[ SECRET POST #2470 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2470 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
[Homestuck, Teen Wolf, Supernatural and Sherlock]


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03.
[Supernatural]


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04.
[Watashi ga motenai no wa dou kangaetemo omaera ga warui]


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05.
[Agents of SHIELD]


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06.
[Sleepy Hollow]


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07.
[Fullmetal Alchemist]


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08.
[World of Warcraft]


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09.
[Pacific Rim]


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10.
[Richard III in "The White Queen"]


















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 044 secrets from Secret Submission Post #353.
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

[fscom]

09. http://oi41.tinypic.com/2r7loi8.jpg
[Pacific Rim]

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah I've always found the whole bechdel test to be stupid.

[likeadeuce]

Or, you could actually look at both of them being conversation starters that measure different things. Not a pass/fail but something to pay attention to.

I'm not sure what the 'broader public' is here, either. People who watch movies?

[(Anonymous)]

I think a lot of people overestimate or misunderstand the importance of the Bechdel Test. I mean, if I like a movie or show, it is much more likely to have passed the test than not, but it isn't the end all, be all of measuring movie/TV quality.

Primarily, imo, it serves as a really useful tool to demonstrate how often stuff *doesn't* pass in general. That is, even if individual movies like Pacific Rim and individual characters like Mako Mori can be fucking amazing without passing it, the BT is still useful in showing us that as a *trend* a lot of stuff still doesn't, and that's troubling.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd like to use this test to try and apply to my own stories. Though the Bechedel test could also be used in conjunction with it.

[helenadax]

But why can't we have both? It's interesting to know if movies reflect the fact that women usually have female friends, sisters, mothers... and we talk between us about lots of things.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know, neither test could be an end-all "is this movie feminist" or not. I think the Bechedel test is just supposed to show "feminine presence". But it would really depend on the movie. Personally, in most movies I don't see a reason why there can't be two named female characters who talk to each other about not-boys. Just one female character seems like it could easily fall into "token woman" field.

[(Anonymous)]

THIS.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, both have their place. The Bechdel test is about pointing a very broad trend with female characters than it is about female characters being good characters.

[(Anonymous)]

In its original context the Bechdel test was a conversation between two lesbian characters and Alison Bechdel NEVER said it was the standard for a good movie or even a feminist movie.

In the original the character said "Yeah the last movie I saw was Alien because two women talk about the monster." or soemthing like that. Then it kind of mutated but yeah, it was just a joke in a comic strip.

[ninety6tears]

The Bechdel Test makes a significant statement when you look at the broader number of what films do and don't pass, but it's not so good as a measuring stick for any individual story.

The Mako Mori test thing irritates me only because Mako Mori barely passes the test herself and the whole thing does reek of "We don't want to admit that Pacific Rim wasn't perfect." I didn't feel like they actually gave her as much of her own story as they could have. Like it's great that she's there and she's not a stereotyped WOC but no, I expected more after all the flailing that was going around. (And the movie had a very low percentage of females even as extras, it was just all-around almost the same old sausage party to me.)

[littlestbirds]

How about we use both of these to teach people to notice how female characters are handled in scripts instead of pretending EITHER ONE makes a movie unambiguously feminist or sexist??? I don't see why one has to be better than the other. They each draw attention to different things. The fact that people fight about this baffles me to no end.

[(Anonymous)]

the bechdel test is a BASELINE. like everyone who is anti-bechdel is acting like it's supposed to be the way to tell if a movie is feminist or not and it's not. it's literally just "i will only give a movie (book, etc) a shot if it meets this standard." then AFTER that you determine whether it's good or feminist or whatever. they could work together. apply the bechdel test, and of those that pass, apply the mako mori test.

[(Anonymous)]

The Mako Mori test is imperfect as well, as it can be passed by a film in which only one woman exists. Because it is imperfect, you are wrong and it should be thrown away.

(The Bechdel test's main purpose is not to be used as a metric for declaring individual movies 'feminist' or 'unfeminist', it's an observation that men have such a stranglehold on cinema that basic aspects of female reality like talking to our friends and sisters and mothers about, y'know, whatever is an incredibly rare event even in films where there IS a second woman with whom a conversation can be held. But go ahead, keep missing the point. Keep acting like martial arts high-kicks make up for a lack of representation on the whole.)

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it would be particular hard for films to pass both, but the idea of the Bechdel test is just to point out a trending inequality in films not to be the buy all standard for good films or feminist films.

[(Anonymous)]

Mako Mori doesn't even pass the Mako Mori test JFC. I still can't believe the amount of pants-creaming going on over a character that basically spent the whole movie being told what to do by Heroic Manly Men who seemed to know what was best for her better than herself. She was even literally KNOCKED OUT of the big climactic finale, how much more fucking passive and disposable can you get?

Also, the Bechdel Test is useful at its most basic level, if nothing else because if having TWO women on a work of fiction is HARD for you (as a writer/director/person in charge)? You bet your ass you should be side-eyed because THAT SHOULDN'T BE SO FUCKING HARD.

[antialiasis.livejournal.com]

As others have pointed out above me, the Bechdel test is completely meaningless as a metric for judging individual movies because that's not what it's for - it's an easy-to-define bog-simple standard that's a nice way to illustrate in an unambiguous way the stark disparity in gender representation over a large sample of movies. It's for analyzing trends, not individual films. It's actually really good at making a point about trends, but whether an individual film passes or fails the Bechdel test has virtually nothing to do with how feminist it is.

I like the Mako Mori test in principle, but defining it is a lot muddier (what counts as "getting her own narrative arc"?) so it's less suitable for this kind of broad trend analysis (it would be interesting to see the results if someone tried to do that, though). And its origin kind of irritates me - I saw Pacific Rim after seeing the Mako Mori test discussed and was expecting her to be amazing, but as far as I could tell she didn't have a narrative arc so much as a generic action hero level of backstory. She had issues, which was nice, but the story didn't exactly follow her efforts to battle her inner demons and overcome them or anything - it was just she's too emotionally involved to be able to pilot a Jaeger because she lived through a kaiju attack, then now she's not, now appreciate our CGI. She had more of an arc than the main dude, and a similar level to your average male action hero, but that's not exactly saying much.

So, well, Mako Mori test meaning the absolute minimal baseline of decent female character development, sure, that's fitting, but she is not the ideal female character should aspire to.

[(Anonymous)]

Considering some of the movies that pass the Bechdel Test, yeah, I don't hold it in terribly high regard either.

[darkmanifest]

Eh, they're both equally flawed, if necessary, baseline tests to me. The Bechdel Test doesn't prevent two women interacting from being shallow and unimportant background characters, while the Mako Mori Test doesn't prevent a whole universe full of men with a variety of relationships with each other from being populated by a single Exceptional Woman who is only an acceptable character because she's "one of the boys".

It's a little better if you combine them, like, say a movie has: A) At least two female characters, B) who interact with each other, C) and each get their own narrative arcs, C) that are not supporting a man's story. But even that has flaws (Fast and Furious 6, of all things, technically passes). So it just goes to show that these kinds of basic tests are not good for determining good character, but rather, demonstrating how fucked up it is that half the entire adult human population has to claw their way into relevance when it comes to the stories we tell.

I've never really liked the The Bechdel Test

[(Anonymous)]

Because context doesn't matter - two women could be talking about their kids, if one of the kids is a boy, FAIL, is all of the kids are girls, PASS.

I want the Hello, Women Make Up Half the World's Population Test (In other words, is there more than one significant female character in the work?).

I want the No, Really, I Actually Do Exist Outside of a Relationship Test (In other words, if a woman is a love interest or potential love interest, is she an actual dimensional character beyond that?)

I want the Actually, It Just Makes an Ass Out of You Test (In other words, do you imply that your assumptions about your female characters only apply to some women, some of the time?)

[sootyowl]

That's why we have the sexy lamp test now.

If a woman can be exchanged with a sexy lamp and the plot doesn't suffer/nothing changes, it fails.

[(Anonymous)]

You're missing the entire point of the Bechdel Test. It's literally just the bare minimum a film could achieve, really, in terms of female representation. Obviously lots of un-feminist films will pass because achieving the bare minimum != good. But the fact that SO many films fail the test is what's startling.

[(Anonymous)]

Mako is hardly the first character to have this though, and considering she's from a fairly shallow movie in terms of story...eh.

[ariakas]

That... isn't and never was what the Bechdel test was supposed to be about. It was supposed to (and does) reveal an overarching trend in media: in spite of being slightly over half of the population, women are vastly outnumbered by men on screen. This isn't realistic, and if it reflects our cultural fantasies, then our cultural fantasies involve erasing the existence of women (unless their lives revolve around men).

The Mako Mori test has a pretty glaring flaw: having one female character and giving her an arc doesn't mean the creator hasn't made her into The Girl (onto which s/he projects all of their beliefs about women, good or bad) or Smurfette (the only woman in the world with anything of importance, while the rest of the cast is chock full of men who pass their own Test). That's still fucking regressive but it would pass the Mako Mori test. Also, it in no way discourages the only woman in the story from being (yet a-fucking-gain, aauauuugggh) the main love interest.

[(Anonymous)]

meh...

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2013/08/28/bechdel-test-bechdel-tests/