[ SECRET POST #2959 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2959 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.














Notes:

Better early than late!

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 044 secrets from Secret Submission Post #423.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[erinptah]

Eh, woman-vs-woman comparisons tend to come with sexist elements that man-vs.-man ones don't. Like, a Sansa vs. Arya fight will turn into "Sansa/Arya is better because femme girls/tomboys are the overall superior way to be female."

Or people will go "why make a Black Widow movie, Carol Danvers is clearly more deserving" -- as if Marvel's female heroes are in direct competition with each other for movie slots, and not in competition with Captain America/Iron Man/Thor/the Hulk/etc, all of whom you should just accept are going to get ten more movies apiece. No matter which one of the guys the fan community thinks would win in a fight.

[masu_trout]

Yeah, I agree with this; I love the sort of friendly-ish 'Character vs. Character' fan showdowns that similar characters seem to get, whether the character being compared are male or female.

It's when it becomes 'I like Character X better than Character Y, and therefore Character Y is worthless/Character Y doesn't deserve screentime/you're wrong for being interested in Character Y that I get frustrated, and that does seem to happen more with female character than male.

(Not that it never happens with male characters, of course, but there seems this perception that female characters are automatically in competition with each other just by existing, even if they're from entirely different genres/networks/mediums/time periods. I think sometimes there's this weird underlying assumption that you can only be invested in so many women at a time, and those comparisons are based on getting you invested in their favorite by tearing down the perceived 'worse options' rather than talking positively about the female characters they like.)

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly, there's always this edge of "if I put down this female character enough, my fave will get a movie instead of her." People don't compare May to Natasha because they want to talk about how interesting it would be to see them meet, or because they want to talk about the parallels in their careers, or because they want to talk about how different their personalities are even though they fill the same niche of terrifyingly competent female SHIELD agent. Nah, they compare them because they want to say that May is a cheap imitation of Natasha, or one of them is far better written, one of them is more impressive because of reasons A B and C, or one of them is more deserving of a solo film/series, etc.

You can compare female characters without subtly pitting them against each other, which is what people mean when they ask others to stop comparing them against each other.

[(Anonymous)]

I prefer May because after all these years, I've still just never warmed up to Scarlett Johansson. There's a lot to be done with the Black Widow, and I just don't feel like I've seen her do it. Kinda how I feel about Halle Berry as Storm, really.

And because I feel bad citing two female actors and no male ones, I should also mention that Chris Hemsworth's Thor never comes to life for me. There's a flatness to him that doesn't really work. Is that just me?

[rhadamantys]

Agree, comparing character between each other is extreme juvenile no mather the gender but comparision between females always are about the things you said. Is funny that the most used arguments to compare female characters is their relationship with the male protagonist or how masculine they are.

[a_potato]

This is pretty much spot-on. When people talk about stopping comparisons between female characters, they're talking about both the tendency to reduce them to/compare them based on feminine stereotypes and the tendency to act as if there can Only Be One. It's as if people think of there only being a certain number of available slots for female characters, and so can't accept when there's more than one female character with a particular characteristic. And, well, that's a problem.

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting. You're implying that we've all internalized the Smurfette Principle on a level we're not even really conscious of. That makes a certain amount of sense, really.