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Roderick

Feminism

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If you don't like feminism, you're either a man afraid of losing your privileged position in society, or you have glorious misconceptions about what feminism is.

:wtf:

Agreed. Sometimes I wonder when people started thinking that if your a feminist, you don't give a shit about anyone but women.

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Really long, but fascinating look into the history of women participating in war games & RPGs.

 

https://medium.com/@increment/the-first-female-gamers-c784fbe3ff37

 

The author of the piece also wrote an incredible (and incredibly long) book about the history of war gaming. They interviewed him about his book on an episode of Three Moves Ahead.

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Really great look at something that's bugged me for a while: the "sameface syndrome" that every female animated character in the past decade or so seems to suffer from. Also briefly touches on the weird initialization inherent to the de facto "female" design.

 

ew4doqH.jpg

 

 

 

One thing I've actually been considering doing for the last few months is gathering up the character sheets from the entire Bruce Timm era of the DCAU and seeing if anyone besides Amanda Waller, Big Barda, and Red Claw were even identifiable if you just stacked them all and set layers to multiply.

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The worst thing about that syndrome is how blind some character designers to it are, when they're so used to optimising to the default pretty female that they forget there is actually the option to do other designs.

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I immediately thought of Frozen before reading that, no suprise she brings that up.

 

Does anyone have examples of animation/comics etc. with a good variety of female faces? Off the top of my head I would say Satoshi Kon's work has diverse female character designs, Paranoia Agent being a good example with a large cast. Having said that, the designs still don't seem as diverse as those for his male characters.

 

Coraline also comes to mind as a good example. (*Just checked and the female characters all have a bit of that annoying 'tiny nose' design unfortunately)

 

It's hard enough trying to come up with examples of animation with a roughly equal ratio of female/male characters to even compare.

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I listened to that story when Chris shared it on Twitter a few days ago and was so disheartened. It's good that CS departments are actively working to address the issue raised in the episode, but it's still so sad thinking of all the women who were pushed out of CS between 1984-today.

 

It also reminded me of this great essay by Ellen Ullman. (She wrote By Blood, one of the Idle Book club picks, and is a long time computer programmer.) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/opinion/sunday/how-to-be-a-woman-programmer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 

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That reminds me of an article I read yesterday that I unfortunately can't find in my Twitter favorites titled something like "I need horrible female developers". The gist of the piece was that women in the gaming industry are expected to be shining examples of innovative skill and design. Sure, it's good that a Jade Raymond can be a role model for women looking to get into the space, but not every female needs to be her to be valuable. The article quoted this from Nicki Minaj -

 

“When you’re a girl, you have to be everything. You have to be dope at what you do but you have to be super sweet and you have to be sexy and you have to be this, you have to be that, and you have to be nice … it’s like, ‘I can’t be all those things at once. I’m a human being.’ “

 

The writer was equating this same strange cultural demand that we have on women to be everything to how women shouldn't be expected to do everything perfectly well in the gaming industry to be valuable.

 

And for what it's worth, it was not pushing affirmative action ie "You should hire horrible female developers". It was more saying that equality is valuable and even if you have a merit-based hiring practice you'd still have more women in the space than there are now.

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Good lord this thread is not helping my unhealthy habit of opening Far Too Many Tabs.

 

Just recently, however, a new creative team took over the comic and gave Batgirl's outfit a much-needed overhaul..

 

H2Z3Brt.jpg

 

So this was forever pages ago but I was just catching up on the thread and this image was bothering the christ out of me. I finally realised why and was compelled to make this.

 

GlNsLGZ.png

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Yeah, I guess the picture is not well done, but people like it less for its execution than for the fact that it isn't gross anyway...

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Her bat-helmet needs a chinstrap if it isn't going to be an attached cowl.

Also, despite the good intentions here, I wonder how long it will be before somebody ignores or screws up the style guide and shes drawn in a comic with the "X - not spandex" look. Unfortunately, it's probably inevitable.

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That reminds me of an article I read yesterday that I unfortunately can't find in my Twitter favorites titled something like "I need horrible female developers". The gist of the piece was that women in the gaming industry are expected to be shining examples of innovative skill and design. Sure, it's good that a Jade Raymond can be a role model for women looking to get into the space, but not every female needs to be her to be valuable.

 

I was thinking this the other day when I was reading some post or another thanking female developers for their bravery and encouraging more to become role models. I mean I'm sure it was well intentioned but all I could think was "Not every woman has to be a role model, some of them just want to do their part and not butt heads, it's unfair to ask somebody to be a symbol if they aren't comfortable with it." I'm probably overthinking things but yeah, it seems like female ANYTHING in this industry aren't just allowed to be that thing, they also have to be a spokesperson for their gender. Probably another barrier to entry honestly.

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I don't have anything meaningful to add, and this has probably been pointed out by someone far smarter than me somewhere else in the world over 15 years ago, but I just needed to vent.

 

As a kid one of my favourite movies was The Fifth Element, but I had not seen it since I was about 13 years old. Well I decided to watch it again recently and was kind of horrified to be reminded of what it was as an adult.

 

Throughout the movie Mila Jovovich's character is described as this "perfect being", created from a superior race of aliens, the person who will save the world from evil and destruction, so on and so forth. However as a character she does almost nothing for the entire movie. She makes no choices, doesn't affect change on the plot by her actions, and apart from a 2-ish minute fight scene she can't even defend herself without the help of Big Strong White Man Bruce Willis to save her. She is basically a human MacGuffin.

 

So what does the movie actually do to portray her supposed perfection, other than being told so by every character? By men constantly remarking upon how good looking she is and what a perfect example of the female form she is. Nude scenes are played for comedy by men being shocked by how good looking she is. She is instantly the love interest of the main character when they meet, and

the film climaxes with a kiss between them and ends with a sex scene.


 

On top of this there is no single positive female character in the rest of the movie. Women fall into one of two categories of either being a dim-witted object for the desire and servitude of men such as the flight attendants, McDonald's workers and so on. Or they are completely sexless and undesirable such as the butch female military officer or Bruce's nagging mother. The female alien opera singer looks like she might go somewhere interesting, however...

it is soon revealed her only importance is to deliver the plot device and then she is simply killed.


 

Obviously this is nothing special about films and there are worse examples, but I was just kind of embarrassed for having liked this movie so much as a kid while being completely oblivious to the kind of ideas it was portraying.

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I was actually thinking about that movie recently as well.  It was prompted by the discussion of the Baby Got Backstory trope thread.  I don't want to get into detail about it here since the other thread is much more appropriate for it but basically I think the movie is an example of it for a lot of the reasons you mention.

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