Lovely Lenten Ladies: Enjol-lass

[tealin]

Inspired by a comment on the last entry – the awesomeness was too much to deny.

When thinking up this series I didn't want just to feminise male characters, and I intend to stick to that for the most part, but this is a good excuse to bring up another topic I'd done some musing on:


Outside my two years in animation school, most of my close friends have been female. I wouldn't say they are many but they are certainly varied, in personality and interests, temperament, tastes, etc. But I almost never see that range of personalities in fiction or onscreen. The range of female characters tends to go from A to, roughly, E. Granted, I tend to befriend my fellow oddballs, and we're definitely not representative of the whole spectrum of the female gender or even the majority of it, so it's understandable we are not so much of a presence in fiction. To be honest, from my perspective, most 'normal' girls (who presumably make up the population of screenwriters' girlfriends) appear pretty much homogenous, but I think that's just because I haven't gotten to know them.

And yet, in stories, you get The Hero, The Funny One, The Jerk, The Nerd ... and The Girl, as if that were a character type. She's there to be the girl. Sometimes she is spunky, sometimes catty, sometimes gentle; she is rarely completely devoid of personality, but her personality falls into a relatively narrow spectrum and is identifiably female.* More often than not she's the love interest of someone in the cast.
*'Tomboy' is a well-defined adjunct to this – the very identity of a tomboy rides entirely on her being a girl but liking to do stereotypically 'boy' things.

It's not that people can't write a range of female characters. On the occasion that a cast is mostly female and more or less in isolation, you can get some quite interesting, distinct, well-rounded characters that cover a wide range of personalities and psyches. This doesn't happen terribly often, but Chicken Run and Monstrous Regiment are excellent examples. However, if Chicken Run had had a more gender-mixed cast, would we have had a Mac or Bunty? I'm not sure we would.

Pixar has garnered a bit of a reputation for lack of female characters. When anyone tries to offer a counter-argument, they inevitably reach for Dory in Finding Nemo – but according to legend Dory was conceived as a male character and only became female when someone heard Ellen Degeneres' short-term-memory schtick and decided she was perfect for the part. Jessie the Cowgirl is also held up as an exemplary Pixar female lead, but she is essentially written as a boy with pigtails. Both of these could be used to further the argument that Pixar doesn't know how to do girls, but I think this could be a gateway into a solution to the problem: When coming up with your cast of characters, create the characters first, then assign them a gender, once their personality is established. Where a person carries their reproductive organs, in our post-feminist world, shouldn't determine who they are, or their role in the story. Each gender does have certain predispositions on average, and sure, lots of people conform to type, but there is such vast grey area between the two poles that you could do practically anything and not stretch the bounds of credulity. People are people; gender is secondary. One of the reasons I love Monstrous Regiment so much is that as the characters 'come out' one by one, they don't change – they are the same person whether they've got socks down their pants or not. (Another thing I love about it is that it's a group of ladies taking charge and being awesome not by following a male pattern of action (as so many 'strong female leads' do) but by doing things their way, which is no less cunning or courageous, does not rely on their allure to the opposite sex, and turns out to be far more successful than the expected strategy would have been. But that's a subject for another day.)

That's my rant for the day – I think I've got it all out now. Anyway yes, female Enjolras, awesome or WAY awesome? I'd watch it.

Comments

[frith]

No replies yet? This an important subject. I must remedy this post haste.

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic:

The Hero -- Applejack
The Funny One -- Pinkie Pie
The Jerk -- Rainbow Dash
The Nerd -- Twilight Sparkle
The Shy One -- Fluttershy
The Girl -- Rarity (Love interest of Spike, the sole man member of the main cast)

The lack of diversity and development in female roles in animation has been a pet peeve of mine for decades, right up there with nitwit sidekicks and songs that don't move the story forward. This is why I love Sunni Gummi, Rain from Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Mrs Johnathan Brisby. They are strong characters with spunk and depth. Lauren Faust's MLP:FIM owns them all.

You might like this correlation of the seven main characters from MLP:FIM with the seven deadly sins, and then again with the seven virtues. The first link also has a side trip to the Green Lantern Corps.

[tealin]

Well, this is that same thing, though – it's a predominantly female society existing in relative isolation, just like Monstrous Regiment and Chicken Run. This seems to be the only environment in which a wide range of complex female characters naturally thrives.