So, I just finished watching Clueless for the millionth time, and Cher is such a great female character. She proves that when a tragedy strikes, female characters don’t have to cry about it, or drink themselves into a stupor, or go on a killing spree. They can head a clothing drive at school or accidentally swerve their Jeeps into unsuspecting cyclists. Man, Clueless is good. Why isn’t Amy Heckerling getting more work?

Watching a character suffer and struggle is often painful and boring – I’m thinking Buffy season 6, which had its moments of dramatic, heart-rending brilliance, but was for the most part unbearably dull. Female characters are forced to suffer and mope long after bad things happen, which is more realistic, but dull to watch. I’m thinking Deb in Dexter, who gets to be awesome for a couple of episodes and then TRAGEDY and we have to watch her act recklessly and cry for the rest of the season. They rarely do that with male characters.

It’s probably a result of gender stereotypes being applied in both directions – men are stoic, women are emotional. It results in a major handicap for female characters, because any time tragedy strikes they have to suffer through a mourning period while their male counterpart returns from the funeral and gets right back to work, or grieves in a way that is interpreted as less “weak” – he drinks himself into oblivion, or goes on a killing spree. Somehow, this is more acceptable than crying. Probably because it’s a lot more fun to watch.

Ellen Ripley rules every marine in the movie, and she’s smarter than the corporate scumbags in the movie. See every scene she has with “corp_scum” :) lol.

Male or female Ripley is one of the best movie characters of all time. Up there with Luke sky-walker, Han Solo, Rocky or Indiana Jones.

I think it would also be interesting to look at the pool of characters EW had to draw from. I would assume the majority of them were men. Would that alter the statistics so that a greater percentage of male characters are unlikable?

And I’m with you on that last paragraph: I think it’s okay to acknowledge that some experiences are experienced differently, and essentially photoshopping boobs onto a character takes something away. But, I think the point is that the character should be written as a character WITHOUT sex. Androgynous? A person should be funny because they’re funny, not because they have a uterus. A person should be tough because they’re tough, not because they have a scrotum. If it’s done well enough, it won’t feel like a female OR male version of an original, it will just feel like an original.

But comedy is a tough cookie, because there are some traits a comedic actor or stand-up artist can play off of that only their sex can. If done right, a woman can make a story about her cycle huh-larry-us, just as how a man can make a story about his morning woody tear-inducingly comedic. But the key there is universality and diversity- one thing can get really old, really fast, so they need to have other stuff under their belt, imo. I suppose the same could be said about tragedy, too- if your only line is the story about the time your dog was hit by a car, you’ll lose your audience pretty fast. That one personal trait can be a PART of the package, but it shouldn’t bloody well be the whole thing.

Circumlocution, I rock at it.

Love Lea Salonga, love lots of things about that film, but struggled with liking a lot of songs in that movie and the depictions of some of the side characters. Just…made me a little uncomfortable. (Mulan)

No one needs to hear my long, involved discussion on the subject of fairytales which I could go on and on about for longer than the 15 I eventually cut my research paper down to. Lots of metaphors, allegories, archetypes floating about…women and speech going back to Eve and reinforcing stereotypes…stepmother as an acceptable way of projecting feelings of hatred onto a parent…stepmother as mother-in-law and a natural circumstance of the time period…evil women, but women with power.

Going off of fenzel’s point, what’s so terrible about these extreme female villains? Aside from the obvious negatives, it made it acceptable at a time when it probably wasn’t going to be to portray these strong women in a position of power (though yeah, they had to be evil). It makes me think of something from this week’s podcast. It may not be perfect, but you’re at least getting the idea out there. And looking at the way people gravitate toward these villains reinforces that for me. You’re getting an audience saying, I like this woman in power…maybe she doesn’t have to be the person we root against the next time we go about this, huh?

Tangled: I’ve been following it for a while and was upset when they replaced Kristin Chenoweth with Mandy Moore, took out the directors that gave us some of our Disney Renaissance films, and the lyricist is the guy who wrote those awful lyrics from The Little Mermaid on broadway. Impressions from the trailer? As a voice actress, Mandy Moore seems to do fine (I’m still worried about the singing…bad memories) but Zachary Levi seems really over-the-top and jarring. I’m hoping that’s all just the trailer. Also, I hope they go more in the direction of Tiana and less in the direction of feisty, spunky, strong female character with Rapunzel (unless they’ve changed her name).

On the subject of adventures: Of course female characters may want to have adventures, too. I just think that writers should avoid making them precisely the same adventures that male characters go on. Yes, they might be placed in the same situations…but they shouldn’t react in exactly the same way. I’m articulating this badly but essentially don’t write something for a man, change the character to a woman and make no changes whatsoever to the story. Especially as a female version of another character, it’s like saying that character has no depth or life of her own aside from being a female version of the original. (Don’t attack me)

… And maybe, by insisting that something is essentially masculine when it isn’t, we shortchange and diminish men as well, by limiting how they might imagine themselves and setting them up as essentially hostile to modernity and social progress when there is no real need to cede that ground either.”

This is awesome. I think I love you. I’m saving this to a text document to relish forever in the hopes that one day society at large will have this epiphany.

@Fenzel: I’m on par with Mlwaski about Ariel, and I thought that about her when I was a wee one, and still felt the same when I watched _The Little Mermaid_ again not too long ago with a seven-year-old girl (with a Disney Princess bedroom): Ariel is her favorite, so I watched with the girl to indulge her a little, and I still thought Ariel was a little prat. Realistic teenager, mind you, but I never liked teenagers much, even when I was one, so there ya go.

But, did you see _The Princess and the Frog_? Tiana is awesome.

Generally: And if we’re talking Disney, here, what about Jesse (from the _Toy Story_ films)? And Mulan?

Disney is a difficult beast to tackle, though, because think about the underlying stories they base their movies with female leads off of: fairy tales, frequently, where the baddies are witches and such (for the most part- _Beauty and the Beast_ immediately springs to mind as an example of a male villain in a movie about a woman, and Belle is another *good* example of a female lead, btw). Notice how in their original, American fairy tale, the bad guy is, indeed, a guy. So I do think they’re trying to break away a little. But it’s a sea WITCH in the Hans Christian Anderson story, it’s a wicked *female* fairy in the original _Sleeping Beauty_, it’s a wicked STEP-MOTHER in the original Cinderella, etc.

I’m curious as to where they’re taking this _Tangled_ though. The first trailer makes it about the “prince” character (and from the looks of it, he’s not even a prince). The only line Rapunzel has is, “Best day EVER!” as she’s swinging around by her hair- although she *does* sort of kick his butt, too. But it felt like the trailer-makers were trying to pull in the boys by having the male depicted as the central character of the movie. And it’s not called _Rapunzel_, after all.

I’d like to throw Kaylee from _Firefly_ in there. I know a lot of people think she’s annoying, but I thought she was realistic- her concerns about, say, being horny, were just as natural in her as they would be in a man. Some said she was just a horny, sex-crazed disgrace to femininity, but I beg to differ, because why is it okay for men to have entire film franchises devoted to their quests for sex (think: pie) and one female character can’t talk about how she hasn’t had some in a long while? This relates to what I was talking about before- a double-standard that shouldn’t be there and is simultaneously reinforced and railed against. It should be just as okay for a woman to want a man in her bed as it is for a man to want a woman in his bed, and audiences demand equality; but unfortunately, when something is portrayed equally, it often gets received poorly. Like what Fenzel was saying, really: characteristics that make one person likable shouldn’t be classified by sex or gender, as masculine of feminine- they should just exist, period, and be acceptable in anybody, regardless of their anatomy, sexual preference, or whatever.

But this isn’t about tossing names out there, so I’ll stop now. But I could think of a number of other females, and they’re mostly from sci-fi shows. (I mean, come *on*, not a single _B5_ character, let alone female, on the entire LIST, EW? REALLY?)

But I *do* need to amend what I said before- I hadn’t looked too carefully at the list before saying “leaving out video game characters” or whatever. I notice now that a bunch got clumped into one, and a few were left alone. It doesn’t change what I said earlier much, because it still seems crazy they’d leave off MARIO, a character that alien races would think is the head figure in a world-wide religion or cult if they observed us, but the list includes Lara Croft and a dude from a game series I’ve only heard of. (Not to say I’m the standard for game popularity in carnate, but