Well Lois Lane the modern girl (and the early Lois Lane) was a capable investigative reporter on her own. However, there was also a massive period where she was just stalked by love interests and weirdos. But the 1950s to 1960s were all about the CCA trying to make women in comics...lesser as part of the larger conservative cultural misogyny.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 21st 2021 at 6:01:26 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Chloe has gone on to be the single most baffling thing about Smallville to me. Lana Lang was right there, but they decided to create an entirely new character while shifting Lana to a different role... and then Chloe’s actress went on to get exposed for horrifying crimes later in life.
Chloe is a character that shouldn't be associated with Allison Mack's later crimes, at least at a storytelling level.
But basically, if Lana Lang was Chloe the plucky reporter (Chloe is the Lois substitute) then there's no real tension between the relationships. No drama other than, "Why isn't Clark dating her?"
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
In the comics, Lana and Clark dated in high school so you could come up with tension in their relationship for one reason or another.
At this point anyone who writes a love interest who's an active obstacle to superheroing is pretty much asking for them to become the most hated character on the whole show.
It's one thing if the superheroing is shown in a more morally ambiguous light, like in Daredevil, and even then you need to be quite careful, for the audience very much wants to see skulls getting busted.
Lana was never actually an impediment to Superman's career, though. Which makes the hatred she got from fans all the more inexplicable, except I think they deliberately set up a Ship-to-Ship Combat situation with Chloe who DID know about Clark's secret identity.
She mostly did her own thing.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
It's amazing how it took Allison Mack getting arrested for sex trafficking for people to be more comfortable talking about how they disliked Chloe.
Another thing I've observed about Smallville is how often it relies on the "sexiness = bad" trope for a show that came out in the 2000s. Examples at the top of my head:
- Lana often wearing more revealing clothing and having her libido jacked Up To Eleven whenever she is possessed or has her behavior altered in some way.
- Clark basically turns into Charlier Harper from Two and a Half Men whenever he's high on Red Kryptonite.
- The episode "Bound" which is basically Lex being punished for having multiple sex partners. His stalker is a woman whose fiancé dumped her for having a one night stand with Lex which she blames him for even though he didn't even know she was engaged when he slept with her. Yet the episode treats Lex like he brought this on himself.
- The first sign that Clark's evil Earth-2 doppelgänger is different from him is when we see that he had a threesome.
Here's the trailer for Disney's Cruella movie. Now I normally wouldn't bring this up here since we've only got a trailer but I have seen some pretty weird reactions to the trailer about how Cruella is being treated as sympathetic. Reason cited are the "I am woman" line which doesn't sound like it is to be taken at face value and her being antagonistic to rich people which doesn't mean she is sympathetic.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
That's also something I found puzzling, to be honest with you. Some people seem to be taking the line entirely at face value and assuming this film will paint Cruella as some sympathetic feminist figure simply because she says it, but to me that ignores the context of the rest of the trailer which to me, suggests Cruella is a bad and self-absorbed person from the start (she even says she was "born bad") who simply becomes worse as the film goes on, and the "hear me roar" line is just a self-serving excuse to put a veneer of women's empowerment over the awful things she does. There also isn't anything to suggest she has some kind of tragic sympathetic backstory to contextualize her actions.
Granted, I know Trailers Always Lie and people might have low expectations from the Maleficent film, which is fair enough but even if the trailer isn't telling the whole story it's still the only thing we have to judge the film by.
A nice butterfly
It's people making a whole load of assumptions on the movie's trailer. It's not even a case of Trailers Always Lie. It's a case of people assuming a villainous character being portrayed in a modern cool way is going to immediately make her some sort of redeemed character and let's face it - a literal puppy killer and skinner's redemption is something that is not going to go well with the public.
The trailer doesn't say she's going to be absolved, people just assume she is and they act in preemptive outrage to what has, to most standards crossed the Moral Event Horizon.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Like reflections in the glass!
I think part the issue here is precedent, or rather the assumption of precedent.
A Live action adaptation of an DAC flick that is named after its villain would naturally invite comparisons to and speculation based on Malefecent, and I woudn't be surprised if such speculation was that it would give Cruella DeVille the Wicked treatment.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Feb 23rd 2021 at 12:18:13 PM
Cruella notably has a non-puppy skinning version in Once Upon A Time where she's The Beastmaster instead.
If they do a "Wicked" version of the story where she's actually someone who loves dogs but framed for animal abuse, I wouldn't at all be surprised. Either that or they don't adress it at all.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Yeah, it sounds like a lot of the backlash is due specifically to a preemptive belief that this film is attempting to be another Maleficent. So not quite apropros of nothing as Disney has a (small in sample size) prior pattern of this, but it's not quite based on anything endemic to the film itself.
Another issue is that 101 Dalmatians (1996) is still in living memory for a lot of folks, and that film's take on Cruella was peak Love to Hate while never pretending she was anything less than a full-on antagonist, so any attempts at trying to recast her as more heroic or even a Villain Protagonist is going to leave a bad taste in their mouths.
The Unknown Unknown
As always, I'll reserve full judgment for the final version despite my cynicism towards the live-action remakes.
Edited by erazor0707 on Feb 23rd 2021 at 5:04:24 AM
A cruel, sick joke is still a joke, and sometimes all you can do is laugh.
A nice butterfly
I mean. I liked Joker. And the Watchmen. And Maleficent.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Charles: and even them cruella is portray as inredemable evil, subverting the idea she was inocent and kept away by her step mother and instead was a enfant terrible, so even if her puppy skinny was gone, the awfullness remain.
Which is notable in a series that kinda argue everyone can be saved.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
An article praising the Final Fantasy games for having good black fathers
. Author is Ash Parrish.
Lately, dads have become the video game industry’s pet trope. There are a ton of games that have won a lot of awards about trying, failing, and in very few cases, succeeding at being a dad. But that trend largely excludes Black fathers (with one extremely notable exception), since the video game industry generally ignores Black people.
I conducted an experiment on Twitter: how quickly can you name a video game dad versus how quickly can you name a Black video game dad that isn’t The Walking Dead’s Lee Everett. The first tweet filled my mentions with various responses within seconds. The second tweet not so much. I did get answers I wasn’t expecting. I’d forgotten about Half Life 2’s Eli Vance and Mortal Kombat’s Jax Briggs. But, as I expected, people overwhelmingly responded with two characters: Final Fantasy’s Barret Wallace and Sazh Katzroy.
I had planned this blog to be something else. It was originally meant to be a celebration of just Sazh Katzroy—Final Fantasy’s other Black dad—before I realized that it was shocking that there was cause to make that particular distinction in the first place. That Final Fantasy—a Japanese RPG that’s been around for 30 years—has not one but two Black dads running around while we struggle to name more than a handful from other games.
There’s an obsession with beating up bad dads, sympathizing with complex dads, and lauding the best dads (in ways we don’t similarly extend to mothers, but that’s a story for another time.) But even though Barret and Sazh definitely fall into those categories, they don’t get the coverage, the discussion, the recognition, nearly as much as so many other gaming dads. In Sazh’s case, that might have to do with the company he keeps. He was introduced in Final Fantasy XIII—a game people really don’t like—and yet he is one of the reasons I find that game to be tolerable or at least not as deserving of the hate it gets.
If you were to ask me to rank the characters from the last 12 years of Final Fantasy games, Sazh Katzroy would be in the top two just ahead of FF 9’s Vivi Ornitier. He is the chillest, most down-to-earth of all of Final Fantasy’s eleventy billion characters, while also being the sweetest, most devoted dad to his son Dahj. When you first meet him, while Lightning’s showing off her general badassery, you’re shown he’s the guy you really want to trust. Instead of joining in with Lightning’s carnage, he offers help to the captured civilians she’s liberating, as a chocobo chick hangs out in his luxurious if not misshapen afro. Sazh stands apart from his comrades. He’s not an overly strong tsundere murder machine like Lightning, nor does he stare at the sky and lament its falling like Hope or Vanille. He embodies the “guy just trying to do his best” attitude that’s so much more relatable than any other character in FF 13 or in the series overall.
If the criteria for what determines a “good dad” is based on the amount of suffering they endure for their children, then Sazh should be at or very near the top of every list. He went off on his own to fight what he thought was an army of foreign invaders. Watched his son crystallize in his arms. After that, he contemplated suicide and then, after ultimately saving the world and restoring his son to life, Sazh endured his son’s soul shattering in to pieces sending him into a coma. Sazh is very much like Mario, but instead of a Princess, it’s his son he’s always saving.
Barret Wallace is a bit more complicated than Sazh but no less worthy of inclusion on all those “best dads” lists that usually ignore him. In Final Fantasy VII he’s the leader of AVALANCHE, a group of ecological freedom fighters determined to use any means necessary to stop the Shinra Electric Power Company from destroying the planet. I’m conflicted about Barret for a lot of reasons but the one thing I love most about him is that his violence does not preclude his tenderness as a father. The archetype for Barret’s kind of dad is that their violence or violent past taint them, making them incapable or unwilling of being gentle with their children—think Kratos or Joel. Barret doesn’t allow that. You often see him hug or play with Marlene, making no effort to shield her from his bloody occupation or the machine gun grafted to his arm.
Think about that for a second. Most dad stories in games (shit, in general) are about people who have to overcome their baggage in order to be better fathers for their children. It would have been too easy, expected even, for Barret to fall into that same trap. But Barret did the reading from day one and said the inherited trauma stops with me.
There’s also a prevailing myth of the absent Black father that states Black dads are more likely than others to abandon their children. But Final Fantasy said “nah” to that bullshit, depicting a Black man utterly devoted to a child that wasn’t even his own blood way back in 1997. And yet, for all that, he’s barely mentioned in nearly every glowing post written about “good video game dads.”
I read this article about Amy Fisher (a teenage girl who shot the wife of the man who was having an inappropriate sexual relationship with her) and how the 90s kind of had an obsession with evil teenage girls who were "seducing" older men. The article got me thinking about how often that trope is used in media and what it says about how teenage sexual abuse is viewed.
The Boy Next Door is the closest thing I've seen to a gender flip of this typical dynamic in media and even then there are noticeable differences like the fact that the guy is legally an adult.
You know, punching "Schutzalter" in Google throws up a handful of news stories along these lines such as this one.
So I'd imagine that these stories are inspired by the occasional Real Life example.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
There is some discourse in regards to the redesign for Lola Bunny in the upcoming Space Jam sequel. Some respect that the character is now less sexualized while others feel this redesign sends the message that a character with a curvaceous body is inherently sexualized rather than just avoid subjecting a character to Male Gaze. Examples are like this streamer 18 minutes in and continuing to the 52 minute mark, roughly.
I honestly love Lola Bunny as done by Kristen Wiig. Making her as crazy as the new Looney Tunes was a great decision. But honestly I always felt it was a shame we never saw the Tiny Toons continued.
Oh yeah and Buster too.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Not really as much of a fan of the new design, and I honestly have to agree due to my experiences with youtube, any amount of curves gets you declared as sexual content...
Which is a shame because that is body shaming its own brand of women.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
I don't have a strong feeling on either. The new one is cuter and hews closer to Kawaisa in some ways, but the change isn't really necessary, though I don't find it offputting either.
Edited by AlleyOop on Mar 5th 2021 at 9:05:02 AM
Is that a Lois Lane plot? I thought it was getting kidnapped by people she's going to expose as evil or people who want to kill Superman.
As well as quite a few CW DC love interests. Notably, Laurel Lance and Iris West. Though with Iris, they seem to have avoided most of the issues with Laurel and Lana.
I think Lana was hurt by the fact that they gave the role of Clark's childhood female friend and eventual confidant to Chloe.