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

Yeah, is the inward vs outward look, men express their self destructive tendency, while women just shut it down.

Yeah, the general idea is that men are conditioned from a young age to express their angst in more aggressive and destructive "manly" ways, while women are conditioned from a young age to be the Stepford Smiler type who suffer in private.

You're missing the much older pattern. Think "Gin Alley" — Hogarth actively tried spiking the prevalent narrative that if a man became addicted, he was a weakling and failure who would, of course, lash out — even failures use their manly strength and aggression actively, after all. While women, as the weaker sex, can't really help themselves, poor dears: no willpower to speak of. Their brains overheat at the best of times. It's not like they can do any real damage except to themselves when they do go off the rails, though: their weak frames just waste even more away. They open themselves to more exploitation, the silly fools — but, what are you going to do: Defiled Forever.

Cue his depictions of both genders being horrifically (and criminally) violent, negligent and dangerous drunks who don't so much waste away as lay waste to everything around them as they suffer from the effects of alcoholism in turn. And, just as importantly, both genders were also shown as being easily manipulated and preyed upon by others for their next bottle.

Hogarth was... moderately successful. For a time.

Then the Victorian period got right back to "the weaker sex" imagery once gin was shoved under the carpet and laudanum became king. Because it was a totally different not-a-problem that men handle so much better. Gin solved!

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jan 30th 2020 at 9:45:45 AM

The Rick and Morty example does show Beth's alcoholism being harmful to others too. In one brief flashback we see a drunk Beth accidentally smack her daughter Summer's face with the wine bottle she is drinking from, giving her a black eye.

The South Park example had both the mom and dad regularly getting into screaming fits at each other, though they both at least made the effort to not involve their kid in the fights.

Hey Arnold was kind of serious for a Nick Toons show, but not so serious that it would show Miriam being a physically abusive drunk to Helga.

Edited by M84 on Jan 30th 2020 at 5:35:28 PM

Beth also shot someone (she thought he was a shapeshifting parasite) and immediately went for the wine. Despite being the most qualified at first aid (yeah, she's a horse vet but still) aside from Rick. Rick and the kids comfort the victim, while her husband Jerry (usually a useless loser) calls 911.

Beth was sober when he shot the guy, but she needed alcohol to cope with the stress.

Her addiction is absolutely destructive, though latter seasons seem to be moving away from it.

Edited by Rationalinsanity on Jan 30th 2020 at 4:14:40 PM

Hell, the show wouldn't even come out and say Miriam was an alcoholic openly. They had to use euphemisms to get past the censors; I didn't know she was supposed to be an alcoholic until I read about it later.

Yeah, in fact when I was a kid I wonder why she was sleepy all the time, you can made the case she was depressed or something.

Nick wouldn't allow it then or now. I can't think of a single kid's cartoon with alcoholism outside of the occasional Very Special Episode.

Hey Arnold made it as obvious as they could. A part of me wants it to stay a "smoothie" addiction, though. Go the Drunk on Milk route. It'd be unusual if they suddenly confirmed she was an alcoholic, unless the smoothies were alcoholic. I've heard some people say she drinks cocktails and similar drinks like Bloody Marys.

Miriam's alcohol addition is Word of God at this point. I thought they mentioned it outright during the The Jungle Movie, but a quit perusal of the character tropes page doesn't mention anything.

Are worldbuilding or setting details acceptable topics here?

In a published work, I would imagine so, yes. Look at the Gor books, for instance.

If they pertain to the discussion of male roles and female roles, yes.

So Riverdale had an... let's say unusual and perhaps slightly troubling handle on sexual assault recently.

The recent episode saw the return of Nick St. Clair, a minor antagonist from season 2 who attempted once to rape Cheryl and got beat up by the Pussycats who stopped him. Nick returns to Riverdale in the recent episode and visits the club Cheryl and Veronica are running. When Cheryl tells her girlfriend Toni what Nick did, Toni has his drink spiked and then has Kevin and Fangs make a video of them tickling Nick which she threatens to reveal if he ever sets foot in Riverdale again or assaults another girl.

As this review put it:

There is also the troubling scene before Toni finds out what happened to him where Kevin and Fangs are acting in a way that makes it look like they had non-consensual sex with Nick. Fangs is shown shirtless and zipping up his pants and Kevin responds to Nick's question of "Who are you?" with "I'll bet you say that to all the boys".

It's kind of a mess.

That also involved Cheryl deciding to blackmail him for money and taking the pay off because her family had recently lost its fortune.

Do tomboyish or butch Alpha Bitch and Rich Bitch characters exist? It seems like the archetypes, especially the former, only apply to hyperfeminine girls.

There's, uh... I forget her name, but there's Ritzlee or whatever her name is from Paranatural. She wears a suit and has close-cropped hair.

Social status and image is something most tomboys and butch characters are portrayed as not caring to uphold in media (as they are usually more grounded and arent superficial) so I assume that is why Rich Bitch and Alpha Bitch characters almost always slide on the very "feminine" side of the scale. The elements that make up those characters are usually coded as feminine in most media. Because their femininity is being used negatively to cast them as antagonistic characters in most cases if that makes any sense.

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 14th 2020 at 4:54:23 AM

There is an exception or two actually but I wouldn't recommend them. The series adaptation of Heathers went with the opposite but it was so toxic I don't even know how to describe it.

An overweight girl, a transgender girl, and a black lesbian girl are the prima donna popular clique who harass the pretty white girl main character and her equally pretty white boyfriend until he decides to bomb everybody.

And the lesbian isn't really a lesbian. She's faking it to fit in with the popular group because having another minority mark on your identity checklist is how you get ahead in life.

I think that sums it up.

Yeah.

I feel like I lose SAN every time I read that.

Heathers has not aged well (it used to be a favorite of mine) but what lunatic decided that was a good idea?

...Who thinks a show like that is a good idea?

I assume a conservative who assumed that the SJW liberals were now the bullies of the poor disadvantaged whites.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 14th 2020 at 12:48:42 PM

Yeah, that straight up sounds like an anti-SJW/white nationalists wetdream.

Jason Mecallif was the writer. Don't know much more beyond that.

So Gwen Stacy has a miniseries now (with the actual Gwen not Spider-Gwen) that focuses on stories "never seen before". And naturally she is in some variant covers with other characters.

I wanted to talk about this one which has her with Carol Danvers which is a variant for Captain Marvel #15◊ because the optics are... odd to put it mildly. It has Carol in the Dave Cockrum one piece which she no longer wears and has been criticized for being too revealing and unusual for a for former USAF pilot to wear. Then there is a Gwen in the clothes she was wearing in the story she was killed off in (it's practically become her uniform now).

So we’ve got these two female characters in outfits that represent status quos that Marvel has been trying to move them on from.

The optics don't look so good.