I don't think it's a matter of making the women characters better than the male characters, but making them equal. Male characters, I feel, can get away with more stuff than female characters. I actually think we're saying the same thing here, but with different words. A lot of the criticism I'm seeing for female characters that already exist is the same type of actions that male characters have been, as you put it, getting away with for years. It's similar to what S. E. Sinkhorn talks about in this post. It's about YA heroines, but it's the same sentiment: female characters can't just be people. They have to be perfect in a lot of bizarre, carefully constructed ways, or they're written off as "not good enough" by someone.
A perfect example of this is the Evil Dead series; Ash was originally written as a deliberate gender-flip of the Final Girl trope. (That being, everyone else dies, this one character is mostly reactive rather than proactive, and runs away screaming and covered in blood, but survives.) In the first movie, that's pretty much what happens, and he upgrades to Badass over the course of the trilogy.
Mia, in the remake, has a much more interesting and developed backstory, LOADS more work to do acting-wise, and has to face what's essentially a physical embodiment of her own inner demons at the end. And she still got criticized by some superfans for not being enough like Ash. I include myself in that list, and that's partly why I went back and changed my mind on it--I still don't think it's a perfect movie, but changing the main character's gender and giving them more to do was a good decision on the part of the filmmakers.
That's what I'm talking about, the tendency to take female characters that are actually pretty nuanced and interesting, and focus only on their flaws or on how they fail to measure up in some way to existing male characters. I'd like to see a lot less of that overall.
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I actually think we're saying the same thing here, but with different words. A lot of the criticism I'm seeing for female characters that already exist is the same type of actions that male characters have been, as you put it, getting away with for years. It's similar to what S. E. Sinkhorn talks about in this post. It's about YA heroines, but it's the same sentiment: female characters can't just be people. They have to be perfect in a lot of bizarre, carefully constructed ways, or they're written off as "not good enough" by someone.
A perfect example of this is the Evil Dead series; Ash was originally written as a deliberate gender-flip of the Final Girl trope. (That being, everyone else dies, this one character is mostly reactive rather than proactive, and runs away screaming and covered in blood, but survives.) In the first movie, that's pretty much what happens, and he upgrades to Badass over the course of the trilogy.
Mia, in the remake, has a much more interesting and developed backstory, LOADS more work to do acting-wise, and has to face what's essentially a physical embodiment of her own inner demons at the end. And she still got criticized by some superfans for not being enough like Ash. I include myself in that list, and that's partly why I went back and changed my mind on it--I still don't think it's a perfect movie, but changing the main character's gender and giving them more to do was a good decision on the part of the filmmakers.
That's what I'm talking about, the tendency to take female characters that are actually pretty nuanced and interesting, and focus only on their flaws or on how they fail to measure up in some way to existing male characters. I'd like to see a lot less of that overall.