fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #1978 ]

[ SECRET POST #1978 ]

⌈ Secret Post #1978 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Friending Meme if people want to add each other on DW!

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10. http://i.imgur.com/Ic8r7.png

That's because male characters are usually far more well-developed. It probably doesn't have to do with their being male.

That's because people write male characters as interesting people, and female characters as boring ones, because they think "female" counts as a character trait. It's not that being male automatically makes a character good.

(Also, I would read the shit out of gender-swapped versions of all those characters in this secret :))

Yes. Because you like the characters already. If you didn't know the characters basis, then there's nothing particularly new about a woman who goes insane because her pretty face got ruined, a woman who is the paragon of goodness and super strong, a doctor whose rough around the edges but a genius at what she does (and she has a good heart), a scientist who gets super-intellect, and loses most interest in social interaction or how the world works, because she's too busy playing with her experiments. There's also not really a shortage of sniveling backstabbers who are inexplicably lieutenants but really only out for themselves.

They're not new 'types', they'd get blasted in an actual show for being the same old things, and that means if people love the female characters this author writes it's because they're writing them in a different way.

But being those "same old types" but *female* IS something new and different, because those types are almost always male.

That's not how sexism operates, bb.

Anything involving Dr. Lazarus is automatically awesome, OP.

Yeah, seconding what anon said above. Several of the most well-loved female characters, such as Ripley from Alien, were originally intended to be men but changed to women after the character had already been developed. Why? Because male characters tend to not only be better-developed, but also developed differently. Few authors think "okay, now I'm going to create a male character" like they do female characters. Instead they're tabula rasa, which makes for a much more exciting starting point. If you start by thinking "so what would this woman be like?" you filter in all kinds of social expectations of womanhood that rarely stack up against what women are actually like in real life. This is why I went through a phase of not finding any female characters I really cared for in most of my fandoms, but being extremely confused because there were so many awesome and incredible women I knew in real life. Where were they in the media I was consuming? Why was it always these same unrealistic, lame archetypes instead?

So by basing them on male characters, you're not only probably fleshing them out better and with fewer biases, but making them more like real life women, too.

+10000000 to everything you are saying. This is my experience as well. And unfortunately it sucks.

Lady Guy and Lady Lobo? I would read the fuck out of that. Even if it's only just characters inspired by them.

It's already been mentioned that badly written women have writers who treat gender as a trait, rather than a factor as to how they themselves,or others will perceive and approach them. I'm not a fan of the movie Salt, but I think it's a good example of your take on writing (lead role was originally written for a dude until Jolie auditioned and was even more qualified for it).

Lobo has been turned into a female canonically on at least one occasion and it was hysterically awesome.

I'm so glad he's a relatively younger character, so hunting for scans or the stories this happens in won't kill me. Can't. Wait ♥

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oftheark - 2012-06-02 23:49 (UTC) - Expand

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darkmanifest - 2012-06-02 23:51 (UTC) - Expand

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oftheark - 2012-06-02 23:53 (UTC) - Expand

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darkmanifest - 2012-06-03 00:00 (UTC) - Expand

I still totally want a series set on Earth-11, where all the characters have been gender-swapped, preferably with the Justice League seen here. And also a Lady Guy. Because hell yes, I need to see that.

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intrigueing.livejournal.com - 2012-06-02 22:59 (UTC) - Expand

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cloud_riven - 2012-06-02 23:37 (UTC) - Expand

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omorka - 2012-06-03 03:48 (UTC) - Expand

Yeah, I don't get how this is a problem. At all. The real problem is that usually mainstream stuff has put way more work into male characters than female ones, and gives them a lot more plot significance. A lot of the characters in your secret are iconic male protagonists, and if you were going to make an iconic female protagonist then an iconic male protagonist doesn't seem like a bad place to start from IMO.

Good. More people should be writing female characters the way that male characters have always been written.

Except, oddly, the only character there who would make an interesting woman (and not in the "how would they be as a woman" sense) is Lazarus. I wouldn't call any other role interesting or somehow different from the general female mold.

So...I'd say it's more to do with your writing style and how you utilize them in the story, and less to do with who you're basing them off of.

Gonna agree that male characters in general receive a lot more development. I have basically stopped reading urban fantasy at this point because I am fucking sick of reading identical characters following the exact same paint-by-numbers formula and ending up with the uber-hot-but-usually-an-asshole dude. Or in YA, the same helpless girl with token strength (usually some ability or another that no one else has but doesn't really exist for anything more than to make her speshul) falling for the stalker guy who is really doing it for her own good! Really!

And in TV/film? Good gods. They're horrible about stereotyping.

(It is not everyone's cuppa, since it's medical drama, but Grey's Anatomy is one of the better shows I'm watching for portrayal of women and a fairly diverse cast. They don't always get everything right, but they get it right more than they get it wrong. I wish more shows had as many awesome women as Grey's does.)

Isn't Grey's created by a woman?

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elialshadowpine - 2012-06-03 03:20 (UTC) - Expand

LOBO!! :D

I got so frustrated with the lack of really rounded female characters when I was a kid, that I started writing my own stuff as a teenager, as an experiment, about a woman who is written as much like male-only tropes as possible. Because she's a woman, it reads SO differently, even though she is deliberately based on male characters. This exercise taught me a lot about my own internalised sexism, as well as society's. (I may come back to developing this story as an adult, not sure, it was a truckload of teenage idfic.)

This is the person who made this secret. I've sort of been doing the opposite of what you did, because it's not something I do on purpose. It was more like "I like Captain America! I'm going to make up a character who is similar to Captain America, except it'll be a woman!" Then I did that over and over, until I realized that very few of my female characters were inspired by other female characters. It made me worry that I might have some internalized misogyny, or something like that.

Anyway, if you ever got around to finishing that story I would totally want to read it. I love it when writers mess around with gendered tropes.

I know I've mentioned it on this comm before, but one of the things my 12th grade English teach did to teach us about gender stereotypes in media sticks with me to this day.

She had us create a cast of characters. Backstories, personality traits, motivations, everything. She didn't tell us why she was doing this. Then, when we were done, she had us switch all of their genders. Those characters whose perception of them drastically changed after the swap were gender stereotypes. Those that didn't were closer to a human universal.

What we noticed was that our perceptions of those characters that were the most realistic, nuanced, and well-developed changed the least. Those that were the shallowest and most one-dimensional changed the most. Gender-swapping a pampered beauty queen to a spoiled male supermodel? Sure, that's different, right? But what about a beauty queen with a drug addicted sister who wants use her money and fame to speak out against addiction, but whose terrible secret - one she can't reveal lest she lose her crown - is that she used to be an addict herself? And has to fight the temptation to relapse daily, which gets harder and harder as she struggles to adapt to her new-found fame and the demands of her schedule? The male model whose career would be on the line suddenly doesn't seem so different. One can blather on about "norms" and "averages" and "biology" endlessly, but at the end of the day, there are women killers-for-hire and male homemakers. A male-/female-anything is "realistic". They exist. It's not those one-note traits, though, that make us human.

There has been a whole lot of discussion on the relative development of characters with regard to gender, and also on use of character, so I'm going to skip that bit, and go straight to...

...is that Ambush Bug?

I would read the hell out of Gal Garner. Again. Hint hint DC.

Oooh. What's female!Starscream like?

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