This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)
This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.
The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character
In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).
Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":
"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.
Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?
Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.
To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.
The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:
I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)
None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.
At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).
Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.
This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.
Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.
Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.
What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.
A really inspired paragraph, thank you.
Thank you so much for that! It makes me happy to know that people enjoy these posts.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the whole "competence tax" argument misunderstands how much fiction aimed at women works.
Romance is part of practically all fiction aimed at women. The most common female romantic fantasies is of being someone who's already special, attractive, or competent, but who has "flaws" or personal difficulties that make her feel overlooked or unappreciated. Then a highly desirable, high-status man comes along who recognizes her worth and loves her for who she already is. The same general fantasy can even happen without romance at all, the key really is being "unfairly" socially overlooked.
The flaws make the protagonist easier to self-insert into and set up the romantic payoff. Conversely, the male love interest needs to be relatively uncomplicated and exceptional for his recognition to be particularly meaningful. Giving him comparable failures and insecurities undermines the fantasy.
And if the competent man is just a minor character, there's often no reason to explore his personal problems in the first place.
It isn't a competence tax. It's setup for self-insertion and romance, or simply ordinary storytelling.
Male fantasies, romantic or not, don't work this way so weaknesses of this type frequently hinder rather than set-up the fantasy being sold.
Yes, but when people notice the cringey unflattering self-indulgent tropes of women's romance fiction, they don't treat it as an injustice that needs to be corrected so more men can enjoy reading about vampire billionaires.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As a small public service here are a few excellent shows with extremely flawed female lead characters: Nighty Night, Enlightened, Six Feet Under, Pluribus, Killing Eve, Fleabag. Many more, but these spring to mind.
The more crowd pleasing you go the less flawed they get, so you get The Diplomat on Netflix where the main character is basically a bit disorganised and supposedly not good at manners and fashion. Or Homeland where our character is paranoid but her mental illness feels kind of separate to her (she is fundamentally good but has to deal with her own mania and paranoia).
But dig deeper and there is plenty of entertainment out there that features flawed women by creators with a deeper understanding of character than the person in the above video, and they aren't actually offensive to feminists or feminism at all as far as I can tell.
I don’t recall who it was in science fiction, but it might have been Phillip Jose Farmer; someone who had been criticized for their inability to write female characters. I’ve found it more speaks to the taste of the reader, and it reveals more about their own prejudice and preference for how they want their characters shaped. There’s nothing I can think of in terms of a writer who just writes objectively bad characters when demarcated by gender; but me not being TM’s biggest fiction reader, I wouldn’t be the one to know. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
There have been many.
Isaac Asimov did kind of write women as basically alien creatures who exist only as sexual distractions for men (Susan Calvin being a notable exception), but, he was an uber-nerd who got started writing in the 1930s. Women probably were distracting alien creatures to him. And to be honest, I always thought Asimov just sucked at characterization in general. His characters are mostly hooks to hang a plot on.
Heinlein, of course, wrote uber-competent characters of both sexes, but his women were usually sexual libertines, and coincidentally, hot, young, nubile, and inexplicably attracted to potato-shaped older men who might happen to resemble a middle-aged SF author.
Those two archetypes, in various forms, are what you find in most early SF, and that's what grinds most feminist readers' gears: women are, in one form or another, basically male fantasies and sex objects. But most of those early SF writers were writing women in the roles that actually existed for women at the time. Some created women who could be smart and brave and actually do things, many just put women in the "wife/sister/girlfriend" role.
(Edgar Rice Burroughs' women were almost exclusively damsels in distress and/or objects of veneration. Robert E. Howard actually wrote female warriors like Belit and Red Nails. H.P. Lovecraft was probably more scared of women than he was of brown people and Shoggoths.)
Modern feminist critique mostly strikes me as bad faith (they will go through a book, analyzing an assortment of characters, and conclude that an author is misogynistic because his female characters have too much romantic attention put on them, or don't have enough to do, or have to be rescued by a man, or fulfill a "gendered role" or whatever). In some cases the observations are actually correct (yes, all the women are romantic interests and are not the action heroes the men are), but that is not necessarily a bad (or unrealistic) thing unless, well, you're a feminist reader who demands all stories give "equal representation" no matter how it distorts the story. But I can see how it would be kind of annoying to read book after book where men are the interesting characters and heroes who do things while women are just their love interests; better authors, even ones who aren't trying to be "feminist," can still make the female characters interesting. Less good authors just make them decoration. But you are not wrong that bad female characterization is usually reflective of an author who's just bad at characterization in general. (A lot of early, and contemporary(!), authors write great ideas, great plots, but cardboard characters.)
Ironically, one popular author often praised highly for his female characters is Brandon Sanderson. It's true his female characters are usually interesting, smart, brave bad-asses who still remain feminine. (Don't forget, Sando is still a Mormon and that always shows around the edges.) But his female characters are also all the same character. He basically can only write one. (Okay, maybe two or three.)
So anyway, yes, the woman in the OP is fairly typical of feminist critics: it's not that any of the women are unrealistic or "bad" characters. It's that they aren't checking her boxes and measuring up against men in the way she thinks they should. I don't know how often women actually note "perky tits" on themselves or other women, but the meme on the Internet is "breasting boobily," which is basically about male authors who spend too much time emphasizing a woman's appearance (and especially her breasts) in every scene, having her examine herself in a mirror (so the author can describe her perky tits), etc. This sometimes happens, and sometimes you do get the impression the author is infatuated with his own character, but now it's like a lot of writing memes, where it's a pattern you sometimes see but the mere existence of it in a scene is not, contrary to lots of bad writing advice, "bad writing."
(I mean, if you start the book with your character waking up from a dream, or the first thing the female character does is check herself out in the mirror, I probably am going to roll my eyes hard.)
I worry that all this discourse has broken my brain, because I've found myself doing the opposite in a current series I'm reading. It's called Years of the Apocalypse. It's a time-loop webfic, and the best I've read since Mother of Learning. But I just couldn't help but notice that the author wanted you to treat a character sympathetically or not based on their gender. The main character and 95% of the people moving the plot forward are female, with no good reason for it. It's really bad if you analyze the irredeemable villains; out of dozens, it took until book two before there was a SINGLE female one.
I wish I could just ignore it, because if I were to suddenly become unable to distinguish pronouns, it'd become a book filled with varied, believable, and interesting characters. But I've become tuned to Notice these things, largely by feminists complaining about the converse. It hurts the story either way.
After all, the Big Lie so many feminists told was that they just wanted equality. That's why "feminism" has such positive connotations in most people's minds, despite literally being an -ism. But the moral people who believed in equality have largely gone their own way; the feminists who are left over actually just think that sexism is only wrong when it's done TO them, not BY them.
Huh, I actually hadn't noticed that; I did enjoy (most of) the characters. Was it really so blatant?
No, what turned me off Years of the Apocalypse (somewhere around the end of book 2; haven't touched it since) was the author's near-total incuriosity towards economics, which was becoming an increasingly large part of the story. There was a line -- and I'm still floored someone could actually write this -- claiming that industrialization increases the cost of household goods. Like, you show the natural land being stripped bare for resources -- where do you think it all goes? Where do the cartoonishly evil (naturally) industrialists get all their money if not by selling the massive quantities of stuff they produce? It's not like people were limiting their consumption out of ecological consciousness before (lol), they just couldn't afford it. So... who's buying all this stuff, then?
I just don't see how you can design a functional world with such a broken perspective on how society functions-- Well, you can't, actually, and that becomes obvious once you start paying attention. It's not like this is some background detail, the on-going industrial revolution is central to the plot, and the author apparently has done no research into how industrial revolutions affect society or even seriously thought about it. It's just the laziest sort of anti-capitalist screed about how greed is destroying the world -- any proper Marxist would be embarrassed to write something so uninspired and thoughtless.
It is otherwise pretty good -- if it weren't I wouldn't have suffered through that as long as I did. The best time-loop fic since Mother of Learning (at least in the fantasy-progression genre)... Well, I'll reluctantly admit that's true, but MoL was a lot better. That particular niche-within-a-niche is just sadly under explored. (Though I'm liking Throne of TIme a lot so far!) Still, it's enjoyable on its own merits when it keeps the focus on anything else.
What is Mother of Learning and what makes it good? I skimmed the internet and it is about a young wizard on a wizard school (inspired by HP?)
Mother of Learning is a prominent webnovel which is particularly popular in rationalist circles (currently the top voted post on /r/rational, beating out Worth the Candle). It's about a young wizard, Zorian, who gets trapped in a one-month time loop after his academy is attacked by mysterious invaders. He must now use the loop to grow stronger and investigate leads until he can find a way to escape the loop and stop the invasion. You can read a longer review from ACX's contest.
Personally, I am firmly of the opinion that Mother of Learning is an inferior version of Time Braid, but others disagree.
More options
Context Copy link
(I'm going to try to keep this more or less spoiler free, so sorry if anything's too vague.)
The school actually doesn't play that big a role in the story after the first several chapters; perhaps in a broad sense it's inspired by Harry Potter, in that most people writing in English today have probably read it and it is about a young man learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up, but it's a tenuous connection. It certainly feels nothing alike. Way, way more focus on world building and a world that (more or less) makes sense, a much more developed magic system (the story is reasonably restrained about when it decides we need to know all those details, but they certainly exist), and it is really primarily about learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up (mentally, at least). (And not petty social drama, poorly designed fake sports, or school life -- even as a kid I got frustrated at how bad Harry Potter was at keeping the focus on the things I wanted to hear about.)
The main conceit is the time loop; every month, time resets. Everything and everyone go back where they were before and (almost) everyone loses their memories of the intervening time, but not our protagonist. So, fantasy Groundhog
DayMonth. But while Groundhog Day is primarily concerned with the time loop itself (it was a much more novel idea back then, granted), MoL uses it as a vehicle to exhibit an intricately designed world, to section off a short stretch of time to explore how everything fit together in that moment. At first it all feels pretty painfully generic: run-of-the-mill D&D style fantasy world, one-note characters (of whom our protagonist likes roughly zero, so you only see them when they decide to come annoy him), disconnected and uninteresting events, and a very straightforward goal. But by going through that month again and again, we slowly uncover the rich detail that was hiding under the surface of all of those things, how many of them were just reflections of our protagonist's limited perspective and immaturity, and how he grows as a result.The character work is... actually just good, without qualification. So with the qualification that almost every character is literally incapable of learning or growing in any durable way because they're reset every month, it's impressive. All the more so because of how hard it is to find any decent characters at all in stories quite so autistically obsessed with detailing an intricate magic system. Part of that is just focusing on the protagonist, who can learn and grow, but it accomplishes a surprising amount through evolution of our understanding of characters that can't undergo actual evolution inside the time loop. I don't want to oversell it, nothing here is groundbreaking, but it's a plus instead of the minus it really should have been by all rights.
The overarching plot is fine-to-good, I'd say. It keeps the pressure up, which isn't easy given the premise, and there are enough twists and turns to keep you engaged. And, like everything else, there's a lot more going on with it than it seems at first. Still, it feels pretty distant most of the time, and for the vast majority of the word count it's just motivation to accumulate ever more knowledge and power. Which is fine by me, that's what I'm here for. It has the standard progression/incremental game hook of number-go-up and getting to do bigger, cooler things as the story progresses, finding shortcuts and new avenues to explore in the time loop -- all pretty basic, but fun. Like, a big goal early on is learning the teleport spell, because that allows us to reach places we couldn't before and to get to critical areas sooner in the loop. And with that power we can save the life of someone recommended as a mentor for another sort of magic we need to do something else, and so on.
Pacing is... eh, let's say 'deliberate.' The whole story is around three thousand pages. I wouldn't call any of it filler -- and in fact I enjoyed it enough I wish there was more; I've re-read it twice -- but it definitely takes its time and you've got to be ready to meet it on its own terms. I don't mind it, but I can certainly understand why someone would. I think it would be relatively easy to put down and pick back up later when you're in the mood, but I read it straight through all three times.
And, like I've said, the best part is the world building and magic, with satisfying mechanics and connections and almost fractal complexity.
On the whole... maybe this is an out-there take, but it kind of feels like Project Hail Mary to me (the book much more than the movie), in that it's focused on learning about and interacting with complex systems, understanding how they fit together and how they might be re-combined to accomplish a new objective. It's lonely in the same way at first, and less lonely later on in the same way too (though that is a bit of spoiler). And they both have an element of piecing together past events from limited clues, though of course that's handled very differently. Otherwise... Outer Wilds? For reasons that should be obvious if you've played it (which everyone should).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, this is why it's good to get a second opinion. Thanks. I guess all this culture warring really has made me too sensitive.
I'm pretty economically ignorant myself, so I guess that side of things didn't bother me as much. But I do have a related criticism that a barely-industrialized world clashes with modern libertine sexual and gender politics. Magic or no magic, it makes no sense to pretend that gay relationships and casual sex are "just normal" in a society that's barely above subsistence level. I suspect that's just what Royal Road readers are used to: shipping characters they like with no respect to realism or gender, and naive anti-capitalist ideals.
So I guess I agree that the worldbuilding just doesn't hold up under even casual scrutiny. Still, I do appreciate the rational way the MC goes about trying to figure things out in the time loops. It's got the nice quality that the plot is mainly driven by lack of information, not bad decisions (or at least, not unrealistically bad ones).
I'll have to check it out!
N+1
I'm pretty tuned to be instantly turned off by CW bullshit but I didn't really notice.
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, well, maybe I'm just not sensitive enough. I'm bad at noticing patterns like that if I don't know to look for them -- I didn't even realize almost all the villains and almost none of the heroes in the new Star Wars trilogy were white men until I heard someone point it out.
Oh, this one I noticed. But yeah, I think it's just table stakes for modern low brow fantasy -- that or some caricature of oppression the protagonist has to overcome, though that's thankfully less common. The latter is maybe more realistic in some sense, but it means we're spending a whole lot more word count on the subject than if society is just inexplicably already perfectly in tune with modern progressive attitudes. It bothers me way less than the economics, and I can't really explain why. Just personal interest, I guess.
Oh, I agree. If it weren't otherwise good I wouldn't be so upset about the lost potential. But for a story to actually be rational it has to be rational all the way through, or it just unravels from there. I'm not totally against giving it another shot at some point, regardless of my complaints, but so far there's always been something I've wanted to read more.
... I was going to warn you it's still pretty early days, but I just checked and its at nearly 700 pages. Definitely flew right by. Still, biggest problem right now is there's not enough of it, which is a good problem to have. Fast updates, too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe the real cosmic horror was the women and brown people we met along the way.
But what about the Irish and people from the mountains of Vermont?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know if it was that he was scared, or somewhere on the asexual spectrum.
It is pretty revealing that his most "interesting" female character was actually a body-swapped male sorcerer.
His wife said he had typical sexuality.
Whatever his wife said, his own letters reveal he didn't care much about sex. I don't have strong feelings about it, but I could easily believe he was in the bottom 25% in terms of male libido. Capable of fulfilling his conjugal duties as a husband, but not super into it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It doesn’t seem to be on YouTube anymore, but to the point about Asimov, several years ago there was a very old archived video of him being interviewed, in a discussion with Marilyn vos Savant (allegedly the world’s smartest woman). Throughout the whole exchange you could tell he was just sitting there, loving it the whole time in laid back, relaxed fashion. Asimov was known pretty well to be something of a chauvinist whose mannerisms most assuredly wouldn’t jive pretty well with the views of women in 2026. Even so though, it doesn’t mean his views were inaccurate; essentially what you touched on. I roll my eyes at the imperative that says women are being demeaned and unappreciated if they aren’t out there essentially acting like men. Someone has to fulfill that role anyway, and it’s not natural to who men are.
If you look at a lot of women now, a lot of them are just miserable, wretched and desperate. I’m not one of those people who thinks women are purely something fashioned by men’s own living. Women just are what they are, and there’s something that makes them unalterable and fixed; and something that can’t be fashioned. You can make them miserable or sick; but you can’t change them. Women the world over are all mostly the same; they’re only a little more happy or healthy, or a little more miserable and ill. And that depends according to whether their men understand how to treat them or not. They aren’t like men in the very fundamental sense that they don’t really have any destiny to work out for themselves or some sense of "true womanhood," that’s yet to be found while we just leave her alone.
Take a mole and force it live on a concrete floor; or throw a frog into a sand dune; or confine a cat to a space only just large enough to allow it to move its tail, and you’ll be a complete success in one respect: you’ll have succeeded so thoroughly in distorting their primary instincts, that you’ll have made them pissed off and desperate and miserable (and probably sickly as well). To me the way the Sci-Fi writers of old took to writing them made a lot of sense.
This may be the interview.
I'm not sure I agree with many of your opinions here, particularly that all women are apparently mostly the same. I've heard feminist women make the same charges against men and I agree with them about as much as I agree with you. Anyway I'm compulsive when people can't find things so hopefully I've found your video.
Yes, that’s the one! Thank you.
Agree to disagree on the rest, I suppose. I’d be more curious to hear about your own experience and evidence otherwise. If people generally were more differentiated and individualized then they were similar and herd-like, you’d never be able to aggregate experiences to draw any reasonable inferences between them. If you want to zero in on very small idiosyncratic behaviors, that’s undoubtedly where you’ll find the most amount of variation between people, but they’re more similar in more ways than they are different than others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Asimov was known for a very spare, plot driven writing style which literary types absolutely hate. But as many have pointed out, he did characterization just fine...,as long as you count robots as characters. His most character driven story is probably the novelette "The Bicentennial Man", but even the short stories had memorable characters like Nestor-10.
More options
Context Copy link
The reasonable commentary I've seen is that the point of a mirror scene is so the POV character can describe to the audience what they look like (although, as I've read, a real person looking at themselves in the mirror usually notices what's changed, what they don't like, that their hair's a mess at the moment...). Presumably many authors think that when describing a female main character, cup size is a mandatory inclusion.
Alternatively, inexperienced authors know they are supposed to describe the environment, but they don't know what parts are important to focus on. So they end up including certain things that don't particularly matter, with female body parts simply being one of the more noticeable bits.
More options
Context Copy link
Right, the reason for a mirror scene is obvious. It's just become such a cliche at this point, it's like "It was a dark and stormy night."
It also easily gets boring. It is usually more interesting when the character description has some dual purpose to it. Someone being intimidated by a character's appearance is more interesting than just describing him as "tall, muscular, and tattooed".
In the worst cases, it feels like a waste of space. Like, this is supposed to be an action story why are you admiring your tits and long, flowy hair? Unless the point is for her to be sexy or it serves some kind of narrative purpose (romance subplot, weakness in fights) it doesn't really matter much.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The MC in The Diplomat is not disorganized or bad at fashion or manners. She is in fact explicitly hyper competent, to the point she's being considered for the vice presidency based on merit. That's the point of the show. The conflict in her character is that she's not where she wants to be, doing things she doesn't want to do, tied to a marriage she wants to end but can't, and surrounded by people who lie to her. I personally quite like her characterization.
Calling that show crowd-pleasing does not match my experience. My normie wife could not make it through a single episode. Whereas I like it because I'm a nerd for international relations and US Gov stuff. On the other hand I think a show likes Fleabag is much more of a crowd pleaser, with all its little winking naughtiness and fourth wall breaking, it's very modern vibes, no wonder it gets so much acclaim. And yet I got bored and couldn't finish the first episode, partly because I found the MC insufferable.
I really hate the way The Diplomat is written. I don’t really know how to describe it, but if I did I’d have to call it something like ‘midwit core’. It feels like Scandal, which imagined itself as a political thriller but which was actually about the super hot protagonist secretly being the most powerful person in the world and hypercompetent and hot and every gorgeous guy wanted her for her brains AND beauty. Okay, yeah I remember Wattpad too. Scandal would also randomly drop in obscure references to domestic or international politics in one liners to make the show seem smarter than it was.
There is just the sense in The Diplomat, too, that the writer is so smug for occasionally throwing in a line of obscure Wikipedia or Whitehall or Foreign Policy or intelligence circle / tradecraft stuff or Britishisms she doesn’t really understand and thinking that this has lent this ridiculous thriller a certain realism. For example, the writer’s grasp of the British class system, Westminster intrigue, the makeup of the Conservative and Labour parties, what the right and the left want, is so warped, it’s like the foreign correspondent for the New York Times in London spent six hours editing the script. It’s not about ‘realism’ - the average American political thriller that features the UK is entirely unobjectionable even in its ridiculousness because it doesn’t pretend to understand domestic politics. The Diplomat will throw in references to niche recent historical events (not like Brexit), specific newspapers or conferences, an Oxford college, a minor public school, a members club, a medium sized financial institution, later US politics too, but in a way that like an LLM would when it’s being overly niche in an unrealistic way, with no background, with no deep cultural understanding of anything (“give me a random deep cut reference that only someone in the New England upper middle class would understand. Make no mistakes”). I note that the creator and writer worked on later seasons of the West Wing, when it got much worse for this, because even when Sorkin is at his worst (which is often) his dialogue, while unrealistic and ultra-liberal, has a certain weight on background that The Diplomat just lacks.
I also find the show’s politics particularly grating. It’s not that it’s like a final vestige of Hillary Clinton era ‘neoliberalism’ or whatever we’re calling it now. I literally liked The Newsroom, I’m clearly not politically picky with my television. I think it’s that this is a prestige drama that sees itself very firmly as imparting a Very Specific Message That is Very Important, when actually it’s a poorly plotted (loosely) “political” thriller where the villains are perennially either venal Biden staffer types who just want power or some loose constellation of bumbling evil ‘far right’. The irony is that I think the main villain is actually an attempt by the writers to cast a Hillary Clinton type as bad, her paranoia damning the world if our heroic and very similar Powerful Woman doesn’t stop her, retroactively excusing 2016 in an “it wasn’t the ideas or the type of person, just the wrong person” kind of a way.
Keri Russell is good. She was always good and the problems with this show are 99% a bad script. Her husband’s character is probably the best in the show.
More options
Context Copy link
I've only watched the first season of the Diplomat, but there is loads of stuff of her hating to dress up for functions, mentioning she needs the toilet or her chair squeaking at undiplomatic moments, and such. It struck me as a character flaw that was not really a flaw, because she is played by Keri Russell and basically looks perfect and is perfectly charming throughout and even when stumbling over her words. Like you I actually quite liked her character and the show, and only meant my crowd-pleasing comment to apply to that aspect of her characterisation, in contrast to a show where the heroine's flaws make her genuinely offputting to a big slice of the audience.
Re Fleabag, I think her flaws in ep1 are genuinely offputting (they did put you off, and me, in that I watched the pilot and didn't return to it for a couple of years) and in that sense the show is not a people pleaser. It may be in others, sure, though I think the winking naughtiness turns out later to be well-rooted in character (and actually in character pain).
Yeah that makes sense. But I would argue that just because she doesn't have an interest in fashion/niceties/etc doesn't mean she can't or doesn't pull it off. Quite the contrary, the plot is often about why these political niceties actually matter in politics, and her having to compromise her no-nonsense vibe to succeed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Fleabag is a very good example. I find that many men seem to kind of hate Fleabag (the character, if not the show) though. Which is not to say that the character is meant to be particularly likeable, obviously she mistreats people around her all the time, but she is fundamentally sympathetic in the sense that she is acting out and has a terrible relationship with women because of the early death of her mother, she is earnest in her own way, she isn’t a caricature of a horrible person. I wonder if it’s because Fleabag is kind of the story of one of those evil BPD cheating whores some men online like to complain about, except told from her perspective instead of just his.
It's kind of the MO for prestigey shows to have a reverse save-the-cat moment or several early on to make you dislike the main character, then get you to sympathise with them regardless as you get to know them over the course of the series. For this reason it may not be a bad thing for a creator if their audience dislikes the character at first – certainly I didn't much like Fleabag (the character) in the pilot ep, though I came to like her more. Any online man who's apt to hate her initially is therefore actually positioned to have an especially powerful viewing experience – though only if they actually persevere with the show.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As always, everything comes from the fact that women are born, but men are made.
Men only have value when they prove themselves. A woman, on the other hand, is of value the moment she finishes puberty. It is said that young women become social millioniares, which is true, but only half the story. The other half is that they are defenseless millionaires. To be a young woman is like being given a million dollars, but being forced to carry it everywhere in a clear backpack, in the roughest neighborhood in town.
The hero leaves society as a boy, struggles against adversity, grows as a result, and returns to society a man.
A heroine cannot go on this journey. A young woman is of great value as it is, and to leave society would mean instant predation and likely death.
The heroine's story is the mirror image, because the conflict is fundamentally social. In the heroine's journey, the young woman is already flawless, but she is not recognized by society (or at least the social class she aspires to). Instead of struggling against adversity to improve herself, she struggles against society, changes society, and is recognized and accepted.
A woman will write a story about a woman who struggles to be accepted and recognized in spite of her inherent goodness. Men read that same story and see a faultless female protagonst who undergoes no challenge and no growth.
A man will write a story about a woman with flaws, and how she struggles against them and is changed by the struggle. Women (especially 21st century ones) will read that same story and see a story about how women aren't allowed to be competent and flawless, and think the man is implying that women don't deserve acceptance.
If you've had the (mis)fortune of reading kid's books about scientists, the pattern becomes obvious. Books for boys about male scientists are about the challenges the scientist faces, the spark of inspiration, and the joy of seeing hard work rewarded. Girl's books about scientists don't have any science in them at all. The woman scientist's social challenges are detailed (nobody believes in her because she belongs to some specific groups), but she believes in herself, and because her self-belief is so strong, one day she is accepted and celebrated. The social struggle is foreground, the science is merely background.
We cannot escape our ancestral scripts. Man struggles against the world, and strengthened by it. Woman struggles against society, and is accepted by it.
I understand the opinion that women are born, but men are made, at least if we're talking about the real world. But this is fiction, storytelling. What stops men from writing stories where they're already wonderful and people just don't realize it?
People talk about good stories, flaws, struggles, and character growth. I think most of that is bullshit. Stories are essentially about people, not about the world. People come up with all sorts of reasons so they can be proud of the stories they like, so they can claim to have good taste, to be sophisticated.
But their tastes are ephemeral. Men and women clearly have different wants in fiction. So taste is biological. And if it's biological, then the very standard by which we judge a good story can shift with the generations.
Suppose I like stories about a Gary Stu who's perfect and loved by everyone. What if I become a tyrant, crack open people's skulls to check whether they share my taste, and execute anyone who doesn't? Only people with good taste get to breed. After a few generations, the world will be filled with people who love Gary Stu, and he'll become the new literary standard. Such is the great providence of nature.
Is the problem men? Is the problem women? I think it's consciousness.
Consciousness gives birth to the ego and to stories. The ego seeks to unify the me of the past with the me of the future. Unification across time. Stories and language seek to unify different people through shared myths and a shared destiny. We are all humans. Unification across space. It's a similar process, and both seek to avert contradictions.
People dislike contradictions. But do contradictions cause any physical harm? No, only mental discomfort. Animals don't agonize over them the way humans do. People suffer when their wishes contradict one another, when the me of tomorrow regrets the actions of my past self, even though I acted according to my wishes at the time. Likewise, people feel discomfort when they realize that others are genuinely different, that their wishes can contradict and conflict with their own.
Consciousness is ultimately about the self. The greatest pain and the greatest fear of humanity is the loss of self. At its core, it's losing your body. Losing your limbs, being unable to walk, unable to see. But it's also growing old, losing bodily functions, becoming unable to eat or speak.
And the body isn't just physical. There's also the mental body, your ego. The fear of losing your convictions, your dignity, your morals. And the mental body isn't just your individual mind, but also the enormous mental structures that extend beyond it. Your family, your company, your country, humanity.
Your body is what allows you to interact with the world. You can pick up an apple with your hand. But to do something bigger, to build a skyscraper, a spaceship, you need a larger body. You don't move your hand, you move your company, your nation. Just as your brain moves your limbs, your consciousness moves these larger bodies.
I'm not just a part of my family, my country, humanity. I am my family, my country, humanity itself. Arrogance? The brain is just one part of my body, yet it declares itself to be the entire me. So why should I be any different?
Consciousness is what makes this possible. And it absolutely demands unity.
To me, what people call Trump Derangement Syndrome is not a syndrome of the physical body, but of the mental body. It's the absolute horror of feeling your own body fail, no longer functioning according to your will.
I see the conflict between men and women in much the same way. When their wishes genuinely contradict each other, the unity of the self begins to unravel. What you thought was your own body suddenly seems alien to you.
Perhaps the culture war is simply a form of body dysmorphia. Consciousness and modern technology have allowed us to see the entire world as our own body.
And the body refuses to obey.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is really less about losing the body, and more about the wrong person being allowed to rule, and thus the body-politic if you like. The thought is that the ego of these people cannot accept that other people who win elections have the right to implement their agenda. They can’t accept Cthulhu swimming straight instead of hard left. And seeing that they aren’t getting their way causes distress, especially for those who have made politics their religion. It would be for them like what would happen to a Southern Baptist who wakes up one morning to find that America is now ruled by Sharia law. If you see that not only your religion under the thumb of those who disagree and who are suddenly allowed to rule over the country and them.
Well, my theory is less about explaining people's motives than their reactions. Democracy already assumes that people we dislike will sometimes govern us, and history has no shortage of intense reactions to lost elections. But just as there are different genres of horror, I think there are also different genres of political distress.
So what is the particular horror of modern politics, of Trump and wokeness? What is so peculiar about it that people reach for the word "syndrome"?
I think it's the horror of the impossible becoming real. It's not merely horrific news, but news you never believed possible in the first place. For many people, Trump couldn't possibly become president. It was just common sense. Only the despicable could have voted for him. Wokeness is somewhat similar. These people are crazy, surely nobody takes them seriously. Yet half the country voted for Trump, and wokeness is the state religion.
This isn't the horror of encountering a monster. It's the horror of discovering that your mother has already been devoured and replaced by one. Your sanctuary has been overturned. What you depended on has turned against you. Where can you even escape? Politics consumes everything. There is no safe place.
That's why I connect it to body dysmorphia. Your body is your first sanctuary, the most sacred place, the thing you trust without even thinking about it. Its usurpation is the highest despair, the plot twist modern cinema is so obsessed with. The overturn of everything. It also explains the feeling of revulsion, which is commonly associated with disease. It's not just that people you dislike have won. They're spreading, and they can contaminate others, turning everything you thought was safe into something alien.
And finally, there's the feeling of impotence.
As I explained in my original comment, when you want to pick up an apple, you move your arm. When you want to build a rocket, you move other people. Society is very much like your body in the sense that you act through it to accomplish things. When animals encounter a problem, they move their bodies to solve it. But humans can do more. They can mobilize the entire society.
The consequences are terrifying. Mountains can be torn apart, rivers diverted, islands created or destroyed, all through the collective will of human beings. Politics is the body of modern humanity, an instrument of power that feels almost omnipotent. It's intoxicating. And awakening from that feeling is almost as brutal.
If your mother turns into a monster, you can still run. Your sanctuary is ruined, but your body remains reliable. You can punch, you can flee. But when the entire society seems to turn against you, what can you even do?
The institutions have been taken over. The common, decent people you thought were just like you, your family, your reliable limbs, turn out to be monsters in disguise. Your body has been infected. It no longer moves according to your will, and the infection is coming for you.
That's why I use the metaphor of body dysmorphia. It captures three distinct terrors: impotence, despair, and revulsion.
More options
Context Copy link
I've said before that I think the internet and culture are dealing with a lot of people who really only became aware of politics near the end of GWB (who they thought was clearly evil) followed by 8 glorious years of Obama and Hope and Change, and thought that would be the future forever (but that next election it would instead be a woman's turn, but still on the Left).
I think we honestly have far far too many people who have made politics into both their identity and their religion. The public is far too “engaged” and it leads them the believe that politics is the only thing that matters. Add in an unhealthy amount of Last Psychiatrist style narcissistic tendencies and you end up with a toxic stew that can only lead to mental health disorders and the destruction of the country through polarization.
Watch some World Series baseball. Carve a pumpkin. Get a hobby.
It appears that Bush demoralized moderate rightists whereas Obama did the same to moderate leftists.
I don’t see it as demoralized to keep politics to one of several things you keep track of. That’s honestly a good thing, in my view. Because politics cannot fill the voids that it’s asked to do by the radical left and right. It cannot make up for a lack of personality, nor can it make up for a lack of hobbies or social interaction. It cannot work as a religion either. And when politics is turned into all of that it ends up being a cause for verbal if not physical “jihad” where the others who merely disagree with you are to be subjugated and punished for being politically incorrect from your perspective. At that point, you set the table for killing people. It’s a dangerous game and I’m not sure where the lines will be drawn.
What I was referring to is that moderate Red Tribers used to support a normie-friendly tendency of 'compassionate conservatism' coupled with a sort of watered-down neoconservatism that allows average Joes to strut around as militaristic tough guys and is based on the notion that Middle Eastern wars can actually be cakewalks. When this nonsense fell apart, moderate Blue Tribers seemingly got the idea to promote a sort of more or less fake civic nationalism intended to 'heal the scars of a racist past' and improve relations between white and black citizens etc. This also fell through so everyone was disappointed in the end, which is fertile ground for political polarization.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is John Snow a cinderella story? I don’t see GOT as him going off to train and grow. It seems like his successes were always because he was in fact elite blood with great traits. He’s more of a Christ figure I think but like Cinderella Christ was always good and just ruler but the world had not figured out that he was Christ. Christ I guess is a Cinderella character.
At least in the TV series, Jon Snow's "going off to train and grow" was his time north of the wall.
More options
Context Copy link
We don't know? The story isn't done
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn’t this the underlying theme of most superhero fiction?
No. Most superhero fiction is about men who are ridiculously competent and powerful... but alas have enemies to match. And in the origin stories, they tend to have to become wonderful people. Peter Parker has to make a moral error which kills his Uncle Ben in order to learn. Superman has had more origin stories than I can count, but in many of them as a boy he uses his powers selfishly and has to be corrected. Batman's origin story is creating himself from nothing but money and his butler after the death of his parents.
This trope predates superhero fiction. Arguably it is the main story arc of The Epic of Gilmagesh, which would make it quite literally the oldest one in the book.
Man is born strong by divine gift, learns moral wisdom in order to direct his strength towards a happy ending, is the original plot; good man learns practical wisdom in order to become strong and achieve a happy ending is the modern variation.
Today's essay, class, is "Is Gilmagesh a Gary Stu?"
If he is, I'd ask a followup: What's the first major myth/story where the male lead isn't a Gary Stu?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ll give you Batman, but it’s definitely there in both Superman and especially, Spider-Man. Also not a superhero movie but It’s a Wonderful Life.
I think that there is a subtle difference between It's a Wonderful Life and a female-focused story where society discovers how wonderful the woman is. (For example the Cinderella tale.)
In It's a Wonderful Life, the main character makes various sacrifices -- he partially loses his hearing saving his brother; he cancels his honeymoon to save his bank; he never makes it out of Bedford Falls despite his burning desire to travel. And so on.
So it's not just the world discovering how great he is. Rather, the main character is suffering and sacrificing to prove to the world how great he is.
By contrast, Cinderella is made to suffer (by doing household chores) but that's not to prove that she is great; it's not to earn her stripes; it's not to accomplish anything at all, other than to (narratively) show that society (as personified by her wicked stepmother) doesn't appreciate her value and therefore mistreats her.
More options
Context Copy link
It's in It's a Wonderful Life (but note George is no neophyte; he actually has done things) and probably some but not all of the Superman origin stories, but Peter Parker refusing to stop a robber who later kills Uncle Ben is Spider Man's defining moment, and is definitely not about him being already wonderful.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To me, this is an interesting question. From the female side of things, the story that comes to mind is Cinderella. Note that to become a beautiful and desirable woman, Cinderella didn't need to train with a Jedi master or do battle with some Dark Lord. She just needed a deus ex machina to provide her some nice clothes and a sweet ride.
So is there a male Cinderella story out there? What comes to my mind is The Once and Future King by T.H. White. It tells the story of a young King Arthur who is consigned to a subordinate and secondary role in relation to his foster-brother Kay. Possibly it served as inspiration for Harry Potter and Dudley which is also a sort of male Cinderella story in some respects.
But what's very different is that these male Cinderellas (1) go off on adventures; and (2) receive education and training. Only then can they assume their destinies.
So why the difference? The only thing I can think of is that generally speaking male main characters are aimed at male audiences and boys (and men) aren't very interested in stories where the male hero is already wonderful and it's just a matter of people realizing it.
In other words, it seems that this idea that women are born while men are made is believed at a very deep level by most people; perhaps it's even informed by our genes.
Harry Potter assumes his destiny (as a wizard, and therefore as a higher being than Dudley) before he goes off on the adventures or receives his education and training. Until about two thirds of the way through the first novel, everything good that happens to Harry is an inheritance (his parents' wizarding DNA, wealth, and social network)
Cinderella marrying the prince is the resolution to the story. Harry learning he's a wizard is the setup to the story. After Cinderella marries the prince, they live happily ever after. After Harry goes to Hogwarts, his real story only starts. Although many things in his life are looking up, he encounters many new problems to deal with and things to learn. As magical as Hogwarts is, it's full of bullies, hard schoolwork, and dangerous dark wizards. Yes, as a wizard he's something more than a muggle, but he needs to learn how to wizard first. He can't just collect his destiny, his gift is just a talent he needs to cultivate.
And as his abilities grow, so do his challenges, because his new antagonists are also wizards.
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree. Cinderella marrying her prince = Harry defeating Voldemort (and to some extent, marrying Ginny).
More options
Context Copy link
I've heard this complaint for Naruto too. And the answer is the same: if you could succeed by only hard work, why didn't one of the hundreds or thousands of other people who worked hard succeed before you? The story only makes sense if the main character has some natural advantages, and the hard work gets him the rest of the way.
Naruto, especially before shippuden, is a "power of friendship" story much more than it is about hard work. The author almost spells it out at times, with Gaara mirroring what Naruto could have become had the village continued to shun him. It is a story about how the people around us shape who we become, and this theme is explored through the lenses of the various characters.
More options
Context Copy link
Harry Potter absolutely has good things happen to him by his own efforts further down the line - it's just that the resolution of the opening "Cinderella" plot isn't one of them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We don't know what happens after Cinderella marries the Prince, but you actually could make a Karate Kid type story out of that, with her stepmother and stepsisters unwittingly playing the role of Mr. Miyagi in making her competent through adversity. But of course, that's not IN the story.
Sure, if she developed some skill from handling all those chores and then later used that skill to defeat some bad guy or whatever. And my guess is that if you tweaked the story in that way, it would seem more masculine to people; it would be more appealing to boys; it would be less appealing to girls. And if you pushed it far enough, you'd end up with Kill Bill.
Implicitly, Cinderella is a hard worker, kind, and agreeable. Arguably all traits she honed in the adverse environment and what ultimately makes her more attractive to the prince than her lazy and entitled family. From a certain angle she already went through her journey and trials, and the story is about her finally receiving her well-deserved reward.
Not in the version of Cinderella I read as a youth. In the version I read, what made her attractive was the fact that she was attractive. I wouldn't be surprised at all if more recent versions of the story reframed things in the direction you suggest, but to me that kind of proves the point. Probably if Disney made Cinderella today, she would have mad skills which she uses to save the Prince and his kingdom.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat is pretty much exactly Cinderella but with a boy. Basically the king's daughter, in the form of a cat picks a poor and mistreated but hardworking boy to live with her in a golden palace. https://www.grimmstories.com/en/grimm_fairy-tales/the_poor_millers_boy_and_the_cat
I guess it's not as famous because it's a bit less plausible a fantasy for a boy to be picked out of obscurity by a princess than for a girl to be picked by a prince.
I read the story and found something which to me was very interesting. Basically, in order to get his reward, the boy must serve the princess for 7 years; he must chop wood; tend to the meadow; and build a house:
In other words, the boy had to prove that he was worthy.
While it's true that Cinderella had to do household chores, I would argue that the point of the chores was not to show how faithful she was, but rather to (narratively) show that society did not recognize her value.
So I would say that no, the two stories are not exactly the same. They are different in almost exactly the way described by posters who have argued that women automatically get value while men must earn their value.
To be sure, I don't dispute that if you looked hard enough you could find stories out there which go against this dichotomy. But it does seem like, at a minimum, the idea is very deeply ingrained in human thinking.
It's true, but what the boy has to do to prove to the cat he is worthy is pretty easy – just stick around and do the chores he is told to do. And it's worth noting that even in Cinderella, she is not literally taken from rags to riches with no agency. She has to 'do' a few things like blend in at a high society event, disguising her real identity; sprint out of the ball before midnight to avoid humiliation; and escape being locked in a room by her stepmother so that she can try on the slipper and prove she is the woman the prince danced with.
Narratively it's 7 years of labor. More importantly, it's very clearly framed as stuff the protagonist must do to in order to prove himself.
Those things aren't really framed as labors she must do to prove her worthiness.
So I'm still not seeing it.
No, she isn't proving her worthiness to the prince with these actions. She's proved her worthiness to us the audience through her previous years of suffering with dignity though. The prince etc is her reward for that from our point of view, even though he probably doesn't know anything about her other than her beauty. You'll see this sometimes the other way round where an action hero gets the girl at the end despite her having only a very vague idea of what he's just done. E.g. he runs out of a burning building and they kiss, all she knows is that he's survived. Narratively her love is the reward for what we the audience know makes him worthy. (In such stories there's usually also an A plot in which he saves the world or such.)
I could believe that in-story characters rewarding a protagonist just for being beautiful and themselves is more common with female characters. I think they still have to manifest their character in action for us the audience to see they deserve to be selected by the Prince though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, but the things the boy has to do are what proves he is worthy--his actions are what earns him the reward. Cinderella's actions merely enable her to accept the reward and aren't used as evidence of her worthiness of it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Surprisingly common trope, actually. A lot of coming-of-age plots out there, where the main character has inherited some great power, and he has to accept himself in order to use it.
Depending on execution, the "prophecized hero king who will save the world" trope is this. The main character is born awesome and talented, and even in his darkest moments he cannot keep himself from being competent. His skills are neglected and dormant, not neglected and gone. Some authors make it into more than this, but some really do just revel in the fantasy of being talented and loved by the word.
I think that usually in these types of stories, the male hero has to have adventures, training, etc. in order to live up to his destiny. All Cinderella needed was a nice set of clothes and a ride to the ball.
Yes, it surely happens, but it doesn't seem all that noteworthy to me. Can you think of a male Cinderella story where the male protagonist kind of just has awesomeness and acclaim dropped into his lap? I'm not denying that they exist, but I suspect they are obscure.
Barsoom? John Carter just goes to Mars and is instantly crazy strong? Starts off awesome, and mostly just has to learn the new culture (and, I guess, be taught a gearing trick on the fliers)? Although he had the backstory to back it up as a soldier...
More options
Context Copy link
In the original Puss in Boots tale, the youngest son does exactly fuck all and ends up married to the princess because his cat was magical.
I feel like a lot of European fairy tales do some variation on this. The protagonist is just some random dude, but he is kind enough to give money to a beggar who turns out to be a wizard, or he captures a magical animal which he releases in exchange for wishes. Using his newfound power he then goes on to improve his life.
Though Puss in Boots is kind of extreme even then, considering the cat does basically all the work.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It depends a lot on the specifics. In some stories, the drama occurs in large part because the hero is unwilling to accept his fate, but once he does it is smooth sailing. Or he struggles until some incident happens that awakens his latent powers (Eragon is one such character, but it is not an uncommon trope). A lot of books from the late 90's and early 2000's open with the protagonist being stuck in some terrible situation and saved due to reasons entirely outside of his control (The most famous example being Harry Potter). You can still have an interesting story like this, but it is undeniable that the main characters did not have to put in effort in order to get saved. Even in stories that execute the trope well, the protagonist continues to receive opportunities due to his innate talent and birthright. In Harry Potter this is executed well and often in creative ways. Take The camber of Secrets, which has a lot of fun with how people idolize celebrities. But in more lazily written stories, such as The Sorcerer's Apprentice basically every important event of the movie happens due to his inborn talents, and it appears that when he overcomes ultimate evil in the final showdown (resulting in him getting the girl) it is completely down to fate rather than any kind of earned competence.
More options
Context Copy link
Sword Art Online?
Lol, I was trying to avoid light novels and just focus on the west as a challenge. But if you include the wish fullfilment isekai which somehow sells like hotcakes, it becomes so obvious that this is a popular trope even among men.
I am sure there must have been a lot of low-brow power fantasy published in the west too. I at the very least remember a lot of suggestive cover art featuring some variation of a muscular barbarian standing on top of his slain enemies, carrying a scantily clad girl.
I, too, remember '80s movie posters.
I posit that a protagonist that is 'born awesome and talented, and even in his darkest moments he cannot keep himself from being competent' is by definition a man.
(By contrast, I posit that a protagonist that is 'born beautiful and virtuous, and even in her darkest moments she cannot keep herself from being valuable' is a woman.)
So, while we're on the topic of Eastern media, I submit Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid as being a male Cinderella story that features a man protagonist [complicated by the fact "he" is female; this is played completely straight with the Lucoa/Shouta relationship though].
(Elsewhere in this thread, I discuss Onimai, which is a female Cinderella story that features a female protagonist [complicated by the fact "she" is male]. It's very explicit about that last part.)
The 'muscular barbarian standing on top of his slain enemies carrying [her as a] scantily clad girl' image is the root of how Tohru sees Kobayashi (and how Lucoa sees Shouta, to the point of explicitly offering him this[1], and on the opposite side how Mihari views Mahiro [though in a more implicit way, which is how she can get off to [what sounds like] him getting off, while still being repelled by actually grabbing his male-ness]).
[1] Which is also why men [including Shouta himself, of course] tend to find that uncomfortable- because that creates, in large degree, a demand for future 'muscular barbarian does the thing' whose results aren't even directly measurable; and leads to instant existential anxiety about "seller decides it no longer wants that future" on the demand side that is fundamentally not resolvable. (Kobayashi's situation is a bit more stable, for she is already established and Tohru has already accepted that what Kobayashi does qualifies as 'muscular barbarian [carrying her]'.)
Actually, most mid to late '00s Western cartoons have this going on; usually Lauren Faust/Craig McCracken works feature characters that have similar inversions, but I remember it being more than just them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the answer is that, in our post-feminist egalitarian society, (the majority of) women believe people are born, and (the majority of) men believe people are made, and they don't really recognize each other's concept of value.
This was especially noticeable in the 2010s, when workplace DEI debates were largely focused on male-vs-female gender equality. Women would focus on the idea of the office as a social environment where the most important part of success was how many inherently-high-social-status people you had on your side. Men would counter by focusing on competence in on-the-job skills, and argue that fewer women had put in the work to become valuable in these areas. This usually devolved into namecalling where women would yell "myth of meritocracy! toxic rockstar!" and men would yell "diversity hire!" No one ever proposed a compromise where some people would be hired to complete tasks and other people would be hired to look pretty.
So to (most) men, a story about society recognizing your inherent social value is just a story about being a diversity hire. It isn't a compelling narrative unless the diversity hire is a villain who gets defeated by someone with skills.
There's also a popular version of the narrative where you just imply that the hero did a lot of training and skill development off-screen, and then those skills are tested in a high-stakes situation. This can superficially resemble the "society needs to recognize my inherent value" narrative, but the central conflict is still whether or not the hero has trained enough to overcome the obstacles.
The counter-example which comes to my mind is the movie Groundhog Day. In terms of the relationship between the male lead and female lead, it followed the pattern that the man had to work on himself; and learn; and develop; and overcome his flaws; and finally make himself worthy for the woman. The woman didn't change at all during the movie, she was more or less perfect from the beginning to the end. In other words, it seems that the movie was a very close fit to the narrative that women are born while men are made.
Nevertheless, my impression is that Groundhog Day was very popular among women. And as far as I can tell, they don't seem troubled at all by the fact that Bill Murray's character was 100% made not born. In fact, they seem to like the whole character arc where he grows and makes himself worthy of Andy McDowell's character.
Here's a thought experiment which takes place in real life: Suppose a woman is looking for a husband and she would prefer a man who is financially well off. Would it make a difference to her if the man is wealthy due to an inheritance or due to having put together a successful startup which sold to Google, Microsoft, etc.? (All things being equal, of course.) I think that the woman (and in fact society in general) would have a great deal more regard for a man who built something valuable from scratch. There just seems to be a deep-rooted societal idea that a man needs to go out and slay the dragon (and become more formidable during the process.)
More options
Context Copy link
Have you seen Trump’s new press secretary? Lol. The dude who wrote her script clearly had a job to do. She was clearly hired to look pretty, because she couldn’t even read off the basic script that had been written for her. Not to mention her horrible wardrobe selection, coming to a press conference looking like a flight attendant.
I think that's an example of what I was talking about, actually. The modern White House press secretary's job really is just to look pretty on TikTok while delivering statements written by other people. But enough people are uncomfortable with the White House hiring someone just to look pretty that they had to settle for someone who looked pretty and also falsely claimed to have spent time and effort becoming a lawyer.
Also, what I'm calling "pretty" isn't quite the same thing as conventional physical attractiveness -- 2010s feminists didn't want tech companies to staff their teams with skinny blondes either.
Oddly enough, skinny blondes were fairly common among the female tech employees in the office I was in. Mostly data scientists from Eastern Europe.
Thin Eastern European blondes, how awful.
What company and office location was this specifically, though? Just so I can avoid lateraling into such a misogynistic, male gaze-centric workplace.
Google NYC, but they took some pains to keep them segregated from the (symbolically) unwashed mostly-male SWEs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is called "OP MC aurafarming slop". It's very popular in niche online publishing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Elizabeth Bennett was famously perfect when she first met Mr Darcy and did not grow at all through the book.
Glibness aside, I think you are right about the heroines journey being social and about acceptance. But good heroine literature is about how young women learn to evolve socially and then how society accepts them.
I think you picked a poor example for your joke. Elizabeth was perfectly worthy and good when she first met Darcy and it was due to his flaws that they were not amicable.
He's rude to her and she believes he is a bad person because of it. Her growth in the book was learning that her first impressions of the men around here didn't see their full story. But there was never doubt about that she was worthy of their pursuit.
Here's that initial meeting from the book:
She was deficient in probably the key thing she needed: evaluating the character of men.
It wasn’t just Mr Darcy that she was wrong about it.
She has excellent awareness of Mr Collins' character. And arguably good judgement of Mr Bingly. And same for other men in the book. So rather it's two men in particular she was wrong about?
Both of them are deliberately deceiving her. One a conman who fooled everyone in her social circle (i think?). The other is too conscious of her low social rank to correct her (she even asks him to justify and he declines).
She is fooled yes, but this cannot be a character flaw. Everyone was fooled. Who judged better than her?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How a verdict of “MID” was delivered in the early 19th century.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of mid.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think most of your post is spot on and I agree heavily with it, although I'd quibble with this. "Changes the opinions and views of those in her immediate social circle", maybe, but isn't "changing society" in a broad political or ethical sense also a quintessentially masculine sort of project?
This dichotomy of "it's myself that needs to change" vs "it's society that needs to change", I wouldn't even say that it's particularly gendered. You can find plenty of men on both sides of the dichotomy. People are probably drawn to one side or the other based on more fundamental underlying factors (although it's also dependent on the context of the specific situation of course). This particular dichotomy (you see the problem as self-change vs you see the problem as other-change) is a recurring theme in Jungian typology, where various traits are ultimately explained in terms of underlying perceptual dynamics.
Well, it all comes down to how the author handles it. You can write a psychologically realistic and aesthetically deep story about a woman who's basically already inherently perfect and just has to get others to realize it. That's fine. There are a lot of different ways that story could pan out and they'd all be fine. But the generic girlboss who's CEO of the firm and runs for president and has a perfect family life and has no other real flaws to speak of isn't one of them; that's just a childish power fantasy.
I wanted to check this out, and I googled "top 10 heroines" from a work computer with a dynamic IP and no logged-in Google account. I didn't get a list I could check the thesis against, because every result on the first page was a list of actresses with the heroines they played being decidedly secondary.
OTOH, "top 10 heroes" gets you mostly rankings of MCU characters, one ranking of superheroes across franchises (with Superman top, naturally), two lists of leading male actors, and one list of "everyday heroes" which was a list of links to good news stories in local papers.
I suspect this just means hero has a secondary meaning that heroine doesn't (the cartoon character lists were co-ed), but that with that exception, the masses care more about celebrity (in both sexes) than story to the point where the concept of "hero" or "heroine" is not relevant to popular culture.
More options
Context Copy link
"changes society" is a recent tack-on to the heroines journey; they all have to be activists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, exactly, with the important caveat that a woman's virtue is not limited to merely being attractive and fertile, but includes a hosts of other characteristics.
As @2rafa has often pointed out, high status men generally opt for women who are their social and intellectual peers. Social skills, intelligence, and mental stability are at least as important as physical attractiveness.
The unfortunate difference is that a woman's maximum social value is largely set in stone by age 16, whereas men continue to progress into much later in life.
I'd add the other rather important caveat that this applies when they're looking for wives. Not girlfriends, fuck buddies or mistresses, but wives.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I get the sentiment, but I think a more accurate picture is that attractive women have value via puberty, and unattractive women dont and are ignored/invisible.
All prime-age women who are neither obese nor deformed are attractive enough for this to apply to them.
More options
Context Copy link
Even unattractive women have uteruses and are thus not expendable by society.
More options
Context Copy link
I tend to disagree with this. Here's a thought experiment: Suppose there were (1) an unattractive woman in mild distress in a public place; or (2) an unattractive man in mild distress in a public place. For example, it appears that the person has just been kicked out of his/her apartment and is facing homelessness. Who is more likely to receive offers of help from strangers? Who is more likely to receive better and more prompt help from society? I think it's pretty obvious that it's the woman.
If you want to argue that attractive women are valued more than unattractive women, I won't dispute you. But to claim that unattractive women are ignored/invisible? Not at all, at least in comparison to low status men.
More options
Context Copy link
Attractive and extroverted women. Introverts get the short end of the stick all the time, regardless of physical appearance.
Neither introverts nor extroverts are “one” thing. I’ve dealt with extroverts who were extremely annoying and dumb as shit and also introverts who didn’t possess the mark of the ‘tism either, and were people you could engage with.
More options
Context Copy link
I would have to disagree with this, at least if we are comparing introverted women to introverted men.
Only true when compared to introverted men.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. @satirizedoor was comparing men to women. Generally speaking, women automatically get valued by society while men do not. To be sure, some women are valued more than others, but in this context it's misleading to say that women are invisible/ignored if they are unattractive or introverted or both. Because it's an overstatement compared to the way society treats men.
Is there overlap? Would an extroverted, attractive but completely unaccomplished man be valued more than an introverted unattractive woman? Possibly yes, but I think that this doesn't take away from the general observation made by @satirizedoor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The steelman is that dropping a book doesn’t require a checklist. People pick up books for different purposes, and sometimes they don’t actually suit that purpose. You don’t click on RoyalRoad expecting Raskolnikov.
The reality is that people do go down checklists looking for things to be upset about, then complain about them online. You see it with feminist critiques, family-friendly scorecards, DEI complaints, you name it.
I submit that there is a technical mode and a genre mode of reading. Essays like this occur when someone applies the former to works intended for the latter.
When Tom Clancy introduces characters, he likes to spew out a few paragraphs about how they’re the best-trained gun/radio/vehicle operator in the area. This is part of his genre, in which the hypercompetent, hypermasculine heroes navigate a violent but meritocratic landscape. If he avoids a “competence tax,” it’s only due to the general lack of women.
This isn’t usually an issue, because most of the people reading Patriot Games know exactly what they’re looking for. On the off chance that someone picks up a Clancy novel, gets a few chapters in, and realizes “hey, all of these characters feel like they came from an alien planet”—it’s okay if he puts the book down. The spell is already broken.
There’s an obvious middle ground here: weaknesses should be prominent, but not too prominent. Kind of like the tits. I know that suggests a motte-and-bailey where “too prominent” depends on the author’s social status. But any more strict technical standard will fail to generalize across genres.
An excellent example. Evangelion has an extremely weird overlap between trauma psychology and teenage boy psychology. The former works because Anno was genuinely having an awful time, but the latter relies on having a teenage boy protagonist in a teenage boy genre. I bet there’s shoujo which manages an f!Shinji equivalent, but all these suggestions are pretty unfamiliar to me.
I submit that most readers of certain genres have a preference for repetitive generic self-insert characters. Most technical readers will not. Again, applying one standard to the other works starts many a squabble.
More options
Context Copy link
Writing female characters seems to be a minefield, ok maybe, but it doesn’t have to be. The OG strong female character is… Inana from the epic of Gilgamesh. Literally.
There is a contingent of people who will complain loudly about any and every flaw in any female character, ever. The solution is to just ignore them; thé ancient Greeks wrote strong female characters all the time and they were patriarchal as all get out. They weren’t necessarily Mary Sues there to show the boys how it’s done.
More options
Context Copy link
To me, this sounds like an attempted variation on the Bechdel test, or the stuffed into the fridge complaint: essentially, that the female characters only exist in terms of how they relate to male characters. When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad. But if the goal of every female character in your book involves a male character in some way (but not vice versa), it suggests that maybe your female characters aren't as fleshed-out and three-dimensional as they could be.
But then, she's still complaining when the female characters' goals involve other female characters. So I don't really know what she's looking for tbh.
I'm having a hard time even picturing how to write a story with characters whose goals don't involve other characters. All the classic male characters of literature and pop culture have goals involving other characters. John Rambo, Huck Finn, Frodo, the A Team. In the X-Files, Mulder's motivation involves his sister while Scully is more abstractly motivated.
Yes. I thought through some characters of my own, and while many seemed like their goals weren't pointing at specific other people, there's always the possibility of asking "but is that really what they want?" Sure, it looks like they're devoted to this mission, but maybe they just care about that mission in the first place to make their father-figure proud... You can always dig down to whatever interpretation satisfies your criterion and stop there.
I just feel like most of these tests or rules are disingenuous. One thing that really stuck with me was how it's misogynistic for a woman's death to motivate a man ("Women In Refrigerators") and it's misogynistic for a man's death to motivate a woman (because now her motives revolve around a man.) (Same-sex couples put in the same situation are "Bury Your Gays.")
So what's the takeaway, then? Are slices of the human experience to be put off-limits to art to satisfy vindictive score-keepers? That's a sucker's game: a grievance can always be found.
As has been said before, “If freedom entails responsibility, most people don’t want to have anything to do with it.” They’ll argue for their privileges more than they ever will their rights, but there are no rights without duties and there are no duties without rights.
99 times out of 100, someone making this argument is looking to saddle someone with duties without rights. Perhaps the duties come now and the rights come in some forbidden future, or perhaps the duties by nature circumscribe the rights to near-nothing. It's an anti-freedom argument.
I suppose, but looking around, I think that giving people the ability to have freedom sans responsibility has produced most of our problems today. Would it be better to somewhat constrain people and have a functioning society or allow total freedom and live in a society where nothing works and you can’t leave the house unarmed lest you be robbed.
Some people have freedom sans responsibility, others responsibilities and very limited freedom; this is a part of anarcho-tyranny.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I hate any and all discussion of the bechdel test from feminists, I think it's all in bad faith. But if I think about the bechdel test myself and try to separate the concept from the pop feminist application if the concept, I think it really is interesting and intriguing. I really don't understand why there are so few movies that pass the bechdel test, and I feel like something may be wrong about the formulation of the question, but I can't put my finger on it.
I would say that the bechdel test should also include the converse (a movie only fails the test if 1. there's no two women who have a conversation about something other than a man and 2. There's also two men who have a conversation about something other then a woman). But even so, I don't think that actually ends up changing much in terms of which movies pass. For whatever reason, there really do seem to be a lot of movies that feature men talking about things other than women, but don't feature woman talking about anything other then a man. I really really don't know why that is, and it kind of bugs me that I can't justify it. Is it simply that there's fewer female characters in movies? Is it something to do with the nature of femininity in our culture, that we don't expect it's interesting to see women talk about things together? I think it should be possible to have a blameless analysis of that question... but not with a feminist. So I'm interested in people's thoughts here.
Also, one thing that bothers me so much is that movies from 2014 onward started explicitly putting scenes on to try to pass that test, like the The Force Awakens scene with Mas Canata and Rey. It feels forced as a scene, but made feminists happy.
I wonder to what extent the Bechdel test has an inherent difficulty due to psychological differences between men and women. That is, if men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people, then male-male conversations are more likely to be about things, while female-female conversations are more likely to be about people.
Ie, suppose we have a story with a main cast of four: 2 men and 2 women. And we have 6 conflicts during the story. If during each conflict one pairing of our characters steps up to solve it together (there are 6 combinatorial pairings, one for each conflict), first of all, only one pairing is female-female, one is male-male, and the other four are some combination of male-female. And if each conflict is on some spectrum of "thing-oriented" to "people-oriented", then it makes the most logical sense for the male-male pair to handle the most object oriented conflict, which involves talking about the thing that isn't people. And if one conflict is mostly people oriented then it makes the most sense for the female-female pair to handle it, which involves talking about lots of people (half of whom are male). If the women solve a meaningful problem where the group is not getting along, that involves talking about men. If the women solve a problem of how to convince the population of a village to band together and fight off the threat, half of the village are men. Now granted, people can have conversations outside of direct plot solving, but those conversations are still likely to be people oriented because, statistically, women are more likely to care about people, think about people, and talk about people. And half of the people they could talk about are men, so especially conversations about multiple people are likely to include at least one man in the topic of conversation.
This doesn't apply if you have a more masculine character who doesn't think about or talk about people or feelings as much. Which can happen naturally if done well. But not if you artificially just write a male character and then gender swap them or try to shoehorn in a bunch of stupid alpha male asshole energy into a woman and call her a girlboss.
More options
Context Copy link
Here's a hypothesis:
Generally speaking, most movies center on a single main character. And that character is either a man or a woman. Male-centered movies tend to fall in the genres of action, adventure, etc. Stuff that men like. For example Conan the Barbarian (1982) or Die Hard (1988). In such a movie, most of the dialogue is going to involve the central male character and his conflict with the Bad Guy, quest for the Macguffin, etc. In terms of advancing the plot, there's not much need for female characters to speak to each other and if they do, there's not much to discuss other than the male character.
On the other hand, female-centered movies tend to be romantic comedies, family dramas, etc. chick stuff. In those movies, people are mainly talking about their relationships with other people. So if two female characters are talking, there's a good chance their discussion will touch on a male character. (And discussions between male characters will touch on a female character. Nobody is talking about how to sneak in to the enemy's fortress and liberate the MacGuffin.)
What about a female-centered action movie, e.g. Kill Bill? It's been a while since I've seen it, but I would be pretty surprised if it didn't pass the Bechdel test. If it fails, then I'll definitely have to rethink my hypothesis.
It’s been a few years since I last watched Aliens, but I’m fairly sure it passes the test by Ripley and Newt talking about the aliens.
Isn't the alien also female? She lays eggs.
Yes, the Alien queen is most definitely female. Not sure about the facehuggers and chestbursters. I'm sure there's a description of the Xenomorph's lifecycle somewhere on the web....
Ah, here. Doesn't look like sex would apply to the facehugger, it's basically disposable. It doesn't appear there are any males in the genetic sense, canonically.
The facehuggers are the males, at least symbolically. They violently penetrate and deposit an embryo inside a reluctant host where after gestation it then bursts out of the distended abdomen. Plus - as you note - they're disposable.
Biologically it's not one to one but it's sci-fi horror, not a science textbook.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Haha, I would heart this if this site supported emojis. The Alien Queen is definitely female, in the way that hive creatures like bees have females. And it's possible that was deliberately chosen so that we have a theme of motherhood in the movie. And the conversation that would pass the bechdel test (besides the aforementioned Ripley/Newt conversations about aliens and Newt's family) is Ripley conversing with the queen about how she wants to queen to stay away from Newt. The conversation is as follows:
Ripley: Get away from her you bitch!
Queen: <Roar>
More options
Context Copy link
And the ship's computer in Alien is called Mother, if that counts.
Funny, I've just looked up the Bechdel Test on Wikipedia and the original comic strip that spawned the term explicitly references Alien.
Interesting. I don't think the original Alien would pass the test, though, unless there's another female character I'm not remembering.
Lambert. I don't recall her having any conversations with Ripley without other crew members included too, though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Kill Bill definitely passes. The bride talks with 3 of her female victims about things other than Bill. Mostly that she wants to kill them and she hates them.
Ok, and I doubt that Quentin Tarantino was setting out to try to pass the Bechdel test. Arguably, he just made a female-centered action movie and as a natural result of that there was dialogue between women which wasn't about men.
I'm still just spitballing here, but I think what it comes down to is that at some fundamental level, (1) men are not that interested in discussions about relationships and are more interested in discussions about the villain's plan to steal a nuclear bomb or whatever; and (2) women are very interested in discussions about relationships and how the female lead got a text message from her ex and she doesn't know whether to meet up or not.
Another interesting thing about Kill Bill:
By far the most memorable conversation in the movie between two men was about Beatrix -- the scene where Bill goes to warn Bud that Beatrix was coming to kill him. So the movie kind of fails a reverse Bechdel test. In fact, off the top of my head I can't remember any scenes in which two men were talking and it wasn't about Beatrix. Maybe the scene in the Okinawa bar? But Beatrix was present and the argument was related to her order.
Anyway, the point is that Quentin Tarantino is not some kind of misandrist. He just made a female-centered action movie and as a natural consequence, a lot of the dialogue in the movie for which Beatrix was not present was about Beatrix. Which makes sense. The whole plot revolved around her and her quest for revenge.
I would say that he passes by writing male dialogue for his female characters. Real life assassins are men, as are people who go on 'rip-roaring rampages of revenge'. Passing the bechdel test is easy, as long as you don't require that any of your characters behave in ways that real women do.
I'm tempted to point out that Kill Bill is wildly unrealistic regardless of the sex of the characters, but I basically think you are more or less correct here.
That being said, I think this observation is basically consistent with my overall hypothesis.
To illustrate, suppose (1) in one movie, two characters of the same sex are having a discussion about the best way to get into a bank vault and steal the MacGuffin; and (2) in another movie, two characters of the same sex are talking about how one of them received a text message from an ex and is wondering whether or not to meet that person for lunch.
Which these is more likely to be "male dialogue"? Which of these is more likely to be in a movie which is oriented towards male audiences? Probably your answer is (1) because in real life, women do not plan heists. And in real life, heist movies tend to be more oriented towards male audiences.
In other words, it seems to me that the tendency of movies to fail the Bechdel Test is not so much due to invidious anti-female bias but rather a difference in male and female proclivities and interests.
It reminds me of Star Trek television show (or was it a movie?) a few years back where early on there was a scene of two female officers on an alien planet facing some kind of hostile terrain together. It seemed highly likely at the time that the scene was shoehorned in so that the show could pass the Bechdel Test. But I am pretty sure you would call this "male dialogue." In the sense that when a member of an armed service is sent on a dangerous mission on hostile terrain, it's normally a man.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bill and Bud talk a little bit about how Bud says he sold his sword. But that's also in the middle of the context of him warning him about the bride.
Right, for the most part the conversation is about Beatrix. Certainly if the genders were all reversed, feminists would count it as a conversation between two women about a man.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Movie that passes and always amuses me that it does: Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (when two girls have a shitting competition, which ties neatly into the concurrent conversation on that topic).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You should. They will claim otherwise, but that's in-between paragraphs applying those tests in exactly that way (and often enough, wrongly).
More options
Context Copy link
Take a wild guess in a group of women in their 20s how much of the conversations revolve around dating and looks upkeep. My observation is that when it is not about girly stuff - there is very strong preference in women to discuss it with the opposite sex then intersex.
Yeah, real life generally fails the expanded Bechdel test, where the expanded test includes stereotypically girly stuff like dating, gossip, and thotmaxxing.
Though in real life women talk with women more about other women than about men
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Whereas the only times I ever saw it used was to imply or outright state that the book/show/game was bad and wrong.
One thing that frustrates me about media criticism is how interesting and nuanced concepts get abused and boiled down to lowest-common-denominator imitations over time, and how the people who should know better aren't rigorous enough about gatekeeping these concepts.
Take the "male gaze". Anyone who's studied film at an academic level would understand that it's an observation about camera perspective in visual media: that, while movies and TV shows often act as though they are presenting the characters within their works from an objective and disinterested perspective (a "view from nowhere"), in practice, the camera is often positioned in an implicitly heterosexual male posture, and female characters are shot and framed in a systematically different manner than male characters. This is an interesting observation! Once it's pointed out to you, you can't unsee it, and in Western cinema it's damn near omnipresent, to the point that it still feels surprising and fresh when movies go out of their way to turn it on its head (depicting female nudity in a deliberately unsexy fashion, or lusting over the male characters and not the female e.g. Magic Mike).
But decades since the term was coined, it's become corrupted from "the ostensibly objective and disinterested (but implicitly male and heterosexual) camera perspective used in Western movies and TV shows" to "something about the way men look at women, which is bad". I saw a post somewhere in which a young lesbian said she felt guilty about looking at other women she thought were attractive, and someone consoled her saying that she shouldn't worry, because sapphic sexuality isn't aggressive like male heterosexuality and she "didn't have the male gaze". No one "has" the male gaze. The male gaze is a property of cameras, not of people. While I have little doubt that Laura Mulvey, the academic who coined the term "male gaze", would agree that men sometimes leer at women in a sexually intimidating manner, that wasn't what the term "male gaze" referred to.
But in any case
As ever, stated vs. revealed preferences. It's easy to say that a movie is good because it passes the Bechdel test, or that a movie is bad because it fails it. But I'd hazard a guess that if you were to look at these feminists' favourite movies, they'd include a lot more movies that fail the Bechdel test than that pass it. I think this would actually be an effective rebuttal to this line of argument – just ask someone to name their top five movies. Better still, consult their Netflix history to see which movies they've watched most. Back when it was still good, The Onion had a great article about the gulf between the media feminists claim to enjoy and the media they actually enjoy.
I think Jiro has the right of it here, and further, the academics often specifically pick terms that would obviously be "misinterpreted" in the pejorative way ("toxic masculinity" perhaps being the worst offender, or "symbolic racism").
Further, I don't find the "male gaze" of the camera to be all that interesting, because when the directors or cinematographers specified that the camera moved up from the walking woman's legs, lingered on her ass, and only then continued slowly up to her face as she turned (revealing her prominent breasts)... they always knew damned well what they were doing. And so did most of the audience. The feminist critic just put a name on the practice so it could be denigrated (and equivocated upon).
I think "white supremacy" has everything else beat by miles, especially in its "no, I said 'supremacy', not 'supremacism', it's totes different!" manifestation.
A friend sent me a Nathan Cofnas interview a couple weeks ago, and I only got about halfway through it before I told him I couldn’t watch it anymore; and it’s specifically because of this academic haggling over words.
It was very clear to me that John McWhorter was wanting to saddle up Cofnas with propositions he just didn’t want to be held to. Forget whatever you imagine to be true for the moment about the differences between individuals and groups. Essentially McWhorter got butthurt over the fact that he thought Cofnas wasn’t being forthright about the things he ‘really’ wanted to say; and he asked him why he was using the language he was; and why he just wouldn’t come out and say something like “black people are stupid.” There are several reasons why, which Cofnas didn’t articulate, but are highly relevant.
So I can use whatever language someone wants me to use. I can say things in a nice way, I can say things in a vulgar way and if you engage in these debates long enough, you’ll find it’s been said every which way. The reason you don’t use words like “stupid,” and “inferior,” is because it smuggles in a moral-value judgment about the worth or dignity of another person. As a matter of principle it’s simply wrong and operationally speaking, it’s factually false as far as being a scientifically accurate term being applied in this respect. And if someone like McWhorter wants to cast aspersions over Cofnas, then there’s no room for this podcast to even take place if he’s not going to engage the argument, and is frantically searching for the rifle in every one of Cofnas’ statements to pull out the proposition that “blacks are stupid.” Because once you start doing that, you’ve stopped giving the benefit of sincerity to what someone is trying to say, and instead you’ve resulted to seeing everything that comes out of their mouth as a coded statement for something more crude and nefarious.
It’s a simple point Cofnas is making. There’s differences among people. There’s differences among groups of people. Across all human traits; and intelligence is no different. I’ve spent a good chunk of my early life around people who were just objectively both more intelligent and educated than me, and I owe a lot of what I’ve learned to these people. Not at one point in any of that did I ever think to myself I was “stupid” or “inferior” to them, because I simply wasn’t.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Toxic masculinity" is actually a perfect example of nuanced concepts reduced to silly caricatures. Originally, it was coined by the men's movement, not academics, and referred to masculine traits carried to unhealthy extremes. The classic example being men's reluctance to seek medical care until far too late. The goal was to get men to realize a need for balance; to understand that things like self-reliance could be taken too far. The modern Internet version is, as happens so often, a perversion of the original.
"Toxic masculinity" is (IMO) intentional equivocation. The phrase "toxic masculinity" can either refer to a particular subclass of masculinity, or it can be describing all masculinity as "toxic", in the way of a poetic epithet. Academics pretend to mean the former, but it is clear that the phrase is intended to assert the latter.
My apologies. I mistook your phrasing "academics often specifically pick terms" to mean you thought those academics deliberately created said pejorative terms. If your meaning was simply that they deliberately adopt and misuse any such term they come across, then I completely agree.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not the modern internet version. I'm tired of people trying to blame the plebs for concept degradation, the "modern internet version" comes directly from academia itself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Either that, or it's a motte and bailey, where the "nuanced academic" version that isn't necessarily wrong is the motte, and the "you put this in so you're a horrible sexist" version is the bailey. And if it wasn't originally meant as a motte and bailey, it's clearly working as one.
That's definitely part of it. The difference in this case is that I think a lot of the people saying "men have the male gaze and women don't" would be unable to define the original meaning of the term "male gaze" if put on the spot. They literally think that "male gaze" refers to the way men look at women and have absolutely no idea what this term means in the context of cinema and TV.
I'm guessing the expression is mainly used in the context of video games nowadays.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Most people don't know the half of it!
The term "gaze" that would go on to inspire the film/media studies concept of the "male gaze" was originally introduced by Lacan in his Seminar XI. Lacan was interested in exploring the way in which there's always a reciprocal interplay between observer and observed: you distort the image you receive (unconsciously), and the image in turn distorts you. The street goes both ways. There's no "I'm the Subject and I'm looking at you like an Object so haha I win" because that way of thinking is thoroughly un-psychoanalytic.
Any originality or nuance that may have once existed in the concept was excised by the Studies crew so that it could be turned into a political cudgel.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm pretty sure there was a mainstream journo somewhere who is responsible for first popularizing the dumbed-down interpretation.
Interesting, any idea who it was? Sounds like the kind of thing Jessica Valenti would do.
That seems likely. Or Marcotte, or Lindy West. Who knows.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not specific to media criticism (though I suppose media criticism is a particularly low-barrier job). Every discussion about intersectionality is prefaced with a claim that a certain conception of it (essentially: video game maluses) is not what Crenshaw meant, but it's what the average person almost always means.
I've always thought that the one redeeming feature of the horrible Charlie's Angels reboot is the contrast it provides between how male McG shot very attractive women in the early 2000s vs how Elizabeth Banks did it (YMMV on whether Banks casts people as hot as the 2000 cast).
Cameron Diaz is gorgeous, as is Lucy Liu (but then, I would say that about an Asian woman wouldn't I?). Frankly, I never understood the appeal of Drew Barrymore: I've legitimately never found her a talented actress or sexy. She's even in one of my favourite movies, Donnie Darko, but every scene she's in grates and her line-readings sound so forced and uncomfortable.
As to the reboot, Kristen Stewart was gorgeous in the Twilight films, but in more recent movies she's received a succession of unflattering haircuts, each more butch than the one preceding it, and Charlie's Angels was no exception. (It's amazing the difference a good or bad haircut can make.) Ella Balinska is pretty hot. I thought the name Naomi Scott sounded familiar, and it turns out she played Jasmine in the live-action Aladdin remake. When I saw clips from that film I thought she looked absolutely stunning, but in photos from Charlie's Angels she looks hardly recognisable and nowhere near as good-looking. I'm calling it a wash.
She used scab writers on her show during the 2023 WGA strike. On this forum, I would expect that to appeal to at least some people.
I meant appeal as in sex appeal. But yeah, based.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
She's the nepobaby, Hollywood royalty. But I'd also mark her as the weakest link.
More options
Context Copy link
IIRC she was a child star and came from an acting family, that carries some inertia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm becoming concerned that our culture is losing basic media literacy. It used to be common knowledge that good characters need to have flaws, not just be perfect all the time. So Achilles had his heel as a literal weakness, but he was also full of moral flaws. If he had just been a good soldier who followed orders without pride, the story of the Iliad would have been boring.
Flawless main characters are such an obvious problem that the original "Mary Sue" short story was just making fun of all the crappy fan fiction where people used characters like that. Usually as self-inserts. It's mind-boggling to me that we've reached a point where professional literary critics not only defend that sort of thing, but they actually criticize anyone who dares write in some flaws for their female characters!
It was bad enough when Star Wars did it. But I thought, "fine, whatever, they're not looking for deep literary characters there, they just want someone to look cool on a green screen and sell toys." But now it seems there's a disturbing number of media following this trend.
I just want to add that the heel gimmick was a later addition by Romans - who considered themselves the descendants of Trojans - as a propaganda to diminish Achilles's victories. In the original Iliad, Achilles had no gimmick like that, he was just that awesome.
ah, cool. always interesting how these myths have changed over the years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
All I could think reading this:
Was "does anyone think House is incompetent?". Does it take away from the fun of the show because he has flaws?
I've been rewatching that show recently and "best X in the business but pays for it" is a perfect description of him. The tortured male genius isn't new. I don't stop thinking House is competent because House has a limp or a drug addiction or is, frankly, a cunt. If anything these weaknesses are what make him tolerable as a character. You can't both be an all-knowing genius and get away with being a cunt unless you have an excuse.
Gregory House is obviously a bag of flaws. We start out seeing that he's an asshole. He's also crippled, but that's the least of his flaws. We quickly learn he's also a drug addict. Ethics rules aren't so much guidelines as a checklist of things to violate. He deliberately pretends to be a racist to get one of his subordinate's goat, and deliberately pretends to be more sexist than he is to do the same to his boss, a subordinate, patients, relatives, etc. He's lazy about seeing 'boring' patients (who he insults all the time) and doing his paperwork. He's utterly reckless -- it's typical of him to nearly kill a patient in the process of diagnosing them. How does he keep his job? He's the best in the world... and, as he obnoxiously asserts constantly and is eventually proven right, his boss is attracted to him.
Little of this, however, is actually the cost of his skills. Except maybe the recklessness and ethics violations. You could have a show about a less-flawed House, but it wouldn't be as good.
But to me the interesting question is where are the female versions of this type of character? I can't think of any off the top of my head, and I suspect a big part of the issue is that people (including feminists) think that Women are Wonderful and would be very uncomfortable with a female protagonist who is so deeply flawed. I suspect that even giving the woman a limp (when there are male colleagues around who walk perfectly fine) would bother feminists quite a bit. The upshot of this is that it would be difficult to prevent a female House from being a Mary Sue type who is extremely annoying outside of the narrative. (Of course the actual House is annoying within the narrative but it's entertaining for viewers.)
I don't think feminists are the issue with that one there- the general lowest common denominator public doesn't want to watch it. Even The Big Bang Theory had to soften Penny's character because test audiences didn't like her.
More options
Context Copy link
I haven't watched all of it, but Bones comes to mind: it ran contemporaneously, and the title character is an autistic-coded female
pathologistforensic anthropologist who often rubs the other characters the wrong way. I don't think she was a Mary Sue type, but had to be paired with a cop archetype for the actual "dealing with violent criminals" parts.So you would say her main flaws are that she is autistic (or at least somewhat autistic) and that she is a difficult person?
From what I remember of the first few seasons, yes. But it has been a while.
I'd never even heard of or watched the show, but I watched a couple clips just now on YouTube and I'm not really seeing it. Her big flaws (being obsessed with her work and easily distracted) kind of reminds me of Bella Swan of Twighlight's big flaw: That she is clumsy. Maybe link to a couple clips to show me what you are talking about?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Jessica Fletcher? OK, maybe it's only me who'd want to punch her at least three times an episode.
Black Widow from the Avengers. Any number of "La Femme Nikita" type characters would work. They all do tend to be portrayed more sympathetically than House, though House is an extreme among male characters. So it probably can be done, but it's harder to do.
I never watched Murder She Wrote, not even once. However out of curiosity I just watched a couple clips on YouTube, and I would say that based on this limited sample, she is more annoying to viewers than she is narratively annoying. By contrast, Dr. House is narratively annoying but entertaining to viewers.
I watched a couple clips of her as well, and I'm not seeing it there either.
To be sure, I am going by very limited samples . . maybe link to a couple clips?
Black Widow is written as a person haunted by the evil she’s done suggesting her internal goodness.
Would you mind linking a couple clips of her showing what you mean? TIA.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't it a semi-recurring theme in the show that he can't get (some) people to take him seriously? The audience isn't shown him that way, though, from what I remember. The conflict is often "mad genius vs. The System".
It's the opposite. The conflict is that everyone knows House is a genius and he gets special privileges because of it, including getting to be an asshole to people.
His direct boss is shockingly tolerant of his bs on the grounds that he's irreplaceable, other people are not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's an interesting thought experiment: What would happen if somebody made a television show or movie with an equivalent female character. An extremely capable professional but a very difficult person with a drug addiction and a limp. I don't think people would go for it, even feminists. Because women are supposed to be Wonderful.
I think that if the networks tried to make a gender-swapped version of House, it would be difficult to resist the temptation to (1) soften her difficult personality and make her more sympathetic; and (2) take away the drug addiction since it's a red flag of poor character. In short, it would be difficult not to make her something of a Mary Sue.
The more subtle example is Wilson, who is a pretty nice guy (at least on the surface) and considered almost saintly because he works in paediatric oncology, one of the toughest jobs there is. And he is a pretty decent guy - except in his personal life. Multiple marriages and divorces, mostly caused by his inability not to cheat. His most solid and long-lasting relationship is his friendship with House, and there are explorations during the series of how maybe this is kinda messed-up co-dependent that is not so good for either of them.
Well yeah, because he's a giant slut [denotation only]. Which is the entire reason he even can function in oncology; if I recall correctly, that's stated more or less explicitly even outside of the traditionally sexual (there's one episode that's explicitly trying to get him to put out a different organ to fix a friend and long-term patient).
Interestingly, I think that's also what allows him to get along long-term with House. Both of them are in it for the love of the game (and receive the love through the game of driving back physical reality [House, stereotypical male trait] and driving back emotional reality [Wilson, stereotypical female trait]). I feel as if the larger conflicts in that series arise specifically when the foundation of that relationship breaks down, or at least that's the impression I get from the clips.
Weakly held opinion: perhaps the reason that neither men nor women can tolerate depictions of women with female character flaws is because it exposes a strategic liability that hurts them more than men would be if acknowledged? Maybe the framing should not be "Women are Wonderful" as it should be "the consequences of Women Not Being Wonderful are way more destructive than they are for men, thus, the trade-off human instinct makes for men always being flawed punching bags is that they're the only ones who may be Great in the end"?
Maybe that's the root of why female characters doing that (re: "Mary Sue") feels so uniquely uncanny vs. the male version of this, which is... well, Superman?
If that is the case, the issue with Modern Day Media is fundamentally a reflection of Modern Writers growing up in a Modernity that [for various reasons] is no longer able to naturally instruct Modern Humanity about why that compromise was made.
Then, the vanity of modern generations decried can be properly seen as rational- for when that compromise is no longer base reality, other concerns, like claiming that 'oh, you just want that because it's your instinct, and so we'll put all our effort solely into
owning the Consshitting on the Lesser Human Beings'... well, that makes sense too, as does the inevitable rejection of their works when they go bankrupt (for human instinct is ultimately what makes stories resonate).[And then, due to the fact women use 'is already aware of that knowledge and bold enough to capitalize on it' as a differentiator between men, women cannot instinctively self-moderate on what they choose as a filter. So, by the time they figure out they need to be screaming that from the rooftops to get men to finally approach them... it's too late.]
...oh, wait, maybe that's why progressives feel no dissonance when calling themselves liberals, isolate 'Ref 1', because that's what liberals are famous for doing, and they interpreted the reason why we did that purely as hatred for the old ways (and... not going to pretend it's not some of the time) rather than the pride and joy that comes from doing a new thing.
An observation one could perhaps make of any successful marriage. (Maybe marriages that don't have those flaws are not stable solely because they don't come with their own continually/tacitly acknowledged costs simply because otherwise there's no strongly defined right and wrong with respect to the other partner?)
I think the co-dependence for both of them is that House has someone he can't drive away (Wilson always comes back, always sticks around) and he can feel superior in that he's the one trying to loosen up Saint Jimmy out of his staid, conformist lifestyle (and not that he needs someone, he doesn't need anyone, not him!) and Wilson can feel superior in that "well at least if I am pathetic with my failed marriages, I'm not as pathetic as House who is still pining over his ex-wife".
It's a great friendship, but it's not necessarily good for them. Both of them enable one another's worse impulses because they are so terrified (in different ways) of being alone, they can't drive away the one person who will tolerate them and stick with them even after seeing their ugly side.
I didn't watch much of the show and don't know what the ending was, but I think they do sort of do a Butch and Sundance ride off into the sunset ending?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's no need to detail how much a man pays for it in his personal life: the societal standard is that men are deficient in their personal lives so it is assumed by default even without being spelled out. It is only detailed for Hannah because it is exceptional in her case.
Yeah, I think this is part of what's going on. In television, movies, etc. when men suffer it's not really noticed. Not the way it's noticed if women suffer. People (including feminists) have blinders to men "paying the price." So to feminists, it seems like only women "pay the price."
It reminds me of the criticisms of early James Bond movies. People (including feminists) were outraged that the movies depicted women getting killed. Even though far more men got killed than women.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Umm... Luke got his friends tortured and lost his arm and Anakin literally fell into evil (and lava)
Yes, but it wasn't only that. At the beginning, he's portrayed as kind of a whiny brat. And immediately encounters men (Ben and Han) who are superior to him in various ways. Even at the end of the movie, Luke needs Han's help to blow up the Death Star. At the beginning of the next movie, Han rescues Luke who has been stranded in the middle of nowhere on the ice planet. Probably there are other examples as well.
Feminists don't only object to female characters being flawed, they object to female characters being seriously harmed; defeated; outsmarted; humiliated; made to look immature; and so on.
So that's how you end up with really annoying Mary Sue type characters. It's not only that they have little or nothing in the way of flaws. They are also annoyingly superior to everyone around them. They undermine the opportunities of other characters to shine.
More options
Context Copy link
I was just thinking of the sequels (Ray). I guess I should have said that explicitly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Funny that you go for the anime examples, because Japanese media (for what I figure are deeper cultural reasons than one might naively assume) is actually fairly liberal with flawed or outright despicable female characters. The same Evangelion (original, not rebuild!) has Asuka, who is essentially a prideful narcissist driven by unresolved mommy issues and still considered one of the protagonists. The whole point of Suzumiya Haruhi is that the titular character is a morally solipsistic obnoxious teenager with main character syndrome who by cosmic irony may actually be the main character/Dread Solipsist of the universe, and it is not suggested that she has any sort of valid excuse for this (even as her backstory of "just wanting to be different" is fleshed out to a fair degree). Girlfailure comedy like Bocchi the Rock is popular with both genders. I mentioned Girls' Last Tour just recently in the context of melancholic slice-of-life, but one of its two protagonists is also implied to be so amoral as to be the human equivalent of a cat that would eat its owner's corpse if he/she died first.
(To the point of "deeper cultural reasons", it's actually quite jarring to the Western eye how often in serious Japanese literature, the female characters are morally deficient and the male characters are openly misogynistic. At times it very nearly feels like the familiar women-are-wonderful moral compass is upside down.)
I don't think Haruhi is much of a character at all. She's treated more like a force of nature than a real person.
Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop is a better example, as we actually learn what caused her to become a chronically backstabbing lying bitch, and she finally gets her closure but finds it hollow.
More options
Context Copy link
Are you implying that Asuka in the Rebuild films is somehow flawless in your view?
No, but (from what I saw, since I have only watched the first two) significantly less unsympathetic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Good post, and doubly good for inspiring the linking of the "Galbrush Paradox" below--which I had never encountered, but which I love both because it is absolutely correct and because Guybrush Threepwood is one of the greatest video game characters of all time. (Heh. Rubber tree.)
What your post mostly made me think, though, was--yeah, as it turns out, people don't usually identify and discuss problems because they are interested in obviously relevant solutions. They identify and discuss "problems" as a negotiating tactic for getting whatever it is they actually want--usually, greater leverage or control over whoever it is they're complaining to.
To give a very simple example, I was subjected to this once as part of a hiring committee. We were going over god-only-knows how many resumes from grossly underqualified applicants, and I would say "let's toss this one out because X." And someone would respond, "wait, though, X isn't necessarily the problem you're making it out to be." Then we'd come to another application with X, and that very same someone would say "let's toss this one out because X." Then I would say, "I thought you didn't think X was a problem though" and I would get kind of a nasty look, followed by vague irrelevant platitudes--not even hair splitting, just straight up gobbledygook. This is from fellow tenured faculty, by the way, PhDs the lot of them, but it became quickly clear that for at least two members of the committee, there were no real standards of evaluation in play--just "say negative things about the ones I don't like, and positive things about the ones I do." Pointing out their inconsistencies was met with dirty looks or accusations of being unnecessarily aggressive about the process.
Actually I once got a similar criticism from a law professor when I was involved in a mock appeal. I threw everything I had into giving the most thorough arguments I could, and my peers were clearly frustrated by the amount of work that created for them. The professor had to step in and give us all a "remember this is just an exercise, we're not actually deciding a case here, no need to put so much into it..." Decades later, I'm still kind of cross about it!
This is like maybe the original sin from the perspective of the contemporary Rationalist movement, which Scott Alexander has done a lot of good work articulating with his culture war writings on social signaling. Most people are not making arguments, because most people are not usually reasoning at all. They're playing a hierarchy game, and complaining is a way of subordinating others. Their arguments are trash qua arguments, but it's a category error to even evaluate them that way. It's like watching someone flip a chessboard and then patiently explaining to them that flipping the chessboard isn't a legitimate move.
I apologize that this is pretty meta but the disconnect I see in so many people between identifying a problem and considering actual solutions is something I think about a lot. There is of course a gender stereotype here ("men, stop trying to solve our problems, that's not why we share them"--"if you don't want me to solve your problem, there's not really any point in listening to you talk about it"--"I'm just talking to show that I care!"--"I'm solving to show that I care!"--"if you really cared then you would stop trying to fix things!"--"okay, I guess I can't fix this relationship then, we're done"--"not like that!"). But while men and women often approach it from different angles, I've had just as many problems with men doing this sort of thing, as women. Most recently, I had a colleague come down with a serious case of AI psychosis (we should definitely start calling it cyberpsychosis) and completely lost his ability to engage with me on substance. Every disagreement we have now turns into him burying me under reams of ChatGPT-generated bullshit; when I pick it apart on substance, he says "okay I'll get back to you" and then ghosts me long enough for the discussion to go stale.
(To avoid having it suggested that I'm doing exactly what I'm complaining about, here, I will respond more directly to the substance of your post with an observation: possibly I don't hang out with the "right" kind of men, or maybe I hang out with the "wrong" kind of women, but in real life I have heard many, many women talk about their own breasts using descriptors like "perky" (or "tight" or "saggy" or "flat")--and almost never heard men speak of women's breasts that way outside of movies. I feel like "real women don't examine, describe, sexualize, or even notice their own breasts, that's something only thirsty lecherous male authors make badly-written female characters do" is the kind of egocentric misconception a teenage boy might have about the virginal purity of women. Women are of course not a monolith, probably not all women do this, but most of the women I've known in my life have been pretty casual/unconcerned/vaguely raunchy when discussing their "boobs" (the word I hear deployed most often, though maybe that is a generational thing). Sure, it's not always handled well in literature, but in reality the only people I know who are more obsessed with female breasts than young men, is young women.)
This is a build-on-and-hijak-a-thread all at once.
Recently, I did a buddy a favor and volunteered as a "mentor" at a startup accelerator he was somehow involved in. No, not Y-Combinator, I'm not actually cool.
For three afternoons, I met with startup founders and gave them my read on their company's prospects. Out of about 9 that I met with for an hour each, 1 was a legit business. Seven were "two guys in a garage" with a kind of cool technology but zero idea of how to begin selling the thing and building a business. I told them these things.
The last one was an over 45, divorced, female solo-preneur. To keep it topical, she had large boobs but they were kind of saggy and although natural still disproportionate to her torso. Can I stop talking about boobs now?
Her conversation with me only covered her inability to secure investment and how this was really weighing on her emotionally. At first I was generally supportive and reassuring, telling her it was part of the "founder's journey." She only doubled down, getting into detail about how she was thinking of putting her Condo (of course) up for sale to self-finance. It was a trainwreck through and through. I talked with some of the other mentors who had met with her. Same story. I talked with some of the founders I had developed a little rapport with. Same story. No one actually had any details on her business besides the little 60 second intro pitch they had everyone do at the start. She hadn't spent any time on that whatsoever.
It dawned on me, then, that this woman had collapsed this entire accelerator thing into a localized status game of "I am the most stressed out about my startup." That was her rubric for success. And that's how perverse these things (status games with toxic success criteria) can get. Taking her at her word, she was thinking about selling her home in a futile attempt to fund a business that she was truly not focused on (and, as an aside, was a looney tunes idea).
But for status (self-perceived) and emotional self-fulfillment, I guess it's worth the pricetag.
She’s likely accustomed to securing investment using her two most valuable assets, but flailing now that said assets are rapidly depreciating.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In my experience, when filtering large numbers of applicants, the best process is to have each member of the committee bring some shortlist of candidates they like (using whatever method they wish) to the first discussion then proceed to discuss the merits of any candidate who makes everyone or a certain number of people's short list and ranking those candidates for progression.
More options
Context Copy link
This sort of thing endlessly frustrates me, and I guess I'm glad I'm not the only one. If we're gonna be like that, why do we have to waste so much time pretending that words have meanings, or that we have reasons for doing things other than "I like it because I like it, because I said so"? I believe Nietzsche complains about this also.
More options
Context Copy link
For the most part, I agree. At some level, everything is about signalling; playing status games; etc. Probably this very post is just an echo of a successful point made by some hunter-gatherer ancestor sitting around the campfire on the plains of Africa.
More options
Context Copy link
"Cyberpsychosis" sounds much broader than AI psychosis to me. It could just as easily refer to people getting radicalised by lunatic conspiracy theories shared by human actors.
It's actually the term for when you've had so much cyberware installed that you experience severe psychological symptoms.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel really lucky to have been disabused of female purity early on.
I had a younger sister on the highschool varsity volleyball team. I was a senior, I was classmates with many of the very attractive and tall senior players. My sister was one of two sophmores on the varsity team. They won states that year, it was not a shitty team. But boy did they love to talk about shit. Any juvenile male thought of 'huh i wonder what the hot girls are talking about, maybe its how they really want some good dick or something' got so disabused that year. No, they weren't talking about dicks, they were talking about their shits. The big ones, the liquid ones, the frequent ones, the smelly ones, etc. I had to beg my sister to stop talking about her team gossip. One of the best parts of going to her games was looking at all the beautiful buts in spandex. But it was completely ruined. All I could think about was them talking about their latest dumps on the ivory throne.
No, it wasn't some psyops to get me not interested in her teammates. Sister would have set it up if it was viable. She told me when her classmates her age had crushes on me. A real caring sibling. I still get along great with her.
Nowadays I have three daughters. They stink, they shit, they pee, I've changed so many diapers, and wiped poop out of a vagina so many times. Sorry if that is graphic for people without female daughters. It just becomes this weird fact of life. Once they get past one the shits get real gnarly and you want them getting potty trained asap. Of course my daughters fought it until 4.
Sorry why am I talking about shit so much? Its a default human experience. And its also like the first thing any self conscious female will want covered up in their characters. I think we should have a shit test for female characters. Can they talk about taking a shit for a few sentences, even just as an internal monologue. If yes, they are a real person. If no, they are fake barbie dolls.
Dear Sir, if you are wiping excrement out of your infant daughters' vaginas, I heartily and urgently recommend you take them to a doctor because that is not where excrement is supposed to exit - think possible fistulas!
If, on the other hand, you mean "small babies are very messy when evacuating their bowels and excrement gets into places you would not think possible", then yes. But that applies to boy babies as well.
The specific baby issue he's talking about is much less of a thing for boys. Their secondary orifice that you really want to make sure isn't getting feces in it is much smaller and more removed from the primary expulsion orifice.
More options
Context Copy link
Ya I don't know how it gets up in there so often. Had to deal with diarrhea the other day and it was like a spray on shit bikini.
And ya it applies to boy babies as well, but the post is about a female literary shit test. I'm not doubting that many male characters can think and or talk about shit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are plenty of works in which the male characters could not plausibly talk about taking a shit. Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?
Ultimately, fiction more often than not wants to show humans as they would like to be, not as they are. If humanity could reinvent itself according to its ideals, it would probably not poop.
(It's often downright jarring when fiction that otherwise has no pretense to cynical realism does involve defecation. I remember being jarred when Soukou Akki Muramasa's protagonist made sure to take a dump before getting in his robot armour.)
I don't have my copy with me, but the (hilarious and highly recommended even to non-writers) How Not to Write a Novel does indeed have a discussion about why characters in novels don't go to the toilet, why this isn't a problem, and why your character should not go to the toilet in front of the reader either.
A Palme d'Or-winning movie features some plot-critical bowel movements, tbh.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That specifically would be silly, but I can imagine Fellowship with an aside about how discomfited the hobbits are (or aren't? Bywater to Frogmorton looks to be an 18 mile stretch with no rest stops...) to be "roughing it" in this sense too. I even think some of Fellowship and the Two Towers might actually be improved by a brief mention of how careful the fellowship tries to be after they realize they're being hunted and tracked, or of how much easier orcs' disgusting habits make tracking those.
There are hints of this in the books, not about lack of toilet facilities as such, just the kind of difficult terrain they run into:
That's before they even get into Mordor:
There is also mention of how it's easy to track the Orcs because of the trail of destruction they leave behind them:
More options
Context Copy link
I don't see that it would add anything: the Three Hunters have no issues tracking the orcs; Aragorn even comments that they seem to be going out of their way to hack things to the ground for no reason other than enjoying destruction and that the trail is clear.
More options
Context Copy link
Characters in novels do sometimes make reference to going to the bathroom, but the scene isn't typically described. And characters mentioning shitting their pants after some terrifying event happens too. The Orc thing you mention would be comic relief, so might fit in somewhere.
Oh, sure. I'm not wanting to know how Tolkien would have described defecation, just whether it should have logically had some impact on the story that was ignored because not intending to describe it led to not even considering it. Off the top of my head: Is the mood turning even more dour because after the Black Riders nobody wants to risk wandering far enough away to get some privacy? Is Frodo's departure in the Breaking of the Fellowship considered unremarkable because they have been in the habit of wandering far enough away for privacy?
I'd say that's the problem. They're tracking the orcs because of Merry and Pippin's capture; it's a horrible time for comic relief (or bathos, if it comes off as comic accidentally) to ruin the tension. There's no safe place to comment until like half a dozen chapters later when the characters are safe and getting each other caught up, and at that point there's no reason for more detail than a quick euphemism about "the smell" or maybe at most "leavings".
The mountain wind carried the cold breath of Mordor, and the two travelers crouched in the lee of a broken stone, their cloaks drawn tight against the gathering dark. Before them, far across the ashen plain, the Eye of the Dark Lord burned like a wound in the sky.
"Do you know, Master Samwise," said Frodo, his voice low and grave, "in all the long leagues since the Shire, I have never once felt the weight of our burden so keenly."
Sam laid a hand upon his master's shoulder. "I know it, Mr. Frodo. The Ring is a terrible thing to bear."
"No, Sam, I meant my bowels. Three weeks of lembas and nothing else. I haven't gone since the Emyn Muil."
A silence fell, deep as the roots of the mountains. "Well," said Sam at last, "that'd be the waybread. Very binding. My gaffer always said a body wants a bit of cabbage."
"There is no cabbage in Mordor, Sam."
"No, sir. Nor a proper privy, neither." Sam gazed solemnly across the blasted land. "I've been meaning to say, I walked off behind that rock yesterday, and I tell you, the whole world was dark and full of terrors, and I still felt watched."
"By the Eye?"
"By Gollum, Mr. Frodo. He was right there."
Frodo closed his eyes. Somewhere upon the plain, the Nazgûl screamed, and neither hobbit could say, in that moment, whether the sound had been in the sky or in the quiet, unhappy rumblings of his own gut.
"We must press on," he said heavily. "The fate of Middle-earth depends upon it."
"Aye," said Sam, rising. "But sir, as they say in Bree, if you're to climb a mountain, it's best to relieve yourself before you go up."
And the Quest, which had endured the Barrow-wights, the Mines of Moria, and the Pass of Cirith Ungol, paused as the most perilous errand of all came to pass
I hate this, but not nearly as much as I love it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Apparently GRRM made up for all the lack of Tolkien talking about going to the latrine where there is no latrine. Yet another reason I am heartily glad I gave up on reading the SOIAF with the first volume, back in the before days when it was first published.
Unprecedented foresight and wisdom.
After getting burned by the Wheel of Time series, my "never start a fantasy series unless it's finished" rule has spared me from several much-hyped series that look like they will never be finished (GRRM and Rothfuss immediately come to mind).
You and a lot of other people. Larry Correia often rants about how badly this has ruined the market for new epic fantasy authors, though for some reason he blames GRRM rather than Jordan.
Jordan died from a rare disease. That's very different from GRRM and Rothfuss who are alive and well, but appear to have gotten terminal writer's block and/or lost interest in completing the series.
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair, Jordan was well aware he might not be able to finish the series himself, and planned it carefully and left all his notes so another writer could do the job. ( @RoyGBivensAction ).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have male peers who got freaked out by the mere mention of periods. Growing up with two sisters within six years of my age, it quickly becomes just a fact of life.
Funnily enough, back in the halcyon days of 2007-12 when Advice Animals were all the rage, many lulz were had at Foul Bachelor Frog, which chronicled the disgusting things single men do when they're at home by themselves. When the distaff counterpart Foul Bachelorette Frog came out, I actually found it weirdly heartening to learn that single women can be exactly as disgusting as single men, which is not at all the impression you'd get from how women are portrayed in most pop culture.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is something I've thought about a lot and talked about it with my wife. I'm very surprised how every woman I've been with has always talked about their "boobs". And my wife even refers to them primarily as boobs when talking about anatomy with my daughter. The first time I heard her say this to my daughter, I said, "please, let's use the correct term: gazongas".
Prior to dating my first real girlfriend and hearing her always refer to them as boobs, I thought that the "correct" thing to call them were breasts. I thought of boobs in the exact same category as tits, melons, and funbags.
But every woman I've been with has basically always called them boobs, and never breasts, unless they're talking to a doctor - they consider breasts to just be a clinical term. Personally, though, I see no real reason why tits should be considered crass, but boobs should be considered the correct casual language.
As for generational effects, at least my wife claims that her mom always said boobs, too.
Bouba(booba?)/kiki effect. "Tits" sounds harsh and therefore rude in a way that "boobs" does not.
(Generally, euphonics seems to be one of those elements of language taboos that divide people harshly: some find it obvious that some words are intrinsically offensive due to how they sound, while some find the idea to be insane and suspect the former must be arguing in bad faith. I remember having an argument here long ago about whether "troon" should be considered a neutral term for the trans, with my interlocutor insisting that the it's only disapproved because leftists don't want to let their enemies have words for things.)
It is deliberately an insult, right? Not a neutral alternative pronunciation of "trans".
A while back someone here used it as a generic term for "to go crazy and become deranged". Taking the opposite view that it happens to apply to trans people but could be used to smear anyone the writer thinks is crazy.
More options
Context Copy link
Generally I'd say that in English, the more germanic/Old-English something sounds, the earthier and rawer the tone. The more Romantic, the more austere and polite.
Thus troons/trans, cunt/vagina, shit/excrete, fuck/copulate, etc. Nigger/negro have the same root I know, but at least in the modern day the Latin niger is usually pronounced with i-as-in-eye, and a soft g. That may be to stop it sounding less like the slur, of course.
How much of that is due to the romance influence being concentrated in the upper classes thanks to the Norman invasion?
Much of it, and of course because for 400 years classical education has been an indicator of the upper classes. I was being descriptive, not prescriptive.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't cunt Latinate too? I think it's really more about the the sound itself; out of my quick-and-dirty list of similar slurs, few are actually Germanic (what words with that pattern even are, apart from moon?).
You would know better than I, I'm afraid, but I'm interested to learn.
I considered that but assumed that the association was Germanic/Anglo -> short and harsh (German tends to sound harsh to English ears) not the other way round. It's quite possible I was mistaken, and the 'nigger' pair backs up your hypothesis since obviously they are both latinate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who pronounces it this way? The classical way is /niger/, the Vatican way is /nidʒer/, if I'm not mistaken.
Perhaps nobody. I am a poor linguist. I was thinking of e.g. Nigerian.
Ah, I was thinking of Gaius Pescennius Niger.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
“Troon” simply is a slur, I don’t think there’s any ambiguity there. Has nothing to do with phonetics. It’s just… that’s what it is. I don’t have a complete theory of how a word becomes a slur or what makes a word a slur, but, we can recognize them when we see them.
“Trans person” seems to work perfectly fine to me as a neutral term.
I generally say "transexual" since I think it's stupid that transgender replaced it for no real reason other than (IMO) to create more hoops for people to jump through.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think you need a complete theory to recognise patterns and the effect they have on listeners. Troon works as a slur for the same reasons coon, goon and loon do, octoroon got its ending, and why the boon part of baboon is such a staple in racist terminology (the only other one that probably comes close is "chimp", with gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, gibbons and all the other well-known primates basically being unheard of), and the long tubular-mouth oo in the middle might well be a human universal gesture of mockery.
(Even the memey zoomer-coomer-doomer series of neologisms is generally at least somewhat mocking. Noob also established itself globally with that particular pronunciation, in defiance of the normal English -oo-/-yoo- distribution.)
FWIW I've heard black women called "sheboons" on 4chan for years now and my dumb brain didn't piece together thst it was derived from baboon until reading your post.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Tits/teats are animal parts. (So are 'breasts' with a side of medical textbook; men already understand this re: 'penis'.)
Tits are for cows (and before you say 'but it's not meant like that', consider what 'cowtits' means).
Chickens have breasts.
Humans have boobs. Uniquely, the word 'looks like' the object.
(For the others, 'melons' is ambiguous and bears a mandate on size; 'funbags' does that and is fundamentally unserious, as are 'gazongas' [and 'vajayjay']. 'Boobs' and 'tits' have diminutives these words lack.)
Tits are a type of bird.
As is the booby.
More options
Context Copy link
So are boobies.
More options
Context Copy link
I enjoy bird watching over a drink in my local bar. I am particularly pleased to see great tits.
More options
Context Copy link
Tits was a serious mathematician.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with the term cowtits.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Funnily enough, in The Stars My Destination, the male lead fails this test. What does Gully Foyle want? Until the very very end, only two things, really: To kill Vorga (which he then has to be taught (by a woman) means "the people behind/crewing her, not the hunk of metal ship itself"), and to have Olivia Presteign. I mean, there's also a point where he wants to escape, and a point where he wants to not be on fire, but that's a temporary situation which I assume doesn't count. I guess the film "Taken" also falls into the gender reversed category, huh?
I can't actually think of a single book I've read where the pattern is as she describes it, I must say.
The issue with every single one of these types of social critiques is that they never seem to correspond to anything in reality: it's all vibes, and anyone who dares question the vibes is a misogynist.
What concrete evidence do we have that male authors use "perky tits" to create (ahem) flat female characters? The influencer's bare assertion. But I've never once seen that phrase in my reading; searching Google books for it, it seems fairly balanced between male and female authors who use it, leaning toward female if anything.
All of this seems to me to be giving woke influencers too much credit: it's pretty much all made up, never actually supported with anything even approaching rigorous, quantitative analysis.
I don't know if it's so much in modern fiction, but I've been reading a ton of Golden Age crime/detective fiction from the period roughly 1900-30s and boy howdy, the women in it are only there to be:
(1) Widowed elderly mother who is concerned about family scandal
(2) Striving society hostess spending her rich husband's money on throwing elaborate country house parties
(3) Young daughters of same husband-hunting and doing nothing else all day (I'll come back to this one)
(4) Young daughters of same going through a rebellious phase, which means being a flapper
(5) Scheming adventuresses whose entire point is to be the Femme Fatale whom the detective outwits
(6) Wholesome lasses the detective/hero may or may not consider a love interest/possible wife/help during the investigation who then doubles up as love interest
(7) Servants and persons of the lower classes who work in shops or tearooms, but they don't really count as women, they're just the background characters needed
Regarding (3), they literally do nothing all day. Some of this may be to do with the lack of education and career opportunities, but it's extremely noticeable when the son of the house is going to university or talking about his profession or business in regard to his life plans, and his sister is "oh I think I'll call on Dolly for tea tomorrow" as the equivalent.
It's really a lot better in modern fiction, though the "hot chick whom I wanna bang and indeed may do so on pages 16, 85, and 130 described in detail" is new (6) for a lot of books.
EDIT: This is why, when Dorothy Parker gave us Harriet Vane who did not immediately want to marry Lord Peter, it was rather novel. Though Agatha Christie was able to do the same with Miss Marple, and to be fair there were Victorian/Edwardian lady detectives as well. But the main female characters in books were either unmarried daughters waiting for a husband, or unmarried daughters/nieces doing the housekeeping for their father/uncle/brother. A male character who spent all his time in the same kind of idleness was a clear indicator that he was a Bad 'Un, but for women there was nothing else (if they were of a certain social class, and such novels were indeed all about ladies and not young persons).
Those sound like archetypes, in a genre where (to my understanding) everyone is an archteype. Are the male characters really so rich and multifaceted?
Well, they are described as "rough around the edges", and if they have edges they must have facets bounded by them.
More options
Context Copy link
Oh sure tropes, but the contrast is really striking to me now: average male background character - has life; average female background character - is there to be pretty.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is a brilliant Soviet joke that ends with Чукча не читатель, чукча писатель.
Same is with the feminist wave that is hell bent on destroying all and everything fun inside mass media. Feminist not reader, feminist writer. While it seems many woman of specific beliefs have very strong opinion on how female characters should be written they seem to forget the other part - the reading. And so far the market has spoken that they just don't want what is pushed on them. This is very similar to the USSR economy - where even the people producing the goods refused to consume them.
Take a recent film i enjoyed - Mortal Kombat II - not that is was some masterpiece, but was relatively free from the woke smell.
Only the men were allowed to lose fights, and the only woman that lost was also beaten up by a woman (and she was from the bad guys' team anyway). Which means that all that involved them was just weaker than the rest - because the plot shield was not from the inside world, but from the outside.
The fact that even romantasy books and chicklit - that are totally dominated by women authors and readers - full with her types of characters tells us a lot.
If Taylor Sheridan's over sexualized one dimensional creatures are more believable and likable than the girl bosses - you have serious issues with audience relatability.
And the answer why something is not written in a specific way - the answer is always because it doesn't sell. You can't force people to consume - and this is why more and more people tune out of the mainstream.
More options
Context Copy link
Hypercompetence is generally uninteresting and - even when it’s interesting - it’s mainly interesting to men. Not because men are more competent, but I think because men like examining very complex and well functioning machines; men will watch hours-long YouTube videos on steam engines and industrial machinery and pore over complex diagrams and cross sections and so on. The ‘hypercompetent man’ is essentially just another one of these machines, the man who reads about these famous generals or whatever is seeing them less as characters or even as human beings and more as versions of those videos where the railroad track connector perfectly switches between the different rails so that trains can go in different directions or something.
If I imagine a hypercompetent woman, like my mother, who held down a very demanding job, had three children, cooked dinner most nights, would pick us up from school on the way back from meetings and then often go back to work, was always working on like 17 different side projects on the weekend, baked sourdough bread, taught yoga for fun twice a week and still attended absolutely everything, her life isn’t actually very interesting. Impressive? Certainly, but these kinds rarely have the tragedy or the strife to be compelling protagonists.
Hypercompetent characters rely on certain behind the scenes shenanigans, and they turn into a puzzle for reader to solve. Imagine Sherlock Holmes books, where you see the world through Dr.Watson only to witness the genius of main character in expose at the end of the movie. This is a common trope for detective movies or TV shows, including female protagonist like with Murder, She Wrote where the main heroine is basically female Sherlock Holmes who also plays her own Dr. Watson using her "housewife" mask - very similar to how inspector Colombo pretends to be dumb in order to solve various mysteries.
If you lack a tension, you can also add a big bad on the background. Like with Sherlock Holmes who had Professor Moriarty as his evil twin, who turned even Holmes victories into strategic defeats and whatnot. This is often used trope in these hypercompetent hero stories, e.g. as when Ender in Ender's Game wins the Game, only to realize that he was duped into genocide or some such.
Also you can always do the Alien trick - just write a role for a man and turn it into a female role. This is how Ellen Ripley was born. She absolutely is hypercompetent heroine. She always connects the dots, has the correct knowledge for the situation be it learning how to operate a gun in 1 minute tutorial only to then rig a flamethrower and grenade launcher under when to situation calls. The same for somehow being robot operator right when it is needed to defeat the alien queen.
If you wanted to turn your mother into a badass, just look at Walking Dead and Carol Peletier. A battered housewife is actually a hidden gem. She can navigate social situations like when inside the compound she used her easy going persona to uncover cult mysteries etc. But she is also a badass sniper on a level of special unit commando Rambo who single-handedly dismantled cannibal cult from the outside rescuing the rest of the group. She can do it all, she can survive on her own out in the middle of zombie apocalypse, she can be a mother and nurturer, she can be a high-stakes spy using her acting skills as the spy and she can be cold blooded killer, Spetznaz executioner.
In short the hypercompetent characters are not interesting for their own growth - although there is a room there as well, especially if they need to get competent in some new realm such as social relations or whatnot. Their main job is structural to the story, they are part of the worldbuilding and/or the plot device.
More options
Context Copy link
I find that hyper competent characters are definitely boring and frankly they aren’t real characters to me. I’ll agree with her up to a point. Making someone constantly whine about having given something up is annoying. Though to me it doesn’t turn the competence into a curse so much as it it reveals that the character is actually immature and whiney. Most people, if they choose to give up on something to pursue their career do so with some thought to the costs. If a person chooses to try to be a D1 quarterback, he’s obviously going to not have time for other things like making art or music or dating or other sports. He’s also the one who decided that was what he damned well wanted and isn’t likely to spend a lot of time rehashing that decision in his head unless he either failed or doesn’t like the outcome. Patrick Mahomes is not sitting on the sidelines wondering about the life he gave up to play football. His career is awesome. Some alternate universe Mahomes who snapped his ACL before the NFL draft and works as a truck driver might regret the decision because that decision made his life kinda suck.
Hypercompetent characters probably aren't fun to watch going to the grocery store, but Apollo 13 is a great film because all the people involved are the best of the best at what they do, and they barely survive by using all of it.
Right, it takes much greater writing chops to do things like make a good horror movie where the characters don't make the stupid horror movie mistakes.
Competency is hard.
The Cabin in the Woods works, but it cheats as it's a pastiche.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are plenty of interesting stories to tell that aren't really about the characters. Often more exploring the limits (as in "as x goes to infinity") of principles. Science fiction often does this, but it's not alone in doing so.
While I thought "dark, gritty" characters were interesting two decades ago, the idea won so heavily that no popular writing I've seen today demonstrates strong principles and I think we've lost something civilizationally aspirational in doing so. We've seemingly decided not to transcend the human condition, but to wallow in it.
But that's just, like, my opinion.
More options
Context Copy link
Great heroes need great villains, or at least great obstacles to overcome. The stakes and challenges have to be aligned to the abilities of the characters.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
“Perky tits”- this is one of the greatest examples of lying to yourself I have ever seen. Girls think about their breast constantly probably more than men do.
? Did you reply to the wrong comment?
Your right was suppose to be to the main comment
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can at least be a counter example. I spend far far more time obsessing over my wife's breasts then she does.
Well, yes, now. Because she's not worrying about attracting someone.
That might be the case for many women. But not my wife. Perhaps she is an outlier. She cares that people thinks she looks good, to some degree, but she doesn't ever wear makeup (and never has). That probably does make her an outlier, in that she simply doesn't obsess over her appearance the way many women do (or so I'm told).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was debating who thinks about it more to myself. Date last night I think took 1-1.5 hours getting ready last night after Pilates. Did I spend more time looking at them or did she spend more time thinking about the right outfit to put them on a platter. I have no idea.
But I do believe almost every girl 15-45 thinks about their breasts.
Eh, I think men and women think about them differently. How much thinking about their knees do men do, before it gets to the 'creaky joints' stage of life? Certainly for young girls, they're as worried about "am I developing normally?" as young boys are about their penises. But once past that, breasts (or boobs) are just a body part. They can be inconvenient, they can be a health concern, but they're there and you deal with them like the rest of your body.
Women maximising their looks for money (e.g. OnlyFans) are going to think about their boobs in the male type of way, but for the same reason an athlete is going to be thinking about his knees: money making area of concern that needs to be looked after and maximised for earning potential.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, it’s perhaps not interesting in the way that we expect “literary” characters to be interesting, but it’s still an interesting phenomenon in its own right. (I’m also not surprised to hear that she was like that. I feel that it shows in your own writing/thinking style.)
As I alluded to with my comments about “complexity”, something I often wonder about is how many people are actually “normal” vs “interesting”. Normal in the sense of, no significant mental disturbances, no real hidden corridors in the psyche to speak of, just… livin’ life and doin’ fine. I know such people exist, I’m acquainted with some. Hypercompetent people are strictly speaking not normal because most people are not hypercompetent, but they’re at least normal in the sense that they probably don’t have significant mental baggage weighing them down (otherwise, it would probably show in their behavior and outlook).
I have no concept of what it would be like to live a life that’s not wracked by anxiety and excessive self-reflection, so people who simply take action as their default mode of being are fascinating specimens to me.
More options
Context Copy link
Or, as in the case of the Motte, examining a very complex machine that only barely functions, which means it was either not engineered at all, or engineered absolutely perfectly, and the most interesting questions come down to figuring out which category which component falls into (and what happens to the machine when it encounters stressors it can't handle without ripping itself apart, and how to tell that from normal operation).
If it was- mainly, having significant amounts of authority such that those things were done automatically at her command rather than her having to do it herself (correct me if I'm wrong but that's what I think you mean here, for giving orders to other men is the mechanism by which average men accomplish something that makes them Great Men) it'd be discarded as "obvious men writing women, how boring".
What's worse is that that condition gives rise to a particular meme about women who are aggressive/oriented enough to do that; if you possess an instinctive understanding of gender roles (and correspondingly label "the one that gives orders" as "the male gender role"), the response and attitude towards that (by both genders) is, by that definition of 'gender', so casually anti-transgender that even the caricatures of it don't capture it.
And it's not like it's that great either for the "not supposed to be the protagonist" gender in the general case, since as you've described it's difficult to make that interesting, willingness to look for the interesting parts, and appreciate the difficulty of them -> the power of those who do them is nowhere near as universal a skill as it needs to be (especially when a society puts zero effort into that), and once devotion to "the protagonists" does start degrading you...
Ironically, the "men should never be permitted to act as if they were entitled to be attracted to us" comment by that sector comes from this specific sector; unfortunately, the women who weren't quite smart enough to figure out that advice was not applicable to them heard it and the social conditions at the time let them reify it. Which is the OP's point, right down to the disclaimer that it wasn't about trans people, because the common definition of what that actually looks like on the FTM side grates on the instinct about as much as the appearance of the stereotypical MTF does.
The disclaimer about trans people was mostly because we just had like 3 other threads about trans people lol.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Galbrush Paradox proven right once again.
Years ago, Cracked had an article pointing out the curious commonality that the female leads in every disposable 2000s romcom were all clumsy. Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson, Drew Barrymore et al. constantly spilling coffee on themselves, doing pratfalls, knocking things off bookshelves.
The author's thinking was that these films were largely written by male screenwriters, who feared being accused of sexism if they wrote these characters to have actual human flaws. Instead, they erred on the side of caution by having the characters be essentially flawless: gorgeous, sexy, funny, smart, ambitious, caring etc. But they still needed to technically have a flaw, so they independently converged on the same character-flaw-that-isn't-really-a-character-flaw: being clumsy.
Well, also, it's a _rom_com. If you make the character ugly, that's going to spoil that part. If you make them unpleasant, it's a different genre (e.g. The Taming of The Shrew). You need the flaw to be something the male character will find endearing or at least tolerable. The clumsiness also makes it easy to set up the meet-cute.
More options
Context Copy link
Part of it is that audiences consider female characters with major flaws to be unsympathetic. For example, there are many widely liked male main characters who cheat on their loving wives (Don Draper etc). This isn’t necessarily portrayed positively, but it doesn’t detract from their masculine appeal really.
How many female protagonists regularly cheat on their loving husbands? It’s almost unheard of. When it happens, they’re universally decried by men and women as a total bitch unless EXTREME extenuating factors apply (like the husband is very abusive or disappears for 20 years).
Only one that comes to mind is Shiv Roy from Succession and the entire structure of the show is such that it doesn't stand out (it's a black comedy and they're all supposed to be awful)
And people still complain she's judged unfairly compared to her male counterparts. YMMV though.
Yeah, and I’d say while she isn’t ’judged unfairly’ she’s both not really the protagonist and ends the show in a very unfavorable position.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you may have a point when it comes to sexual promiscuity. People naturally see sex as something that women give and men receive. So that a female main character who sleeps around isn't going to be seen as positively as a male main character who does so. Even in Sex and the City, the Samantha character was nowhere nearly as promiscuous as your typical male womanizer character in network television.
But when it comes to other issues, I'm skeptical. Here's an example of what I mean: In the all-girls Ocean's 11 movie, there's a sequence where Julia Roberts' character runs a return scam on a department store. How would audiences have perceived this if George Clooney's character had done something similar in the original Ocean's 11 movie? I'm pretty sure it would not have been received more sympathetically and I would guess it would have been received less sympathetically.
Perhaps those aren't good examples since Oceans 11 movies are heist movies which glorify crime. But even so, I think there is a rather straightforward explanation: People, including feminists, think that Women are Wonderful and don't like portrayals of women with significant flaws.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Just so.
More options
Context Copy link
That post expresses my thoughts perfectly, yes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is no level of feminist takeover of the publishing industry where they'll stop complaining.
Literary agents and publishing houses can publicly brag about rejecting male authors for being male, and still you'll get this kind of bullshit.
It's just noise. There's no intellectual content here.
Exactly. I have no idea who this woman is or why I should give a single shit about her complaints (and I don't mean this as a dig at OP). Some woman on the internet is mad about books? Oh, no. Whatever shall I do.
It makes me think of this meme. I can enjoy all kinds of books if I ignore the nagging about why I shouldn't enjoy them.
It sounds like she's some sort of professional editor or manuscript reader. So, unfortunately, if you ever want to publish something through mainstream channels, this is the sort of person you need to convince. So maybe most of us can ignore her, but it does tend to influence the culture over time when every single published books has the same sort of feminist spin to it.
That's true, and I imagine it's a big factor on why modern big publishing has gone to crap. But as someone who is happy to read old problematic books or self-published new problematic books and has no desire to publish anything outside of an anonymous racist substack (it's a joke, see Donald Boat tweet), her complaints are just noise on the internet that I don't have to care about.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Every author and publisher could be feminist and every problem with the industry would still be men's fault.
Sure, if nothing else they could blame men for not buying, reading, and gushing about their books. But that's the nature of hate ideologies. The out-group is blamed for essentially everything.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm really curious for examples here. I asked Claude for examples, and it gave me a bunch of mystery protagonists, like Holmes and Poirot. And then it generalized to "action heroes", which I quickly pointed out isn't even true, as Bond suffers immensely for his competence.
Thinking now about other competent characters, I can't think of specific ones. Star Trek, which is clearly competence porn, has Picard, who has the job of being the loneliest man in the universe, and Spock who repeatedly denies his feelings only to then rediscover them and be hurt by them. I haven't thought through every TOS and TNG character though, so maybe some of the other men may not apply.
I think it may have a point for "mystery protagonists", but I can't confirm since I haven't read too many. But of course, the whole point of a Holmes-style mystery is that he's investigating other people's lives, meaning the focus is not about his life.
But does anyone have any examples where the original video is correct? Where are the thousands of immensely popular books with competent men who don't pay the tax? It seems to be that the male characters like that are what RedLetterMedia would call "black tank top" protagonists, and even then, they usually have a dead wife.
I do think there is the trope of the modern crime novel police detective who has given his all to the job and this has cost him his marriage, family, friendships, etc. (excessive drinking and smoking may or may not be part of the package). Modern female police in the same role often have the same costs. I am not sure if this is viewed the same way for both sexes in such works, I feel women may be judged in-universe a little more harshly for abandoning traditional roles of wife and mother in favour of career, but this is not necessarily the case (any more?)
I think, though, for the maverick loner male detective, casual girlfriends are a lot easier to come by (and discard/they leave him) than for his distaff equivalent. Spenser is one of the very few who has a stable, settled, long-term relationship and back in the 70s there were a couple of books where the late Robert Parker broke up Spenser and Susan (mostly due to Susan's insecurity) and that didn't go well so they got back together. Jonathan Kellermann tried it with the Alex Delaware character where both Dr. Delaware and his lover split up and got new partners, but they got back together (I think but don't know if that was partly due to readers not liking breaking up the band, and partly that Kellermann couldn't make the casual dating with new partner work for Delaware).
More options
Context Copy link
Here's a possibility: Lazarus Long in Heinlein's Time Enough for Love. Basically a male Mary Sue.
But I think few critics would try to argue that Time Enough for Love is serious literature or that Lazarus Long is a complex character. He's basically just a Mary Sue who is always smarter and better and more competent than anyone around him.
I enjoyed Time Enough for Love and I also enjoyed the Honor Harrington series (which has a female Mary Sue as the lead character) but you have to approach both with the right attitude. Typically, science fiction is more about world-building and plot than it is about characters.
Anyway, I suspect what's going on is that in general people are a lot more sensitive to female suffering than male suffering. So if there is a story where a man "pays the price" or otherwise suffers, it's just not as noticeable or memorable. Thus the idea that only women "pay the price."
I remember that some of the early James Bond movies were criticized by feminists on the ground that they depicted women getting killed. But that if you did an actual count, far more men get killed than do women.
More options
Context Copy link
Of Star Trek protagonists, Kirk perhaps pays the least, but he does pay over and over again. (Despite his reputation, he hardly every gets the girl, and he loses them all the time)
Holmes is canonically kind of a miserable guy who, when he doesn't have crimes or writing of monographs to keep him occupied, gets strung out on cocaine. He's asexual by nature and appears to enjoy none of the other pleasures of life except smoking. Watson is actually quite successful, married (though eventually widowed, and without issue), and often happy, but he's the chronicler, not the protagonist.
Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is another Holmesian character; he has one pleasure besides solving mysteries, which is eating himself to obesity. His Watsonian sidekick is Archie Goodwin, who gets beat up and arrested a lot. Unlike Watson, Goodwin never marries.
Mike Hammer is the archetype of the noir detective; if you think they don't pay, you don't know the genre (not GETTING paid, now, that happens on the regular)
Yeah, Archie never marries, but he does have Lily Rowan as his long-term companion (conveniently there to go dancing with and off on trips, but never demanding 'put a ring on it' and rich enough to pay her own way and never be dependent on him) and plenty of casual female interest throughout the series of books. Archie is the one Wolfe sends out to seduce female characters for information and this is made quite explicit in one novel. I think some of that was the view (before Sexual Liberation) that being the gay bachelor playing the field was the male fantasy instead of being tied down from an early age with the ol' ball and chain and a couple of kids, and possibly Stout's own character traits as well.
Wolfe also likes beer and orchids, don't reduce him to just being a gourmet! (as well as a gourmand, there's even a cook book)!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Holmes is an addict and a loner, he isn’t married and is officially a lifelong bachelor. He has lost the one thing that gives a man (or anyone) a true legacy. For Poirot the latter is true, I’d say he’s even more asexual than Holmes, he’s a fastidious neurotic, he’s highly flawed, and many people hate him and even those who don’t often only tolerate him because he is useful or well-connected (on account of his usefulness).
In general, universally hypercompetent main characters are rare.
I would make the argument in those cases that they would have those same problems regardless of their career. Holmes is easily bored and would be an addict whether he was a detective or not. If anything, solving interesting cases (which he only gets to do due to his success) is the only thing keeping him from being constantly comatose.
Poirot appears to be, as you said, asexual. He is not foregoing romance to pursue excellence in his field. He just has little interest in women in the first place.
This is Countess Vera Rossakoff erasure and I will not stand for it! 😁
I see I need to read more Agatha Christie. I guess it does fit his character that Poirot would fall for an extraordinary mind.
Poirot is stereotypically what otherwise you'd call "a lifelong bachelor" (coughcough) and his one constant loyal friend is Hastings (who, bless him, is not overburdened with brains). There's no romantic relationship there, though you could certainly spin an angle of perhaps unrequited longing (on Poirot's part) or 'so far in the closet he has not the faintest inkling of any non-straight desires' (on Hastings' part) if you were writing fanfic.
So Poirot's fascination with and admiration of Countess Vera is something that will never be requited, but she is loud and colourful and flamboyant and all the things he is not, in his ordered, strict life. I don't think Christie is creating that as "gotta have something het here to keep the suspicions away", but rather that of course if he's going to be knocked head-over-heels for anyone, it's the likes of Vera (and not Miss Lemon, his very practical and orderly secretary).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, but that goes back to the original argument where the woman was suggesting that men writing these woman characters will have them be hypercompetent in some ways and then be, say, a terrible mother or give them crippling neuroses. That doesn’t seem too different to Holmes being a hypercompetent detective but also an addict or Poirot being a hypercompetent detective but also a neurotic asshole
True. Flaws tend to humanize characters and make them interesting. She is missing the point in so many ways.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know about thousands, but it certainly happens. In many hero's journey stories, the protagonist suffers on their way to success, but not because of it. You can absolutely find examples where there is no question as to whether the protagonist did the right thing or if the sacrifices made along the way were worth it. Mystery protagonists are a bit of gray area, since they often don't pay the tax directly, but they do suffer because of certain aspects of their personalities. Whether those aspects are key to their success is somewhat up for interpretation. Sherlock's substance abuse comes to mind as an extreme example of this.
More pertinent to the books she may be reading is the male love interests in women's romance stories. They certainly tend to benefit from their position and don't have real problems to speak of. Perhaps aside from a wild side that only the protagonist can tame.
There are all kinds of stories out there. By including some in your data and excluding others, you can find any kind of pattern that you want. It's just that those patterns don't actually say anything about writing as a whole, and counterexamples are at this point very abundant.
So are we talking about a protagonist like Frodo, then? She wants a female Frodo?
The first thing that comes to my mind for a female Frodo is Dorothy.
I think it's worth noting that Frodo was regularly surrounded by characters who were clearly superior to him in many ways. I think it's pretty likely that modern feminists would not be happy with a female character who needed guidance and support from male characters who were superior to her.
More options
Context Copy link
Or a female Christian Grey, or Doctor Who, or some career woman who has risen to the top of her field and lives a fulfilling life due to the choices she made.
Well, realistically she would probably prefer that none of those existed so her complaints would carry more weight and improve her reach on social media. Having real grievances would be a better look than making up claims that aren't true.
Interesting. I can't comment on Grey or Dr who directly since I've never seen Grey's anatomy, and I've only seen very very few dr who episodes. Do they really not suffer? If so, where does the drama come from in those shows? What is a typical episode (or season, if seasons carry the narrative weight)? They just keep having more people coming to them, and they help them without any particular cost to themselves?
I feel like I've seen softcore porn about women sex therapists who go and help client after client live better lives. Though that probably wouldn't (or would, if your hypothesis about them wanting to complain is correct) make a feminist happy. And it's also not anything anyone watches for the plot.
But these instances of hyper competent masculine characters who simply help others without cost to themselves seem to be so rare. It seems strange for feminists to go calling this out as a great inequity, when there don't seem to be very many.
Christian Grey is the title character of Fifty Shades of Grey, not Anatomy.
Oops. In my defense, I think @Bombadil might have edited the post, originally saying just Grey. Not sure though.
I did edit it to clarify, but I did so before you posted your comment. I try to avoid substantial edits after people reply. It was definitely ambigous.
Regarding Grey's anatomy, while I have never seen the show, I believe it focuses mostly on the interpersonal drama that goes on in the hospital. So his professional skills don't really factor in all that much.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In dr. Who, The Doctor has human companions who he deeply cares about and a strict moral compass which severely limits his available actions. He also often has to solve problems under severe constraints and without access to his full arsenal of tools. The few episodes where The Doctor does get to show off are reserved for season finales or as payoffs to darker arcs. Christian Grey of fifty shades is a sadist (which is supposedly hot in the context of the story) and not the main character of the story he is a part of.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The premise that female characters are not allowed to be interesting or competent is wrong, and I doubt it has ever been true. Certainly, it has not been the case for more than a hundred years.
Dracula has a competent female POV character who is smart and solves problems. Jane Austen's romance novels have main characters that are interesting for other reasons and competent within their caste in society. Agatha Cristie has written novels and short stories with female main and side characters who can be competent murderers, investigators, socialites, and informants.
Lord of the Rings, progenitor of the modern fantasy genre has Galadriel and the "I am no man" scene. Narnia has female characters every bit as competent as the boys. Detective novels, comic books, novels. Take your pick. Female characters can be found in every flavor. The heroes of the past thirty years include the genius Hermione Granger, media personality Katniss Everdeen, Vin the Mistborn, and half the Marvel roster. Many stories follow the plotlines that mostly appeal to boys but with a female lead playing the role of hero no differently than normal. You really do just have to look for it.
Sure, some women are written to be sexy and that is fine. Other stories have flat out boring characters. But if you are not into those, don't read them. Simply read something else written for a person like you.
Maybe she is talking specifically about modern romance novels, in which case I kind of get it. I could see how it would be difficult to find women's romance not about a hapless lady stuck in a boring life who gets swept off her feet by a rich and competent suitor. But I am sure it exists. As for why those stories eclipse everything in their field, that has little to do with men and everything to do with what the majority of customers want to read. She can take her problems up with women, evolution, or God. Her choice.
The prototypical Hallmark movie has a female protagonist who is very competent in her high-powered city job before she moves back to her hometown for plot-convenient reasons.
Of course, the city life and her jerk city boyfriend make her miserable, which is why she'd much rather move back and hook up with the handsome widowed lumberjack.
Although you're basically right. The Hallmark movies are just as gender-normative as the billionaire werewolf romance novels.
More options
Context Copy link
The premise is that it is modern feminists that won't allow it. Many of your examples predate modern feminism. Even Hermione and Marvel characters are, while not as old as Dracula, adapted from sources that predated online feminism.
Also, there's always been an exception for "character I personally like".
Brandon Sanderson still writes competent female protagonists, as does Marvel. Women like this one will keep complaining no matter what happens.
Sanderson's characters all have flaws, weaknesses and pay for their competence/agency. At least all I remember right now do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You don't understand- I must crusade against anything offensive to what I deem my Privilege to be, what the proletariat prefers (i.e. "vampired billionarely") be damned.
I will submit that it's very difficult for cross-gender writing to occur properly, not because of a shortage of those who are able/willing to understand how the other works, but because its audience is generally limited to the people who are willing and able to find that kind of writing interesting.[1]
The people that cause the most trouble to this group- by definition those with the most Privilege to stop it from being written- are those who are technically able but unwilling because it would require them to think about someone other than themselves for more than 5 seconds. And note that they aren't actively tearing down works where female characters are interesting- Harry Potter being a good example of that (as far as the books themselves are concerned), but Hunger Games as well.
They'll complain about the late '80s version of this (or the others, actually) mostly because they're concerned that men will find a woman who gets along with/doesn't actively hate men preferable to themselves (i.e. it's a complaint from Privilege [to be maximally mercenary/bad-faith in dealings with the opposite sex]).
When there exists a thinkpiece against those works, that is what it is about (the Terminator franchise is this in microcosm- bookended by 'Sarah Connor gives birth to John more or less without question' to 'literally screaming at a genocidal computer about how important it is for it to respect her vagina').
[1] Sorry, @Primaprimaprima, I haven't finished writing the reply to your other thread yet; if you were wondering why people who are very high-openness tend to cluster around Japanese media, I assert this is a significant contributor to why. Less Privilege to disrupt that expression there, so you get more of these works and more capable writers putting them to paper.
No rush! But if you do have a reply to the other thread I would love to read it.
More options
Context Copy link
The world would be a better place if more people had the integrity to not make up problems where none exist. But then i guess that would be the end of her career, and besides there clearly is an audience willing to uncritically lap it up. Good for those like her, bad for gender relations.
I see where you're going, but most, maybe even all human progress seems a function of rejecting the status quo because of its maybe-not-yet-evident problems. Most technology exists to solve problems we previously just accepted, or didn't even consider to exist (problem: I can't fly like a bird). Not sure where I'd draw the line, though.
"I can't fly like a bird" is objectively true, especially in an age without planes. "Females characters are not allowed to be interesting or competent" is just not. Not even within her own framework.
I agree, but I think a more charitable interpretation of her claim is that female characters are not allowed to be interesting or competent in every last way that male characters are allowed to be interesting or competent.
And I think that so stated, the claim is true. But a big part of the difference is that it's far more acceptable (both to feminists and society in general) for male characters to be humiliated; seriously harmed; made to look foolish; defeated; outsmarted; mocked; helped by other characters; and so on. Which is why so many female hero-type characters end up being extremely annoying Mary Sue types.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I see no distinction between "making up problems where none exist" and "shooting women and children".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is going to come off as much more flippant than I intend it, especially given the brevity, but: I really think part of growing up is learning to ignore spurious female complaining. While they can and do have real problems, shit-tests are endemic.
I hope this doesn't come off as flippant either, but this strikes me as cope. Yeah, you can ignore spurious female complaining, but then those complaints become policy. I get that we live in a world where men as a sex have virtually no cultural or social standing, but calling surrender to that fact a form of maturity comes off to me as rationalizing.
No, by learn to ignore it I also mean remove their institutional power and right to vote.
How's that been polling recently?
How's democracy been working out in general?
DM me when your ideology rises from the ashes.
I don't suppose I'll be able to.
More options
Context Copy link
Just remember the revolution will not be televised. And it probably won’t be discussed on Internet forums either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know how much is even a shit test. I frequently see women get upset about thing A, then go on to complain about unrelated thing B (which is actually fine). The most self aware of them will apologize to me days later and tell me this explicitly. The majority do not.
More options
Context Copy link
It's interesting that in many traditional cultures, there is a norm against public female complaining. Grievances are supposed to be filtered through the woman's husband/father/male guardian. (Both traditional cultures and modern western culture have norms against public male complaining, in the sense that if a man does it too much he will be accused of being a whiny and/or effeminate.)
Not that complaining is inherently wrong, of course. But it does seem that women have a tendency to go overboard and to make complaints which are logically contradictory.
Indeed "scolds" were criminals and by modern standards harshly punished. This would be women who criticize, complain or make angry statements in public.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I remember this discourse about Buffy the Vampire Slayer being 'performatively feminist' as a piece of media and how there were all these secret ways it was actually demeaning to women... and no that wasn't true. It was just feminist. There was a girl power speech in it that Buffy gives and the central premise is basically girl power.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link