fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2470 ]

[ SECRET POST #2470 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2470 ⌋

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

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[Homestuck, Teen Wolf, Supernatural and Sherlock]

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03.

[Supernatural]

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

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[Agents of SHIELD]

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[Sleepy Hollow]

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[Fullmetal Alchemist]

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[World of Warcraft]

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[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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

"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"

The point is that Mako is Japanese and it's part of her culture to listen to her elders (Japanese fans have been very happy about this detail). "It's not obedience, it's respect", she says it herself. Not rooted in sexism. Also, if you actually watched the film, you'd have noticed that Raleigh also treats Mako extremely respectfully from beginning to end. He doesn't assume things about her, underestimate her or tell her what to do.

The fact that Mako passes out near the end is a little meh, but hey. She still got to be the most interesting character in the whole film.

I did watched the film, actually, hence the above meltdown in my comment. I wouldn't have bothered ranting if I didn't know what I was ranting about.

I will give you the Japanese characterization. I had not thought of it that way and, if that's the case, then that's pretty neat. I still did not like the way Raleigh treated her. There are ways to show a male character being respectful of a female character (I see it a lot in the shows I watch, exhibit A: Sherlock and Joan on Elementary) without patronizing or infantilizing her all the damn time. It's like he didn't think she'd be able to figure out which way was right or left while they were in combat without his help.

DA- How do you figure Raleigh was patronizing towards Mako? I didn't see/get that vibe at all.

AYRT

Two instances I can think of: when Mako shows him to his room and talks about his fighting technique and DARES to criticize him by saying he's unpredictable, he gets all mansplainy and patronizing and goes, "Well, when you're *in combat* you have to make decisions" like she couldn't possibly understand because he's been in combat and she's just some amateur Jaeger fangirl. I concede that most of it struck me because of the actor's delivery, but nevertheless, the dialogue alone gives the same impression.

Also, as I said, every time they were in combat he wouldn't stop giving her orders like she couldn't figure out what to do next without his help (never mind the fact that aren't they supposed to be reading each other's minds? and that her simulator score was supposedly 51/51 so if Raleigh was so impressed he should have acted like she knew what she was doing).

Judging from this thread, clearly YMMV but I really wish there was more discussion of the fucked up aspects of this film in regards to Mako's characterization.

Or maybe Raleigh is an intensely damaged young man and is shown to be defensive as hell to everyone from and he would have said exactly the same thing to ANYONE who criticizes him from Chuck all the way up to Pentecost.

It's nothing to do with Mako being a woman and everything to do with Raleigh being stuck in his own head.

As for the other: Think about it for a moment. If YOU had been given a machine that locked into your head and fought in it for months. Had felt your brother DIE in that machine, and then someone who'd never piloted that machine was in it with you? Would you not try to help them, too? Again, nothing to do with Mako being female and everything to do with the fact that GD is Raleigh's baby. Even if, in the end, Mako knew more about it than he did, thanks to the upgrades.

Very possibly I'm making a mistake by jumping into this when I'm completely and utterly unfamiliar with the fandom, but I'm noticing that you keep responding in this thread with in-universe justifications. These may be perfectly valid points; it's entirely possible that these two characters with their various traits and backgrounds wouldn't conceivably interact any other way... but at the same time, those interactions and personalities were deliberately chosen by someone, and they could just as easily have written them in ways where they would have reacted differently or teamed them up with other characters instead of throwing them together.

The results may be inevitable on the characters' level, but the writers could have taken the narrative in a variety of other directions. There are any number of stories that could have been told here, and they chose this one.

anon the ayrt is rt (if that makes any sense)

YES, EXACTLY. This is what I mean. My problem is that there were SO many different ways for the lone female character with lines in this film to have been handled and for the other male characters to interact with her that would still have made sense within this universe and yet the writer/TPTB/whoever chose to execute it in such a way that it comes across, whether unintentionally or not, really patronizing and downright offensive.

I know you are trying to speak about trends, but I think you're wrong with PR. The only way that relationship could have been handled any way else would be to switch the genders of Mako and Raleigh. If you think that the very act of Del Toro choosing Raleigh as the seasoned pilot was sexist*, then I guess your point can stand. Otherwise I can't see how it does.

*Which, hell, would have made the movie bomb even harder in the States, because that's how Action Movies work, however sad that is. As it is we get two awesome women pilots in the main movie - piloting 50% of the giant robots we see moving - and even more in the non-movie canon comic.

Two women pilots, one of whose lines can be counted with the fingers of one hand and who dies the first time we actually see her in combat. And her watch had been supposed to remain unbreached for six years or somesuch. Again, it would have been really easy to make her a much more prominent character and that alone would have made a huge difference.

The only ones I feel that could have been female would have been the scientists. Either of them. Everyone else is fine by me.

Except, trends or no, thread!OP started off by arguing that Mako herself doesn't pass the Mako Mori test. Which means that, quite frankly, OP him/herself is arguing along specific lines. The fact that Raleigh would have almost certainly treated a male copilot EXACTLY the same way as he treated Mako is pretty damn relevant. IIRC, that is considered one of the other "tests".

The problem is that this characterization between these two characters are part of a broader problem in the film industry. So people are going to be a lot less likely to write it off as just ~character quirks~ and are going to be much more likely to attribute it to yet another example of the type of thing that's been happening in movies since they started making them.

YMMV obviously, but I thought when Mako criticises Raleigh's fighting technique he takes it fairly well. He doesn't deny it or disregard her opinion (or her entitlement to an opinion), he basically cops her criticism and offers an explanation that when he's in the moment he makes split second decisions that he has to live with.

Combat-wise, I don't think he is giving her orders. He's verbalising decisions that they are making in tandem, for the benefit of LOCCENT (back at the Shatterdome) who are listening on the radio. The novelisation makes it clear that pilots are trained to "call" their moves in a way, both to let LOCCENT understand what's going on and also because for inexperienced pilots, it provides a focus point mentally while they're still relatively new are drifting in a combat situation. We hear other pilot teams doing a similar thing - Sasha Kaidonovsky tends to call moves while Aleksis remains silent.

DA

And personally I wouldn't think that someone risking their life for yours (ie giving her his oxygen and knowing he might not survive detonating the jaeger in the void) automatically makes the 'saved' person weak or suddenly not an awesome character.

Had his oxygen run out first and she'd done the same thing, I would have been equally happy with that ending, and I get the impression that she WOULD have done the same thing.

It's not a commentary on Mako being weak so much as on the writing/the perspective of those behind the movie. The fact that they chose to have her pass out instead of having an active role in that final battle shows IMO how important they considered her to be. She and Raleigh could have easily detonated the bomb together and then gotten ejected separately through some other malfunction. Her passing out served NO narrative purpose other than being a plot device for Raleigh to be the one oxygen-deprived so we could have the final scene of her weeping over his presumably dead body. Which was necessary because...?

"Had his oxygen run out first and she'd done the same thing, I would have been equally happy with that ending, and I get the impression that she WOULD have done the same thing."

Then why didn't that happen? It's pointless to say that a hypothetical scenario WOULD have happened if it didn't actually play out onscreen. What the audience saw was yet again another female character stripped of her agency and another Heroic Male Character having to save her. How is that different from 95% of all female characters in action films?

Personally? It probably didn't happen (now whether this is bad writing or not is another story altogether) because I honestly got the impression from the whole set up of the film was that it was about Raleigh learning to stop putting other people at risk to do things, which was why he saved Mako and risked only his own life to detonate the bomb.

I see it less of her being stripped of agency than this story was more about Raleigh's growth than it was about hers.

Again, whether this was how they meant it or not, and whether it was a good or bad decision (like I said, I would have been happy to see it go in the other direction too), you spend more of the film 'with' Raleigh than you do Mako. To me, regardless of whether it was intended to be or not, this film seemed to indicate that it was more about him than it was about her.

Would I loved for it to have been about them equally (or even flipped with Mako being there from the beginning and it being more about her growth and overcoming HER fears and emotions), absolutely.

Unfortunately you (and other commenters) are correct, people still default to a male protagonist because they see men and women as inherently different, when really, barring squishy bits, we're probably more similar than dissimilar.

Until they wake up and smell the coffee though, I don't think there's anything REALLY wrong with being happy that we do get strong female characters, even if they're not in the lead role.

And... that got really tl;dr and probably rambly and non-sensical, sorry. D:

"Until they wake up and smell the coffee though, I don't think there's anything REALLY wrong with being happy that we do get strong female characters, even if they're not in the lead role."

In this we agree, I too have no problem pointing out well-written, complex, respectfully treated female characters even when they are not the protagonists (it's what I do in every work of fiction I consume). We just disagree on whether Mako is such a character. (However, I blame this on the people behind this film rather than on Mako herself.)

"I see it less of her being stripped of agency than this story was more about Raleigh's growth than it was about hers."

And therein lies the problem.

Agreed, it IS a problem. And the movie could have just as easily been flipflopped with the majority of the film being about her growth and not Raleigh's.

I won't deny that I enjoyed the movie though, mostly because hey, stuff blew up and creatures got killed and Mako and Raleigh and pretty much the entire cast was hot (nerdy-Owen-from-Torchwood, woo! though I'm drawing a blank on his actor's name now for some reason...).

Exactly.

But she doesn't pass out near the end? The beginning is when she passes out. The one who's passed out in the finale is Raleigh.

I saw the movie twice and I don't remember where the OP of this thread is coming from.

AYRT

I'm referring to the sequence right before Raleigh detonates the nuclear bomb. Mako is ejected early from the Jaeger because her oxygen runs out, so Raleigh switches it for his. But she still loses consciousness and that is when Raleigh says, "It's OK, I can do this alone." The whole point of the Jaeger system was to have TWO pilots mindmelding or whatever, so the fact that the climactic sequence where they actually vanquish the Kaiju threat for good purposefully removed one of those pilots from the action (and the female one, obviously) left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2470 ]

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Totally DA

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AYRT

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