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Notes -
Disney is back where it started:
Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles
But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand, and needed some boy-friendly properties. There were some that had had some success - Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars - but it wanted more. (Article 1, article 2 on marketing research in 2009 about this.)
They took a few gambles on intellectual property they already owned (or at least that wasn't too expensive) - Tron, The Lone Ranger, John Carter
of Marsand so forth - but those didn't give them the wins they wanted.So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both. But now both Marvel and Star Wars are sputtering at best, so it seems they think it's time to start up the search anew.
The obvious question is what happened to their last investments. The polite answer is that they stopped producing acceptable stories, or overexposed or overextended their franchises with TV shows and the like beyond general audiences' interest. But is that all? "To lose one strategic franchise may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness." What's to say that they won't make the same mistake again, whatever it was?
So there are less polite answers. That link leads to the /r/saltierthancrait discussion of the article (taken down now, by the looks of things. Too impolite even there!) where the poster summarizes their take on the story as "1. Buy new IP to have something for boys 2. Alienate them by pandering to girls 3. Repeat."
And even if it's so that both franchises' declines followed girl-power (or other identity-politics) pushes, that's still not a correlation that one's supposed to draw in polite company, not without a lot of throat-clearing. And true: the orthodox explanation of quality decline and overextension has much truth to it, and it's even possible to explain any alienation of target demographics as being due to such overextension: the same ambition that led Disney to want to give itself some appeal to boys also could lead it to try to make Marvel or Star Wars appeal more to girls. Maybe pure greed is the only explanatory factor needed.
Still, though, I have my doubts. I feel like there's a cultural undercurrent, much broader than just Disney, that it's a problem whenever anything is enjoyed by boys(/men) and not girls(/women). Perhaps there's an element of blank-slatism here: the belief that gender differences are all due to socialization, and in a perfect, prejudice-free world, male and female tastes would be the same.
That is: if there were any value to [something], then girls would see it. If they're not there with the boys, then either they're being kept away by something toxic or exclusionary, or there isn't any value to the thing and the boys shouldn't be having fun with it, either. Anything with predominantly male enthusiasts therefore should be either integrated or banned. (Going the other way, it seems much more easily accepted that boys are at fault for not being interested in something that girls are, for example.)
But if it's not true that, but for patriarchy, boys and girls would have the same interests, then the pursuit of this equalization can result in feeding a whole lot of interests or fields or value in general into the void. If lightsabers and starfighters appealing more to boys than to girls was not a problem that needed fixing, and Disney doesn't realize this, then they'll slide right back into this pit every time they try to escape. And if it is true, well - they'd better hope that they can somehow find fixes that work.
If you look at the Star Wars sequels, what male character can boys look up to? Can any of them be considered heroes? Look at Indiana Jones. They wheel him out, make him useless and is replaced by a woman. Marvel is the same. Robert Downey Junior retires, and they replace Iron Man with a sassy black lady.
In modern media, white men cannot be the hero, cannot do anything heroic. This fundamentally is why these boy brands are dying. They take these properties and then the only thing the creatives want to do is tear down the characters that people like.
Boys don't enjoy literature/films with female protagonists, while girls are okay with media with male protagonists. This has been demonstrated in numerous studies:
A 2022 analysis based on PIRLS data found that elementary school boys were significantly less interested in texts with female protagonists—even when the text was otherwise identical—while girls showed consistent interest regardless of protagonist gender - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959475222001013
A 2008 British study of about 4,000 children aged 4–16 found that only 5% of boys preferred books with a girl protagonist, while 22% of girls were comfortable with male protagonists. Boys were as interested in protagonists like robots or monsters as other boys, suggesting the issue isn't solely the female gender but perhaps relatable content or format - https://lisamartinbooks.com/articles/2016/11/26/where-the-boys-are
A long-standing pattern noted by children's literature professionals is the belief that “girls will read books with boy heroes, whereas boys won’t read books with girl heroes” - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/06/gender-imbalance-children-s-literature
It would be interesting to know why this is. My intuition is that, if I picked up a mass-market piece of adventure literature with a girl protagonist, there would be a greatly increased likelihood of there being some point in the story where the dramatic arc is sabotaged in the way that is so typical of female-protagonist stories - like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth, or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him, or whatever. I would find this disappointing and anticlimactic, especially in literature of a tier so low that I have no expectation of the victory-by-leveraging-wonderfulness-of-women being written in a remotely interesting way. Could a similar line of expectations dissuade other prospective male readers?
Indeed, it doesn't seem like boys avoid e.g. the Metroid series of video games; even if the protagonist is revealed to be female, the genre guarantees that Samus will still only defeat the final boss by getting gud. I also do not get the sense that the fandom of wildbow's Worm (whose female protagonist does not get treated well by the universe at all) leans female.
Worm was written by a man, and it shows. So was Practical Guide to Evil. It shows so hard that you can clock the author's sex just by reading the book, even when they use a totally sexless pseudonym and write an opposite sex protagonist.
A quick check confirms that Samus was created by a man as well.
If you've ever read chicklit, the difference is obvious. A female author of a female protagonist will linger on her interactions with every remotely relationship-appropriate male, to make sure the reader knows how desirable he is, and the flavor of his desire for the main character. Is he a good friend who respectfully hides it? A burning frenemy who offers aid even though he shouldn't? A simp?
As a man, reading that sort of book is alien in a way that few other things in sci-fi or fantasy manage. Like, you really go through life keenly aware that most men you interact with are at least some level of interested in you? Just because? As the default?
There is a male version of this, called "glazing", but it takes the form of gratuitous reaction shots to something impressive the male character has just done.
But women can more easily imagine being showered in attention and praise for doing something impressive than men can envision a world where they are loved and wanted just for existing.
Disclaimer: I think that last category might actually exist in anime, but I don't watch enough to know for sure.
It's amusing how online women will complain about "men writing women."
Yet, the archetypal outcome of a male author writing a female protagonist for a male audience is an unrealistically strong and independent badass female protagonist, like Samus or Lara Croft.
The archetypal outcome of a female author writing a female protagonist for a female audience is a realistically passive, hypoagentic female protagonist, like Bella from Twilight or Anastasia from 50 Shades of Grey.
It's also annoying because women aren't exactly better at writing men. I've seen some truly awful caricatures of what women think men are like (mainly from books my wife reads, and then asks me "is this accurate"). Yet the "men writing women" complainers act like this is a uniquely male offense. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps don't want to understand) that it's simply hard to get in the head of the opposite sex.
I swear you gotta find chinese cultivation literature written by women for women. The guys there are the angstiest most memory addled (literally necessary every female cultivation novels male protag gets hit by pans/trucks/magic/curses every 5 minutes) wangstfests ever. The men will have an all consuming inciting incident that traumatized them and they will have no plan of action (or a ridiculous 2 million step rube goldberg plan nothing in between) that cannot be resolved unless the female acts as the motivating force for them to move forward. After that its just endless emotional traumas and memory wipes to torture the protag and the male love interests repeatedly so the denouement of love declarations can be made over and over and over again.
Any idea on what's the source of mind wipe obsession?
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sm61Fau9w7k?si=z-rOmvg1_LzKWMBF
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There are so many layers of doublethink about it, but like many other bits of feminist media criticism, "men writing women" complaints are fundamentally horror at the thought that a man might ever have sexual thoughts about a woman without permission (both her permission and the permission of You, The Female Observer). Any realism concerns are a fig leaf. All of this is trivially revealed, say, when women make a "men writing women" complaint and are then embarrassed to discover that the writer was a woman writing for women about her real nigh-universal woman experiences which they already knew they shared when making the complaint.
Closely related: women policing "unrealistically" attractive female characters as a crude disguise for envy that they're prettier than them.
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Mate, in the last Culture War thread we had someone on here commenting about that immigrant case saying that sure, it's totes normal for an adult man to want to bang a 15 year old girl (because men are wired to be attracted to youth and fertility). Women do learn early that simply having boobs and a pulse gets you male attention in the "I'd hit that" sense. Not that they're interested in you as a person, that's where the fantasy wish-fulfilment comes in.
I'm not saying it isn't true, or at least very common. I'm saying that as a man who is usually invisible, it's not something I can easily relate to.
Yeah, it's tough for men. But for women, it's not attention as "here you are as a person", it's "here's boobs on legs". Visibility, sure, but might as well be invisibility. Some women work that angle, but when you're fourteen and growing into womanly features this kind of "every male from fourteen to forty is looking at my tits" is not the boon it might appear.
I wasn't thinking about it in a sort of "grass is greener" sense (I really am quite happy being invisible!) It strikes me more as a people vs things dichotomy. Like, the detailed flourishes of the attention are the draw of the work, for women readers, where as it's just not for male readers. And that isn't to say that women don't appreciate some plot, or men some interpersonal character moments. But I observe a sort of fascination from one or the other that serves as a fairly reliable tell.
And I would bet that for women authors, delivering satisfying amounts of good attentions, and satisfying comeuppances for bad attention is possibly the most important skill in their craft.
I'm the worst potential audience in the world for "romantasy" (and believe me, Tonstant Weader Fwowed up when I learned this neologism) so I can't speak for the mass audience of women readers of such stuff.
But I think it's more about soft porn (as per the devolution of the Anita Blake series) than romantic attention, as having two or more supernatural beings lusting after your PI/Wiccan/half-Fae heroine means you can stuff in the adult scenes that publishers crave for page-turning appeal; you can describe the ravaging by the werewolf tech executive founder of the billion-dollar startup on pages sixteen to twenty, then go for the seduction by the vampire biker gang leader on pages thirty to thirty four, and maybe throw in some will they-won't they UST between your hard-boiled heroine and her on-again/off-again boyfriend who's a half-demon sorceror running his own rival paranormal detective agency sprinkled all through the novel (volume six of the fifteen - and growing! - volume Susie Superb, Witch Attorney series, on sale in every good bookstore now!)
See Laurell Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, where she completely lost the plot, as the main focus is "I gotta get pregnant so I need to bang every single hot guy I encounter". All this is for ostensibly magical purposes, so that's why she has to have sex with fairies, humans, every other supernatural being, etc., but that's only the figleaf for "and now here's sexual encounter number fifty-six".
EDIT: I think the main difference between men and women readers of erotica (shall we say) is that the guys will go straight for the Hawt Action without much need for justifying it, but women need a lead in (hence the establishing of the love-hate relationship between Hot Guy Numbers One Through Four and the heroine before they bang, or the Merry Gentry "The Goddess said we have to bang so we can get our old magic powers back. Yeah, it's a divine command, so strip now").
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Why have I never seen this word before this week, and yet like eighteen references in the last few days, each of which is presented in such a way as to help normalize it? Is this a psyop?
I don't think we had a lexical gap here. I don't think a new word is called for, and if it were, I definitely don't think it should be that one. Nothing about this feels organic or warranted.
For me, this was back in April with "crashout." These things come and these things go.
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It's popping up because it is slang and then it got picked up in the tech-sphere (which is highly adjacent to here) as the term of choice for the behavior of LLMs being overly supportive in chats.
It's all over the place right now because of people complaining about LLMs and then a bunch people picking up and using a youth term because "neat new" and "how do you do fellow kids."
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I picked it up from my son, and it really feels like a perfect term to describe the thing in a lot of progression fantasy where the MC does something impressive, and then the focus swaps out to random other characters just to show how jaw-dropped impressed they are at how that was IMPOSSIBLE!
It hits a sweet spot as a specific term for unsightly over-praise.
Please, for the love of dog, actually fucking write this. I NEED to see the Burger Xianxia cinematic universe.
The full copypasta:
Originally from this review of I Shall Seal the Heavens.
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It's a copypasta that's been around for ages.
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I am both dispirited by the increasing influence of Chinese cultivator tropes, and cheered by the reminder that, yes, people are people (and often have bad taste).
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What's this, Snow Crash fan fiction?
Gotta make it present tense for that.
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It's used widely elsewhere in modern zoomer-ish parlance from what I can tell.
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A quick search indicates that this forum saw its first use of "glaze" in this sense 11 months ago.
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It's relatively new, but I've seen it around more than one week. What you observe happens with all buzzwords, including "psyop".
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The last major intended-for-girls cartoon that didn't have this, that being MLP G4, had an absurdly large male following precisely because it lacked this.
The show bible for My Little Pony is on archive.org, and it has some interesting things to say about how they positioned the world. It's also from 2009 so it predates the woke spillover:
This sounds right to me, though the contrast between the corpospeak and the graphic design is certainly pretty jarring. I never watched it (not even when it was big), but there's a richness to the detail of the world and characters. Contrary to modern female character design, every character page has a "bad points" section as long as her "good points" section, and this is probably one of the reasons it had such a strong following in its heyday. Characters' bad points cause conflicts or avoidable problems, creating room for the ponies' good points to shine and resolve them.
The target audience was very carefully designed, and they knew they were targeting boys too (given the bronies of the 2010s, perhaps it worked a little too well). Some cut-down quotes from p65, if you want to read it in detail:
While MLP was a breakout exception, it's an existence proof that the suits used to know how to make girl shows that that boys could watch. But all we have now are the corpses of old franchises going to resyk to be turned into slop. Why haven't we seen other major media cater to girls-but-also-boys in this way, instead of the torrent of flawless mean-spirited girlbosses that we did get?
An important distinction here: "modern female character design" does still produce characters with lots of bad points, but not on purpose.
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Because someone mentioned it above: the flawless mean-spirited girlboss is a religious thing, and most show writers are, if not necessarily that religious, encouraged in that direction by the suits. Problem is, of course, that because their religion is a religion of hatred, people need to have some other motivation to watch it.
The best example of a Western show post-MLP (or at least, post-Lauren Faust-directed MLP) to not be outwardly religious in this way is Gravity Falls. I don't think Alex Hirsch is particularly religious in that way (or at least, he isn't in a way that negatively impacts his work, though there are also signs that he understands what I'm about to talk about below).
Oh yeah, about that. The boys that persist in watching it are also [at least sometimes, if not most times] doing it for that reason, just like they were with Sailor Moon back in the '90s (and is part of why the post-woke MLP [G5, the 3D era one] designs look significantly less attractive, like dogs), and is why slice of life anime with all-female casts tend to have significant male followings.
(What that reason is... is more complicated; smarter men than I have tried and failed so I'd have to think about it more. I'd say 'moe' as a first pass, but that's not any less dense.)
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Young boys also enjoy Bluey.
I hate everything, but I like Bluey.
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Evolutionarily speaking, a woman's worth is largely dependent on immutable physical characteristics (modulo things like plastic surgery), so these sorts of stories tend to psychologically resonate with women. They don't have to go wrest their value from the external world like men do.
I once asked my mother why so many Hallmark movies copy the "It's a Wonderful Life" plot where a woman makes a life-altering wish, gets transported to another timeline, and then realizes she doesn't like it and has to find a way back. She responded, "oh, the movie is telling you that actually everything is great for you already, and you're just too stupid to realize it!"
That one strikes me as perfectly reasonable and not necessarily anticlimactic...
"worth is largely dependant on immutable physical characteristics" is true evolutionarily speaking about all forms of life
Well sure from a deterministic perspective this is trivially true, but the sense we are using it is that a woman doesn't have to do anything in order to be wifed up and have a decent lower-middle-class family life except excercise judgement over which specific suitors she ought to choose. In this frame, far from being slop, Twilight is actually the core female struggle heightened by supernatural fantasy elements.
@self_made_human's recent posts about the pretty-but-dim model from this week's thread are a sad counterexample. You might get no shortage of men wanting to sleep with you, but it was the social technology of enforced monogamy that made them commit. Identifying who will stick is a prerequisite to choosing a suitor, and seems like a much harder question.
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Consider the number who become obese, refuse to socialize, or are just unpleasant and offputting, there's clearly a 'something' she has to do.
Unpleasant and offputting to some extent = "picked no suitor, which is by definition not the correct suitor".
I think my limit on "significantly loses attractiveness due to weight" is about BMI 35 or so (100kg/220lb at 168cm/5'6''), which is significantly into the "obese" range.
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She just has to avoid failing; she wins by default. It's completely different from a man, who can be nice, safe, reliable, and still end up completely overlooked.
There is a reason Fluttershy is the most popular of the mane six. Butterscotch would have ended up FA.
Since when? If we accept the sheer number of works involving a character as a proxy for popularity, and look at Twibooru, Fluttershy is in third place (nearly tied with Pinkie Pie, at 295K and 291K respectively), far behind Twilight Sparkle (1st, at 410K) and Rainbow Dash (2nd, at 318K).
Rather humorously, the same dynamic is true for Worst Pony Applejack (227K), behind Rarity at 247K.
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The default for secular western women is an obese woman too unpleasant to hook the men she does manage to attract, but that's ok because she has no way of knowing if she can trust him anyways.
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So, you take a work of fiction with a male main character. It falls into the "Men want to be him, women want to be with him" tropes and everyone is happy. You try to do the same thing with women? You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her or you create a woman men want, but women don't want to be her.
Speak for yourself, I want a woman who can knock me unconscious.
Sam Hyde has some advice about this.
And that would be…?
(I mean, this is totally vague — you don't even have a link — how is it not "low effort"?)
Here you go. Timestamped!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=P6mdWmP-v58&t=705
Thank you; that does indeed clarify what was previously too vague.
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Sometimes jokes can’t be explained without ruining the joke and therefore are “low effort” but jokes should be the exception
Is a quote that's very rarely actually true but likes to be paraded by people who simply made a bad joke and they aren't willing to own up to it.
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A true man of culture, I see.
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Male audiences might not want modern Hollywood female lead character because Hollywood writers often insinuate the woman of the show doesn't want them in her life.
I firmly believe there is a good number of strong female characters that western/American male audiences have been fans of. Even in the action-centric genres, Ahsoka from the the Star Wars Clone Wars tv show, Katara from Avatar, and Vi from Arcane, Gwen Stacey from the newer Spiderman are all examples of very well received female characters. These aren't solely male fantasy waifu audiences either, and had strong female fandom components as well. They run a gauntlet from girly-feminine to tomboy, unabashedly straight to gay, supporting characters to show leads, and so on.
But they all also have very clearly dear personal relationships with men in their life- and not even necessarily romance fantasy waifu stuff either. Ahsoka is the apprentice for (secretly married) Anakin Skywalker, and it's a mentor-mentee relationship with no sort of romantic tension between them. Katara was the center of one of the larger (fan-insisted) love triangles of its time on television, but she's also a sister who simultaneously gives sass and cares for her brother and is almost defined by her consistently demonstrates compassion for strangers female and male alike. Vi is punk-butch aesthetic and unambiguous lesbian, but one of her closest relationships- and deepest regrets- is regarding her surrogate father-figure Vander, and her regret at getting him and her adopted brothers killed. Gwen may be in a tragic/doomed romance trope with Spiderman-Morales, but the emotional crescendo of character conflict/character arc in the second movie is her reconciliation with her father.
None of these characters are defined by their romantic relationship with the main man of their narrative. However, they also all have close and personal relationships with the men in their lives, the sort of thing that they worry/anger/fear over and would fight for. They wouldn't fight beside / for the men in their life merely because 'it is the right thing to do,' but because it's personal and they care and if someone threatened to take the men they cared about away from them, it would be visceral.
By contrast, what sort of personal male relationship does Brie Larson's Captain Marvel treasure enough to fight for? In the Star Wars sequel trilogy, what is Rey's emotional connection with Finn, her co-lead and the series larger self-projection male role? In Rings of Power, who is Galadriel's male emotional connection... besides the awkward love interest of the Dark Lord himself?
These aren't characters who show any particular desire / want / interest with an emotional relationship, romantic or otherewise, with the men in the setting who might serve as an audience proxy. Captain Marvel is stoic and most personal relationship is an abusive one she destroys the moment she girlbosses harder. Rey is... hard to place, since she's somewhere between oblivious / stuck in a fated romance / the trilogy was a thematic mess. Galadriel's indifference towards her own subordinates spawned sociopathic comparisons in her first episodes.
But note that all three of these characters have romantic love interests! It's forced / non-central / etc., but the nominal titulation is there if that was all that it took to get male investment. Captain Marvel got ship-teased with War Machine. Rey and Kylo Ren are having sexy abb scenes in the second movie. Galadriel and Sauron are the bad boy trash.
But I doubt much of the male audience could see themselves having a warm or interesting conversation over dinner, let alone something more. Polite discussion at best, maybe, if not barely restrained impatience / apathy. Oh, sure, they'd Do the Right Thing and save you if you were in danger, but only with the same emotional intensity as stranger #XYZ.
Compare that to a character who might not be a lover, but who might love you as a brother, or a mentor, or a friend... how many Strong Female Characters would extend even that?
How can you write such list and omit The two strong women in western action movie canon: Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor? Zero girlbossing, 100% believable authority, Significant Relationship Stuff, all while exhibiting classic female traits. I’ve never heard a single guy say anything bad about either character.
What made them such great and believably strong characters is that they were strong women instead of being "strong" teenage girl romantic fantasy protagonists. A show vs tell difference. Anyone who's seen a mother on the warpath for their children knows they can be really fucking scary. That's the energy channeled by Ellen Ripley at the end of Aliens and Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. That's what made them both so believable for teenage boys because which teenage boy doesn't know a mother (their own or some friend's) whose wrong side you really don't want to end up on?
It really is a shame both movie franchises ended after only two movies.
Ageism!
Or rather- I wanted to pull from relatively recent characters, while Ripley and Connor were much older (as in, pre-2000s) characters who might be filed under a 'well, writing was better back in the day.' Newer characters with still-younger audiences make a stronger point on current audience-reception dynamics.
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Have you watched Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles?
I was just revisiting it and God, it’s good. They focus a bit more on the motherly side of Sarah and the difficulties she has trying to bring up a son and keep him safe, whilst keeping her every bit as badass. John Connor grows in a very realistic and impressive way over the course of the series, and the new characters are very good too.
No, but perhaps I should. I tend to be awerse to watching series that have (or at least should have) long term plot but were cancelled before resolving it or, worse, started strong but were derailed / ruined before the end (cough Game of thrones cough).
IIRC, Terminator: Sarah Chronicle Chronicles was showing clear signs of being about to be derailed when it was canceled. (That is, they pulled the whole "let's change the setting entirely" thing as a cliffhanger)
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My gut says that it's something very profound and evolutionary. In the ancestral environment, a boy has to earn his place as a man (by hunting, fighting etc) whereas a girl grows into a woman without doing anything per se. It would make sense for boys to seek out male role models for that reason.
Also a boy's hero journey might be more interesting to a girl than vice versa because women have higher levels of cognitive empathy or perhaps it resonates with women in an evolutionary "selecting a winner" kind of way.
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