b rank for most of students is that almost nobody is able to tell when he is actually being sincere.(and even as player its hard to tell in certain b supports whether he is being sincere or not)

Like I did play male character on first playthrough and even I was uncomfortable with Sylvain once I learned he is skirt chaser because he is straight up misogynist While he does have lot of redeeming qualities, he never felt fully "redeemed" to me because his character arc is never about learning that what he is doing is bad and instead it focuses more on him meeting someone(whether romantically or platonically) he can actually trust to not have ulterior motive.

Edited by SpookyMask on Dec 9th 2019 at 7:33:12 PM

The teacher-student thing has definitely been a trend in Japanese media lately. All that I can say positively about it is that like in Three Houses , explicit romance is usually saved until after the student has graduated. Oh, and it's miles less creepy than the previous forbidden love fad it replaced.

Sylvain is an interesting case. He's one of the deepest and most well-developed characters in the game, but he never grows out of the sleazy womanizing. He doesn't care about hurting the girls he sleeps with, but he also is never shown to push a girl who doesn't want him (your unfortunate games mechanic-induced Tower experience notwithstanding).

One thing I've noticed about him is that his behavior tends to bother male players much more than female ones. Part of it is definitely that he's attractive, but I also think that it has to do with the fact that he doesn't exhibit some behaviors that IRL creepers tend to: he never tries to touch a girl without her permission, he doesn't fixate on any "targets," takes no for an answer (again, excepting your unfortunate luck), and it's repeatedly demonstrated that his behavior keeps him away from a real fulfilling relationship: IIRC he has the fewest potential romantic endings of any student, and it's always only with the girls he doesn't try to pull his bullshit on.

The question is regarding this character would be is there anything in his backstory that would have led Sylvain to have this opinion because that definitely isn't something that comes out of thin air and tends to either come from past experience or something that has happened in his family on multiple occasions.

Have not played the game yet since I don't have a switch yet but considering how bloodlines are treated in the series as a whole I wouldn't be surprised if some families took protecting their bloodline and wealth to such an extreme that unhealthy mindsets formed along the way.

Which raises the question of if there is a means to make the person see that just because terrible people exist doesn't give them an excuse to paint an entire gender in that light or if that is a permanent trait that Sylvain has forever.

Edited by Darthwyn on Dec 9th 2019 at 1:15:13 PM

It is explained by his backstory, yes. He was born with a genetic advantage called a Crest, and because of that he was chosen as heir over his Crestless older brother. Because of that, his father treated him like that genetic fluke was all that mattered and his older brother repeatedly abused and even tried to murder him. It's a known tactic in the world for poor women to sleep with men with Crests to try to have a Crest baby that will give them higher status, and since Sylvain purposefully cultivates a bad reputation he believes that any woman who shows interest him is just after his Crest, defining him by that just like his brother and father did.

The teacher romance thing has been a Japanese trend that goes back a ways. In Cardcaptor Sakura, her mother was one of her dad's students and it's heavily romanticized.

Japanese aren't the only ones who okay with teenage/adult romances though. Just look at Dan Vs cartoon, particularly Hortence character.

Yes, that's true, it's not an unusual fantasy in the west either.

"In Cardcaptor Sakura, her mother was one of her dad's students and it's heavily romanticized."

Or sakura brother or one of sakura friend who have a crush on her teacher.

it dosent help CLAMP pretty much hold a "love cross all barriers" sort of things.

Yeah CLAMP has some views on romance that are... kind of odd, to say the least.

@Sylvain stuff: I haven't play the game, but I guess the appeal of that character (ignoring the teacher x student romance angle for a moment) is that I guess there are those who find "redeeming" bad boys. I mean if you've read a lot of shoujo mangas, manhwa, manhua, or basically comics from East Asia aimed for women. There is a worrying amount of douchebag love interests in them. The level of douchebagness and possessiveness reach a mind-boggling level in Chinese comics or manhua. Manga and manhwa can be bad about it, but manhua is like really bad. Is there really a fad for being abused at the moment? I mean those stuff have existed for a long time, but the number seem to increase greatly lately.

I put the redeeming part above in quote because most of the time those douchebags aren't exactly redeemed. I mean they are still possessive douchebag but less of a douchebag sort of toward the main character. Yeah, I don't get it.

Which brings up oddly an actual thing that has long bothered me. Which version of DONT STAND SO CLOSE TO ME by the Police is the better one. The first one being a rock song that's engaging and bouncy about its subject matter and takes it less than seriously or the second which actually is tortured and melancholy that makes it much much more serious.

Because I tend to prefer the first because it implies that it's much more about the teacher and the student being the subject of unpleasant rumors while the second is that it is a horrible longing torturing both as well as entirely justified.