(no subject)

[camwyn]

So I understand there's a meme going around involving impressive female characters in our icon collections. Or something like that. I understand it's in response to a rather unpleasant "HA HA ALL FEMALE CHARACTERS ARE ONE OF THESE CATEGORIES HYUK LOOKIT DA WIMMENZ" type of flowchart. More than that I do not know, and am not sure I want to. I figure I'll just stick up my own contribution to the icon side of the deal here:




... okay, that's not many. I mostly play males, or characters without sex or gender. (Granted, humans who interact with these characters tend to assign them gender and they tend to assign them male gender, but still.)

Comments

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Who are they? I recognize Mulan, but no one else.

Pt. 1

[camwyn]

- Janine Melnitz, the secretary from the Real Ghostbusters. Grouchy, snarky, unwilling to take Dr. Venkman's crap, served as a Ghostbuster in her own right several times. Unfortunately softened and made more 'maternal' and less 'New York Jew' after the first season or so because the executives thought that children might be frightened by her glasses and adults might be frightened by her personality.

- Someone on DeviantArt did a Transformers version of Ecto-1, the car from Ghostbusters. I've played the resultant robot as a character, and I've always played the character as female in personality regardless of what she looks like or the preponderance of male Cybertronians in Transformers in general.

- Okay, this one's my fault. I rp the main character of Half-Life: Opposing Force, a Marine named Adrian Shephard. I created his entire family as part of his background, and eventually the RP wound up coming back to his hometown. This is the face I've given his mother, Kate Shephard, who is currently mayor of a hundred and forty survivors of an alien invasion and conquest of Earth- age up the face by about thirty years to get something a bit more accurate.

and - These are both my version of the main character of Fallout 3, the Lone Wanderer/Vault 101 Dweller. The photo is of a Korean actress named Yoon Eun Hye, because the initial setting of the game is in the vicinity of Arlington, VA, and I wanted someone of an Asian ethnicity who wasn't Chinese or Japanese and apparently there's a good-sized Korean population in the area.

- This is Star Paladin Cross, an NPC from Fallout 3. She's the third highest ranking member of the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood of Steel. Her rank is equivalent to either one of the lower forms of General or higher forms of Colonel. She could probably tie your ankles together behind your ears without breaking a sweat. She came east from post-apocalyptic California more than twenty years ago as part of a mission to recover technology from the ruins of Washington DC; when her superior officer decided that it was more important to protect the people of the Capital Wasteland from the mutant threat than it was to obsessively pursue technology, she agreed and went along with the change in mission. She protected the player character and the player character's father when the PC was only a few days old, and if the PC is of good character when they finally meet her again, she'll ask to fight at the PC's side for the rest of the game.

Pt. 2

[camwyn]

- This is Fawkes, another Fallout 3 NPC. Fawkes is a supermutant. Supermutants were humans who were forcibly exposed to a genetically engineered virus called Forced Evolutionary Virus, which was originally intended as a biowar counter-agent and was later turned into an attempt at a supersoldier program. Most supermutants infected with the strain that created Fawkes are homicidal in the extreme and prone to capturing strong humans for FEV exposure and eating the weak. Fawkes was an exception. After the FEV infection had run its course Fawkes still had sanity and mind left, and refused to participate in the usual supermutant lifestyle. The other mutants locked Fawkes in an isolation room and threw in food from time to time, mostly to have somebody to mock. Fawkes made good use of the computer terminal in the room and essentially memorized absolutely everything in the database the machine had access to, developing something of a Zen philosophy to hold onto sanity and civilization, and chose the name Fawkes in honor of "a man who was willing to die for what he believed". All supermutants of Fawkes' strain are physically asexual- canonically, their FEV strain destroys physical sexual characteristics- but Fawkes' voice actor said that he recorded all of Fawkes' lines with the idea in mind that Fawkes had been a woman before she was exposed to the FEV. I have gone with the voice actor's assumption and treat Fawkes as formerly physically female regardless of what she's got below the belt now.

- This is Arcee, one of the few canonically female Transformers from the 2007 movie universe. Arcee is a scout and a saboteur and is known as a speedster, and in the prequel comics I had access to was part of Bumblebee's unit holding the line against Megatron's forces to convince the Decepticons that the Allspark (source of all life on Cybertron) was in one location as opposed to the real one, thus diverting the Decepticon forces' main strength. Arcee was known for developing a fighter's instinct and will as a result of combat rather than being born with them. She was originally going to have a major role in the first movie but Michael Bay has said he doesn't like the character and didn't know what to do with her, so he put Ironhide in instead. Fuck you, Bay. Not that I don't like Ironhide but you're a jerk regardless.

- This is Alyx Vance, of the Half-Life video games. She appears for the first time in Half-Life 2, rescuing the player character from being assaulted by cops when he's dumped in a city he doesn't know with no tools, weapons, or any kind of clue what's going on. She's the daughter of a scientist the player character was friends with in his job from the first game, and she's equally good with robots, hardware hacking of human and alien technology, and her custom-made sidearm. She will hurt you if you hurt the people she loves and protects.

Re: Pt. 2

[prodigal.livejournal.com]

Didn't know that about Fawkes. Interesting.

Re: Pt. 2

[camwyn]

Yeah. Bethesda has said that they intended Fawkes to be male, and that if you go through the various terminals etc. in Vault 87 all the female subjects listed in the computers died so Fawkes had to have been a man. I tend to go with the characterization of the actor who played the part over the intention of the director or writer, though, so since the voice actor said he worked with the assumption that he was voicing a former woman, that's what I work with.

[derien.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'm not sure how that got turned around - I think the person who originally did that flowchart did it with a feminist intention. Saw it a few days ago, here:
http://jezebel.com/5661155/flowchart-know-your-stereotypical-female-characters

My argument, though, is that every character can probably fit this flowchart and that since there's a LOT of possible "stereotypes" we're still a lot better off than we were a while back. Every new character is in essence creating a new stereotype they can stick in there, somewhere. (On a personal note I don't think Uhura is a very good choice for 'useless,' though. Her role wasn't well explained in the original show, but if you think about it, working with a probably often programming on the fly with the Universal Translator must be difficult and at least slightly important.)

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

*nods* Well, and if you actually read her commentary on it rather than just the flow chart, she states that a number of those stereotypes are fairly positive, really. Likewise, she states that stereotypes and roles are the backbone of most fiction and there are a lot of good characters which still can get classed into one of those roles. It was more about 'If you have no female characters who end up in the strong original character category, then perhaps you should think about that' than 'OMG! These are all bad characters and how could anyone write them!'

I've really been trying to figure out how and why people misinterpreted that flow chart quite so badly.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

I think it's mainly because the flowchart is set up such that however good or bad any of the stereotypes are, if you arrive at any of those endpoints, you have by definition given The Wrong Answers to the initial extra super vague questions that led to the result of Strong Female Character, and that therefore all of the examples used for those stereotype endpoints must not be Strong Female Characters (in the flowchart maker's opinion, at least).

That may not have been the chart maker's intention, but the logic of the flowchart as presented makes that a pretty easy conclusion to make.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[milkshake-b.livejournal.com]

Thank you for articulating this so well--I've been trying to do so myself for days and failing. And I'm not so sure about the maker's intentions; I have seen some profoundly misogynistic stuff come out of Jezebel before.

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

IAWTC.

*would like to agree more eloquently but doesn't really have anything to add*

Also, some of the non-Strong Female Character endpoints have some pretty fuzzy logic connecting the answers to the conclusion, but that pales in comparison.

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

I'm a troper. Fitting any kind of characters into archetypes doesn't bug me unless you try to say that that's all that they are (and the flowchart is pretty ambiguous in this area), or the category you're putting them in is both inaccurate and inherently bad.

This comment has fairly little to do with the specific example of the flowchart; I just wanted to get that in.