[ SECRET POST #6018 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6018 ⌋

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


01.



__________________________________________________



02.



__________________________________________________



03.



__________________________________________________



04.



__________________________________________________



05.



__________________________________________________



06.



__________________________________________________



07.
























Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 16 secrets from Secret Submission Post #860.
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

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Character growth happens to girls. Almost always into wives. I still don't see many childish female characters who don't grow to be a (sometimes playfully) childish wives. The only one I can think of is the recently mentioned and also recently maligned "irrelevant" Legally Blonde.

Luke Skywalker got to do character growth from a childish moisture farmer into a Jedi Knight.

[(Anonymous)]

... he was still a childish Jedi Knight, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Good for him. But there's no well established societal expectation that a moisture farmer is childish and that all moisture farmers become Jedi Knights.

There are LOTS of societies where women were socially and legally considered children, and were expected to be childish, and expected to become wives and mothers.

I'll take a childish female character who isn't childish in the makeup/dresses/buy me things as romance way who then becomes a wife. Give me a childish female character who wants to play with dinosaur toys while flying her space ship. Give me a childish female character who makes funny sound effects while she fights off a bunch of bad guys. Give me a movie about 5 high powered female execs who have been playing tag for 20 years. Give me a childish female Jedi Knight who uses the force for pranks. Love me a female character who loves to dress up in glittery pink to get her law degree.

Men get to have this. Give me it.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

The mention of Tag in the middle of this was great, I’d love a version of that but with 5 high-powered female execs too!

[(Anonymous)]

Okay?

Try Barbara Hambly's books - I still reread the Darwath Trilogy every couple of years. Swordswomen and bishops and a teenage queen about to get a truckload of political theory dumped on her head because most of the government is dead by apocalypse and she needs to step up. (Something I love with Hambly, is she does warrior-women and politicians great, but she also writes very sympathetic 'silly' characters who I want good things for.)

Garth Nix's Abhorsen books - necromancers and magic and women routinely carrying swords. Librarians who carry a safety whistle in case the monsters in the stacks try to eat them (predominantly female).

Digger - graphic novel where the heroine is a wombat who loves a well-dug tunnel.

Pretty much everything by Elizabeth Lynn or Patricia McKillip has solid heroines with a variety of roles in life


Oops, you wanted specifically 'childish' heroines. Try Toshokan Sensou | Library Wars or Last Exile: Silver Wing for kinda... hot-tempered and hasty girls who do military stuff, as things I've watched lately.

(Some of these are a bit old - I just turned my head to read titles off one of my bookshelves.)

Are any of these recs going to make you feel better in yourself?

[(Anonymous)]

Are any of these recs going to make you feel better in yourself?

I was gonna thank you for the recs, but then you had to go do that. Maybe don't be a dick? You don't even know what gender I am.

[(Anonymous)]

Wasn't trying to be a dick. Sorry it came across that way. They're all solid reads.

[(Anonymous)]

Books and specific genres of movies and TV are better with female characters, yes. I don't think any of your recs are comparable to Star Wars or the kinds of shows the OP has a problem with female characters in (which I inferred are mostly cdramas, since those have so many secrets about childish female characters with squeaky voices).

And Abhorsen's main characters are either boring or annoying as fuck.

DA

[(Anonymous)]

And Abhorsen's main characters are either boring or annoying as fuck.

This just feels like moving the goalposts at this point.

[(Anonymous)]

You can't even keep your arguments straight here. Up above you said Men are made childish to give them character growth into Men (TM) and I pointed out that Luke did not, in fact, grow into a man... he became a Jedi Knight, yes, but he was still childish and immature on many levels.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

No one will ever say that a Jedi Knight is not Manly (tm). If he's childish, that's just an approachable man and a loveable rogue. A narrative with a childish woman rarely ever shows her as childish AND competent. When they are, they're usually villains (violent women in lolita style for the titillation of a male audience).

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I think you're bringing a lot of personal bias into how you read characters.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

This seems on target to me. Luke did a lot of growing up in the process of realizing that his "enemy" was telling him the truth, while his mentors had lied to him for their own purposes, and figuring out what the right thing to do was with ultimately no guidance. He's disobedient to a degree that endangered the lives of an entire side of the war - what had been his side - but he commits to negotiating or dying in the process. In a lot of ways, Star Wars was a full throated endorsement of men growing up to be whole human beings: with feelings and vulnerabilities and some ideals that didn't survive life experience, but a whole HELL of a lot more that did. This is childishness being brought forward as an expression of deep humanity, as a direct connection to intuition and imagination and love that doesn't apologize for itself.

And in that, IMO, it's very different from the infantilized, performative "look down on me, but feel affection for me" appeal that's forced on too many female characters.

I have no opinion on whether non-western media is typecasting women into this role, but I've seen a lot more of it than I want to in American canons, and if I never ran into it again, I'm pretty sure I would not miss it one bit.

[(Anonymous)]

This. You get it. Thank you for typing out all that analysis. I did not have the brain power for it last night.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Sometimes girls get married? Sure. Sometimes boys get married. Finding a romantic partner who is into you is a very common plotline. If it's a good story then there's going to be an element of negotiation where both (or more) parties find what they want and need in each other and remain their own selves inside that supportive relationship.

You just. You just seem to have an extremely limited range of things that you actually read/watch, and are trying to say that some tropes are universal. When maybe you should just read more.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Maybe you've been lucky to only see the minority of movies, tv, and books that don't do this to female characters, but I think it more likely that you just haven't noticed it.

References:

https://www.theverdictonline.org/post/the-infantilization-of-women-in-mainstream-media-and-society

https://www.culturereframed.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CultureReframed-SexualizationOfGirlsReport-2019.pdf

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244019881024

[(Anonymous)]

And maybe you should try to read more.

[(Anonymous)]

I read for information and watch for entertainment. If you want to say that reading is inherently a better form of entertainment, and that people who don't read for entertainment are lesser, then I don't want to have a conversation with you anymore.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Sorry, I did phrase that badly.

There is a substantial difference between noticing that there's a bias in how many of X stories can get told, and declaring that All X Is Trash.

And you seem to be skewing to the latter half of the above sentence.

Yeah, I think this conversation is better ended here.

DA

[(Anonymous)]

If the same type of story is told over and over, people are going to get sick of it. That doesn't mean they're all trash, but it's very reasonable to just not want more of the same after a while, and there is also something to be said of it being endemic of mainstream media's fear of originality. No individual story or writer can be blamed for being part of a larger trend, but at the same time the trend itself can and should be examined.

Re: DA

[(Anonymous)]

So much this.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

De-lurking after reading the first link to thank you for them.

And while that one was mostly about the effects of presenting women as immature, this part felt very relevant to the way Han (particularly) treated Leia in Star Wars.

"The subtle hint when men ‘girlify’ women in high power situations is to put across a very simple message: that they do not belong here and nor is their power/status equal to that of their male peers. [...] Men use the word ‘Girl’ and ‘Princess’ to paint powerful women to be ‘powerless’ and ‘childish’ and we see how this is often aimed at women who are perhaps too ‘outspoken’ or ‘ambitious’ for our society."

Interesting how a character who is often criticized for immaturity (Luke) manages to be completely unthreatened by Leia's assertiveness, while Han is extremely easily offended, insecure, and boastful, and still tends to be read as "more mature." When he doesn't seem mature to me at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, that's an interesting perspective.

[(Anonymous)]

Wait, people actually think Han is mature?