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

Interestingly, Pages from a Virgin Diary does a version of Lucy's death as an honor killing for being with a man who isn't acceptable.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was getting at. Why does Holmes need a love interest at all? It's just one of those things execs think they need to appeal to people, but it's been shown again and again that it's not necessary for a film to have broad appeal.

Sometimes I see it as a sort of Have I Mentioned He Is Heterosexual Today, given the appearance (or assumption of appearance) of Holmes' tension with Watson. Can't be a confirmed bachelor if you have a sexy female love interest, after all.

All of that depends on the adaptation, considering how many authors have gotten ahold of the franchise. For what it's worth reading the original works I didn't really see most of the Ho Yay on first glance, but after being told about it, it makes him come off as more of an Ambiguously Bi Casanova.

And in the case of the Guy Ritchie films it seems like they just wanted to fill the films with as much Ship Tease as possible for the shippers in both hetero and slash directions. Not quite queerbait because it doesn't feel like it was backpedaling or dangling the possibility of LGBT canonicity, but rather pandering since a lot of the Yaoi Fangirls who would best appreciate it care more about having as much subtext fodder as possible rather than outright consummation.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jan 22nd 2020 at 7:43:50 AM

While I love queer interpretations of works, there's also the fact that it actually falls into the trap of "must have a love interest." Holmes being simply a bachelor with no interest being more acceptable in Victorian times.

I guess that's one thing that plagues both male and female characters alike - not being allowed to be single.

On an unrelated note, I just realized that the one continuity where Chun Li killed Bison was Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

How sad is that?

In the case of Irene the reason is simple: is rivarly foe yay, I mean sure she appear in one story and moriaty did too and yet he is single out as homes super arch nemesis.

I will guess is an issue that homes is so know that people can see who he is without reading any novel(I havent) and something I have seen in a sort of meta fiction is that most adaptation are more into homes as himself(the snarky, deadpean, sarcastic, intelectual mean british) which is why more often that not watson is reduce to a bumbling sidekick, elementary is intersting in that a) it make watson female(by lucy liu, not less) and b) did not make her a love interest, which consider watson is asian is a HUGE plus.

I mean, look house who is a adptation of homes sort to speak, the series was really draw by house being himself, mean, jerkish but also right.

Pretty typical of fighting game storytelling, really.

Fighting games tend to have a somewhat straightforward plot, but loads of characters. "Here are twenty characters who ALL have beef with the main bad guy. Or work for him. Or are in some way related to his master plan. Or something."

So a lot of characters wind up having backstories, goals, and ambitions that ultimately go nowhere because they were really just there to fill space. They get to achieve the culmination of their stories in mutually exclusive ending cutscenes that are immediately declared non-canon as soon as the next game comes along.

Chun Li and Guile are particularly popular space-fillers because they have the most direct beef with Bison, but since they aren't the main characters, they don't get to have their plots go anywhere. Ryu and Ken are the main characters. Which is why Street Fighter II canonically ends in nobody beating Bison, and instead he's abruptly ganked by Ryu and Ken's villain, Akuma, to set up how scary Akuma is.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 23rd 2020 at 8:38:14 AM

I'm glad that Sherlock Holmes came up as a topic, because I've read several Holmes pastiches recently, and they fit into my thoughts on how to do things "right" (and what adaptations are doing "wrong").

The works in question are as follows, all of which I'd recommend as good books generally:

• Literature/The Affair O The Peculiar Protocols (Holmes and Watson novel by Nicholas Meyer about an investigation into The Protocols of the Elders of Zion)

• The Affair Of The Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall (cozy, Lovecraftian book about a trans man Watson raised by puritanical cultists and a pansexual female Holmes)

• The Tea Master And The Detective by Aliette de Bodard (Space Opera in which Watson is a Living Ship and Holmes is female and takes inspiration from Judge Dee-style detectives in Chinese and Vietnamese media)

One commonality of all of these is that in-keeping with the original books, Watson or the equivalent is very much the viewpoint protagonist and Holmes or the equivalent is more remote. Which I think is a good way to go about it, because

I liked how Meyer's book used the idea of a charismatic, bluff Watson who is a bit of a ladies man and also unusually uses that idea of Holmes as ignorant of any topic he isn't an expert in (the only other time I've seen this is in the somewhat Holmes inspired William Murdoch of Murdoch Mysteries). I'd really like to see more adaptations draw off of that line about how Watson knew (or maybe "knew") women on five continents rather than being about Holmes' (non-existent in the books) love life.

Because of the Gender Flip angle, I did like how Hall approached the idea of a Holmes with an active love life. In this book, the Irene Adler equivalent is Holmes' ex-girlfriend (it ended badly), who as per the original story, is an actress with a "past" interested in settling down to a normal life. So, despite having "Holmes" romantically involved with "Adler", is faithful to the books in the relationship dynamic. Incidentally, it's implied that "Watson" will end up romantically involved with the Lestrade equivalent.

Finally, in de Bodard's book, neither the Holmes or Watson equivalents are interested in romance with each other or anyone else.

Edited by Hodor2 on Jan 23rd 2020 at 9:53:10 AM

Thing is, Ken and Ryu are less "main characters" and more mascots. That thing you said about characters having beef with the main villain? It doesn't apply to them in the slightest. The closest they have is when Bison was after Ryu in SF Alpha because his dark side superpower was kindred to his own abilities but other than that they have nothing to do with Bison. Their true enemy, as you said, is Akuma. Chun-Li, Guile and Cammy are the ones doing the majority of the fighting against Shadaloo. Hell, one of the trailers for Super Street Fighter IV had Cammy and Chun-Li fighting Juri who was the new Shadaloo villain introduced in that game and it's Cammy, Chun-Li and Guile who encounter her in the OVA not Ryu or Ken. It's no coincidence that neither Ken nor Ryu appears in Legend of Chun-Li.

Street Fighter kind of has the opposite approach to their protagonists that Mortal Kombat does. SF uses Ken and Ryu as their mascots and tries to sell them as their main heroes despite their loose at best connection to the main plot. MK by contrast uses Scorpion and Sub-Zero as their mascots but is under no delusion they are the main leads unless it's a piece of media specifically focusing on them such as Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero or the new upcoming animated movie that will star Scorpion. Just imagine if MKX ended with Scorpion being the one who defeated Shinnok even though Cassie Cage was the new hero.

Edited by windleopard on Jan 23rd 2020 at 9:31:27 AM

Honestly, that could have happened once and it would have been great. Mortal Kombat: Deception ends with Shujinko pulling off All Your Powers Combined with all the MK Kast to create a swirly deathy boom that destroys its main villain Onaga.

The same game also features Scorpion ascending to the heavens after being caught up in a soulnado during Deadly Alliance. There, he meets the Elder Gods themselves, who have long held a tertiary presence over the canon but rarely actually done anything. Due to the emergency crisis, the Elder Gods empower Scorpion to defeat Onaga and send him back to the mortal world. In exchange, they vow to resurrect his murdered origin story and return him to the peace he once knew.

Scorpion: Champion of the Elder Gods is one of the coolest things ever done with the character. But this is Shujinko's game, so Scorpion just winds up being a tacit contributor to the Captain Planet blast. Shujinko being some asshole invented for this game and immediately reviled by the fandom over the obnoxious efforts to shoehorn him into the New Big Hero role.

Scorpion, meanwhile, gets f*cked over. Since he didn't defeat Onaga, the Elder Gods revoke the deal, kick him out of his Champion of the Elder Gods role, and tell him to go f*ck himself in the short time left before the writers blew up the timeline and rebooted the series.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 23rd 2020 at 9:06:53 AM

This is only tangentially related, but if we're mentioning adaptations of Holmes, I found out a while back that Neil Gaiman himself wrote a really good short story called "A Study in Emerald" which is a crossover with the Cthullu mythos. It's kind of brilliant, honestly.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jan 23rd 2020 at 12:13:34 PM

Yeah, that is one of my favorites too. One thing I find really clever about that one is that it gives "Holmes" and "Watson" traits which don't seem out of character when reading, but which on reflection, are more the character traits of Moriarty and Moran.

In particular, I love "Watson"'s line about how he's not a literary man, which Watson actually is (since he's the one who is supposedly the author of all of the stories).

Speaking of, I found it cool in Meyer's book how he plays up the idea of the literary Watson by having him connected with some of the early Bloomsbury Circle (Watson's married to the (as far as I can tell fictional) sister of Constance Garnett) and he and Israel Zangwill have a bit of a Sitcom Archnemesis thing going on, since they are published in the same magazines.

Edit - Not really on topic, but in de Bodard's story, the Watson-inspired ship is a big fan of what I guess I'd call "Asian drama" - those historical fiction soap opera/costume drama shows in Japan, South Korea, China, and probably elsewhere. Well, not per se the shows on right now (since the book is set in the far future), but that genre. Which I found an unusual and amusing take on Watson's literary interests.

Edited by Hodor2 on Jan 23rd 2020 at 11:01:53 AM

Maybe but unlike Shujinko the fans actually like Cassie.

In fact, not it wont and tobias is wrong in that account, originally Scorpion was supused to travel back in time and stop young shujinko (which given MK 11 you can said it was kronika sugestion) which monster show up.

And I dont know how much that would good, scorpion have always being side chararter and anti hero, updating him as main hero with cero conection to the villian is odd at best.

Yes, Cassie's pretty great. Which is why it's a shame that Netherrealm promptly fired her from being the main character, brought Liu Kang back into the spotlight, and then blew up the entire timeline anyway.

It kinda going to happen anyway, MK have being rotating protagonist since MKDA broke liu kang neck.

MKDA have kung lao and kitana

MKD have shujinko

MKA have taven

MK 9 have raiden

MKX have cassie

MKK 11 have Raiden/Liu kang.

Hell is not like cassie was shove into inrrelevance, she and her family got her own storyline, as jacqui.

Edited by unknowing on Jan 24th 2020 at 9:02:51 AM

Weirdly, the opposite is also true as there's like a handful of characters that are actually in relationships-relationships in all of fiction. Ken and Guile may be the only people Happily Married in all of fighting game fiction. Sonya and Johnny being the main couple but Kitana and Liu Kang still at the flirting stage after decades.

Also, while Ryu and Ken don't have a main beef with Bison — and that's not accurate since the Street Fighter Alpha games are the ones where they actually have a plot — they actually do have the OTHER plot of Street Fighter.

Which is to say Street Fighter has two plots generally.

• Defeat Bison
• Defeat Akuma

Ryu and Ken have the Defeat Akuma, not the Defeat Bison one.

Except, of course, Ryu and Ken defeat Bison in Street Fighter II V (the anime), the anime movie, and V.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 23rd 2020 at 4:19:08 AM

Happily Married characters in fighting games aren't that rare - off the top of my head there's Kim Kaphwan and Goro Daimon from Fatal Fury/King of Fighters, and Slayer from Guilty Gear.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jan 23rd 2020 at 7:41:34 AM

And Sophitia from Soulcalibur as one of the more well known ones, if only because Ron the Death Eater and Die for Our Ship hits her husband so much. Though I haven't played the latest title to see if they did anything to her and her husband, since it's somewhat of a reboot/reimagining from what I hear.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's at least one married person in most fighters, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the gender ratio for that category skewed more towards male characters compared to female characters.

Oh yeah, and Dhalsim is another SF rep as well.

Edited by Customer on Jan 23rd 2020 at 1:28:02 PM

Yeah, I mentioned the thing with Bison in my post.

There's also Hakan a Turkish wrestler from Super Street Fighter IV. And I believe Vanessa from King of Fighters is also married with children.

Edited by windleopard on Jan 23rd 2020 at 9:27:19 AM

So there's going to be a comic celebrating the 90th anniversary of Nancy Drew. Sounds great, right? Except for the fact that the comic will revolve around the Hardy Boys solving her murder.

As you can imagine, this has drawn some criticism.

Some are hoping that it will turn out that Nancy is actually faking her death.

I am somehow baffled how anyone could write an article about the 90th anniversary "celebration" of Nancy Drew in 2020 and then imply within that the first book was published in 1965.

That total failure of research/math/logic aside, it's both disappointing and nothing new. The 70s TV show built on being a crossover between the two also gradually phased out Nancy in favor of more Hardy Boys stories, until she all but vanished from a series that started with her name in the title.

Edited by TotemicHero on Jan 25th 2020 at 10:46:26 AM

A response from one of the creative team:

Outside of Joe's girlfriend (and that was in the teen/young adult aimed Casefiles series), they've never killed off any major and/or recurring characters in the Hardys or Nancy Drew series to my knowledge.