the zero-sum game, with red sonja reference
posted by molly under this and that | permalink | | leave a comment | 4 comments
Marie Brennan has a wonderful post up at SF Novelist entitled Emasculation Not Required. It’sĀ about gender in media, and how, unfortunately, in many male/female relationships presented in movies, TV, and books, the loss of the archetypal male protagonist who runs roughshod over the plot and gets the useless (but attractive) babe at the end has been replaced not by men and women working together as friends and equals, but instead it has been replaced by shrill women who assert their power over newly useless or dumb males.
This sucks, obviously. Brennan’s point is that this new trope does nothing to level the playing field and does everything to create frustration and annoyance on the part of women and men alike.
To wit: I love Princess Leia from the original Star Wars movies, but I always want her to. . . I dunno. Chill a little. Be the same bad-ass laser-gun-weilding bun-head (hell, be the same space-concubine on a leash) but at the same time, be less terrier-like, please! That said, Leia is infinitely preferable to Queen Backlash or whatever her name was in the new Star Wars movies. Queen Backlash is not, if I recall correctly, shrewish. . . but she also is critically deficient in moxie, so much so that she appears to die of sad, like some sort of weird throwback to Genji Monogatari or something.
We’ll see what happens with the Red Sonja remake in the works. I cannot imagine how that movie could be worse than the original, but I will be majorly disappointed if the new Sonja takes its cues from the original, which I believe was an hour and a half of:
Red Sonja: I don’t need a MAN to help me!
Not-Conan: Yes you do!
(She does)
Here’s hoping!
1:41 pm, 16 February 2010
You know, my fiance’ has recently taken to watching Bones, which is a good example of this. I find the lead male to be emotionally impotent and the other men to be complete wimps. The heroine has absolutely no empathy and is just a mirror image of the original problem. In the end, both genders are made out to be weak and miserable.
1:49 pm, 16 February 2010
Logan, I haven’t seen Bones, but I hear what you’re saying. I wish assertive women didn’t equal “masculine bitch” to TV/movie scriptwriters. Taking the worst (stereotypical) traits of men and women and reversing their positioning is not a move forward.
5:48 pm, 16 February 2010
OMG. Thank you for linking to that article. A thousand times “yes” with the gender inversion not being a sufficient answer. I loved what she had to say about the buddy-movie dynamic; wish more creators thought that way!
Also, I recently attempted to re-watch Red Sonja and it… ah… well, it didn’t exactly live up to the slightly-better-than-mediocre image that lingered in my head from childhood. Completely unlike Beastmaster, of course, which I described to my wife yesterday as a horrible movie for which I will never be able to feel anything other than deepest love.
9:16 pm, 16 February 2010
Red Sonja is the pits. THE WORST. Not-Conan’s shirts alone should be considered a cinematic war-crime (Conan the Bedazzler? NO!), the child/fat man combo is repulsive in every way, and no one should have approved the Sandahl Bergman/Brigitte Nielsen combo of Bad Barbarian-Babe Acting. God! Neilsen should be fined for that mullet, but Bergman in particular should be ashamed of trying to imitate the already-suspect acting of Anita Pallenberg as the Queen of Sogo in Barbarella. Jesus.
I got like 5 minutes into Beastmaster the other night but it wasn’t the right time. I plan on re-watching it soon, though, ever since Jesse just told me the whole tigers-died-because-they-were-dyed-black thing was an urban legend. But I know what you mean about horrid things you love; I feel the same way about, for example, the Ranken-Bass Hobbit/LoTR cartoons, the Tank Girl movie, Sailor Moon (shut UP!), I could go on. <3