tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57381878151634020432024-03-12T20:39:28.487-07:00Strong Female CharacterAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09881498113230582150noreply@blogger.comBlogger101125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-25133776544807798582014-02-19T22:00:00.000-08:002014-02-20T01:25:56.844-08:00The Hero and The Dream Girl<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-73e43d98-4e8d-447e-feb2-f452f04c2bae" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“Any delusions I once had about me being the protagonist of some predestined epic quest have gone the way of boy bands.” So says the last man on Earth, halfway through an epic quest of which he is certainly the protagonist. What Yorick is doing, however, is confusing the protagonist for the hero, which is what he really wants to be. In his head, he’s a dashing space captain, a barbarian warrior, and a slick noir detective: a hyper-masculine ideal who drives the plot and gets the girl. In reality, he’s surrounded by women who arguably have far better claim to the title of “hero.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There’s Dr. Allison Mann, who solves the main problem of the series by restoring men to the planet. In fact, the climax of the gendercide plot revolves entirely around her and her relationships, while Yorick remains strapped to a hospital bed, unable even to understand most of what’s going on, let alone do anything to stop it. In the pivotal moment, he’s little more than a damsel in distress, rescued one more time by one of two women who have been saving his life for five years. There’s Agent 355, the bodyguard responsible for protecting Yorick, who is again figured in a role usually occupied by a woman. While he struggles with the possibility that he may not be the hero of the story, she busies herself with the actual heroics, all while trying to resist the corrupting influence of the violence that comes with survival in a dystopian world.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And then, of course, there’s the real reason why Yorick can never be the hero in his own story: the position was filled before he was born. </span><span style="background-color: cyan; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Hero Brown</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Like Yorick, his older sister, Hero, is named after an obscure Shakespearean character: Beatrice’s sweet, spineless cousin from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Much Ado About Nothing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. The irony of her brother’s name, which comes from a man who dies </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">before</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> everyone else, instead of after, is echoed in her own. While her namesake swoons in the face of accusations of premarital sex, Hero Brown is introduced having sex in an ambulance while on duty. Still, as Yorick observes, “In a weird way, Hero and I sort of grew into our names. She got a gig as an EMT… I became a worthless joker.” For Hero, the Shakespearean connection, while amusingly ironic, is less relevant than the modern connotation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Hero is Yorick’s most obvious foil. They look incredibly similar, and they both entertain, at one point or another, aspirations of becoming a writer. Most importantly, however, they both embark on a quest; while the brother has the designation of protagonist, it is the sister who goes on the hero’s journey.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">According to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Hero with a Thousand Faces </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">by Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey -- also known as the monomyth -- is the journey taken by the archetypal hero in mythology. This hero is usually male, and Campbell later argued that this was because “all of the great mythologies and much of the mythic story-telling of the world are from the male point of view. When I was writing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Hero with a Thousand Faces</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and wanted to bring female heroes in, I had to go to the fairy tales. These were told by women to children, you know, and you get a different perspective. It was the men who got involved in spinning most of the great myths. The women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories.” There is… a lot to dissect in that comment, but what is most relevant to this analysis is Campbell’s identification of the limited narrative space that exists for heroic women. You don’t have to look much further than the Valentine’s card displays to see the difference between boys, who learn that they can be monsters and pirates and cars and superheroes, and girls, who are told that they can only be fairies and princesses. With her arc, Hero pretty much punches that gender division in the face.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The hero’s journey is split into three parts: Departure, Initiation, and Return, and it begins with the call to adventure. For Hero, that comes just after the plague strikes. She has just watched the man she loves die in her arms when a fellow EMT tells her that they have to help the living. Hero refuses, saying, “No. They can help themselves.” She then spends several months journeying from Boston to Washington, D.C., battling starvation as she treks across a post-apocalyptic landscape in order to find the last of her family. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Along the way, she runs into what Campbell terms “supernatural aid,” in this case the leader of the Amazons. The Amazons are a group of women who said good riddance to the end of mankind and ushered in the new matriarchy by blowing up all the sperm banks. They’re ultra-violent, man-hating straw women the likes of which only Fox News could dream up, though the narrative humanizes them by showing us Hero’s rise through the ranks. She is recruited by the leader, Victoria, when she sees a starving, almost feral Hero slice an Amazon’s face open with a tin can. Victoria rewards her with food for this desperate act and, when Hero tells her she’s looking for her mother, Victoria replies, “And found her you have.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the aptly named flashback issue, “Hero’s Journey,” we learn that Hero is particularly susceptible to the controlling influence of others. Before the plague, she was involved with “this constant parade of losers and… quasi-abusive scumbags” as she searched for the love and validation that she felt was missing from her father. Just when she thought she had found someone who truly appreciated her, a global extinction event took him away. Many fictional women share Hero’s tendency to trade agency for validation; the difference here is that the narrative overtly condemns this trait, instead of glorifying it as is the case in many a YA romance.</span><span style="background-color: cyan; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Accordingly, while Victoria serves as Hero’s mentor, protecting her and teaching her how to survive in the new world, she does so as a corrupting influence. She forces Hero to kill an innocent woman to prove her loyalty, and this murder has a profound psychological effect, triggering Hero’s long battle with psychosis. This could be read as a rather unpleasant version of Campbell’s “crossing of the first threshold” into the world of adventure. The next time we see her, Hero muses aloud that “it is so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">easy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">to kill someone. Easier than doing laundry. It… It even </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">smells</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> like laundry. I’ve done it. Have you done it? Killing, I mean, not laundry. Heh.” The effects of her psychosis only worsen after she witnesses Victoria’s death and kills the person responsible. By this point she is also suicidal, asking Yorick to kill her: “All you have to do is make a fist. The bullet does the hitting for you.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">After this bloody showdown, Hero goes into the “belly of the whale,” otherwise known as the prison at Marrisville. According to Campbell, “this popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation… Instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again.” This is precisely what happens to Hero, who spends her time in prison being deprogrammed. When she emerges, she is ready to continue her journey down the “road of trials.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the point where Hero’s story becomes even more subversive, as she dons the trappings of Hollywood’s masculine heroism. When we see her next, she’s wearing a sort of modern cowboy outfit, complete with hat and six-shooter. Having left the prison some time earlier, she’s on a mission to save Yorick from Agent 355, whom their mother now believes to be a shady character. On her way through Kansas, she questions the owner of a brothel, who assures her that they operate inside the law. “I don’t,” Hero replies, every inch the cool Western lead. When she finally catches up to Yorick, she shoots and shatters a sword, only slightly undermining this feat of sharp shooting by pointing out that she was aiming for the attacker’s face. When he asks her if she plans to kill herself, she states, “I’d rather try to make up for some of the horrors I inflicted on the world before I off myself,” framing her journey as a road to redemption.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This stage of her arc is integral to Hero’s development, representing both her reconciliation with Yorick and her final rejection of Victoria. The former is important for mostly technical reasons; while she’s still perceived as an antagonist, it’s basically impossible to make Hero a hero. The latter is the most difficult trial on a road full of them. Even after her deprogramming, Hero hears Victoria’s voice in her head and sees her in delusions. On these occasions, Victoria urges her to kill Yorick and destroy every chance of restoring men to the planet. However, when she has the perfect opportunity to do just that, she chooses instead to resist. We see her in her own mind, still agonizing over one of the women she killed. Victoria urges her to kill both Yorick and Allison, and when she recites the reasons why the men deserved to die, Hero calmly tells her that she’s heard all of that before. Victoria then resorts to reminding Hero of the sexual abuse she suffered at her grandfather’s hands. Hero assures her that she remembers, but that she has moved on… then she stabs Victoria through the eye with the arrow Hero used to kill Victoria’s murderer. She turns the violence that Victoria instilled in her back on Victoria in order to rid herself of these same violent urges. In this moment, she also vanquishes the last controlling influence in her life, earning the freedom to live on her own terms.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The next stage of her journey along the road of trials begins with a letter that Yorick asks her to deliver to Other Beth, a woman he met on his own journey. When Hero finds her, Beth is heavily pregnant with Yorick’s child; by the end of the issue, Hero offers to take her along with her, telling Beth that she can provide medical help. Although Beth doesn’t let Hero know, it turns out that the letter Yorick sent asked her to be a friend to Hero. As they travel back across the United States, Hero and Other Beth pick up three more companions: Russian secret agent Natalya Zamyatin, astronaut Ciba Weber, and Ciba’s infant son, Vladimir Jr., the first boy born post-gendercide. Despite Natalya’s superior training, it is Hero who leads the group as they make their way across the Atlantic Ocean to return Vlad to his father’s homeland. Her task is incredibly difficult and its success equally impressive; while Yorick can disguise himself as a woman, there’s not much anyone can do to hide two babies whose existence should be impossible.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A hero usually completes his journey with a prize to keep and new knowledge to share when he arrives home, and Hero is no exception. Near the end of the journey, Hero and her friends are holed up in Paris, trying to find Yorick. Frustrated, Hero laments her solitary status: “I watch Beth breastfeed, and it makes my mastectomy scar ache. All I have to show for my life is a fucking sock stuffed in my bra, like I’m fourteen all over again.” She sees their treasures as symbols of accomplishment: motherhood and romantic love, represented respectively by the two children and Natalya’s rifle, named for her late husband. From her perspective, her quest is over and she has nothing to show for it. Natalya rejects this conclusion, telling Hero that she’s gained three friends.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is a powerful idea. While a hero usually has to return with a princess, a golden fleece, a magical elixir, or, in this case, a lost brother, Hero’s reward is female friendship. Admittedly, due to Hero being a supporting character in the larger story, we don’t get to see her nurture these friendships. Still, the narrative’s explicit acknowledgement of the importance of friendship between women -- both in Hero’s relationships and the central bond between Allison and 355 -- is heartening. It’s also interesting, when you consider it as the endpoint of Hero’s arc. She begins as a woman dependent on the approval of men, and she transfers this dependency to Victoria following the gendercide. After her stint in prison, she comes to rely on herself, remaking herself into the very model of the lone cowboy. Finally, she becomes someone on whom other people can rely, who will cross the globe in aid of a friend. As the world begins to rebuild itself, she becomes what she was always meant to be: a Hero in word and deed as well as name.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Between Strong Female Character™ and actual strong female character, due to the fact that she spends most of her time as the hero of the C-plot</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Beth Deville</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Beth Deville is simultaneously the most important and least personally influential woman in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Y: The Last Man</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Finding her is Yorick’s primary goal; unfortunately, this means that she spends a large part of the series literally floating on an island far away from the main plot. Her existence drives the action, but her absence is required to make that happen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Beth’s story is about what happens when a person is turned into a MacGuffin against their will. We are introduced to her through a conversation with Yorick, during which he laments the state of his life and she acts as the perfect supportive girlfriend, albeit one who is halfway around the world. Just as he’s gearing up to propose to her, she interrupts him to say something important; unfortunately, their conversation is cut off, her comment left unspoken and his proposal unanswered. This is how we see their relationship for most of the series: Yorick projecting his feelings and hopes into the silence with Beth unable to respond.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When Yorick decides to go from New York to Australia, he frames his search for Beth as a quest, making her the quest object. He also assumes that she was going to say yes to his proposal, further denying her subjectivity and agency. Later in the series, we learn that many of the things that Yorick appreciated about Beth were reflections of his own interests; they hate the same things and enjoy the same pop culture, and Beth is willing to wear a Hallowe’en costume that caters to Yorick’s fantasies. One of the lessons that he has to learn over the course of the series is that a woman is not his soulmate simply because they like the same media. To my mind, this speaks volumes about the depth of his relationship with Beth. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In light of this, it’s especially troubling that Beth spends most of her panel time as a figment of Yorick’s imagination; she is, quite literally, the girl of his dreams. In these dreams he is invariably the hero, casting himself in a number of Hollywood action roles and forcing his imaginary Beth to portray a host of generic love interests, all of whom are sexy and passive. In these dreams, Beth usually comes to some kind of physical harm and warns Yorick not to look for her. The crucial shift in this pattern occurs when we are given access to Beth’s dreamscape. Her memories and thoughts revolve around Yorick, and the vision culminates in a scene in which Beth turns into a superhero and saves Yorick from a giant capuchin monkey. Despite her central role, she realizes that this is not her dream but Yorick’s, and this connection allows her to realize that he is still alive.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This issue complicates Beth’s role as an object. Taking this new information, she travels to France in her own quest, for which Yorick is the prize. What makes her treatment subversive is the fact that Beth (and the narrative itself) calls attention to it. When she saves dream Yorick, she says, “No. This is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">your </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">dream. I’m… I’m living your dream.” She shows us that Yorick has been projecting his own thoughts and desires onto her, and his dreams now replace her own. In this moment, we understand that what we have seen up to this point is Beth as Yorick sees her, not as she truly is. While he imagines her as a damsel in distress that he has to save, she makes herself the questing knight. The narrative builds on this with its follow-up to that first conversation and the interrupted proposal. After they are reunited, we learn that Beth was going to break up with Yorick during this conversation. Her life was going somewhere while his had hit a wall, and no matter how much she loved him, she wasn’t willing to let him hold her back. As she puts it, “I had a whole world to explore and you… you didn’t.” Seeing that he has undergone some serious personal growth, she is now able to see a future for them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, while Beth does get some opportunity to contest her objectification, the narrative still isn’t terribly interested in her as a person. As soon as she decides to go to Paris, she promptly disappears from the story, not to be seen or heard from for upwards of a year (in both comic and real time). She gets to stick around a little longer after her confession, but most of her panel time is spent as bait intended to lure Yorick into a trap. After this, the last time we see her is in a flashback from the flashforward that comprises the final issue (it makes sense in context). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Around six years after the ending of the penultimate issue, Yorick journeys to the Kalahari to give Hero the late Agent 355’s collapsible baton. He jokes that she’ll “be less likely to shoot [her] eye out with it while [she’s] out here doing [her] whole ‘white woman’s burden’ thing.” Hero protests, saying that it’s the lionesses, and not the native population, who need their help. She waxes poetic about the women’s ability to adapt following the gendercide, and Yorick remarks that she “even sounds like her.” It turns out that the “her” in question is Beth Deville, who ended up as the love interest for the other Brown sibling. The evolution of their romantic relationship occurs entirely off-panel, so it reads as a bizarre twist instead of an organic development. The only explanation is that the hero has to get the girl, even when there’s no build-up whatsoever. It’s an amusing play on a tired trope, but it still posits Beth as a prize to be gifted by the narrative to whomever it sees fit.</span><span style="background-color: cyan; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ultimately, my problem with Beth is that her story doesn’t go far enough. We are told that she’s more than a MacGuffin, but the moment she gains agency and subjectivity, she is removed from the narrative. We get to see her thoughts, but all of these thoughts revolve around Yorick; it’s so bad that the only conversation she recalls having with Hero -- the person she ends up with -- is actually about the other woman’s brother. It’s understandable for reasons of streamlining the narrative, but it leaves Beth woefully underdeveloped. She may not be an object, but she’s also in no way a fully realized character.</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-5993726784619836012014-01-26T15:29:00.000-08:002014-01-26T15:29:30.863-08:00The Self-Made Mann<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid--e2d5856-d0da-a067-65dc-3857767d064a" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the problems with what we call the Strong Female Character™ is their simultaneous ubiquity and rarity; just about every comic, film or television show has to have one, but quite often one seems to be the limit. They’re the Love Interest, the Girl, the token, and the representational weight of one half of the population falls on their invariably slim shoulders. Even those characters that manage to achieve realistic complexity can be crushed under the massive form of the Everywoman.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There is no such problem in the series that I will be discussing for the next several posts: Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Y: The Last Man</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. As suggested by the title, the series tells the story of the last man on Earth. In 2002, a mysterious plague instantaneously wipes out every creature with a Y chromosome, save for one unemployed English major/escape artist and his disobedient capuchin monkey. When the gendercide hits, Yorick is proposing to his girlfriend, Beth, via phone call, and the rest of the series follows his quest to reunite with her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“It figures,” one character observes halfway through the series, “An entire planet of women, and the one guy gets to be the lead.” To Vaughan’s credit, however, while Yorick struggles to stay afloat in a sea of existential angst, the series uses his journey to depict the all-female population’s efforts to ensure the continuation of the species and the establishment of a matriarchal society. Yorick is the last man, but it’s the last women who drive the story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Dr. Allison Mann</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first thing to know about Dr. Mann is that she’s the best of the best. She tenured at Harvard before the age of thirty, and her papers bring other scientists to tears with their perfection. The finest scientific mind in the United States, who “knows more about asexual reproduction than anyone alive,” Dr. Mann is introduced giving birth to her own clone. When Yorick tells her she’s a god, she replies, “Yes. I know.” She’s the kind of person who didn’t need half the population to die to be considered exceptional. Dr. Mann is formally introduced as humanity’s best hope for survival. Yorick, accompanied by his bodyguard, Agent 355, an ultra-competent member of a secret paramilitary organization dating back to the time of George Washington, is sent to find Dr. Mann. She is tasked with finding out and reproducing whatever protected Yorick and Ampersand from the plague as well as mastering the creation of viable human clones. Without her, Yorick is merely an anomaly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, when Yorick and 355 find her, she has given up on cloning, saying, “I just want to do whatever I can to make up for my stupid mistake… so I can kill myself in good conscience.” Joining Yorick’s quest is, initially, a matter of seeking absolution. However, a year and a half later, she reveals that the male fetus she claimed to be carrying was actually female. Now relatively certain that she didn’t cause the plague, she still lacks faith in her own abilities. To her, the baby’s sex matters because “it means I’m a fucking failure!” Her self-described “shoddy science” could easily prevent her from successfully cloning anyone. Compounding the difficulty of her already nearly impossible task is her own self-doubt.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Allison Mann has a complicated relationship to her ego, her identity, and her sense of self. Early in their journey, Yorick makes a comment about “someone like you,” and she immediately gets defensive about her mixed Chinese and Japanese background, even though it turns out that Yorick was talking about something completely unrelated. Later, she speaks English to her Chinese mother, who demands that she switch to one of her parents’ languages. On some level, she wants to sever ties to her own history, to any part of herself that she did not create. This extends to her reluctance to reveal her real name, despite the fact that she admits early on that “Allison Mann” is a fabrication derived from Mann’s Chinese Theater: “something kitsch-y and faux-Asian to insult my father.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The key to understanding Dr. Mann -- AKA Ayuko Matsumori -- lies in her construction of “Allison Mann.” Although she argues that her self-naming was a “dumb teenage rebellion thing,” it’s clearly much more than that. She uses her new identity to separate herself from her father, the man who controlled her life until he disowned her for being a lesbian. It was likely at this time, when they renounced their familial ties, that she became Allison Mann. This is the name that she hopes will go down in history when she gives birth to the first viable human clone, a project that she begins not for the sake of scientific progress, but for bragging rights over her father. She makes a point of detaching herself from her father but, in so doing, strengthens the attachment. Instead of working </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">herself, she works </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">against </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">him. “Allison Mann” is important because it is the name Ayuko Matsumori gave herself, but it is perhaps more important because it is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the name her father gave her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This changes when she sees her father for the last time. It turns out that Dr. Matsumori managed to survive the plague because he (probably) caused it. (The series never confirms the veracity of his story, but there is something to be said for the fact that it explains more than any other theory put forward.) Whereas she began her cloning project to beat him, he started his to remake her, viewing the clones as opportunities to fix the mistakes he made while raising her. He was responsible for the death of her fetus, and he plans to finish sabotaging her work by killing Yorick. This drives Allison to fight back, asserting her identity and her agency: “My name is Doctor Allison Mann, and your hostage is my </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">patient</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.” She claims responsibility for keeping Yorick alive and vows to bring men back to the planet.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Most importantly, however, she finally finds a way to separate herself from her father through the things she has learned on her journey. She accuses him of letting his ego get in the way of his science, and he turns the accusation back on her, asking her how she’s any different. She responds, “Because I learn from my mistakes. I care about people other than myself, and I owe it to them to get this right. I will get it right.” Her accomplishments are no longer driven by hubris and a need to outdo the man who rejected her; instead, she finds confidence in the good she can do for the people who give her love and support. Her self-chosen name no longer reinforces her connection to her father, but severs it. Finally, in a moment loaded with symbolism, one of the Ayuko clones distracts her father and gives Allison the chance to kill him. After he dies, Allison hugs her younger self and tells her that she’s sorry: Dr. Allison Mann embracing Ayuko Matsumori and apologizing for all of the suffering that they have had to endure.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What sets Allison apart from her father also differentiates her from the Dr. Mann who began the journey with Yorick and 355 four years earlier. In the time just before the plague hits, Allison is at her most self-centered, literally growing another version of herself inside of her in order to prove her superiority over the man who disowned her. The gendercide both undermines and strengthens this self-centeredness, at once awakening Allison to the effects her actions have on others and making her believe that her work was powerful enough to kill billions of people. While she originally joins 355 and Yorick as part of a search for redemption, it is the journey itself that helps her to care for others.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Throughout the series, there are a myriad of references to Dr. Mann’s seeming heartlessness. She claims that her father’s death was the only good thing to come out of the gendercide, interrupts Yorick’s romantic musings with mood-killing logic, and destroys a bonding moment between 355 and Yorick with news of the pygmy shrew’s extinction. Yorick considers her to be robotic, thinking of her as the Tin Man, and she hardly dissuades this way of thinking when she says things like, “Love isn’t an ‘emotion,’ it’s an abstract construct mammals assign to a biological imperative they don’t fully understand.” However, the Tin Man is a more apt analogue than even Yorick might realize: the Tin Woodman of the original books gained his metal body due to an enchantment intended to keep him from the girl he loved, and he retained his emotional tenderness despite -- and, bizarrely, because of -- the removal of his heart. Allison suffers betrayal at the hands of the woman she loves and builds herself a metaphorical suit of armour. Having been abandoned by almost everyone she loves, she forsakes interpersonal connections. Despite this, she largely forsakes violence, believes that everyone deserves the chance to be saved, and risks her own life to help people she’ll never meet. Unlike the Tin Man, she doesn’t need a heart made of velvet and sawdust; she simply needs a reminder that hers is still in her chest.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This reminder comes from three sources: Yorick, 355, and Rose. When she clones herself, Allison tells her assistant that they’ll worry about the ethics later. Her friendship with Yorick, born of snarky quips and years spent caring for him both medically and emotionally, helps her to see that there is a person beyond the problem. By the end of their time together, Allison thinks of Yorick not as an experiment but as a friend. In her pivotal moment of self-identification, she includes Yorick: “My name is Doctor Allison Mann, and your hostage is my </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">patient</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.” In so doing, she makes the care of others part of her identity. Her relationship with Agent 355 is somewhat more complicated. In its early stages, the friendship between Allison and 355 seems to be based mostly on mutual respect and, on Allison’s end, an unrequited crush and a lie intended to get 355 to like her. Still, over time they come to rely on each other as a source of honesty and support. Allison encourages 355 to think of her own needs instead of always tending to the needs of others, while 355 helps Allison to emerge from the critical echo chamber of her own mind. The extent of their devotion to each other is evident in their final goodbye: an exchange of “I love you’s” delivered in gibberish. It’s explained in an earlier issue both that they speak gibberish to keep the content of their conversations secret from Yorick, and that they speak it with incredible ease. This is their shared language, and it is used to discuss important things; its use in this exchange speaks to the value they both place on their relationship.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Allison’s romantic relationship with Rose Copen is the series’ most explicit treatment of her trust issues. Rose is an Australian spy, originally posted to a ship carrying both our heroes and a cargo hold full of heroin. She is ordered to cultivate a relationship with Allison in order to keep tabs on Yorick’s movements, but she soon finds herself falling in love with Allison. Allison, for her part, finds herself drawn to Rose despite her protestations about the inherent falseness of love. When Rose inadvertently reveals her orders to Allison, the doctor feels that her distrust of love has been validated, and she plans to dump Rose before Rose can betray her any further. Rose surprises her, however, and goes AWOL in order to pursue her relationship with Allison. By the end of the series, Rose is pregnant with the first clone of Yorick, having stayed with Allison until her death.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We’ve seen this character arc in its simplest form many times: a self-centered workaholic is reformed through the healing power of love. In many of these stories, this reformation involves the character quitting their soulless corporate job and taking up a career in whatever field the creators consider to be good, honest work. In Allison’s case, however, the narrative suggests that opening yourself up to love, both platonic and romantic, can make your work better. This isn’t the kind of nebulous development that takes place in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">; love doesn’t just “thaw a frozen heart.” It causes Allison to take risks, to trust other people, to find value in herself irrespective of her brilliance. It helps her to make scientific advancements for the good of others instead of bragging rights and the attention of a neglectful father. Ultimately, it empowers her to save humanity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is a particularly fascinating aspect of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Y: The Last Man</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">: Yorick may be the lead, but he’s not the hero. I’ll be discussing this in greater depth in the post about Hero Brown, Yorick’s conspicuously named sister, but it’s also highly relevant to any analysis of Dr. Mann. In Allison’s final scene, the last thing Yorick says to her is, “Good luck saving the world, Allison.” She wishes him the same, but it’s made clear in the final issue that she was vastly more successful. Before she died, Dr. Mann cloned females en masse and impregnated Rose with a viable clone of Yorick. Yorick ends up a relic of another world, trying and failing to find meaning in his survival. Yorick wallows in the existential angst of being the last man, while Allison ensures that there will be another.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Actual strong female character</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-41753338985627432292013-12-22T15:02:00.001-08:002013-12-22T15:02:57.915-08:00The No Queen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: In order to keep this post to a manageable length (ha!), I’ve elected not to discuss in detail two of the major issues that emerged in the months leading up to the film’s release: namely, <a href="http://oreides.tumblr.com/post/69580681309/what-did-you-think-about-frozen-after-watching-it" target="_blank">the appropriation of Sami culture for the sake of yet another white princess story</a>, and <a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/frozen-head-of-animation-says-animating-women-is-really-really-difficult-89467.html" target="_blank">the opinion put forward by </a></span><a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/frozen-head-of-animation-says-animating-women-is-really-really-difficult-89467.html" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/frozen-head-of-animation-says-animating-women-is-really-really-difficult-89467.html" target="_blank">’s head of animation that animating multiple women in one film is “really, really difficult.”</a><span style="background-color: white;"></span> I recommend you check out those links and do a quick Google search; the second issue in particular produced some brilliant snark and meta.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My sister and I are very close. We spent our childhood as co-authors of a number of intricately planned playtime scenarios, and our teenage years as sounding boards for each other’s adolescent rants. She is one of my best friends and, accordingly, one of my go-to movie buddies. This is why I invited her along on my second viewing of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, having decided after the first viewing that I needed to know my stuff when I wrote a post fifteen months in the making. She was slightly hesitant, which is understandable, given the fact that I had prefaced almost every comment about the film with “But the real problem with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">is…” However, when we emerged from the darkened theatre, she proclaimed that she enjoyed it. I experienced a brief period of self-doubt. Perhaps I had been too hard on the movie; after all, I’d been preparing to write about it for over a year. Maybe I simply wanted to hate it. It was possible that I had been infected with a Disney-specific case of the “Bah Humbugs.” Or maybe, as I realized later that night, having spent two hours writing out all of the things that bothered me about the film, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">just sucks.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: This is not to say that my sister has terrible taste in films, just the opposite in fact. A couple of days after seeing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, she joined me in critiquing it, and she wanted to add to my analysis her own point that the filmmakers failed to exploit the emotional potential offered by the musical format. She would also like everyone to know that, contrary to Disney's marketing, <i>Frozen </i>is neither the best thing since sliced bread nor the "Greatest Animated Event Since <i>The Lion King</i>.")</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Differing from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Snow Queen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">in everything (including the name) but the inclusion of a queen associated with snow, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">tells the story of the princesses of Arendelle, Anna and Elsa, two sisters who spend their early childhood as the best of friends. While Anna is normal, Elsa has the ability to produce ice and snow with a simple gesture, and, we are told, her power increases with age. When they are eight and five years old, respectively, Elsa accidentally blasts Anna’s head with her powers, and the royal family must seek the help of trolls to heal her. The trolls alter Anna’s memories to remove any knowledge of Elsa’s power, while the king and queen decide to “protect” Elsa by severely limiting her access to other people, including her sister, until she can control her powers. This separation drives the sisters apart, and it takes thirteen years before they have another conversation. During this time, their parents die in a shipwreck, leaving Elsa to become queen. On the day of her coronation, she opens the gates, lets people in to see her, and promptly reveals the force of her still uncontrollable power by sending the kingdom into a potentially eternal winter. It is then up to Anna to find Elsa and convince her to restore summer to Arendelle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Anna</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We begin with Anna, our plucky protagonist. As a child, she’s rather charming: an exuberant kid who clearly adores her sister and her powers, which she encourages Elsa to use when they play. The first misstep in her story occurs with the removal of the ice from her head. The head troll, Grand Pabbie, recommends that “we remove all magic, even memories of magic to be safe. But don’t worry, I’ll leave the fun.” What the film fails to highlight here is the fact that Anna is being brainwashed, having treasured memories altered without her consent ostensibly for her own good. Instead of allowing Anna the opportunity to decide how to respond to her near-death -- by acknowledging that it was an accident and continuing as before, or taking extra precautions to decrease the likelihood of it happening again, or even rejecting Elsa herself for her own protection -- two men in authority remove her agency. But don’t worry, it’s “for the best.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The denial of agency continues to dictate Anna’s story throughout the film. In fact, Anna is so sheltered that she isn’t even allowed to take the risk of being her own character; her resemblance to Rapunzel is the reason why I can’t stop calling </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen Tangled on Ice</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Like Rapunzel, Anna is kept inside one building for most of her life with very little opportunity to develop relationships with anyone outside of her parents and the skeleton staff that the king keeps on after the freezing incident. She’s desperate for human contact, unversed in social etiquette, and used to spending her time in the company of paintings. However, while Rapunzel was the one who did the painting (and the knitting and the guitar playing and the ventriloquy…), as far as I can tell, Anna doesn’t do much of anything. Rapunzel fills her time with a number of activities, while Anna’s hobbies seem to be limited to indoor cycling, dramatic posing with paintings, and begging her sister to spend time with her. Even locked up in a similar situation, Rapunzel displays more character depth than Anna.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Another point in Rapunzel’s favour is the focus of their respective “I want” songs. Rapunzel wants two things: to see the lanterns and to emerge from a long captivity to experience the world. Anna wants the latter, but her main goal is getting “a chance to find true love,” which she envisions as a man, “a beautiful stranger, tall and fair.” Whereas one might imagine that Anna would seek a replacement for the strong familial bond she once shared with her sister, the film depicts her as diving headfirst into dude-wrangling. She commits herself so completely to her task that she is engaged by the end of the night, to a visiting prince she’s known for a matter of hours. While several characters point out the foolishness of agreeing to marry someone with no indication of their personality save for a willingness to sing cheesy duets, it doesn’t really make up for the fact that Anna’s storyline revolves around the hunt for romantic love.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first candidate for primary love interest is Hans, Anna’s princely fiancé. When Anna goes after the fleeing Elsa, she leaves Hans in charge of Arendelle. He immediately starts distributing cloaks and working to keep the population from freezing to death. When he believes that Anna might be hurt, he leads a search party for her. In response to accusations of Anna colluding with a sorceress whose powers may destroy everyone in the country, including the visiting dignitaries, Hans defends Anna’s decision. In addition to the care he shows for Arendelle, he appears genuinely to like and respect Anna. Yet, for reasons of lazy, nonsensical writing, he turns out to be the villain. He reveals that he faked his love and respect for Anna, using her desire for human contact in order to gain access to the throne. After he has been defeated in arguably the least climactic way possible, Anna punishes Hans by accusing him of having a frozen heart and punching him in the face. Keep in mind that this is the man who tried to kill both Anna and her beloved sister in order to steal their kingdom for himself. If the filmmakers wanted us to rejoice in a moment where Anna has gained power over the person who manipulated and belittled her, they should have shown her sending Hans off to prison herself. Instead, a male servant sends him back home to be punished by his brothers while Anna and Elsa get no mention whatsoever. Anna doesn’t defeat the bad guy; all she does is kick him when he’s down while the film practically flashes signs saying “Strong Female Character.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The second candidate is Kristoff, the rugged mountain man who conveniently witnessed the trolls healing Anna thirteen years earlier. He’s rude, socially awkward, and condescending, but you know he’s the real love interest because he’s the one who journeys with her. Unlike Hans, who urges Anna not to sell herself short in their first meeting, Kristoff constantly belittles her. After hearing that she agreed to marry Hans on the day they met, he argues that he can’t trust her judgment. He agrees to accompany her to see Elsa not because he feels a moral imperative to fix a catastrophic situation, but because he won’t get a replacement for his demolished sled if Anna dies. Even the first indications of his fondness for her are condescending. In the scene in which Anna utterly fails to climb a mountain while Kristoff smugly looks on, the screenplay describes his reactions thusly: “Kristoff smiles, getting a kick out of her” and “Kristoff watches after her, digging her fearless pluck.” Add in the “Feisty Pants” nickname and his general inability to respect her personal space or decisions and Kristoff seems like the last person we should want Anna to end up with.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What makes this set-up even more problematic is the fact that both potential love interests follow in the king’s footsteps as men who exercise control over women. In Kristoff’s case, we are made complicit in this process, as the film’s framing encourages us to identify with him. He is introduced before the sisters, he witnesses their life-altering event, and he gets all of the action hero moments in the climax. With Hans, it’s troubling because on some level, it seems like the film is suggesting that he’s a better ruler than either of the two women. After all, he’s the one who takes care of the kingdom when Elsa abandons it and Anna leaves to look for her, neither one ensuring the well-being of their subjects. The fact that his villainous reveal comes so late in the film makes it less believable, so we are largely left with an image of two capable men who should control everything so the girls don’t have to worry their pretty little heads about it. To have Anna end up with either of these men denies her autonomy. While an empowering narrative may have had Anna confront the various violations of her agency, dating back to that initial decision to “keep the fun” and ditch the truth, the one we actually get frames just such a controlling relationship as true love.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As if this weren’t bad enough, even the supporting characters disrespect Anna and her decisions. The trolls initially treat her like livestock, Bulda observing, “Bright eyes. Working nose. Strong teeth. Yes, yes, yes. She’ll do nicely for our Kristoff.” During the song, “Fixer Upper,” the trolls dismiss her “quote ‘engagement’ [as] a flex arrangement” and attempt to wed Anna and Kristoff without their consent. Anna doesn’t get the opportunity to call the trolls out on their violation of her agency; instead, the film avoids giving her even this small shred of control over her own life, having her swoon to avoid presenting a confrontation. This gets even worse when the supporting character in question is Olaf, who informs Anna that Kristoff is in love with her. When she expresses surprise, he says, “Wow, you really don’t know anything about love, do you?” Keep in mind, by this point in the film, Olaf appears to have been alive for about a day and a half. Anna is more clueless than a character who was literally born yesterday. The final indignity is the fact that she actually listens to the talking snowman who was earlier pictured dreaming about suntanning, and therefore begins to consider Kristoff as a viable romantic option and probable true love.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Although the film touts itself as a sister story, Anna’s relationship with Elsa is equally damaging for her character. If we look at the relationship from Anna’s perspective, it’s hardly the example of true love that the film claims it is. For the first five years of her life, Anna had a strong bond with her sister, but that suddenly ended when Elsa was moved to another room and stopped interacting with Anna at all. Because Anna’s memories of the freezing incident were removed, she doesn’t understand why Elsa has suddenly rejected her. Nevertheless, she spends years trying to get Elsa to talk to her, eventually giving up before their parents’ death drives her to try one more time. She begs Elsa to mourn with her and comfort her, but Elsa doesn’t answer, instead leaving Anna alone with her grief. When Anna informs Elsa that she’s started forming new interpersonal connections, Elsa lets her know that they will be returning to their lonely existence and lashes out at Anna with a wall of sharp icicles when Anna objects. When Anna appeals to her to fix the eternal winter, Elsa again uses her powers against Anna, this time piercing her heart with a lethal cold. Yet Anna still sacrifices herself in the name of the love that she has for her sister.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I take issue with the film’s positive portrayal of this scenario. Yes, sisterly love should get more focus in children’s films and yes, it is necessary for Disney to start interrogating its own restrictive definition of true love. However, Anna’s sacrifice for Elsa proves that she hasn’t learned anything from her experiences with Hans and Kristoff. She claims on several occasions that Elsa would never hurt her, but we know that she also thought Hans was a trustworthy person, and she had more interaction with him in one day than she had with her sister in thirteen years. She claims to know her sister, but she has no memory of the aspect of her sister that has dictated Elsa’s development for over a decade. All Anna has are childhood memories and an unconditional love to which she would, if she were a compelling, realistic character, have added some conditions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is ultimately the problem with the relationship on Anna’s end: it’s too perfect. Anna has every right not to trust Elsa, yet she blindly supports her. It’s as if the filmmakers were unwilling to devote more of the film to the sisters’ relationship, so they limited the damage to what they could try to repair in the half an hour or so that actually featured Anna and Elsa’s interactions. The depth of Anna’s sisterly devotion seems to be less an example of true familial love and more a cop-out to allow the film to spend more time developing Anna and Kristoff’s romance. Instead of subverting the heterosexual, romantic true love trope for which Disney is famous, it merely reinforces it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally, we come to the issue of Anna’s status as the protagonist. By all rights, Elsa should be the main character of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Both women are far more reactive than active, but Elsa at least attempts to take charge of her life. Elsa has the history of abuse and, while Anna was certainly neglected, she was not shamed into a ferocious self-loathing. Anna is marked by absence: she lacks memories, powers, knowledge, and agency. While it would have been fascinating to see her work to discover and regain these things, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is obviously more interested in keeping her static. The men in her life -- including that freaking snowman -- make most of her decisions for her. She’s not allowed to have a truly broken relationship with her sister because fixing that relationship would require both of them to grow as people. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The only time that the film respects her decisions is when she sacrifices herself to save Elsa in an act of true love, and it’s difficult to ignore the implications of this moment. Anna temporarily becomes an ice sculpture, the pretty object that the film has subtly been transforming her into from the beginning. She sacrifices herself to save a person who has attempted -- accidentally or not -- to kill her on two occasions, yet the film still rewards her display of love for another person at the expense of the self. It is also always dubious to grant a female character agency only in situations where she is causing her own destruction, whether or not she ends up surviving. In choosing Anna as the protagonist over Elsa, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> privileges passivity over agency and posits an ideal princess who is little more than a bit player in a story that purports to be hers.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Strong Female Character™ </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Elsa</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, Elsa is equally problematic. In both the original story and early drafts of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, the snow queen was the villain. For me, Elsa never entirely made the transition from the bad guy we’re supposed to root against to the good guy we’re supposed to root for, so we’re left with a sort of good guy that we’re just kind of ambivalent about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We meet Elsa on the night that defines the trajectory of her life, when her power transforms from a source of entertainment and enjoyment to a source of fear and shame. While Anna emerges from her near-death experience with no memory of the event, Elsa has it indelibly etched into her mind. After Elsa blasts Anna with her powers, the first thing her father does is blame her, asking “What have you done?” Grand Pabbie, the troll who wanted to preserve Anna’s memories of fun, has no such comfort for the eight-year-old Elsa; instead, he shows her frightening images of her magic causing other people to attack her. He claims that she will need to learn to control it, and that fear will be her enemy. Of course, he says this just after she lost control, and he gives her visual aids that are likely to scare the crap out of her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The king’s method of controlling Anna is removing her knowledge, but in Elsa’s case, he makes her constantly aware of her dangerous difference. He takes her away from her supportive sister and the rest of the population, keeping her locked up in a room where she appears to do little else but stew in her guilt. He encourages her fear of her powers, teaching her a mantra -- “Conceal it. Don’t feel it.” -- designed to make her feel ashamed of this part of herself, even as it ostensibly encourages her to control it. When even these measures fail to neutralize her powers, he gives her gloves as a final piece of insulation from the world. She becomes entirely dependent on him, and he uses this dependence to encourage her self-loathing. While the film tries to gloss over the abuse by proclaiming the good intentions of her parents, the fact remains that Elsa arrives in the story’s present day a pretty broken person.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What is particularly troubling about this sequence is the fact that we learn absolutely nothing else about Elsa. We see how she is controlled, but we do not see how, or even if, she resists. Like Anna, we don’t see her do much of anything; still, even Anna does </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">something</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Literally all Elsa does is freeze things, feel guilty about freezing things, and refuse to touch anything because she’s afraid she’ll freeze it. If she finds consolation in reading, in creating art (ice sculpting, anyone?), or in imagining a normal life surrounded by people, we don’t get to see it. Because the film focuses more on Anna’s experience as collateral damage than on the systematic destruction of Elsa’s self-worth, we are denied the opportunity to identify and empathize with Elsa.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first and only time that we’re encouraged to identify with Elsa is also the only time that she is allowed by the narrative to rejoice in her powers. When she accidentally reveals her magic at the party following her coronation, the guests turn on her. She runs from Arendelle, freezing the water beneath her feet and unknowingly bringing about a Narnia-style total winter. Even in this moment, we are aligned with Anna. However, in Elsa’s next scene, she has made her way into the mountains, where she promptly sets about rejecting the world that rejected her and claiming the mountains as her icy realm.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSFlvxnbgk" target="_blank">"Let It Go"</a> constitutes the majority of Elsa’s character development. In the first part of the song, she repeats her father’s lessons: “Don’t let them in / Don’t let them see / Be the good girl you always have to be. / Conceal / Don’t feel / Don’t let them know.” This time, however, she realizes that “now they know” so she can “let it go.” At the same time, she removes her glove, the symbol of her shame and imprisonment. In the next verse, Elsa claims that “the fears that once controlled [her] can’t get to [her] at all.” Without this fear, she is free to “see what [she] can do / To test the limits and break through.” She further proclaims, “No right, no wrong, no rules for me… I’m free!” As she continues to sing about exploring her own undiscovered potential, she builds a massive castle out of ice. Then she gives herself a makeover, unwinding her hair and transforming her dress. In the final chorus, she triumphantly states that “that perfect girl is gone,” and shuts the audience out of her new home.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">On the first viewing, “Let It Go” seems like an empowering song. It has shades of Idina Menzel’s iconic rendition of “Defying Gravity,” and, like that song, its primary message is “Screw you, I’m awesome.” Unfortunately, what and how she’s singing doesn’t match the visuals. <a href="http://bluandorange.tumblr.com/post/69250857240/im-watching-it-over-and-over-again-so-youll" target="_blank">As Bluandorange argues</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, “This isn’t a pop ballad, this isn’t shitty actress lipsyncing, this is a goddamn proclamation of self-acceptance and fuck all the haters. It isn’t something you sweetly coo to yourself.” Menzel’s performance is big and vibrant, whereas Elsa’s is cute and coy. She looks happy, yes, but not liberated or righteous or exhausted but accomplished. She’s just bland, and the act of raising a castle singlehandedly in the space of a minute becomes less impressive when it seems like she didn’t put any effort into it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first time I saw this sequence, something about the end felt terribly wrong, but I couldn’t quite explain it. Once again, <a href="http://bluandorange.tumblr.com/post/69242804462/green-greens-replied-to-your-post-one-of-the-big" target="_blank">Bluandorange hit the nail on the head</a></span><span style="background-color: cyan; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">: the filmmakers determined that they “can’t have her angry so let’s make her say her ‘fuck yous’ with bedroom eyes.” Every time that Elsa should look overtly emotional, it’s toned down in order to keep her looking attractive. After Elsa’s makeover, she not only wears a dress with a revealing slit up one leg, but walks with a pronounced sway in her hips. She speaks the song’s final line, “The cold never bothered me anyway,” directly to the camera, offering a come hither glance before she disappears into the castle. Most damning, however, is the image-lyric combination that involves Elsa proclaiming for the last time that “that perfect girl is gone” while the camera pans up her leg, revealed by the slit.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Dealing with the difference between the concept of the “good girl” or “perfect girl” and the reality of the actual woman could have provided the framework for Elsa’s development. The “good girl,” a term obviously used by her father many times over the years, is the perfect victim, a girl who submits to male authority, keeps her power hidden and useless, and polices her own actions to keep herself in line even years after her abuser’s death. With this definition of the “good girl” to overcome, Elsa might have emerged as a woman who embraces her power on her own terms. Instead, the “good girl” merely comes to represent one half of the tired, old virgin/whore dichotomy. If Elsa is no longer “good,” she must be “bad,” and that apparently requires her to get in touch with her sexual side. Even “free,” Elsa just swaps one kind of male control for another: her father’s shaming tactics for the objectifying force of the male gaze. The former encourages her to make herself small and insignificant; the latter locates her significance in her value as a sexual object. She is allowed to exercise her power as long as that power makes her attractive. Just once, I’d like to see a female character demonstrate her rejection of societal expectations by conjuring up a hoodie, a pair of jeans, and not a single toss about what others think of her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Although it sails some pretty choppy waters in terms of unfortunate implications, “Let It Go” is ultimately sunk by its own irrelevance to the rest of the film. In another movie, the scene would have served as the first step in Elsa’s journey toward self-acceptance; this one spends the majority of its remaining time punishing Elsa for daring to think that she could have freedom or agency. The very next time we see Elsa, she learns that she has pulled an accidental Jadis and frozen her kingdom, and this knowledge drives her to admit that she can never be free of the negative consequences of her powers. The triumph of “Let It Go” is replaced with despair and panic, and this causes Elsa to lash out at Anna, striking her heart with an icy blast. Her power remains a lethal, uncontrollable force.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Not content with making Elsa relive the worst day of her life by having her nearly kill her sister for the second time, the film prepares more explicit punishment. Her fortress of solitude is invaded by two assassins whom she struggles to fight, despite the fact that she is surrounded by the one element that she can control. Hans prevents her from killing the men by appealing to her need not to be “the monster they fear you are.” At the same time, he redirects an arrow meant for Elsa to the ice chandelier above her head. With the help of yet another controlling man, the symbol of her power -- represented by a part of the castle formed at the height of her creative effort -- is turned against her. The ensuing crash somehow knocks her out, and she awakens chained up in her own dungeon, the gloves replaced by enclosed gauntlets and shackles. Instead of fighting back in order to reclaim her freedom, Elsa seeks release only to save Arendelle from the force of her magic. In her eyes, she is unworthy of freedom for her own sake. She is every bit the monster that they imagine her to be.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So how does one slay such a beast? With love, obviously. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Seriously. This happens.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Elsa, somehow caught in the storm that she herself created, comes face to face with Hans. He tells her that Anna has died, and the storm is halted by the force of her grief. He raises his sword to deliver a blow that she is too distracted to block, and Anna sacrifices herself to save her sister’s life. In order to give Anna an opportunity to save herself, the film denies Elsa her one chance for redemption. Instead of harming Anna, Elsa could save her. Instead of freezing her by accident, she could thaw her deliberately. She could take control of her own power and find in herself the potential for positive magic. Elsa’s story would have received some form of resolution, and Anna’s unwavering faith in Elsa would have been validated. But, alas, this is not that movie. This is the kind of movie where the most important piece of character growth occurs as a result of the character in question overhearing everyone’s favourite half-baked snowman repeating a key phrase. “An act of true love will thaw a frozen heart,” so Elsa uses her love -- presumably for Anna; it’s never explicitly stated -- to restore summer to Arendelle. From this point on, she appears to have full control over her powers, and she only breaks them out to make instant skating rinks for her subjects to enjoy. And everyone lives happily ever after. Maybe. Possibly. Sort of?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The thing about this “happy” ending that we have to think about is who the film considers to be deserving of happiness, and this brings us back to the filmmakers’ choice of protagonist. While I personally dislike the resolution of Anna’s storyline, it’s clear that she gets everything she wants: friends, family, and a romantic true love. We are supposed to want Anna to succeed, so we support her friendship with a snowman whose narrative importance and screen time eclipse those of his creator. We sympathize with her need to spend time with her sister, even though every meeting results in her triggering Elsa because she doesn’t respect Elsa’s boundaries. We even back her choice of romantic partner, no matter how terrible he is for her, simply because she wanted true love and seems to think she has found it in Kristoff. So much of the film is dedicated to making the audience pro-Anna that it forgets to remind us to support Elsa, and the same goes for the ending.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Elsa ostensibly gets what she wants, but it comes at the cost of the freedom she truly desires. On the mountain, she could use her powers unhampered by the fear of hurting other people, restricted only by the limits of her imagination. In Arendelle, she must presumably spend the majority of her time focusing on her love for Anna to keep herself from freezing everything she touches. She can never get angry at Anna, even justifiably, because that emotion might counteract the effects of her love, just as her fear of her own power overwhelmed the love that kept her away from Anna in the first place. As if that weren’t enough, as far as we know, Elsa still doesn’t know how to control her powers; she learns how to thaw her ice after the fact, but there’s no indication that she ever figured out how to prevent the freezing in the first place. Considering the fact that her outbursts seem to be directly tied not only to her emotions, but to her self-worth, it’s unlikely that she’ll be able to control her powers completely until she improves her self-esteem. She needs to learn to love herself, but the film denies her this validation. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">could have told the story of an outsider who comes to embrace the parts of herself that society condemns in an act of self-affirmation; instead, it transforms the outsider into a dangerous Other, a threat to society that can only be neutralized by forcing her to adhere to the status quo.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is why I take issue with a common reading of the film that interprets Elsa’s ice powers as a metaphor for queerness. In this reading, Anna triggering the reveal of her magic would be analogous to her accidentally outing Elsa. The time she spent in her room would be the time spent in the closet, her father’s shaming a kind of conversion therapy, and her self-loathing the effect of internalized homophobia. Anna is the family member who gets painted with the same brush for supporting her sister, but is nevertheless willing to risk her own life to show Elsa that she is worthy of love. Finally, the ending shows that Elsa’s queerness can be not only accepted but valued by the society she was certain would reject her. Spelled out like this, Elsa’s storyline seems like a potential source of empowerment for many a subtext-savvy LGBTQ kid.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What that reading neglects to consider, however, is the overtly negative portrayal of Elsa’s powers. Grand Pabbie doesn’t just tell her that she has to worry about other people’s fear; he tells her that that fear is justified, because her magic is both beautiful and inherently dangerous. Her powers are explicitly lethal, and their primary target is the straight ally, whose approval she must receive before she can return to society. The citizens don’t turn against her simply because she has this queer magic, but because it starts to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">freeze people to death</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Finally, it’s important to note that she is only accepted because her difference provides entertainment for the rest of the population; she’s safe as long as the “normal” people don’t feel threatened by her. Elsa’s story may be similar to the narratives of many LGBTQ people as well as a number of other marginalized groups, including people with disabilities and neuroatypical people. However, in every case, this similarity functions not to normalize these people, but to stigmatize them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I think that the reason why so many people are turning to alternate readings of Elsa’s story is because they know on some level that it isn’t the progressive tale that it claims to be. Compare it to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Brave</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, for instance. Like Elsa, Merida endangers both her kingdom and her family; however, the two differ in narrative treatment. Merida makes all of her own choices, while Elsa causes the central problem basically by existing and having the misfortune of being raised in an abusive household. Merida is rightfully shown to have messed up, but she fixes her mistake and is implied to become a better ruler as a result. Elsa is vilified throughout her film for an inborn trait that she can’t control or change. So, while Merida’s choice was wrong, Elsa herself is wrong. Ultimately, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Brave</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> views women’s power as a very positive thing, and its message is about using power wisely to benefit both one’s kingdom and oneself. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, on the other hand, denigrates and demonizes women’s power at every opportunity, neutralizing its force by limiting its use to the creation of beauty and the demonstration of love. Hence an empowered Merida is figured as a hero, while an empowered Elsa is figured as something just short of a villain.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In many ways, I think that Elsa would be a more positive character, or at least a less insidiously negative one, if she were the film’s villain. Disney has a host of compelling female villains, from the Evil Queen to Maleficent, Ursula to Mother Gothel. Although these women are all eventually defeated, before that happens, every one of them enjoys significant agency and power. These stories arguably vilify women’s power, but at least they show its awesomeness before they strike it down. I mean, it’s difficult to ignore the troubling symbolism of a powerful woman being defeated as a result of impalement on the phallic prow of a ship, but seeing a leviathan of a sea witch make the sea do her bidding is still pretty cool. By contrast, Elsa is only cool in the literal sense, as she has her power undermined from the opening scene.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">’s opening number shows a group of men harvesting ice while singing: “Cut through the heart, cold and clear / Strike for love and strike for fear / See the beauty, sharp and sheer / Split the ice apart / And break the frozen heart.” <a href="http://wingsandtails.tumblr.com/post/69489877593/really-disturbed-by-this-opening-songs-lyrics-and" target="_blank"><span id="goog_1466839492"></span><span id="goog_1466839487"></span>As Wingsandtails points out</a></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_1466839491"><span style="background-color: cyan; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1466839488"></span></a><span id="goog_1466839493"></span>, the song is all about “destroying [the ice’s] natural shape and ‘taming’ it for human consumption” and, while the harvesters claim that the ice is “stronger than a hundred men,” they seem to hack it apart with little trouble. Because Elsa -- and, to a lesser extent, Anna -- is identified with ice, the song seems to foreshadow her disturbing narrative of disempowerment for the sake of fitting in. Even before she enters the story, her power is already being dismantled; instead of building her up, the entire narrative conspires to break her down.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Strong Female Character™ </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Conclusion</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While I was shopping in the Disney store the other day, I overheard a conversation between an employee and a customer who was looking for a toy for a young relative. The employee said, without a hint of irony, “I don’t have the hero right now, just the girl.” Easily the most problematic piece of marketing for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> was a trailer that posited several responses to its own question, “Who will save the day?” The ice guy, the nice guy, the snowman, or no man? These two examples speak volumes about the modern perception of heroism in children’s cinema, particularly in terms of who is denied the label of “hero”.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Because of its (ostensibly) central sister story and its two female (again ostensible) co-leads, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> would like to think of itself as subversive. But subversion isn’t pouring the same mould, colouring inside the same lines, and sticking to the same tropes, until you inexplicably veer off in another direction during the last act. It’s not undermining and demonizing women’s power until you realize that the end of the film is coming up and shove in a single scene showing this woman’s newfound societal acceptance. It’s not hyping the film as a sister story, only to focus on the romance while giving the sisters a few cursory scenes in which all they do is cause each other pain. It’s not making the female protagonist's one act of heroism an act of self-sacrifice while her male love interest gets to perform all the daring stunts. You are not shifting any paradigm when “no man” saves the day; the heroic norm is still being defined as a man, even and especially when it’s “no man.” All you’re doing is re-affirming the status quo, and this is what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">does best.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first time I saw this film, I spent days trying to decide what the “real” problem is. It could be the screentime-stealing antics of the snowman, the awkward villain reveal, or the unequal power balance between the two romantic leads. It could be the glorification of an unhealthy sisterly relationship as true love, or the demonization of women’s power and agency. It could be any of the problems that I’ve discussed in this analysis, or any one of the myriad issues I didn’t touch on. But the real problem with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">is that it made a massive amount of money in its opening weekend, so we’ll be seeing its influence in animated films, Disney and otherwise, for years.</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-28917477702009420302013-12-01T22:30:00.000-08:002013-12-02T00:25:43.201-08:00A Dolly, Bred and Buttered<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now that it’s Hunger Games season again, it’s difficult to go anywhere without seeing Jennifer Lawrence. Her image can be found on buses and T-shirts, and her perfect archery form and eccentric interview style have made her the darling of a massive online fanbase. However, before playing the 74th Hunger Games victor made her famous, her portrayal of another strong female character made people take notice.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Winter’s Bone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, Lawrence plays Ree Dolly, a teenage girl in the Ozarks who is left to care for her younger siblings after her mother descends into a catatonic state and her often absent father disappears. When her father, Jessup, misses a court date, the sheriff informs her that their house and land are forfeit as part of his bail. Desperate to save her home and her family, Ree vows to find her father, alive or dead, and hand him over to the law. Unfortunately, while family is Ree’s greatest motivation, it is also her greatest hindrance and, more often than not, her greatest enemy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The entire first act of the film establishes Ree’s strength of character, showing us the enormity of the challenge she faces in merely keeping things running. Over the first few scenes is overlaid the sound of a woman’s voice singing “Missouri Waltz”; while its mournful singer nostalgically recalls being a child on her mother’s knee, we see the seventeen-year-old Ree acting as a maternal figure for her younger siblings while her own mother is essentially dead to the world. She does the laundry and her mother’s hair, and she makes the meals as well as the decisions to keep or get rid of pets. She has had to grow up too fast, and this is made abundantly clear when she walks Sonny and Ashlee to school. After dropping them off, she wanders the halls, looking in on the classes that she should be taking. In one, the students are receiving dolls to teach them how to take care of children; while they are learning responsibility in practice, Ree is practicing it in reality.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The most poignant moment in this sequence, however, involves Ree looking in on her old JROTC drill team practicing a routine. Here we see just what she’s lost: the future she wanted. We learn over the course of the film that Ree had hoped to join the army, but those dreams were dashed when she took over caring for her siblings. Later, she tries to join up in desperation, hoping to use the money to provide for her family. She is denied, rejected according to a set of age restrictions that deem her a minor even as she acts as a parent.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ultimately, it is poverty that is Ree’s worst enemy and her driving force. She provides for her family using the hunting skills that her father taught her, but it is clear that squirrels can only feed them for so long. Their meager supplies are supplemented by neighbours, but Ree warns her siblings not to rely too heavily on their kindness, as they should “never ask for what ought to be offered.” It turns out that these neighbours are motivated by more than the thought of a friend in need; they want to know how much Ree has told the police. In addition, we later learn that Sonny is the man’s biological son, and their donations appear to be almost a form of child support. The code that these characters live by is not one based on altruism, but of taking care of one’s own.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When Ree learns of her father’s betrayal, she begins to learn just how weak even these loyalties can be. Because Jessup mostly worked with his relatives in the meth-making business, Ree must ask them about his whereabouts, increasingly aware that they may be to blame for his disappearance. Ree promises the bail bondsman that she’s a Dolly, “bred and buttered,” and that is what allows her to realize that her father is not just missing, but dead. This certainty isn’t due to any particular psychic talent common to Dollys, but to the fact that her kinship grants Ree familiarity with their brutal code of honour. Familial ties are sacrificed the moment someone violates this code, and Ree quickly realizes that Jessup stepped out of line. However, to save her home, she herself has to risk committing the same violation that got her father killed. As she learns, “come the neck-cutting, blood don’t really mean shit to the big man.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It turns out that Jessup’s crime was becoming a snitch. He couldn’t handle ten years in prison, so he sacrificed both his standing with the Dollys and the family that he didn’t want to lose for a decade. Much of the other characters’ hostility toward Ree can be traced to their assumption that she will crack as her father did. This complicates Ree’s quest, as she has to get proof for the sheriff, while ensuring that she doesn’t lead the law back to her father’s murderers. Also complicating her quest is her uneasy alliance with her father’s brother, Teardrop. Teardrop initially respects the code, discouraging Ree’s search. As she gets closer to the truth, however, he takes responsibility for her in order to protect her from the others. He aches for vengeance, and the last time we see him, he departs on a suicidal mission to kill Jessup’s killer. The film juxtaposes Ree with these two men, whose respective weaknesses led to their demise. Jessup betrays the family’s secrets, while Ree is able to hold her tongue, even under immense emotional pressure. Teardrop’s need for vengeance is his undoing, but Ree makes a point of not seeking the kind of firm answers that would allow her to punish those responsible. She is willing to keep quiet and move on, and in this way proves herself to be stronger than either of the two men. She may not be a righteous avenger of wrongs, but she is alive at the end of the film.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The code by which all Dollys must abide is not the only governing force in their community; operating alongside these rigid guidelines is an equally rigid, if untraditional, set of gender roles. Because the people Jessup worked with were mostly men, Ree seeks them out to ask her questions. At no time, however, does she speak directly to any of them without first talking to a woman acting as gatekeeper. In this community, it is the women who form the first line of defense against intruders. When Ree refuses to give up the search for her father’s body, the wife of the man in charge of the drug operation, Merab, enlists the help of her sisters in beating her up. Because the violence occurs between women, Teardrop cannot punish Ree’s attackers for their brutality.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, this does not mean that women are safe from men’s violence and control. Teardrop himself physically threatens Ree when he thinks she’s out of line, and he operates within an environment of overt domestic abuse, telling his wife, “I said ‘shut up’ once already with my mouth.” The extent of men’s control over women is evident in the case of Ree’s best friend, Gail, who has to ask her husband to borrow his truck. When he refuses, she tells Ree, “He never says why not to me, Ree, he just says no.” Ree responds that “it’s so sad to hear you say he won’t let you do something, and then you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">don’t </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">do it.” Gail explains that it’s different when you’re married, and that is clearly true. In this community, the formation of close bonds is a double-edged sword: you may gain protection, but you also risk harm at the hands of the person who offers it. At the same time, the protection that women offer men does not necessarily extend to themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Still, in this film, the women are the plot’s movers and shakers. Ree sets out on a quest through a familiar landscape made alien by the other characters’ hostility. Gail provides her with transportation and tends to her wounds after the beating. Merab and her sisters discourage her from her task, but when word of Ree’s mission spreads across the area, they help her in order to avoid further talk about their illicit activities. The men cause the problems, and the women solve them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the things that sets Ree apart from the other female characters is her ability to occupy a kind of liminal gender space. At their first meeting, Merab asks Ree, “Ain’t you got no men to do this?” “No, ma’am, I don’t,” Ree replies. With her father gone, she must take his place in order to look for him. She informs her siblings that Jessup taught her how to shoot, and she inherits this task from him, preparing them for a time when they will help provide food for the family. She also performs the tough physical labour often considered to be men’s work, like chopping wood, and hopes to embark on a typically masculine career path. At the same time, she occupies the traditionally maternal space left vacant by their mother, cooking and doing other domestic chores. Ree’s characterization strikes a near perfect balance between nurturing softness and stalwart toughness, without gendering either aspect of her personality.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Because Ree is such a pillar of strength, some of her most compelling moments occur when she is weak or vulnerable. Throughout the film, we see the toll her situation takes on her, as she soldiers on while admitting on several occasions that she’s reaching the end of her rope. One particularly effective instance involves Ree taking her catatonic mother out into the woods and crying in desperation, “Can you please help me this one time?” That moment reminds us that Ree is still only a teenage girl, taking on responsibilities and challenges that have destroyed the adults in her life. After the beating, Ree can barely move, but she still engages in sarcastic banter from the floor; to Merab’s question of what they’re going to do with her, she says, “Help me. Ain’t nobody’s said that idea yet, have they?”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Her most difficult trial occurs at the climactic moment of the film, when she is arguably at her most vulnerable. The women who beat her show up, claiming to be taking her to her father’s bones, which essentially means that they will be taking a defenseless Ree out to a secret burial location where they could easily kill her and dispose of her body. Still, Ree accompanies them. They take her out onto a swamp in a small boat, stopping by a tree. Then Merab tells Ree to reach in and grab Jessup’s wrist. Finally, she hands her a chainsaw.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is where Ree fails, though it’s hard to count it as a failure. She holds her father’s hand, but she cannot bring herself to cut it off. Merab wields the chainsaw instead. It’s difficult to overstate the visceral horror of this scene. The young woman who has faced every other challenge head-on, no matter the danger or unpleasantness, hesitates at the thought of carving up her father’s corpse. This is the one obstacle that she cannot entirely bring herself to overcome, and it is obviously the most traumatic. Sitting there in the boat, Ree initially sobs, then tries (and utterly fails) to distance herself from the horrific act in which she takes part. Later, when the bail bondsman asks her how she did it, she reiterates that she’s “bred and buttered.” In order to save her siblings, she must maim the body of the man who helped give them life; in order to challenge the brutal actions of her extended family, she must draw on the resilience that they share.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Although the original novel was written by a man, Daniel Woodrell, a fair portion of Ree’s onscreen strength can be attributed to the film’s director and co-screenwriter, Debra Granik. The scenes following the beating, in particular, appear to bear the mark of a woman’s lens. Unlike the majority of Western media, which often fetishizes women’s battered bodies and glamourizes the violence that caused their bruises, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Winter’s Bone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> doesn’t show most of the beating. When it shows Ree afterward, her pose is not sexualized, and the process of tending to her wounds does not include a voyeuristic moment in the shower to wash away the blood. The focus rests firmly on her pain, not the pleasure that a viewer might derive from it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Winter’s Bone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is the portrait of a young woman who is born and bred to survive the harshness of her environment. Still, for all Ree’s claims that it is the Dolly blood that empowers her, the death and corruption of almost every other Dolly suggests that Ree is more than the blood that flows through her veins. She may be “bred and buttered” but she has also adapted, grown, and resisted. In the film’s final scene, Ree tells Sonny and Ashlee that she would be lost without their weight on her back. By that point, it’s hard to imagine anything she couldn’t carry.</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-49718956614163380112013-11-11T20:00:00.000-08:002013-11-11T22:25:47.452-08:00The Roughest, Toughest Cowgirl in the Whole West<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: This is definitely being posted in time for late Hallowe’en parties, as promised. Unfortunately, those parties are being thrown by people who have been stuck in a time loop for the better part of two weeks and are nevertheless determined to celebrate the holiday of sugar, fireworks, and societally sanctioned cosplay.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It took thirteen films and seventeen years for Pixar to make a movie about a female protagonist. Despite a host of notable ladies, for most of the studio’s feature filmmaking history, the real focus has been on the men. Dory is arguably the best part of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finding Nemo</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, but the story is about the father-son bond. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Up </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">gave us Ellie, but took her away a few minutes later to jump-start her husband’s adventure. While Helen and Violet get more focus than a lot of other female characters, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Incredibles</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> reserves most of its screentime for Bob’s mid-life crisis and Dash’s frustration at his forced normality. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, the film franchise that started it all, revolves around Buzz and Woody’s friendship and their bond with Andy. Still, there has been some progress over the years, and that progress can be traced through the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> series and the development of its principal female character, Jessie.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For those who haven’t seen it, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> posits a world in which toys come alive when people aren’t looking. The films revolve around the adventures of a group of toys owned by a boy named Andy, focusing on Woody and Buzz, a sheriff and a space ranger who overcome their initial rivalry to become best friends. In the first film, the accidentally abandoned Buzz and Woody must find their way back to Andy’s house before moving day. In the second, Woody is stolen by a toy vendor intent on selling the complete </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Woody’s Roundup</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> collection to a museum in Tokyo. The third film takes place as Andy prepares to leave for college and his neglected toys decide to donate themselves to a daycare, only to find that they may have been better off gathering dust in the attic. The movies are well-written, well-regarded, and well populated with compelling characters.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The problem is that the vast majority of these characters are men. Even given a world of possibility -- the toys are sentient chunks of plastic, after all -- the writers default to male in just about every case. T-rex? Male. Piggy bank? Male. Telephone? Male. Even baby dolls are gendered male. In fact, in the first film, the only female toy of note is Bo Peep, and she’s basically kept around to be Woody’s love interest. It’s not until </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story 2</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> that the series gives any real focus to a female character.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jessie the yodelling cowgirl is one of the supporting characters on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Woody’s Roundup</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">; based on the short snippets we see of the show, she exists primarily to be saved by Woody and marketed in toy form to little girls. Her toy self is introduced welcoming Woody to the group via attack hug. Jessie is Bo Peep’s polar opposite; while the latter tends to be quiet and passive, Jessie is loud, enthusiastic, and prone to invasions of other people’s personal space. In the context of the show, she’s Woody’s right-hand woman, and they hit it off almost immediately. Unlike the other female characters, Bo Peep and Mrs. Potato Head, Jessie is linked to a male character through the bonds of friendship. Indeed, the film suggests that a set of toys is something like a family.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In completing the set, Woody’s arrival assures that the set will remain together forever, stored in a Japanese toy museum. When Woody balks at this idea, Jessie turns on him; his departure would force her to go back into storage and, as she says, “I won’t go back in the dark!” Over the course of the film, we learn the extent of the trauma that drives her to have panic attacks at the mere thought of being boxed up. In a song that gives us the least compatible voice actor-singing voice match-up since Garrett in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Quest for Camelot</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, Jessie tells Woody about her former owner, a girl named Emily. Emily adored Jessie until adolescence struck and Emily replaced her favourite toy with make-up. Jessie waited years for Emily to play with her but, when Emily finally found her under the bed, she abandoned Jessie by the roadside in a donation box. It’s implied in this film and its sequel that Jessie spends most, if not all, of the time between Emily’s departure and the film’s present moment in storage. Because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Woody’s Roundup </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">aired in the mid-fifties and the donation appears to have occurred in the mid-sixties, Jessie may have spent over thirty years in a box.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As we see in this film and its sequel, trauma of this magnitude tends to make good toys go bad. Stinky Pete’s issues stem from never being purchased and played with -- hence his mint condition packaging -- while Lotso’s reign of terror at Sunnyside has its origins in his accidental abandonment and subsequent replacement. Jessie arguably suffers even more acutely, having not only had the love of a child, but finding herself abandoned by this same child, implicitly figured as the love of Jessie’s life. The fact that Jessie doesn’t make others suffer for her pain speaks to the strength of her character.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jessie finishes her story by observing that “you never forget kids like Emily or Andy, but they forget you.” This drives her to reject Woody’s initial proposal that she and the rest of the set accompany him back to Andy’s house. However, the series’ thesis is that a toy’s life is only worth living if it’s loved by a kid, so Jessie must make a choice: protect herself by going to the museum and never connecting directly to a single kid again, or risk abandonment to enjoy a few years of one child’s love. Ultimately, she chooses the latter, and Andy adds another girl to his toy collection.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> begins as Jessie and the rest of the gang face the prospect of this abandonment. Andy is preparing to leave for college, and he must decide what to do with the childhood toys that he hasn’t played with in years. When the garbage bag he intended to take up to the attic unsurprisingly ends up in the garbage, all the toys (save for Woody, who witnessed the mix-up) believe that Andy was throwing them out. It is Jessie who suggests that they place themselves in the box for donation to Sunnyside Daycare; as she says, “I should have seen this coming. It’s Emily all over again.” This time, however, she takes charge and acts to save herself and her friends.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As events unfold, it becomes clear that Sunnyside is not the peaceful retirement home the toys were hoping for, but a totalitarian dictatorship where toys are controlled through surveillance and torture. This is where things get a little dubious in terms of Jessie’s portrayal. Woody and Jessie are the spokespeople for their respective sides in the debate over Andy’s intentions. While Jessie advocates for Sunnyside and self-preservation, Woody defends Andy and argues that their duty is to be there for him. While the film offers some evidence to undermine Woody’s argument -- Andy has already neglected them for years, and that’s unlikely to change -- it shows us that Woody is right. Andy did intend to put the toys in the attic. Sunnyside is a terrible place and they were foolish to go there. Jessie was wrong. This wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, but it remains that we spend a large portion of the movie waiting for the inevitable moment when Jessie will admit that Woody was right all along, and that her experience was less dependable than his faith.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The dubiousness doesn’t stop there, as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> also witnesses Jessie’s transformation into a love interest and a damsel in distress. The previous film showed Buzz as having an immediate attraction to Jessie, to which she remains mostly oblivious until the latter half of the third film. It’s only when he is put in Spanish mode that Jessie seems to return his affections, and this seems particularly disturbing because that version of Buzz is not the one she knows. Spanish Mode Buzz is essentially a different person, as illustrated when he sees Jessie for the first time and the soft focus of love at first sight alters her image. While Jessie did have a damsel in distress moment in the second film, she played an active role in her own rescue. In the third, Spanish Mode Buzz risks his life to save hers, as her usual competence conveniently deserts her long enough for him to prove his love. Finally, when they are back in the safety of Andy’s room, Woody asks Jessie if she’ll be okay in the attic, and she replies, “Of course I will. Besides, I know about Buzz’s Spanish mode.” While Woody is showing concern for his friend by making reference to the traumatic experiences that have heretofore shaped her character, the new Jessie dismisses his concern on the grounds that she has a distraction, as if her new romance has magically healed her trauma.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Interestingly, while Jessie is undergoing this change, Barbie, another addition to the female character roster, demonstrates character growth in the opposite direction. When we first meet her, she is crying over Molly’s decision to donate her as if it were a horrible break-up, including an admission that she and Molly were “growing apart.” At Sunnyside, however, Molly is quickly replaced by Ken, the man who was literally made for her. When he imprisons her friends, she dumps him and joins them in solidarity, knowing that she is sacrificing her safety and status in the daycare hierarchy. She also plays an integral part in the escape plan as she exploits her connection with Ken in order to get information about restoring Buzz’s memories and personality. Finally, she assists Jessie in confronting Lotso and dispels any misconceptions about her intelligence as she states that “authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force.” Ultimately, it is Ken, not Barbie, who chooses love over status, lending support to her statement and claiming this Barbie to be one in one hundred million.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Still, there are some subtle moments of character development for Jessie as well. The best of these happens at the end of the film, as Andy gives his toys to Bonnie. Andy pulls Jessie from the box first, introducing her as “the roughest, toughest cowgirl in the whole West.” When he passes her to Bonnie, she takes a moment to adjust her hat and brush her hand across her face in an affectionate gesture. No other toy receives this intimate treatment, and it appears to be an indication of Jessie’s importance to her new owner. In Bonnie, she may have found a replacement for Emily.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the more unpleasant aspects of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">films is their treatment of the concept of “girls’ toys.” When Buzz learns that he is a toy in the first movie, his existential despair is demonstrated by his willing submission to a tea party with Sid’s sister. In the second film, Stinky Pete’s punishment is to be left with a girl who draws on her toys. In the third, Ken is heckled by Lotso’s other cronies for being a girls’ toy, to which he responds, “Why do you guys keep saying that? I’m not a girls’ toy, I’m not!” The film even joins in, treating Ken’s obsession with fashion as ridiculous. While Buzz undergoes torture in the form of brainwashing, Barbie torments Ken by ripping his clothing. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The treatment of Jessie’s bond with her female owners, however, subtly undermines this criticism. Jessie clearly loves being a girls’ toy. She was devoted to Emily and, despite her betrayal, upheld her as a wonderful owner. When Woody tries to convince her to go back to Andy’s house with him at the end of the second film, it only takes one mention of Molly to get her to agree. Bonnie, the successor to Andy’s legacy of imaginative play, treasures her from the first instant, proving her value. Even the shift in the series’ focus from Andy to Bonnie suggests that there is no shame in being either a girls’ toy or a girl’s toy, which even Buzz and Woody become.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story of Terror</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, Jessie herself demonstrates the potential awesomeness of a girls’ toy. A half-hour long Hallowe’en special that aired this year, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story of Terror</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> features Jessie as its protagonist. When a flat tire causes Bonnie and her mother to take refuge in a motel, Jessie and the others find themselves getting picked off one by one by an unseen creature. Eventually, the creature is revealed to be an iguana who fetches toys for his owner to sell online. Woody and Jessie -- decades-old collector’s items -- sell quickly, and Jessie takes it upon herself to prevent not only them, but all the rest of the toys, from being shipped away from their rightful owners.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In order to do this, Jessie must overcome her fear of being boxed up (which, it turns out, was not magically cured by Buzz’s love or his sexy Spanish accent). She is assisted in this endeavour by Combat Carl, a Black soldier toy with a missing hand, who encourages her to believe in herself. Telling herself that “Jessie never gives up, Jessie finds a way,” she makes her way out of a sealed box, saves Woody, and reveals the other toys to Bonnie and her mother. It is thanks to Jessie that the hotel manager’s side business is discovered and her friends saved. Both Buzz and Woody, the series’ usual protagonists, commend her for her brave deeds. Bonnie adjusts her hat and hugs her, further supporting the idea that, while Andy and Woody’s bond formed the foundation of the first three films, Jessie and Bonnie’s connection may take centre stage in future additions to the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">franchise.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jessie’s increasing importance and the franchise’s changing focus appear to be part of an ongoing shift at Pixar. Last year, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Brave </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">marked the end of the studio’s female protagonist drought and became their first film to focus on the relationship between two women. Their 2015 release, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Inside Out</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, is set to feature not only a girl in the lead, but two more female characters going on a journey through that girl’s head. While this is good news, the fact remains that Pixar still has a long way to go. The studio has yet to feature people of colour, people with disabilities, or LGBTQ* people as protagonists. They trust their audience to identify with toys, monsters, robots, rats, and fish, but anyone not coded as straight, able-bodied, white, and male still seems to be a bit of a stretch.</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-64378971150782561502013-11-03T12:55:00.000-08:002013-11-03T12:55:22.448-08:00Recommendation: Gravity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I had originally planned to write this post as soon as I got home from seeing Alfonso Cuarón’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Gravity</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aha</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, thought I, in the dramatic way one always claims to have spoken their internal monologue when recounting its content to others, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I shall deliver a post not only on time, but early, and thereby redeem myself in the eyes of my readers! </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Then I actually saw the film, and those plans changed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Watching </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Gravity </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">is an intense experience; I spent a solid couple of hours on something of an adrenaline high after the credits rolled. Most of that time was spent gushing about the film’s many strengths -- stunning visual effects, strong characterization, and tight plotting among them. What really stuck with me, though, was the fact that the character that all of this was built around was a woman.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Gravity</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> tells the story of a space mission that goes disastrously awry when a freak accident knocks out communication with ground control, kills the majority of the mission’s crew, and leaves first-time astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone (played by Sandra Bullock) stranded in the vacuum of space. The rest of the film focuses on the remaining crew members’ fight for survival in, as the film’s opening title card describes, the harshest environment possible.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There’s a lot to say about the character of Dr. Ryan Stone, and it took me very little time to decide to dedicate a full post to her when the film is released on Blu-ray. For now, however, I want to stick to a fascinating and relatively spoiler-free aspect of her treatment: her point-of-view character status. Unlike </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, which leaves the reveal of its protagonist until pretty late in the game, this sci-fi thriller lets you know very early on that you’re supposed to identify with its female lead. Even before the audience receives confirmation of the deaths of just about everyone else in the movie, we are quite literally aligned with Dr. Stone’s perspective. We see her surroundings through her eyes, through the plastic of her helmet. We don’t just identify with her; we are her. Even beyond the literal point-of-view shots, this character-audience alignment is built into the structure of the film itself. At one point, Dr. Stone is running out of oxygen and on the verge of passing out, madly scrambling to get into a space station just to take a breath. We feel her barely controlled panic, just as we feel cathartic relief when she manages to get inside. The film takes a moment to ease the audience’s tension as well as hers, and we take that first breath with her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In a recent interview, Sandra Bullock said, “I’d like to think at some point instead of it being a woman’s film or a man’s film, it is just a great story, and both sexes can go and get the same enjoyment out of it. It’s entertainment, you’re not curing cancer. And I would love for it to get to a place where it’s not about the gender of the actor. With </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Gravity</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> we get as close as you can to that, because there’s nothing about my character that screams female.” While I agree with her main point, I actually think there is something about Ryan Stone that “screams female”: Bullock herself. Sandra Bullock is largely known for her roles in romantic comedies, and there is no genre as implicitly and explicitly feminine-coded as the rom-com. Far from disproving Bullock’s point, however, I think this history supports it. What better way to prove that women can and should be the lead in films in traditionally masculine genres than to make an excellent sci-fi film that crushes box office records starring a woman who made her name in “chick flicks”?</span></div>
Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-88314251142060468192013-10-28T23:07:00.000-07:002013-10-28T23:07:55.430-07:00<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-549c2ba4-02d0-b122-f163-71fbe7b72f3a" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Dear readers,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Lately it seems that half the things I post are apologies for not posting. This is, admittedly, more of the same. I’ve had an incredibly busy couple of months, and as the winter holidays loom, I don’t foresee any changes. As such, I’m formally announcing a switch to posting every ten days to two weeks. This way I’ll be able to give the analyses the time that they (and you) deserve.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now on to some better news. I’m seeing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Gravity</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> tomorrow and will likely be able to post some of my thoughts about it this weekend. Just in time for Hallowe’en (or at least some rather late Hallowe’en parties), I’ll also be discussing Jessie’s role in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toy Story of Terror</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. After that, it’s time for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Winter’s Bone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, one of the films that we recommended last November. If you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to consider doing so before the post goes up. It’s well worth your time. Rounding out the rest of November will be posts analyzing Black Widow and the women of James Cameron’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m not going to tell you what I have planned for December, though you may rest assured that a review of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Frozen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> will be kicking things off. That accursed snowman is already haunting my dreams.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Sincerely,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> The Management</span></div>
Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-90848279883222233532013-10-18T23:00:00.000-07:002013-10-19T01:07:14.414-07:00Evelyn Carnahan O'Connell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: This post will focus on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Mummy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Mummy Returns</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. As far as I’m concerned, there is no third movie.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Between the trip to Disneyland and a selection of concerts featuring the most influential artists of my childhood, the past few months have been a bit of a whirlwind of nostalgia. Just when I thought I could escape its pull, I checked out the next request and promptly gave up any hope of surfacing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When I recount the formative narratives of my childhood, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Mummy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> rarely gets a mention. It’s all superheroes and princesses and cats who eat pizza before and after doing martial arts. Still, whenever I adopt a zombie pose, I get the urge to to chant “Imhotep! Imhotep!” instead of “Brains!” When I thank people for their hospitality, I have to bite back the words, “And your eyes, and your tongue.” I even have the film to thank for my short-lived desire to become an Egyptologist. Looking back now, however, I see that it was also the source of one of the most important strong female characters of my childhood: Evelyn “Evie” Carnahan O’Connell. Although the marketing department clearly thought that Rick O’Connell was the film’s hero, I would argue that Evelyn is the actual protagonist. It is her quest, her dream, her mistake, and her decision to set it right.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">First, some background: the eponymous mummy is Imhotep, a high priest who falls in love with the Pharaoh’s mistress, Anck-su-namun. When the Pharaoh discovers her infidelity, the two lovers murder him. When his guards arrive, she kills herself, confident that Imhotep will resurrect her. Just before he restores her to life, however, he is discovered; for his crime, he is cursed and buried alive to be eaten by insects. The curse is less a punishment for Imhotep than a punishment for the people who awaken him, as he comes back with the ability to conjure not only the plagues of Egypt, but sandstorms in the shape of his face.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Thousands of years later, Evelyn’s brother, Jonathan, finds a key and a map to the lost city of Hamunaptra, a place that Evelyn has researched extensively. When they decide to locate the city, they take as their guide Rick O’Connell, a former Colonel of the French Foreign Legion and obvious leading man. In Hamunaptra, they find Imhotep, the Book of the Dead, and a whole heap of trouble.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Evie is introduced as a fascinating combination of ultra-competence and utter hopelessness, the kind of woman brilliant enough to understand multiple forms of ancient languages, yet clumsy enough to demolish an entire library’s worth of shelves while replacing a single book. She owes her job at the library not to her own talents, but to her late parents’ patronage of the institution. Her application to join the Bembridge scholars has been rejected multiple times, always with the explanation of a lack of field experience. She’s a woman with something to prove, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Mummy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is the story of how she does it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While Rick gets the big action-filled set pieces, it is Evie who controls most of the plot. She saves Rick’s life soon after meeting him, and he later mentions this as the only reason he has chosen to return to Hamunaptra. The quest itself is intended as a search for the Book of Amun-Ra, the artifact that first interested Evelyn in Egypt, the hunt for which she calls her “life’s pursuit.” When they find the Book of the Dead, it’s Evie who decides to read from it, saying, “It’s just a book. No harm ever came from reading a book.” When this ostensibly harmless bit of reading leads to the release of an ancient evil, Rick plans to make it someone else’s problem. Evelyn refuses to run away, takes ownership of her mistake, and vows to set things right. Even her eventual capture is proof of her agency; she chooses to go with Imhotep in order to save her companions. In almost every situation, Evelyn is the one making the decisions and dealing with the consequences.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the things that I most appreciate about her is the fact that the narrative allows her to make mistakes. She’s introduced doing something foolish that ultimately causes significant damage and prompts her boss to compare her unfavourably to the Egyptian plagues. Later, she resurrects a being with potentially apocalyptic power. Where the film succeeds is in not condemning her -- or even judging her too harshly, really -- for these decisions. She combats her boss’s assertion of her ineptitude with proof of her competence. Instead of claiming ignorance as an excuse to get out of dealing with the Imhotep problem, she assumes the responsibility to vanquish him.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The way she goes about doing this sets her apart from many of the strong female characters that populate action films today. Evelyn is basically all brains and very little brawn. When she has to fight other characters, her first reaction is not to launch into a perfectly choreographed battle, but to shove a lit candle into her attacker’s eye. In the climactic scene, when the leading lady would usually fight the villain’s girlfriend or female partner in crime, Evie spends most of her time running away from Anck-su-namun. She’s the anti-Action Girl.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Evelyn prefers to lay an intellectual smackdown. In Hamunaptra, one of the members of the rival expedition observes, “They are led by a woman. What does a woman know?” As it turns out, basically everything. The characters’ survival and their progress through the plot often relies on Evie’s deductive skills as well as her ability to translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in high stress situations. It is her translation skills that allow Jonathan to gain control of the Pharaoh’s guards, who rob Imhotep of his immortality. Without her, Rick couldn’t have killed him. While Rick performs all the swashbuckling antics, Evie does all the intellectual heavy lifting.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Even as Evelyn plays an integral role in defeating Imhotep, the film gives her another victory: intellectual superiority over the Bembridge scholars. They claimed that the two incantation books were in Hamunaptra, the Book of Amun-Ra at the base of the statue of Anubis and the Book of the Dead hidden in the statue of Horus. Evie discovers that they mistranslated the source of this information, and in her own translation, she finds that the two locations should be switched. Upon finding this, she exclaims, “Take that, Bembridge scholars!” Even with an army of zombified people and a nearly restored mummy outside, urging the plot onwards, you still want to take a moment to bask in her joy at being better than the people who rejected her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What makes Evie’s portrayal in the first film even more extraordinary is the fact that she is canonically biracial. Unsurprisingly, her actor isn’t. The film’s treatment of race tends to be quite dubious, painting most of its characters of colour as villains, greedy, immoral cowards, or cannon fodder. The Medjai warrior, Ardeth Bay, manages to defy this characterization, but he still sacrifices himself to save the white and half-white people (even if his death doesn’t stick). Setting aside the casting issues, the fact that Evie is biracial makes her an even more progressive character. In American cinema, where the smartest guy in the room is almost always white and male, it is very cool to see that distinction go to someone like Evelyn.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, all of this changes in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Mummy Returns</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. The sequel takes place ten years after the original, in 1933, when the reincarnation of Anck-su-namun and the curator of the British Museum decide to resurrect Imhotep to fight a new Big Bad, the Scorpion King. Evie and Rick get involved when their eight-year-old son, Alex, gets his hand stuck in an artifact that the villains need and is therefore kidnapped. Then it’s a race against time to save Alex and stop the Scorpion King from conquering the world with his supernatural army.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For my purposes, there are two things that matter in this movie: the reincarnation storyline that turns Evelyn into an Action Girl, and her fridging. In this film, Evelyn gets all those choreographed fight scenes that were conspicuously and gloriously missing from the first one. While she explains that she’s picked up some combat moves from Rick, it’s revealed that most of her new tricks are remnants of her past self. It turns out that she was once Nefertiri, the daughter of the Pharaoh who was killed by Imhotep and Anck-su-namun. Her issues with them therefore date back thousands of years, when she witnessed them killing her father.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Evelyn of the first film was refreshing partially because she wasn’t a badass fighter who could hold her own against men in combat. Too often, that kind of character displays the appearance of power with none of the agency that should accompany it. The same is true of this new Evie. She’s controlled by the memories of her past life, to the extent that she almost falls out of a flying dirigible. She’s driven by the need to protect the Bracelet of Anubis and the boy who wears it, and her duties as both the ancient guardian of the artifact and a mother supersede the thirst for knowledge that defined her character in the first film. It eventually turns out that Rick and Evie are just playing predetermined parts in the defeat of the Scorpion King. The agency of a clever librarian is replaced by the destiny of a warrior princess, and Evelyn’s character suffers a tremendous loss.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As is often the case in stories of destiny, the focus is on the men. Evie’s brilliance is transplanted into her son, and he gets to shine as one of the principal characters. Rick takes centre stage as a father who saves his son and the whitest Medjai ever, destined to kill the Scorpion King. When Alex stands up to Imhotep, the mummy says, “You have strength, little one. You are your father’s son.” Apparently Imhotep forgot that it was Evie, not Rick, who most often defied him and tried to trick him.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Evelyn’s destiny, it appears, is to be killed. Out of the blue, Anck-su-namun stabs her, and Evelyn dies. I don’t mean to be repetitive, but there is so much wrong with this moment that it’s like my brain gets stuck on it. Evelyn, who was the protagonist in the first film, gets fridged in order to fuel Rick’s manpain. She lacks narrative value beyond her role as Alex’s mother and Rick’s wife, and this is confirmed with her last words, with which she tells Rick that she loves him and that he has to take care of Alex. With the possible end of the world looming, the woman who was willing to face an ancient evil on her own because it was the right thing to do doesn’t even mention it? I might understand this scene if she were heroically sacrificing herself to save the world, but she really does just get randomly stabbed out of nowhere before the job’s done. Even her resurrection can’t make up for this.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All you really need to know about Evie is summed up in one of her own lines: “Look, I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter … but I am proud of what I am! … I am a librarian.” In the first film, this is the greatest thing about her: she is a knowledge-seeker, and she doesn’t need fighting skills to be awesome. The second film feels like a betrayal of the essence of Evelyn, replacing her agency with an ostensibly cool backstory that seems to make her stronger even as it weakens her character.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Actual strong female character who devolved into a Strong Female Character™ in the sequel</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-55894155033034091542013-10-12T23:00:00.000-07:002013-10-13T00:37:49.057-07:00Disneyland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’d like to kick off this post with an assurance that I will be publishing the next installment of Reader Request Month: 2 Fast 2 Furious in the next day or two. I foolishly thought that I could keep up with my blogging even when, over the course of a week, my niece was born, I started a new job, and I departed for “the happiest place on Earth.” When I returned from Disneyland, I needed some time to settle into my new routine, but I should be on track to resume my regular schedule of weekend posts.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Back when I was a kid, I used to watch <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x3poLxJjzw" target="_blank">a commercial for Disney World</a> on our Lion King VHS. As a five-year-old, I didn’t really understand the irony that made the ad funny, but I did know that I wanted to go to that park… or maybe the other one. I wasn’t sure at the time whether Disneyland or Disney World was actually closer. Not that it mattered; all I knew was that one day, I was going to visit Mickey and my beloved princesses.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Nineteen years later, that day arrived. I was initially worried that going to Disneyland for the first time as an adult would ruin my experience. This seemed even more likely in light of the fact that I’ve analyzed the very same princesses that I grew up blindly idolizing. Faced with the Disney machine, would I be able to enjoy the magical kingdom populated by characters I’ve loved for decades, or would I see only the money-making ploys of a corporate giant cashing in on manufactured nostalgia? The answer, it turns out, was both. Often at the same time. (In the interest of staying on topic, I’ll talk about only those things that relate to the characters we’ve discussed here on the blog.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When I arrived at my hotel, one of the first things that caught my attention was a framed picture of the first six princesses: five white women and Jasmine. That proved to be the case throughout the park; most products only acknowledged the existence of eight princesses, invariably excluding Pocahontas and Mulan. Merida, having debuted after the success of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Tangled</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> made Rapunzel a necessary addition to any group photo, was left out, but still featured on a lot of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Brave</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">-specific merchandise. I knew that I would be leaving with some of it. But from the time I walked into the World of Disney store on the first day, I also knew that I was going to make it my mission to find things relating to Mulan and Pocahontas. When it came to merchandise, I was largely unsuccessful. Even in the land of imagination, it seems that no one can imagine people wanting products depicting all the princesses.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the park’s major shows, however, I managed to find an interesting trend. In Mickey’s Soundsational Parade, Tiana gets her own float. In the abbreviated live musical version of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aladdin</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, Jasmine has a solo, “To Be Free”. Pocahontas has a featured segment in the World of Color show. She, Mulan, and Tiana all make an appearance in Mickey and the Magical Map. Disney is fine marketing an overwhelmingly white set of princesses to the masses, but when it comes to the parks, it seems that the company feels a need to stand by its claims of diversity and imagination. Sort of.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Mickey and the Magical Map involves Mickey, a mapmaker’s apprentice, trying to fill in an unfinished spot on said map. The dot jumps around the world, taking Mickey to the locations of several Disney films. After King Louie finished telling the audience how much he wanted to be like us, the dot took Mickey to the setting of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pocahontas</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">… and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Mulan</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">… and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Tangled</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">… simultaneously. Having seen only a few items of merchandise featuring Mulan and absolutely no mention of her otherwise, I was willing to ignore the seeming collapse of time and space in order to hear “Reflection,” one of my all-time favourite Disney songs. Then Rapunzel and Flynn showed up, and both Mulan and Pocahontas were suddenly incorporated into a love song and lost in a sea of lanterns. Mickey’s final destination was Hawaii, where Stitch appeared without Lilo or Nani, despite the fact that they, and not he, are native to the area. It’s a bit of a mess, and it proves that even in a show intended to illustrate Disney’s diversity, they still prefer to feature the popular characters that are already featured elsewhere.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Yet I found that some of my favourite memories of the trip came as a result of Disney’s marketing machine. All around the park, I saw hundreds of little girls wearing princess costumes. Those who wore Tiana’s outfit reminded me that, despite the film’s flaws, Tiana herself is worth looking up to. One particularly memorable group of girls stood in front of me in the line to meet Merida, each one sporting dyed red hair and an official dress, clearly excited to meet their favourite character. I myself made a Build-a-Bear and named her after the princess of the Clan Dunbroch.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My favourite memory, however, is of standing in the audience for World of Color, watching scenes from the films of my childhood, when suddenly there was the image of a red-haired girl and dozens of little voices exclaiming, “Merida!” As an adult, I connected to Merida immediately, but I found her more compelling the more profoundly I considered the critical work being performed by her story. Hearing a bunch of kids express such utter joy at seeing her made me remember what it was like to love Belle, simply because she was awesome. Like the older brother said in that commercial, it really brought out the kid in me.</span><br />
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-18090958406119793932013-09-24T21:10:00.000-07:002013-09-24T21:13:39.540-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dear readers,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />This is Ashley, dropping in to let you know that Megan is in the Happiest Place on Earth, which just so happens to have the Worst WiFi Connection. As such, Reader Request Month has been delayed and will now extend into October. Thank you for your patience!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sincerely,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> The Management</span></div>
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05642772249687394107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-28871015240663241332013-09-13T22:00:00.000-07:002013-09-13T23:42:12.623-07:00Mako Mori<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: This post will focus primarily on the theatrical release of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. There is a significant amount of supplementary material available, and I will be discussing some of it, but I think that it’s important to address the world and characters as portrayed on the screen. Significantly fewer people are going to read the prequel comic, the novelization, <a href="http://www.thevine.com.au/entertainment/interviews/guillermo-del-toro-on-pacific-rim-and-why-making-a-movie-is-like-sex-20130710-241894" target="_blank">Guillermo del Toro’s interviews</a>, and <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/pacific-rim-travis-beacham-tumblr-questions/" target="_blank">Travis Beacham’s</a> <a href="http://travisbeacham.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">blog</a>. And now, without further ado, the first entry in Request Month: 2 Fast 2 Furious.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When I first saw the trailer for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, I, like many others, thought it looked like the love child of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Transformers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Godzilla</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and a particularly colourful neon glow stick: the product of a summer Hollywood blockbuster breeding program. Despite the involvement of Guillermo del Toro and Idris Elba, I had no intention of seeing the film. But that all changed when the Fire Nation attacked.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In this case it wasn’t Azula and her ilk who invaded my corner of the Internet, but another Japanese woman associated with the colour blue. Mako Mori was suddenly everywhere, and I knew immediately that I would not only be seeing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> but writing about it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Set in the near future, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> takes place in a world where gargantuan monsters called Kaiju emerge from an interdimensional portal under the ocean, known as the Breach, to wreak havoc on a global scale. When traditional weapons prove ineffective against the Kaiju threat, the nations of the world come together to find another solution. That solution is the Jaeger, a massive, nuclear-powered Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot, piloted by a two-person team whose minds are linked through a neural handshake. One such team is comprised of the Becket brothers, Raleigh and Yancy, the latter of whom is killed during a mission. Raleigh is left without a co-pilot or a Jaeger, and he leaves the program. As the frequency of Kaiju attacks increases, more and more Jaegers fall. Governments turn to ostensibly Kaiju-proof walls to protect their coasts, but these prove useless. With the end of human civilization looming, it is up to Marshal Stacker Pentecost and the pilots of the world’s last four Jaegers to destroy the Kaiju and seal the Breach.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Mako Mori’s strong female character credentials are established in her first few minutes of screentime. She is introduced as “one of [Pentecost’s] brightest.” While Raleigh, the white male protagonist, has only just learned about the plan to seal the Breach, Mako has already played a major part in the mission. She oversaw the restoration and upgrade of the Becket brothers’ Jaeger, Gipsy Danger, and she compiled the list of candidates for the co-pilot position. She has an intimate understanding of the inner workings of both the machines and their pilots, whose number she wishes to join. To that end, she has completed fifty-one simulator missions with fifty-one kills: a perfect record. To put this in some perspective, the prequel comic compares piloting a Jaeger to “trying to solve a Rubix Cube in the middle of a boxing match.” Doing that successfully a hundred percent of the time is astounding.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It is this level of expertise that qualifies her to judge Raleigh’s own record. She calls him out on all the usual traits of the white, male hero: “I think you’re unpredictable. You have a habit of deviating from standard combat techniques, you take risks that injure yourself and your crew. I don’t think you’re the right man for this mission.” Of course, we know that he will prove to be the perfect person for the mission, but it’s still notable that Mako is willing to point out that the qualities that make him a good Hollywood hero also make him a potential liability in the field. It is equally notable that Raleigh himself respects her opinion, even though she’s basically telling him that she thinks his redemption arc is going to get people killed. She is intelligent, competent, and unafraid to do and say what she thinks is right.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> was marketed as a Hollywood blockbuster, we think we know how this will turn out: Raleigh will engage in reckless behaviour that saves the world and proves Mako wrong. She will exist only to serve his storyline, likely as his love interest and the prize he earns for said reckless behaviour. At best, she will become his sidekick. We need look no further than </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Wolverine</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> for examples of both possible paths, conveniently -- and tellingly -- also portrayed by Japanese women whose only function is supporting the real hero, a white man. We’ve seen it before, and we think we’ll see it again in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Then the film disappoints our expectations in the least disappointing way possible: Mako becomes the deuteragonist. Instead of serving Raleigh’s arc, she is given a separate, complementary storyline; boiled down to its bare essence, he is the has-been, she is the rookie, and they both need Gipsy Danger’s help to exorcise their demons.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In order to gain entry to the Jaeger, Mako must demonstrate her compatibility with Raleigh, both mental and physical. To prove the latter, she must fight Raleigh using a specialized form of martial arts termed “Jaeger Bushido.” Pentecost is initially reluctant to let her try out, but after Mako tells Raleigh that he’s not trying hard enough and Raleigh challenges her to a match, he concedes. Raleigh tells her that he’s “not gonna dial down [his] moves,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">”</span> and Mako assures him, “Neither will I.” What follows is a battle between equals, as they match each other point for point, until Mako has Raleigh on the floor.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What has thus far prevented Mako from piloting a Jaeger is Stacker Pentecost. In a Drift-produced flashback, we learn that Mako survived a Kaiju attack in Tokyo when she was a child. She witnessed the battle between Coyote Tango and Onibaba, as the Jaeger, piloted by Pentecost, destroyed the Kaiju that killed her parents. Afterwards, Pentecost adopted her, trained her, and raised her in the Shatterdomes; he became her superior officer, her sensei, and her adoptive father. When she leaves the combat arena, certain that she will be denied the position of co-pilot, Raleigh tries to get her to fight back, claiming, “You don’t have to just obey him.” “It’s not obedience,” she responds. “It’s respect.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The film does a lot of subversive work using these two relationship dynamics. <a href="http://ninjaruski.tumblr.com/post/55771708561/there-is-something-that-people-looking-at-makos" target="_blank">Mako’s relationship with Pentecost revolves around respect</a>, but it is important to note that this respect goes both ways. While Mako obeys Pentecost’s orders, she doesn’t do it out of hero worship. She knows that he is a good leader, and she does what he asks not just because he asks it, but because she trusts that he has good reason to ask it. This doesn’t mean that she stays quiet when she takes issue with his orders, confronting him in person and (in the novelization) going so far as to “strenuously object” with his rulings in official documents. He, in turn, shows respect for her culture, her personal space, and her accomplishments. Later, when Pentecost decides to pilot a Jaeger, knowing that it is a suicide mission, he asks Mako to protect him. When he dies, <a href="http://leonardnimoy.tumblr.com/post/55469912306/mako-mori-meta-the-only-unsubtitled-japanese-phrase-in" target="_blank">she calls him “sensei” one last time</a>. Despite the power imbalance, their mutual respect makes them equals.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The film’s equalizing project is particularly subversive in the case of the relationship between Mako and Raleigh. The whole concept of the two-pilot system and the neural handshake is compatibility; your ideal partner is the person who drives you to excel, and who then matches you in excellence. The neural handshake enables two people to become one incredibly powerful entity. Making Mako, an Asian woman, the perfect match for the white, male hero, suggests that she is his equal. In the summer blockbuster, where no one is more important than the white, male hero, this is a big deal. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In light of Hollywood’s long history of portraying Asian women as subservient, submissive, sexualized objects, Mako’s treatment is especially subversive. In addition to the equal status suggested by her Drift compatibility with Raleigh, the film supports her power and importance through more subtle devices. She is always fully dressed; there are no </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Star Trek</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">-style underwear shots to appease the male gaze. In fact, there is a scene in which she watches Raleigh removing his shirt through a doorway and then through the peephole in her own door, explicitly assuming the gaze herself. Still, Raleigh’s gaze does play a role in Mako’s treatment, in the sense that he gazes at her like she’s the greatest person in the world. He fights on her behalf, always in an attempt to ensure that others acknowledge her brilliance and treat her with the kind of respect that he believes she deserves. The film essentially uses the audience’s identification with its white, male hero to convince them that Mako is the best character in the movie.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What I find particularly impressive is the film’s ability to balance Mako’s characterization; while she is intelligent and competent, she is also a rookie, and rookies make mistakes. Mako’s major error occurs during the first neural handshake test. When she and Raleigh link minds, he gets distracted by memories of his brother; this, in turn, causes Mako to “chase the rabbit” into the Drift and relive her own traumatic experience. While she inhabits her own terrified eleven-year-old mind, she subconsciously charges up Gipsy Danger’s plasma cannon, putting everyone and everything in the Shatterdome in danger. Although they manage to power down the Jaeger and avoid disaster, Mako is deemed unfit as a pilot. By grounding her, Pentecost prevents her from taking advantage of what may be her last opportunity to avenge her family.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Earlier, when Mako confronted Pentecost about taking part in the co-pilot trials, he informed her that “vengeance is like an open wound. You cannot take that level of emotion into the Drift.” Ironically, Mako’s single-minded mission to get revenge on the Kaiju stands in the way of her ability to use the one weapon with which she can take this revenge. While some people have criticized this scene and the final showdown -- in which, at the last moment, Mako’s oxygen feed is damaged, she passes out, and Raleigh saves her by jettisoning her in an escape pod -- I think that there are sound reasons for both moments of weakness. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The former is basically a matter of putting Bruce Wayne back in that alley with Joe Chill, and giving eight-year-old Bruce a gun that will stop him from ever having a reason to become Batman. In this case, however, Joe Chill is a 2500-tonne, city-destroying monster, and the gun responds to thought commands. Mako gets distracted, but, given the enormity of her trauma, it would be unrealistic if she didn’t. In some ways, this moment is actually a subversive triumph: Mako’s emotion and subjectivity fly in the face of the emotionless, inscrutable Asian stereotype. Furthermore, it’s a woman who, while experiencing a moment of apparent powerlessness, finds the power to fight back. It’s the wrong time and place, sure, but it’s a little inspiring just the same.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As for the later scene, Tumblr user Spider-xan <a href="http://spider-xan.tumblr.com/post/56299203631/even-though-my-personal-preference-would-have-been" target="_blank">has capably explained its subversive meaning</a>: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“Even though my personal preference would have been for Mako and Raleigh to do the final moment together, I will forever appreciate that we got a scene where a white man thought an Asian woman’s life was worth more than his and actually made sure she would survive for sure while he went on a suicide run where survival was uncertain, but unlikely, even if he did survive in the end.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Which is also why it annoys me when I see people in Mako’s tag say that it would have been more ‘feminist’ (and I guess ‘anti-racist’, though not like these people every acknowledge that Mako isn’t white) if she had saved him and ejected him from the pod and even died herself, because do you know how damn often in white man/Asian woman pairings especially, the Asian woman is supposed to nobly die for the white man while he moves on? And the whole ‘stoic Asian who dies so the white man can live as he accepts his death with honour~’ crap.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s important to remember that every race is portrayed in mainstream media using a different set of stereotypes and tropes. Just because an Asian female character doesn’t conform to the ideal that has been established with white women in mind doesn’t mean that the Asian woman’s portrayal is inherently unfeminist or regressive. In many ways, not adhering to the criteria of a Strong Female Character is actually a testament to Mako’s strength as a character.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I defy anyone to call Mako weak after seeing her first outing in a Jaeger. When Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon are destroyed and Striker Eureka is paralyzed during the first double event, Mako and Raleigh get their chance to redeem themselves following their disastrous test run. Not only do they kill both Kaiju, they vanquish the second one mid-air while it’s flying Gipsy Danger into the stratosphere. While Raleigh exclaims that they’re out of options, Mako deploys one of her personal additions: a chain sword, designed to honour her sword maker father. She slices the Kaiju in half, claiming the kill for her family, thereby satisfying her need for vengeance and completing her character arc. Although she goes on to play a major role in the final battle, this is the climax of her story. She has redeemed herself, avenged her family, and looked mighty cool doing it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The biggest problem with Mako Mori is not a problem with her, but with her environment. While </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> generally does a good job of representing a global conflict that actually involves the entire world, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the “entire world” seems to be just as dude-heavy as it is in any other blockbuster. Of the principal characters, only two are women: Mako and the Russian pilot of Cherno Alpha, Sasha Kaidonovsky, who gets a few lines, a little screentime, and an unpleasant death. As in every modern discussion of the feminist value of a given film, critics have highlighted the gender disparity in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> through the use of the Bechdel test. It fails; Mako interacts more with the Hansens’ bulldog, Max, than she does with her fellow female pilot.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Regardless, it is difficult to dismiss a film as unfeminist when it features a character like Mako Mori. To that end, Tumblr user Chaila <a href="http://chaila.tumblr.com/post/58379322134/spider-xan-also-i-was-thinking-more-about-why" target="_blank">has proposed the Mako Mori test</a>, which is passed if the movie has “a) at least one female character; b) who gets her own narrative arc; c) that is not about supporting a man’s story.” Chaila suggests that it be used alongside the Bechdel test; while passing either test (or both) does not necessarily make the film feminist, it does indicate that the female characters are being treated at least a little like actual people.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Personally, what bothers me is that the world of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> does have a number of compelling women; they just didn’t make it onto the silver screen. The prequel comic, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, written by Travis Beacham, features four women who easily could have been included in some way, and whose inclusion would have improved the film. The first is Luna Pentecost, Stacker’s sister and a fighter pilot with the RAF. She volunteered to take on the first Kaiju when it struck San Francisco, ostensibly to repay the Americans for their help during the Blitz. Stacker points out that she really just wants to slay a dragon. She dies in the battle, but her influence is apparent in the way that she inspires Stacker. The second is her friend and fellow pilot, Tamsin Sevier, who went on to join the Jaeger program as Stacker’s co-pilot. She also gave her life for the cause, dying of cancer from exposure to the Jaeger’s nuclear core. The third is Naomi Sokolov, a journalist and former “Jaeger-fly”. As a teenager, she was attracted to the Jaeger pilots’ celebrity; as an adult, she turns an assigned puff piece into an examination of the political reasons for the shift from offensive weapons to defensive coastal walls. She goes from being drawn to the glamour of the celebrity heroes to understanding and advocating for the program itself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally, there is Dr. Caitlin Lightcap, the inventor of the Pons, the technology that allows for the neural link between two pilots and their Jaeger. We meet Dr. Lightcap, one of the world’s leading experts in brain-machine interfaces, when a deep depression has interrupted her work at DARPA. While her former professor creates the machines, she makes them work. She is also responsible for discovering the need for two minds to share the neural load, having saved one of the test pilots by linking up to the Pons. She then goes on to join this test pilot in the first Jaeger prototype and log the first Kaiju kill without the aid of nuclear weapons. Describing this event, her scientific partner says, “I know one thing for sure: it felt pain. And half of what hurt it -- maybe more -- was that mouse of a girl from Pittsburgh. The message was clear -- we are far bigger than we look.” The fact that this woman doesn’t even get a mention in the movie is an absolute travesty.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Still, given time constraints, I can understand why these specific characters didn’t make the cut. That doesn’t mean that others couldn’t have been created. In fact, there is nothing in their characterization that would prevent Stacker Pentecost, Herc and Chuck Hansen, or Hermann Gottlieb and Newt Geiszler from being women (or, in the case of those last four characters, people of colour). In a more perfect world, we might even see Raleigh Becket himself replaced by a female version.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">is a subversive film, and it uses the audience’s expectations about Hollywood blockbusters to challenge these same expectations. It questions the concept of the individual white, male hero and makes its hero’s compassion his strength. <a href="http://soyonscruels.tumblr.com/post/57000194513/witchpriest-ok-the-pacific-rim-class-post-we" target="_blank">It puts a working class Black man in command, and then, through the judicious application of a halo, a meaningful last name, and a death scene in which he sacrifices himself so the world can live, makes him a Christ figure</a>. <a href="http://ladylurknomoar.tumblr.com/post/56509656274/disability-in-pacific-rim-let-the-outcasts-in" target="_blank">It codes the two scientists whose work enables the pilots to collapse the Breach as having two different disabilities</a>. It has Mako Mori in it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, it isn’t perfect. In using the trappings of the blockbuster, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pacific Rim</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> perpetuates some of its more dubious traditions. (If I never see another film in which the only person who can save the world is a white, cisgender, straight dude, it will be too soon.) I like to think of it in terms of an </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Animorphs </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">cover: the goal is to turn into a wolf, but the werewolf-like creature in the middle is still pretty cool.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Actual strong female character</span><br />
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-32871445484429429142013-09-09T11:27:00.000-07:002013-09-09T11:27:55.051-07:00Request Month: 2 Fast 2 Furious 2 Late<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Dear readers,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">As you've probably noticed, last week's post is late, so late in fact that it's encroaching on this week. Real life has temporarily gotten in the way of blogging, but I will have the post up ASAP. Thanks for your patience.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sincerely,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> The Management</span></span></div>
Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-37750588143417356432013-08-30T23:30:00.000-07:002013-08-31T02:35:35.233-07:00The Almost Fire Lord<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All screencaps: Piandao.org</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: Azula is a famously contentious character. What follows is merely one of a myriad of possible interpretations of her arc. Also, it is long. Very long. Like, hundred-year-long war long.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One year ago, we kicked off this blog with an analysis of the first three Disney Princesses. These royal ladies sang their days away while doing their chores and dreaming of the princes who would one day save them. They were polite, kind, and compassionate, and every person and animal they met immediately loved them. In fact, anyone who didn’t fall head over heels for these women could be summarily dismissed as a villain, and the narrative deemed their deaths not only justified, but necessary. They were practically perfect in every way, and the person we’ll be talking about this week could not be any less like them if she were actually a 400 foot tall purple platypus bear with pink horns and silver wings.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Princess Azula of the Fire Nation is not like any princess that has come before. She’s not the headstrong tomboy who yearns to escape a life of rules in order to seek adventure in the great wide somewhere. She’s certainly not the paragon of war-time femininity who gets everything she’s ever wanted simply by wishing for it and adhering to societal expectations. She is a lethal force of nature, a brilliant military mind, a first-class firebender, a broken child, and one of the most compelling villains I’ve ever seen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Origins</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It seems only right that we begin with the root of all of Azula’s evil: her childhood. One of the strengths of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar: The Last Airbender</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is its ability to establish history, both cultural and personal. The characters are products of their environment and their past experiences, and we see firsthand through vibrant world-building and a number of flashbacks how both of these things affect them. In Azula’s case, many of her character traits can be traced back to her home life as we see it in “Zuko Alone.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the focuses of this episode is the increasingly antagonistic relationship between Azula and Zuko. They function as foils for Sokka and Katara; they are the same age and, in both sibling dynamics, the younger sister has a dominant role. Katara’s role is maternal; while she and Sokka engage in their fair share of squabbles, he considers her his rock. He derives strength from her strength, and he offers his support when she needs it, regardless of whether or not he agrees with her. They depend on each other. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">By contrast, Azula and Zuko spend most of their formative years in competition with each other. From an early age, Azula was able to manipulate the people around her, and she is particularly skilled at getting to Zuko. She exploits his close bond with their mother in order to humiliate him, and she infantilizes him by referring to him by the nickname “Zuzu.” When she tells him that he’s wasting his time failing to hone his mediocre knife fighting skills, he responds, “Put an apple on your head and we’ll find out how good I am!” Their rivalry is fierce and, as we see in this flashback, becoming increasingly violent. The mutual support that Sokka and Katara offer each other is contrasted with Azula and Zuko’s constant need to one-up each other.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A prodigy dedicated to perfection, Azula wins most of their battles. However, Zuko is the clear victor in the struggle for their mother’s affection, even if Azula pretends she doesn’t want it. Ursa regularly expresses her love for Zuko, supporting him even in his failures. Ultimately, she demonstrates the extent of this love by killing the Fire Lord and accepting banishment in order to save Zuko’s life. To her son, she is the ideal mother, sacrificing herself to protect him. Her treatment of Azula is markedly different. This is at least partially because Azula is the kind of kid who ponders aloud the number of people her father would have to kill to succeed his own father as Fire Lord. Ursa reacts to these comments by asking what is wrong with her. While Zuko is “darling,” Azula is “that child.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To one person, however, she is “my dear,” and therein lies the problem. Her father, Ozai, raised Azula to be his heir, and he uses her to gain the approval of his father, Azulon. He has her demonstrate both her extensive knowledge of military campaigns and her advanced firebending ability, calling her “a true prodigy.” The problem is that Ozai is a sincerely terrible person. He is willing to have Zuko killed to appease his father, and he jumps at the opportunity to become Fire Lord when Ursa kills Azulon. In addition to this, he uses Azula to gain favour for himself, nurturing both her natural talents and her tendency toward cruelty to make her into his perfect heir. Even her name marks her as Ozai’s weapon in the fight for his father’s favour. While Zuko has the more obvious abuse narrative, Azula is just as thoroughly messed up by Ozai, if not more so.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Zuko also has the benefit of Iroh’s love. During the flashbacks, Iroh is laying siege to Ba Sing Se, and he sends gifts for his niece and nephew from the Earth Kingdom. To Zuko, he gives a pearl dagger from a general who surrendered to the invading Fire Nation forces; it is inscribed with the words, “Never give up without a fight.” It’s a perfect gift, tailored to Zuko’s personality in a way that demonstrates Iroh’s profound understanding of him. The gift that Iroh sends for Azula is “a new friend:” a doll who “wears the latest fashion for Earth Kingdom girls.” Azula burns it. Based on everything we know about Azula, even by this point in the series, Iroh could not have picked a less suitable gift if he’d tried. He gives Zuko a present that speaks to him as an individual; he gives Azula a present that acknowledges that she’s a girl. And all girls like dolls, right?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While Ursa is an ideal maternal figure, Iroh is basically the moral centre of the show. He spends years helping Zuko become a decent person, supporting his nephew through a difficult, painful identity crisis. Yet he spends no time at all trying to understand Azula. Zuko enjoys the support of two people who allow him to fail and love him regardless of his abilities. Azula gets validation from a power-hungry monster while these same two people appear to put very little effort into understanding her. They want her to conform to certain societal standards of femininity and decency, but Ozai encourages her to embrace her difference.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is not to say that the show ever <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWoobie" target="_blank">“woobifies”</a> Azula. She is a callous person who revels in the power she exercises over others. She sees most people as a means to an end, and she has no problem using them as she sees fit. Even as a child, she lies as easily as breathing, gleefully ponders her uncle’s death, and endangers her friends for her own amusement. She is thoroughly awful, and that’s what makes her so great.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rise</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As Zuko explains before we know anything else about Azula, his father used to say that she was “born lucky,” while Zuko was “lucky to be born.” While I agree with what Zuko goes on to say -- that he has fought for everything he has, and that his struggle has made him strong -- I would argue that Azula is more than simply “lucky.” True, she does have immense privilege and natural ability, but there is significant evidence of her hard work. No one becomes that good at bending without working at it, and even a genius has to pay attention during her studies to pick up that much information about the military campaigns of a nation that thrives on war. She plays an active role in the making of her own terrifying self.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first time we properly meet Azula, she is on a mission to bring Zuko and Iroh back to the Fire Nation. The captain of the ship on which she is travelling tells her that the tides won’t allow for them to bring the ship in. She responds by asking if the tides command the ship. When the captain answers in the negative, she asks, “If I were to have you thrown overboard, would the tides think twice about smashing you against the rocky shore? … Maybe you should worry less about the tides, who’ve already made up their mind about killing you, and worry more about me, who’s still mulling it over.” From the start, she is someone not to be messed with.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This becomes even clearer when, in her next scene, she performs the incredibly difficult task of bending lightning. Her advisors, Lo and Li, observe that her effort was “almost perfect,” to which Azula responds, “Almost isn’t good enough.” Then she continues to practice. Rather than making her lazy, being lucky and gifted has driven her to strive for perfection. If she’s not the best, she’s not good enough; failure is simultaneously a looming threat and an alien concept.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the more compelling aspects of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar: The Last Airbender</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is the fact that, while the Avatar himself is a boy, the best benders of the other three elements are girls. Katara masters waterbending in a matter of months, Toph incorporates earthbending into the way she experiences the world, and Azula’s blue flame burns hotter than that of any other firebender in the series. In addition to their mastery of their respective elements, every one of these girls is a master of a special, advanced form: blood, metal, and lightning bending, respectively. Aang’s divine powers make him almost omnipotent, but even he might have a hard time beating any of these three in a one-on-one situation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As the second season progresses, Azula shifts her focus from Zuko and Iroh to a much bigger prize: the Avatar. This is the prize that Zuko failed to bring home, and either killing or capturing the Avatar would prove her superiority. So would a mid-season fight that pits Azula against Zuko and Aang at the same time, and culminates in a showdown between herself and Team Avatar plus Zuko and Iroh. Against a group that includes four master benders, Azula still manages to come out on top, exploiting a moment of distraction to cover her escape.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Because completing one nearly impossible task is not enough to keep Azula busy, she decides to add the conquest of an unconquerable city to her agenda. After tussling with the Kyoshi Warriors while tracking Appa, Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee use their uniforms to enter the city of Ba Sing Se. There they are welcomed as allies ready to help the city in its hour of need, as a massive cover-up has just been exposed. The Dai Li, an organization of elite earthbenders established by Avatar Kyoshi to protect the Earth Kingdom’s culture, has become corrupt; they brainwash citizens and keep the entire population -- including the Earth King -- ignorant of the war that is being fought outside their gates. They operate under the command of the king’s advisor and puppetmaster, Long Feng.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Azula correctly deduces that anyone who controls the Dai Li controls Ba Sing Se and, with it, the entire Earth Kingdom, and she begins to craft a plan to seize control for herself. To do this, she uses her opponent’s expectations against him. She has Mai and Ty Lee discuss their true identities out in the open to make Long Feng think he has the upper hand. He confronts Azula with this information, and she pretends to be caught out. She makes him a deal: she will win him the Earth King’s trust, and he will get her the Avatar. Once she has access to the Dai Li, she begins to work to change their allegiance. As one Dai Li agent states in his report to Long Feng, she’s “more than cooperating. She’s really taken charge. She’s terrifying and inspirational at the same time. It’s… hard to explain.” Even with this indication of Azula’s plan, Long Feng thinks that he will easily get the better of her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When it comes time to show their cards, however, Azula has the winning hand. Long Feng double-crosses her, but finds his betrayal lacking follow-through when the Dai Li fail to follow his order to arrest the Fire Nation princess. Azula informs him that they’re waiting to see who will win before they pick sides. She’s confident that they will choose to side with her; he has clawed his way to the top, but she was born with the divine right to rule. It’s an argument based on pure hubris, but the monumental force of Azula’s self-confidence sells it. She knows that Long Feng will bow down to her, and he does. He concedes defeat, telling her that she’s “beaten [him] at [his] own game.” Her reply: “Don’t flatter yourself. You were never even a player.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the things that sets Azula apart from other women villains is her presentation. Whereas other evil ladies use their feminine wiles to seduce men into doing their dirty work for them, Azula uses her cunning, the force of her personality, and her own firepower. This is reflected in her visual depiction. Many, many shots of Azula have the camera focusing on her face. We see the minute changes in her expression, and they allow us to see her mind working. It’s likely not a coincidence that Ozai is often portrayed in the same way, as when he gives a slight smile of approval at Azula’s firebending display in the flashbacks. Whereas the vast majority of women villains in mainstream media use their sexual appeal as their principal weapon, with the camera obsessing over their objectified bodies, Azula is often all eyes and face. She almost confronts the viewer, and she fills the screen with her presence.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the midst of enacting the coup, Azula also takes some time out of her busy schedule to kill the Avatar and bring her brother back into the fold. The latter she does through the judicious application of keywords; Zuko’s obsession with regaining his honour leaves him open to suggestion. In her showdown with Long Feng, Azula had to make him believe in her strength, but in her conversion of Zuko, she has to exploit his weaknesses. She offers him redemption, honour, and their Father’s love, and she tops all this off with the suggestion that she needs his help to bring her plan to fruition. Again, she uses the power of words to get what she wants.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Although the Avatar doesn’t stay dead, killing him while he is in the Avatar State is an impressive achievement. While everyone looks on in awe, Azula sees an opportunity to bring Aang down, and she takes it. Had Katara not healed him, Aang’s death would have ensured an end to the Avatar cycle of regeneration, leaving the Fire Nation’s conquest of the world largely unhindered.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At the end of the second season, Azula is essentially unstoppable. She has accomplished the task she originally set out to complete by imprisoning Iroh and bringing Zuko home. She has conquered, with two other girls, some costumes, an iron will, and no loss of life, a city that her nation’s armies spent a century just trying to enter. Finally, she has every reason to believe that she has eliminated the only threat to her father’s plan to take over the world. And she has done all of this at the age of fourteen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In “The Boiling Rock,” Azula proclaims herself a “people person.” The events of that episode, and of most of the rest of the third season, thoroughly disabuse her of that notion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As with Mai and Ty Lee, “The Beach” is a pivotal part of Azula’s characterization. In fact, Lo and Li’s assurances that Ember Island “gives everyone a clean slate,” “has a special way of smoothing even the most ragged edges,” and “reveals the true you” seem to be meant for Azula in particular. In their initial foray out onto the island, Azula has only been physically stripped down, trading her armour for beach clothing. During this scene, she acts as she always has, destroying children’s sand castles and ordering her friends around. What’s changed is the setting; on a beach in a bikini top, Azula is not the conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Instead, she’s a teenager who enjoys ruining vacationers’ days.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This becomes abundantly clear when she gathers her friends to play a game of kuai ball, which is basically volleyball where kicking the ball is allowed. Azula encourages her teammates to exploit one of their opponents’ injuries, and the game ends in a decisive victory for Team Fire Nation Royalty. Azula, basking in the glory of winning a game against a few random teenagers, proclaims, “We defeated you for all time! You will never rise from the ashes of your shame and humiliation!” In that moment, it becomes obvious that she has no idea how to interact with her peers like a normal person.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When a boy, Chan, invites them to a party at his house, Azula realizes that he doesn’t know who they are. She decides not to enlighten him, instead assuring him that they will try to act normal among all the important Fire Nation youths. She later explains that she wanted to know what it would be like to see how they would be treated if people didn’t know who they were. It’s interesting that Azula is the one behind this plan; while the other three act somewhat differently, Azula seems to consider the party an opportunity to see who else she could be.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It turns out that the “true” Azula is basically a socially awkward dork. She takes the saying “partying from dusk ‘til dawn” literally. She compliments Chan’s “sharp” outfit by saying that he “could puncture the hull of an Empire Class Fire Nation battleship, leaving thousands to drown at sea… because it’s so sharp.” Watching her is a bit like watching a robot learn to be human; it can try all it wants, but it’s just not programmed that way.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Enter Ty Lee. All of Azula’s relationships are dysfunctional, and her friendship with Ty Lee is no exception. Still, even with a history of using fear to control her best friends, Azula does seem genuinely to like Ty Lee on some level. The best evidence for this claim occurs in this exchange. When Ty Lee begins to cry after Azula calls her a tease, Azula immediately seeks to comfort her and gives her the sole apology she delivers all series. More importantly, Azula reveals one of her own weaknesses to Ty Lee; as an exploiter of weakness, Azula must know that she is giving Ty Lee ammunition that can be used against her. Still, she admits that she has no luck with boys, and Ty Lee tells her basically to act vapid and laugh at everything the boy says. This works frighteningly well until Azula reveals her actual true self, complete with plans for world domination with Chan at her side. It becomes clear that her upbringing as a megalomaniacal overlord has somewhat impeded the development of her social skills. The fantasy of being a normal girl, even temporarily, is dashed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“The Beach” brings us another revelation about Azula’s self-perception. Having dismissed her friends’ confrontation of their respective traumas as “wonderful performances,” Azula allows herself a brief moment of seemingly authentic introspection. She claims that she doesn’t care that Ursa liked Zuko more than her, but she follows this up with the observation that “[her] own mother thought [she] was a monster… She was right, of course, but it still hurt.” Although Azula plays this revelation off, the fact that she later hallucinates her mother suggests that she is more profoundly affected than she would have her friends believe. It also makes one wonder whether realizing that her mother saw her as a monster helped Azula to become one.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“The Boiling Rock” marks the beginning of the end for Azula. After Mai saves Zuko and the group of escapees, Azula reveals her surprise at Mai’s betrayal. Mai explains her choice: “I guess you just don’t know people as well as you think you do. You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you.” Azula responds, “No, you miscalculated! You should have feared me more!” After Ty Lee paralyzes her, she orders them to be put somewhere where she’ll “never have to see their faces again.” The rage she displays during this exchange is the most emotion we’ve seen from her up to this point. Her friends’ betrayal shakes her to her very core.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Even if you support the idea that Azula only thought of Mai and Ty Lee as pawns (or perhaps bishops) in her long game, there are still several reasons for the profound effect their betrayal has on her. First, there is the fact that Mai frames it as a miscalculation, which means that it is Azula’s mistake. For a person whose worth has always hinged on being perfect, such a massive oversight would be catastrophic. Even worse, at the end of the second season, Azula used a similar betrayal to gain control of the Dai Li. She observed that “it’s terrible when you can’t trust the people who are closest to you.” Even then, Mai and Ty Lee shared a look behind her back. It is this egregious error that leads to Azula’s obsessive need to snuff out disloyalty in “Sozin’s Comet.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Azula’s fall largely takes place over the show’s four-part finale. In a flashback, we learn that she put forth the suggestion to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground. When it comes time to follow through with this plan, she is certain that she will be working alongside her father. However, at the last moment, he tells her that he will be leading the fleet while she remains home. She is understandably angry, and she exclaims that Ozai can’t treat her like this; “You can’t treat me like Zuko!” Ozai offers her the title of Fire Lord as compensation. A moment later, he declares himself the Phoenix King, the supreme ruler of the world, leaving Azula with an empty title.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the second major betrayal that leads to Azula’s fall. At the moment when she is to receive her well-earned reward, Ozai not only refuses payment, but acts as if she never deserved it in the first place. He has no intention of sharing the glory, despite the fact that she did all the work to get it. Azula, who has always been confident that her father values her, suddenly learns that his love was a lie. The fact that she compares her treatment with Zuko’s speaks volumes; she sees herself becoming a failure in her father’s eyes, and she resists his dismissal. Still, it may be the last indignity that stings most. Azula receives her reward as heir apparent, but that coveted title has been rendered meaningless. Even more humiliating is the display that follows: banners emblazoned with the Phoenix King insignia pop up around the arena as Ozai claims his new title. This was all planned in advance, likely at the meeting that took place when she and Zuko were sent away to Ember Island. At the same time as she was trying to overcome Ozai’s influence to interact with her peers in a healthy fashion, he was arranging for her downfall in the area where she excelled. Another miscalculation is added to the tally.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Having been betrayed by three of her closest allies, Azula sets to work banishing all potential traitors. Unfortunately, in her paranoid state, she finds a reason to suspect almost everyone in her employ of treachery. She sends all of her bodyguards away, even as she falls further into the grip of a nervous breakdown or a psychotic break. When no more external threats remain, she turns on herself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Although, at this point, her defeat is still to come, I consider this scene the end of Azula. Left alone in her room, she attempts to put her hair up into her customary top-knot. When she fails, she tells her hair that it’s time to “face your doom” and cuts off the two locks that frame her face.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Hair and identity are intimately linked in the world of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar: The Last Airbender</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. When he seeks to hide the fact that he is the Avatar in the third season, the usually bald Aang grows out his hair. Zuko and Iroh cut their hair at the beginning of the second season to mark their severance from the Fire Nation and to allow for them to disguise themselves. In this case, both men try -- and almost succeed -- to make new lives for themselves in their fabricated identities. When Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee present themselves to the Earth King as Kyoshi Warriors, we know who they actually are from their distinctive hairstyles.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Azula’s hair functions on a fairly obvious semiotic level in these final episodes. After Ozai’s betrayal, we can see Azula’s breakdown in the replacement of her usually perfect top-knot with loose, unstyled hair. When Azula cuts those two locks, she removes her most recognizable physical feature. In the world of cartoons, where most characters wear the same outfit for the show’s entire run, such a dramatic visual change is a big deal, and in this case it seems to represent a loss of identity. Everything that Azula thought she was has been compromised. In addition to this, the framing of the cut as an attack makes it the G-rated version of a violent act of self-mutilation. This echoes the way in which her paranoia causes Azula essentially to defeat herself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The hair-cutting is significant for another reason, as it marks Azula’s break from reality. Looking in the mirror during this moment of splitting the self, Azula sees a hallucination of her mother. Ursa tells Azula that she didn’t want to miss her coronation, but Azula can’t accept her pride: “I know what you really think of me. You think I’m a monster.” Their conversation turns to Azula’s tendency to use fear to control people, and Azula argues that she had no other choice: “Trust is for fools. Fear is the only reliable way. Even you fear me.” Ursa denies this, telling Azula that she loves her, but Azula responds by throwing a hairbrush into the mirror and shattering it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This exchange, like many a mirror-focused scene before it, is fraught with symbolism. As Azula seeks to destroy herself, her mind creates an image of her mother, like a subconscious attempt to protect the self. This Ursa doesn’t see her daughter as a monster; instead, she views her as a misguided child. She offers the love that Azula claimed not to need, and it is this that Azula rejects. This may be because Azula doesn’t believe that Ursa loved her, or because she realizes that this is just a figment of her imagination offering her empty promises, just as her father did. It may be because Azula has been operating in the realm of fear for so long that she wouldn’t know how to accept this love, even if it were real. On another level, this mirror-mother appears to be a representation of Azula’s sense of self-preservation and, in destroying her, Azula signals her inability to value herself now that she has failed in her own eyes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">After this, Azula’s defeat is just a matter of course. The last member of her family turns against her, claiming her title. The most powerful waterbender in the world pulls off an ingenious maneuver and shackles her to a grate. The proud, perfect Fire Nation princess is reduced to a sobbing mess, breathing fire in a tragic display of madness. This is the last we see of her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Azula’s arc is powerful and tragic and brilliant, but that doesn’t mean it’s free of dubious implications. It perpetuates the correlation between evil and mental illness that pervades Western media. Iroh, the moral centre, tells Zuko that “she’s crazy and she needs to go down,” which suggests that it is Azula’s mental illness -- arguably not even present before her breakdown -- that needs to be punished. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In addition, while a perceptive viewer will trace Azula’s breakdown to the betrayal of the people she trusted most, the show also ties her downfall to her rise to power. Her obsessive behaviour focuses on assassination attempts. When Lo and Li express their concern for her wellbeing, Azula says, “My father asked you to come here and talk to me, didn’t he? He thinks I can’t handle the responsibility of being Fire Lord, but I will be the greatest leader in Fire Nation history.” One could easily read Azula’s storyline in these final episodes as a cautionary tale about what happens when women gain political power, as Azula crumbling under the pressure of her title before she has even officially assumed it. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that Azula would have been the only female ruler of a country; the Earth Kingdom has King Kuei, the Water Tribes have Chiefs Hakoda and Arnook, and the Fire Nation has a long line of male Fire Lords, including Zuko. While they have their own problems, only she is shown to have broken down. In a series full of powerful women, it’s disheartening to see that none of them can bend their way through that particular glass ceiling.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally, there is the matter of Azula’s future. While other characters’ final scenes show them reunited with their families and friends or paired off with their love interests, the last we see of Azula is a shackled, broken kid. The last we see of Ozai is a shackled, broken man. The difference is that Ozai is given the chance for redemption. When Zuko visits him in his cell, he tells his father that his banishment put him on the right path, and he suggests that Ozai’s time in prison might do the same for him. A similar assurance spoken to Azula is noticeably absent.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the major themes of the series is redemption. Aang makes up for abandoning the world in its time of need by saving it a hundred years later. Zuko undergoes a long and painful journey of character development that ends with him joining the people he once hunted and helping them to win the war. Offering redemption to Ozai is, in principle, what the show’s about. However, by denying Azula the same option, it sets a troubling double standard. The man is afforded the possibility of redemption while the girl is denied it but, more importantly, the abuser is offered the opportunity to make good while his victim is left to cope with the consequences of his abuse.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What makes this even worse is that it is Azula, not Ozai, whose position at the end of the series mirrors Zuko’s at the beginning. She has had the ground swept out from under her feet by their father, and she too bears the scars of his betrayal, if less visibly than Zuko does. As Zuko’s sister, Azula is the descendent of both Good and Evil, as the show embodies in Avatar Roku and Fire Lord Sozin. If Zuko can learn to embrace the good parts of himself, why can’t Azula at least have the chance to try? Finally, the third season makes Azula a significantly more sympathetic character than Ozai, suggesting that the audience would care more about her potential for redemption. If anyone deserves to be a phoenix, it’s the girl who burned the brightest.</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-88842388095518542002013-08-25T12:00:00.000-07:002013-08-25T12:38:10.949-07:00The Knife Thrower and The Circus Freak<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Avatar%20-%20the%20Last%20Airbender/ep28-817_zps06024389.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Avatar%20-%20the%20Last%20Airbender/ep28-817_zps06024389.png" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All screencaps: Piandao.org</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Imagine, if you will, living in a world partially populated by superhumans. They can magic buildings into existence, burn down houses with a gesture, freeze people to death, and fly. The more powerful among them can rip apart metal with their bare hands, conjure up lightning, control other people’s bodies, and even remove powers from other superhumans. Surrounded by powerful beings waging a century-old war, is there any way for a normal person to stand out?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The answer offered by </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar: The Last Airbender </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">is an unequivocal “yes.” Sokka becomes both an excellent swordsman and the brains behind massive offensive maneuvers. Suki plays an instrumental role in a number of dangerous missions. Yue sacrifices herself to save the world. June can fight off multiple attackers in a barroom brawl while holding her drink, and not spill a drop. Many of these characters are among the premiere fighters in the show, but none of them are likely to go up against a powerful bender and come out with a win.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That distinction is reserved for Mai and Ty Lee, the two girls that the greatest firebender in the world calls on when she needs extra firepower. With their respective long-range and hand-to-hand combat skills, they might be more likely than Batman to beat Superman in a fight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Mai</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first thing Mai says is “There really is no fathoming the depths of my hatred for this place,” and this sets the tone for both her personality and character arc. The place in question is Omashu, an Earth Kingdom city recently conquered by the Fire Nation. Mai is there because her father, an important Fire Nation noble, has been appointed its governor. Despite the excitement inherent in a move to a recently conquered city -- assassination attempts by rebellious locals seem to be common -- Mai is bored.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While she claims that nothing happens in Omashu, Mai nevertheless keeps herself prepared in case that changes. An impossibly good knife thrower, she uses the long folds of her clothing to conceal knives of at least five varieties, as well as spring-loaded holsters on her wrists and ankles that shoot arrow-like stilettos. The first time we see her demonstrate her skills, she is chasing after Team Avatar, having misidentified them as rebel assassins. She makes them work for their escape and, when the group disappears into the ground, she sighs at the loss of her entertainment.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When Azula arrives, Mai jokingly hopes aloud that Azula’s there to kill her. Instead, she offers her a part in a mission, and Mai accepts before Azula can elaborate. At this point in her story, Mai appears cold, unable to care about anything but the rare thrills that break up her dull existence. She impassively watches as hoards of plague-ridden citizens fill the streets, going so far as to eat the Fire Nation equivalent of popcorn while looking down at them. Later, she accepts Azula’s logical observation that the return of Mai’s baby brother is not worth the loss of a powerful earthbender king; accordingly, she calls off the deal, leaving her brother with the enemy. Even fighting sometimes fails to make Mai feel, as she observes after temporarily beating Katara and Sokka: “I thought when Ty Lee and I finally caught you guys, it would be more exciting. Oh well, victory is boring.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Her emotional distance isn’t explained until the third season, in an episode called “The Beach.” After depicting Mai, Ty Lee, Azula, and Zuko’s attempts to be normal, the episode culminates in a soul-baring session. When pressed to reveal her childhood trauma, Mai initially refuses to admit that she has any. She recognizes that her privilege made her life easy, but goes on to describe the stifling rules that that privilege imposed on her: “I was a rich only child who got anything I wanted. As long as I behaved… and sat still… and didn’t speak unless spoken to. My mother said I had to keep out of trouble; we had my dad’s political career to think about.” Azula sees this upbringing as the reason why Mai is afraid to care about anything and incapable of expressing herself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Azula describes the Mai of the second season, but she appears to have missed the development that Mai undergoes in the third. For the vast majority of the second season, Mai is Azula’s faithful soldier, carrying out her orders. On the two occasions that she defies any part of Azula’s plan, it’s because her task is unpleasant or inconsequential. Still, it’s worth noting that Ty Lee obeys every order without question, so when Mai engages in these minor acts of defiance, they mean something. This becomes clear when she refuses to jump into a slurry of water and earth, saying, “She can shoot all the lightning she wants at me -- I am not going in that wall sludge juice.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Although Mai says this in a very offhand manner, it’s not hard to believe that Azula would have threatened to electrocute her friends. A flashback episode shows us that Mai served as a target for her firebending on at least one occasion. Later in the third season, it’s confirmed that Azula controlled both of her friends by making them fear her, so it’s important to note that Mai was displaying signs of rebellion even when she seemed to be loyal to Azula.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The catalyst for the change from subtle to overt rebellion is the return of Zuko. Her romantic interest in him dates back to a childhood crush and, after his return, they resume the relationship they appear to have had before his banishment. It quickly becomes clear that unfeeling Mai feels very strongly about Zuko; when he observes that she’s beautiful when she hates the world, she tells him, “I don’t hate you.” With him around, she becomes more optimistic and enthusiastic, even trying to cheer him up on a number of occasions. He also makes her angry, and she expresses this emotion more freely around Zuko than she likely ever has with anyone else. He is the one thing she loves, and the one person with whom she can express herself. In that sense, her relationship with Zuko proves Azula wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Even though he is the one thing she values, Mai is willing to end their relationship when Zuko disrespects her. When his jealousy causes him to start a fight, she calls him out on his uncontrollable temper. He responds with a condemnation of her lack of passion, and she shuts him down. Later, she comforts him after he admits that he’s angry at himself; he comes to terms with the source of his rage, and she reveals that she is passionate about him.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is what ultimately allows her to break free of Azula. In “The Boiling Rock,” Mai confronts Zuko for the first time following his departure from the Fire Nation. She is livid about the letter he left in place of a goodbye, saying, “You could have at least looked me in the eye when you ripped out my heart.” He tells her that his leaving wasn’t about her, but about the Fire Nation he hopes to save from itself. She responds that he’s betraying his country, and the argument is left unresolved. She has confirmation that he values his country more than he loves her, and the country that he wants to save is the version that exists in his head. To stand by him is to stand against her family and her country. At this point, she has no real reason to take his side.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And yet she does. When his life is threatened, she risks her own life “saving the jerk who dumped [her].” Azula had been willing to let him die, and she is shocked at Mai’s betrayal. She asks for an explanation, and Mai says, “I guess you just don’t know people as well as you think you do. You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you.” For her actions, Mai is locked away. When she eventually gets out of prison, she reunites with the newly crowned Fire Lord Zuko, rewarded for her rebellion with love and the presumed title of Fire Lady.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now, normally I’d be more than a little leery about supporting a character arc that ends with a woman betraying her female friend in the name of her love for a man, but there’s a lot more to Mai’s story than its basic description would suggest. Firstly, she explicitly chooses love over fear, knowing that she will suffer for her choice. As a person whose character initially revolved around her hatred for her situation, Mai demonstrates enormous growth by consciously deciding to embrace positive emotion. Perhaps more importantly, by defying Azula, she eliminates the last set of rules that restricted her. Once she forces Azula to punish her, she frees herself from the fear of punishment that would otherwise have regulated her actions. Although it seems a bit contradictory, her imprisonment liberates her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Actual strong female character</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ty Lee</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first time we meet Ty Lee, she’s looking at Azula upside down while balancing on two fingers. As in Mai’s introduction, it’s difficult to imagine an image that could more perfectly introduce the character and her arc.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Like Mai, Ty Lee is one of Azula’s childhood friends, her minion dating back to their days at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls. She is something of a girly girl, wearing pink and flirting with boys (even the ones on the opposing side). In the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Mean Girls</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">-style trio, Ty Lee is “the dumb one;” if Mai’s hair is so big because it’s full of secrets (and knives), Ty Lee is the friend who’d offer to take you to Taco Bell when you’re feeling down.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The show subverts this trope by making Ty Lee the most brutally efficient hand-to-hand fighter in the series. Ty Lee’s intelligence is most clearly expressed in movement, as she demonstrates on a number of occasions a keen ability to read others and exploit their weaknesses. In this sense, she’s similar to Azula; while Azula uses her words to attack psychological soft spots, Ty Lee literally hits a nerve in order to paralyze her opponents. Her most impressive ability is chi blocking, a martial art that uses direct blows to pressure points on the body to disrupt an opponent’s chi flow. In practical terms, this means that Ty Lee can not only paralyze people, but temporarily prevent benders from accessing their bending. After their first fight, Katara claims that Ty Lee is the scariest member of the group. While she says this before getting her own chance to battle Azula, it’s still a pretty powerful endorsement of Ty Lee’s ability.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We meet Ty Lee when she has left her life as a nobleman’s daughter behind to run away and join the circus as an acrobat. Azula thinks that Ty Lee’s chosen lifestyle is beneath her and offers her the opportunity to go traitor-hunting with her. Ty Lee declines, saying that her aura has never been pinker. This is the first and last time Ty Lee explicitly refuses to obey Azula.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">By the next scene, it’s not hard to see why. Azula spends the entirety of Ty Lee’s performance persuading her friend to accompany her. Unfortunately, Azula’s method of persuasion involves lighting the safety net on fire and releasing all of the circus’ dangerous animals into the big top. When Azula visits her friend in her dressing room after the performance, she insinuates that she will ensure that the routines will become increasingly dangerous until Ty Lee decides to join her. In the spirit of self-preservation, Ty Lee observes that “the universe is giving [her] strong hints that it’s time for a career change.” When the two girls arrive in Omashu to recruit Mai, she expresses disappointment at the news that Ty Lee has left the circus; Ty Lee had said it was her calling. Ty Lee replies that “Azula called a little louder.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This concession reveals the pattern of their relationship, as it becomes more and more obvious that Azula is the dominant force in Ty Lee’s life. In the flashback episode, we see Ty Lee paired at all times with Azula, who is simultaneously bully and best friend. When Ty Lee flawlessly performs an acrobatic trick that her friend botched, Azula shoves her to the ground. A moment later, she is whispering in Ty Lee’s ear, planning a game that will humiliate both Zuko and Mai. Throughout the second season and into the third, any task that Azula assigns to Ty Lee is as good as done the moment she says it. This includes missions as dangerous as taking out an elite earthbending squad, which she does both cheerfully and decisively. It is almost as if Ty Lee cannot fathom a world in which she tells Azula “no” and gets away with it. Considering Azula’s violent reaction to Ty Lee’s initial refusal to join her, this approach to their relationship makes sense.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Because we rarely see Ty Lee outside of Azula’s influence, it is difficult to tell just how much of her friendliness toward the princess is based on genuine affection and how much of it is based on fear. When Azula makes a pun about the Kyoshi Warriors, Ty Lee applauds her wit. When Azula outlines her plans to stage a coup in Ba Sing Se, Ty Lee tells her how much she admires her confidence. Even as Azula adds another set of soldiers to her entourage in the form of the Dai Li, Ty Lee praises her speech as “pretty and poetic but also scary in a good way,” all while pouring her tea. It is difficult to determine the ratio of actual feeling to concern for her own safety, and Azula’s own ambiguous feelings toward Ty Lee merely complicate the situation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The most revealing treatment of their friendship occurs in “The Beach.” One of the conceits of the episode, as explicitly stated by Lo and Li, is that “Ember Island reveals the true you.” In Ty Lee’s case, her true self appears to be an attention-obsessed heartbreaker who manipulates boys into serving her with no real intention of reciprocating their affection. It’s a far cry from the girl who unquestioningly obeys her friend’s every command. In this situation, she has the power, and she is more than willing to use it. However, she is unpracticed in the art of control, so she tries to appease the boys with assurances that she likes them all before eventually knocking them out in order to get away.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ty Lee turns to her friend for confirmation that her sheer likeability drew in the boys, but a jealous Azula tells her that she’s a tease and that the boys don’t actually care who she is. Ty Lee is hurt, and Azula offers her what turns out to be her only apology of the series, admitting to her own jealousy over Ty Lee’s ease in conversing with boys. Regardless of her motivation, Ty Lee is a good friend, and she immediately offers to help Azula with her problem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Later, on the beach, Ty Lee is forced to confront the reasons for her attention-seeking when Zuko calls her a circus freak. She proudly claims the title, telling her friends that she joined the circus to escape from a house where she was one of seven identical sisters. She felt that she lacked an individual identity, and she admits to being terrified that she would live her life as part of a matched set. The attention she seeks now is the attention she lacked growing up. This desire might also help to explain her friendship with Azula; being the chosen friend of a princess likely goes a long way to cementing one’s popularity, even at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ty Lee’s defining moment occurs just after Mai’s, when she defends Mai against Azula at the Boiling Rock. After Mai betrays Azula, the two girls prepare themselves for what would clearly be a fight to the death. A visibly troubled Ty Lee stops the fight before it can begin, using her chi blocking to paralyze Azula. In this moment, Ty Lee appears to relinquish her image of Azula as “the most beautiful, smartest, perfect girl in the world,” replacing it with a truer vision of a violent, destructive girl who rules others with fear. The upside down Azula has been turned right side up, and this is a version of her that Ty Lee can no longer support. Like Mai, she goes to prison a free woman, no longer a slave to Azula’s will.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This, in and of itself, would be a good ending. Ty Lee could wait out the war in jail and return to the circus, safe in the knowledge that Azula has been defeated. Instead, she joins the Kyoshi Warriors. Now, I will readily admit that Ty Lee is a strangely ambiguous character; while Mai’s story is straightforward, Ty Lee’s relies in part on the viewer’s interpretation of Azula’s character, and that can fluctuate wildly across audience members. Still, I don’t understand how it could be considered a victory for a girl who felt like she’d lost her own name to join the show’s most obvious matched set. With the exception of Suki, we know nothing about these girls, including their names. I suppose that it might have been an effort to show that Ty Lee has overcome her need for attention, but that is a pretty hollow victory when the admirable goals of establishing an identity and achieving recognition as an individual suddenly no longer matter. While Ty Lee’s arc includes a journey from obedience to freedom, it also depicts a young woman who has found happiness and self-fulfillment giving it up to become exactly what she was trying to escape.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Strong Female Character™ </span><br />
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-85737868473618802142013-08-17T22:00:00.000-07:002013-08-17T22:00:24.571-07:00The Greatest Earthbender in the World<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Avatar%20-%20the%20Last%20Airbender/ep26-1314_zps3e1e6196.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Avatar%20-%20the%20Last%20Airbender/ep26-1314_zps3e1e6196.png" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All screencaps: Piandao.org</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the original plan for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar: The Last Airbender</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, Katara was the only female member of Team Avatar. Aang’s earthbending teacher was originally conceived as a “big, muscly kind of jerk guy” who would serve as a foil to Sokka’s nerdiness. Early production notes indicate that this character would have attracted Katara’s romantic attention, making the Katara/Aang relationship into a love triangle. Luckily, head writer Aaron Ehasz noticed the gender disparity and lobbied for the earthbender to be a girl. And thus Toph Beifong, the Blind Bandit, the Runaway, the Melon Lord, and the greatest earthbender in the world, was born.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Even in the early stages of her development, the character who would become Toph was blind. In most mainstream films and television shows, characters with disabilities are defined by them. Stories about these characters revolve around how very unfortunate it is that they can never lead a “normal” life, and these narratives typically suggest that every person with a disability resents their situation. Most of the time, however, these characters aren’t even represented, limited instead to Very Special Episodes in which the abled members of the main cast learn lessons about tolerance. Often, these one-off episodes portray the abled person admiring the person with a disability for their optimism in the face of terrible hardship. Basically, most media treats disability as a horrible affliction that we must look beyond, even as it ensures that all stories about people with disabilities are about their disabilities, not about their personalities or accomplishments.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before Toph enters the narrative, the show subverts this pattern with Teo, a boy paralyzed from the waist down whose inventor father builds him a glider that allows him access to the skies. Unfortunately, though he does return in the third season, his story is almost entirely limited to one focal episode. Toph, by contrast, is a principal character, one of the uncontested main members of Team Avatar.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toph’s introductory episode is an explicit rebuttal to the typical portrayal of people with disabilities. The first time we meet her, she is defending her title at a WWE-style earthbending competition as the Blind Bandit. Aang, Katara, and Sokka are initially skeptical; surely a tiny twelve-year-old blind girl couldn’t beat a bunch of full-grown men. However, she can and does, and she is only defeated when Aang unfairly uses airbending in his challenge for the title.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When she disappears afterwards, Aang must use clues gleaned from a vision to find her, as no one knows who she is. It turns out that she is the only child of a wealthy couple who have kept her existence secret in order to keep her safe. They are exceedingly overprotective, limiting her to beginner level earthbending lessons, and having servants not only supervising her when she goes out on the grounds, but blowing on her soup when it’s too hot. She is a prisoner in a gilded cage, and her repeated escape attempts do nothing but move the bars closer.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Later in the episode, after she and Aang have been kidnapped, Toph’s father reveals that his primary reason for keeping her close is her blindness. When Sokka and Katara ask for her help to save Aang, her father states, “My daughter is blind. She is blind and tiny and helpless and fragile. She cannot help you.” Toph, confronted with her father’s low opinion of her ability, says simply, “Yes, I can.” Sokka and Katara offer to help her, but she declines. Then she takes on all seven adult earthbenders at once and she wipes the floor with them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Even in the face of a display of bending that floors master waterbender Katara, Toph’s father refuses to accept that she can take care of herself. He concludes that she’s had too much freedom and puts her under twenty four hour surveillance. Finally, she escapes one last time to join Team Avatar, claiming that her father changed his mind and is now perfectly fine with letting her travel the world. The last we see of her father, he is ordering two earthbenders to “do whatever it takes to bring her home.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toph’s father is presented as controlling and irrational, and the show condemns his point of view. He is wrong for controlling her and for viewing her in terms of what she can’t do instead of who she is. By condemning him, the show rejects the usual approach to the mainstream portrayal of disability. It strengthens this message by having Toph defend her actions with very little reference to her blindness, instead framing the conversation as a matter of agency versus control. She doesn’t explain that she has devised a method of sight that involves reading vibrations in the earth, thereby “overcoming” her disability. Rather, she points out that she’s good at fighting, that she loves it, and that she deserves to exist and be accepted as she is. Ultimately, she joins Team Avatar because they can give her that acceptance.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That’s not to say that the other kids don’t say insensitive things; in fact, one of the most compelling aspects of the show’s treatment of this issue is that it never entirely becomes a non-issue. It can be difficult to find a balance between normalizing a disability and erasing it, and I think </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar: The Last Airbender</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> does an admirable job. While the show never focuses another episode around Toph’s blindness, it also doesn’t let the audience ignore it and pretend she’s just like everyone else. She’s not, and that’s completely fine. The way it accomplishes this is through the power of jokes. When the group takes cover in a hole, Sokka laments that “It’s so dark down here. I can’t see a thing.” Toph responds, “Oh no, what a nightmare,” and Sokka apologizes. When they’re looking for things, she takes great delight in pretending to see them, only to remind her friends that she can’t. It’s a fun way to remind the characters and the audience that she experiences the world differently without making this difference a big deal.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The shift in Toph’s loyalty from her biological family to her found family forms the bulk of her character arc, and it is best exemplified in the development of her relationship with Katara. In “The Chase,” nurturing team mom Katara comes into conflict with the recently liberated Toph. Toph refuses to help the others set up camp, claiming that she can pull her own weight. The tension increases over the course of the episode, in which Team Avatar endures a sleepless night spent fleeing from Azula’s relentless pursuit, eventually causing Toph to leave the group. She runs into Zuko’s uncle, Iroh, to whom she confesses, “People see me and think I’m weak. They wanna take care of me, but I can take care of myself, by myself.” Iroh tells her that there is nothing wrong with getting help from the people who love you, and she decides to rejoin the team.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The tension between Toph and Katara can be traced to a myriad of sources. First, their respective elements are incompatible; while Katara is all about the push and pull of compromise, Toph is stubborn and rigid. Katara is also suffering from some serious disillusionment, as she thought that adding another girl to the group would give her the opportunity to bond with someone like her. Instead, Toph turned out to be very much “one of the guys.” This would be especially difficult to take for a girl who had no friends of her own age in the South Pole. Because she had never had a friend in her entire life, Toph probably seemed like the perfect candidate for companionship. As if that weren’t enough, Katara’s need to take care of others conflicted with Toph’s need to prove that she could fend for herself. Katara falls into a maternal role, and Toph is more interested in discovering what life is like without parents.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The issues raised in “The Chase” are resolved a season later in “The Runaway.” The episode begins with Katara and Toph sparring with Aang as part of his training. The training session quickly devolves into a fight between the two girls which ends in the G-rated, water- and earthbending equivalent of mud wrestling. Their tension thus firmly re-established, Toph basically sets out to tick Katara off. She does this by using her bending to pull a number of scams, first sensing the rock in the shell game, then eventually building to full-on blackmail. Katara warns her that she’s playing a dangerous game that could get all of them caught, a particularly serious situation considering the fact that they are in the Fire Nation. Her prediction promises to come to fruition when Sokka discovers a “wanted” poster for a girl known as “the Runaway.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">By this point, Katara and Toph have explicitly reassumed their mother and child roles. Katara thinks that Toph is acting out because she misses her parents and can’t deal with the fact that she still loves the two people she pretends to hate. Toph seems to resent Katara for trying to act as her mother. Later, she reveals to Sokka that she has conflicted feelings about Katara’s maternal qualities: “The truth is, sometimes Katara does act motherly, but that’s not always a bad thing. She’s compassionate and kind and she actually cares about me -- you know, the real me. That’s more than my own mom .”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toph’s reckless behaviour takes on new significance in light of this confession. On some level, she seems to be asking for someone to discipline her; she needs Katara to provide order and rules. She needs Katara to fulfill the role of a mother, to care for her and protect her from her own bad ideas. This might be another reason for Toph to act out; she has to know that Katara will acknowledge her flaws, because that means that she cares for Toph the person, not Toph the idea. While she could look for validation from Aang and Sokka, neither her god-like student nor her crush can really fill that parental role.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Katara tries to re-define their friendship as a relationship between equals by offering to pull a scam with Toph. In this way, she can show Toph that she’s fun while hopefully removing the baggage of projected parental failure from their relationship. At the end of the episode, Toph tells Katara that she was right and asks Katara to help her write a letter to her parents, thereby relieving her of her role as maternal figure as Toph seeks to re-open communication with her actual mother.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Further proving the importance of her relationship with Katara is their shared vignette in “Tales of Ba Sing Se.” After observing that Toph has “a little dirt on [her]... everywhere, actually,” Katara suggests that they have a girls’ day out at the spa. It’s not really Toph’s scene, and she says as much; still, she makes it through, and even enjoys it, albeit with the help of humourous earthbending hijinks. Afterwards, a group of girls insult her makeup, and she opens up the stone bridge to dump them in the river, with Katara helping to punish them by floating them away on a wave.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The exchange that follows is remarkable. Katara tries to tell Toph that the girls had no idea what they were talking about, but Toph assures her that “It’s okay. One of the good things about being blind is that I don’t have to waste my time worrying about appearances. I don’t care what I look like. I’m not looking for anyone’s approval. I know who I am.” Still, she’s crying as she says it. Katara notices and tailors her response to reinforce Toph’s value as a person, even as she also addresses the unspoken question: “That’s what I really admire about you, Toph. You’re so strong and confident and self-assured, and I know it doesn’t matter, but you’re really pretty.” This response earns Katara the (should-be) coveted Beifong shoulder punch of affection.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This vignette accomplishes a lot in a very short time. It frames the spa trip more as an opportunity for the two girls to bond than a foray into beautification. It allows us to see how Katara and Toph’s relationship works when it’s not bogged down in mommy issues. It argues that women and girls should be defined by their personality instead of their appearance without demonizing the pursuit of beauty. Most notably, it removes the validation of women’s appearances from the realm of the male gaze. Girls insult Toph’s makeup, she and another girl punish them for their hurtful comments, and a girl tells her that she’s pretty. While it depicts women as the harshest critics of other women’s looks, it also suggests that women can build each other up and bolster each other’s self-confidence.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is particularly interesting in light of Toph’s complicated relationship with gender performance. Whereas Katara fights to be allowed access to traditionally male spaces, Toph’s domination in Earth Rumble V and VI proves that she’s already there. As far as we know, she spent all of her time at home with her parents and servants, with regular visits from her earthbending teacher, Master Yu. It’s no surprise that a sheltered, disempowered kid would want to emulate the competitive earthbenders’ overt displays of strength and forge a place for herself among them. Joining their ranks, however, necessarily requires her to immerse herself in their hyper-masculine subculture, based on violence and trash talking. Toph happily becomes a master of both.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the more problematic behaviours that Toph picks up from the competitors is her tendency to base jokes on the denigration of stereotypically feminine traits. For example, when Aang challenges her to a match, she asks, “Do people really want to see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">two</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> little girls fighting out here?” She calls him “light on his feet,” “Fancy Dancer,” and “Twinkletoes,” the last of which becoming her official nickname for him. She tends to view strength as physical power, and she obviously associates physical power with masculinity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This becomes evident in the “Ember Island Players” episode. Before the four-part finale, Team Avatar goes to see a play about their adventures. The play is unutterably awful, mischaracterizing literally every single person (though nowhere near as terribly as the actual adaptation by M. Night Shyamalan, as these characterizations at least have some foundation in canon). Aang is an irritatingly cheerful woman, Sokka is a useless jester, and Katara is a moralizing crybaby with lines like, “My heart is so full of hope that it’s making me tearbend!”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">During the first intermission, the kids complain about their portrayal. Toph, who won’t be showing up until the second act, just tells them that the truth hurts. Her friends tell her to wait for her own depiction, confident that it will be just as offensive. Toph emerges onstage as a massive, muscular man, introducing himself as Toph, “because it sounds like ‘tough,’ and that’s just what I am.” Unlike her friends, Toph is ecstatic, and she says that she wouldn’t have cast it any other way. Then the actor Toph explains that he can basically use echolocation, and the real Toph beams.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The play is a clever take on a Hollywoodized </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A:TLA</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">; therefore, both the actor’s ridiculous onstage antics and Toph’s reaction to her own representation can be read as commentary on the process of adaptation. A paragon of masculinity, size, and physical strength, actor Toph is what Hollywood usually chooses to depict when it must portray a cocky, powerful character. Even </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A:TLA </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">almost perpetuated this uninspired portrayal in its original plan for Toph. In this moment, we see just how subversive Toph’s character really is. While her introduction hinged on the audience’s reluctance to see a tiny blind girl as a powerful figure, the deeper meaning of this scene relies on the audience’s knowledge of Toph’s strength. To an audience familiar with Toph’s accomplishments, the notion that this muscled giant is in any way her equal is laughable. She has real power, while he has ridiculous bravado. She has displaced him as the true possessor of strength, and he stands as an empty symbol. However, the fact that Toph then tells Aang, “At least it’s not a flying bald lady,” suggests that she herself still values (her flawed perception of) masculinity above (her equally flawed perception of) femininity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This makes sense when you consider Toph’s approach to earthbending. To her, bending is all about being firm and grounded, and it is best taught by inflicting pain and slinging insults. When a blindfolded Aang moves out of the way of a rolling boulder that he was supposed to stop, she exclaims, “If you’re not tough enough to stop the rock, then you could at least give it the pleasure of smushing you instead of jumping out of the way like a jelly-boned wimp!” Katara warns her that Aang responds better to positive reinforcement, and Toph gets a chance to test this theory when he fights off a saber-tooth moose lion and stands up to her psychological assault. “You just stood your ground against a crazy beast,” she says. “And even more impressive, you stood your ground against me.” It is only after Aang has proven himself to be solid and forceful that Toph will call him an earthbender.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Earthbending forms the core of Toph’s character. It is ingrained in her personality, from her direct approach to problem-solving to her plain-spoken wisdom to her rock-solid sense of self. The reason for this lies in her own instruction in the art at the paws of the original earthbenders: the badgermoles. She explains: “They were blind, just like me, so we understood each other. I was able to learn earthbending, not just as a martial art, but as an extension of my senses. For them, the original earthbenders, it wasn’t just about fighting; it was their way of interacting with the world.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Toph’s reliance on earthbending is her greatest strength and weakness. It allows her to detect lies, save her abled friends, and hold up entire buildings against the force of angry spirits. It also makes it nearly impossible to “see” anything clearly when she is on wood, sand, or ice, leaving her helpless in many dangerous situations. However, Toph refuses to remain weak, so she does everything she can to adjust to these materials. Wood and water are a lost cause, but she goes from perceiving everything as “fuzzy” when walking on sand to bending it into a scale model of Ba Sing Se, complete with the Earth King and his pet bear.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It is in the moment when she is most vulnerable that Toph discovers her greatest strength. In the final two episodes of the second season, the two men Toph’s father paid to kidnap her finally succeed. To do this, they send a letter ostensibly penned by Toph’s mother, telling Toph that she is in the city and asking her to come visit. They play off of Toph’s love for her mother; while her father made his opinion of her very clear, her mother says little enough that she might believably be willing to get to know the real Toph. Toph’s unrequited familial love is only the first vulnerability that they exploit; when she arrives at the house, they lock her in a metal box.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Up to this point, one of the incontrovertible truths of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A:TLA</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> world is that it is impossible to bend metal. Xin Fu says as much when he tells Toph, “You might think you’re the greatest earthbender in the world, but even you can’t bend metal.” For a time, even Toph believes this. As all of her ploys to get out of the box prove unfruitful, however, she looks to the metal itself. Overlaid on the scene is the voice-over of a guru, telling Aang that all of the elements are connected. Even metal, he says, is just “a part of earth that has been purified and refined.” Without the benefit of hearing this voice-over, Toph nevertheless finds the impurities in the metal box and physically pries it apart. When her captors come back to investigate, she imprisons them in the box, exclaiming as she leaves, “I am the greatest earthbender in the world! Don’t you two dunderheads ever forget it.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In this scene, we see the essence of Toph. She finds herself in a seemingly impossible situation, so she does the impossible to get out of it. She has been locked in a cage -- a metal box, the prison of her parents’ house, the jail of their controlling affection, or the dark dungeon that others assume she is confined to due to her blindness -- and she forges her way to freedom. Ultimately, Toph Beifong is a character who finds empowerment in disempowerment, turning perceived weaknesses into real strengths.</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-58707561333754291142013-08-09T23:00:00.000-07:002013-08-14T00:44:31.280-07:00The Avatar, The Warrior, and The Moon Spirit<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All screencaps: Piandao.org</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When I was working out this month’s posting schedule, I ran into a problem I haven’t had since we put together the Disney Princess series: too many ladies. I knew that Katara, Toph, and Azula needed their own posts, but that left me with the issue of placing Mai and Ty Lee. Should they get their own post or double up with Azula? Should I group Kya, Ursa, and Yue together to discuss the theme of women’s sacrifice, or should I risk the dubious implications of putting Yue and Suki together in what would seem to be a collection of Sokka’s love interests? What would I do about the two female Avatars? And, most importantly, could I fit Smellerbee in somewhere?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar Kyoshi</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Avatar Kyoshi: Master Genderbender</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When Aang, Katara, and Sokka visit the Southern Air Temple, they come across a room containing statues of all of the past Avatars, a sea of dudes stretching across the floor and up into the walls. So it’s something of a surprise to learn in the very next episode that the most recent Earth Kingdom Avatar was a woman, especially given the fact that her statue clearly depicted a man who looks nothing like her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While the show does wonderful things with many of its female characters, it’s scenes like this that remind us that its representation of gender is far from perfect. The Avatar is an almost omnipotent being whose primary responsibility is keeping the world working properly. While other world leaders are humans who have been granted tremendous power, the Avatar is a tremendously powerful being who has been given human form to keep him or her connected to human concerns. To make the Avatar a man about 99.9% of the time suggests that men are more worthy of this power.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The series already perpetuates this insidious message in many of its human hierarchies. The Northern Water Tribe, Fire Nation, and Earth Kingdom are all ruled by men, and the Air Nomads that we meet are all male, save for the Avatar Yangchen. The Order of the White Lotus, a secret society dedicated to spreading ancient knowledge across the world, is a massive sausage fest. The masters are men, the generals, admirals, and inventors likewise.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As a woman in an officially recognized position of power, Kyoshi is a big deal. She is also big in the literal sense, a statuesque woman with the biggest shoe size of any Avatar. She wears a uniform with face makeup intended to intimidate others, and she wields two fans that she can use both as weapons and as tools for bending. Whenever she shows up, she is the most striking, terrifying person onscreen. Had Aang been able to summon her to fight Fire Lord Ozai, you get the feeling that the show would have been over sometime during the first season.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first time we see Kyoshi “in the flesh,” she is borrowing Aang’s body. He is standing trial for a crime that the villagers of Chin claim she committed 370 years earlier, when she killed their leader, Chin the Conqueror. While Aang and the Water Tribe siblings argue that no Avatar would commit murder, the first thing Kyoshi does when she possesses Aang’s body is admit to killing Chin. She offers a description of justifiable homicide, citing Chin’s tyranny and his army’s expansion across the continent. When he reached the peninsula where she made her home, he demanded her surrender, and she refused. To protect her people, she used her bending ability to break off the chunk of land that would become Kyoshi Island. Chin did not step back in time and fell to his death as a consequence. “I created Kyoshi Island so my people could be safe from invaders,” Kyoshi says, and you can almost hear the mic drop.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In an online game that bridged the gap between the second and third seasons, Aang ventures into the spirit world to reconnect with four of his past lives. Kyoshi tells him about one of her greatest challenges: resolving an attempted revolution in the Earth Kingdom. The peasants felt that the king did not represent their interests, and they started to destroy symbols of the old government, which included historical artifacts. The Earth King ordered Kyoshi to help him quash the revolt, and she refused; to his exclamation of “How dare you defy your king,” she responded, “How dare you defy your Avatar!” Still, she offers to protect his interests and Ba Sing Se’s cultural heritage if he will listen to the peasants’ grievances. She does this because, as she says, everyone should have a voice “if balance is to prevail over tyranny.” Unfortunately, part of her solution is the formation of the Dai Li, an elite group of earthbenders who became corrupt sometime during the 170 years since her death. Considering the fact that the city Aang established went wrong less than two decades after his own death, Kyoshi did pretty well.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally, in the last arc of the show, Aang calls upon Kyoshi once more. She gives him the advice that “only justice will bring peace.” While she admits that she made mistakes, she clearly considers the Avatar’s duty to be the dispensation of justice. To assume that kind of authority, a person would have to be pretty self-confident. Then again, if you were an almost all-powerful Amazonian woman who lived for centuries and watched kings cower at your feet, self-confidence would hardly be a problem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Strong Female Character™ (because she’s awesome, but ultimately undeveloped)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Suki</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While the Dai Li didn’t work out precisely as planned, Kyoshi had more luck with the establishment of another fighting force: the Kyoshi Warriors. A group comprised entirely of young women, the Kyoshi Warriors practice a fighting style that involves using their opponent’s force against them. They wear armour that resembles their founder’s own preferred garb, as well as her customary makeup. Their leader, Suki, describes the outfit: “It’s a warrior’s uniform. … The silk thread symbolizes the brave blood that flows through our veins. The gold insignia represents the honour of the warrior’s heart.” As non-benders, their technique relies heavily on the use of fans as weapons.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The warriors are introduced in an episode which revolves around another condemnation of overt sexism. After claiming that girls are inherently better at sewing than boys (who are apparently better at hunting and fighting), Sokka needs to learn a lesson about the inaccuracy of stereotypical gender roles. The show teaches him this lesson at the hands of the Kyoshi Warriors. When he claims to be the best warrior in his village, Suki asks him to demonstrate his abilities. Sokka thinks that he will be showing off his skills to a bunch of untrained girls, but he quickly finds himself with his hand tied to his foot, humiliated by Suki’s vastly superior technique.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Soon, Sokka swallows his pride and asks Suki to teach him, which she agrees to do on the condition that he trains in the traditional uniform, makeup included. While this is played for laughs, it is to the show’s credit that both Sokka and Aang end up fighting Fire Nation soldiers while wearing this makeup, and absolutely no one comments on it either during or after the battle.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The most interesting part of this episode for me, however, is Suki and Sokka’s goodbye. He apologizes for his behaviour, saying, “I treated you like a girl, when I should have treated you like a warrior.” Suki replies, “I am a warrior, but I’m a girl too,” giving him a kiss on the cheek. The rest of the episode is fine, if a little heavy-handed, but this exchange, clearly intended to bring the message home, actually undermines it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s break the story down a bit. A sexist guy who thinks that fighting is an exclusively masculine pursuit makes fun of a group of female warriors. When they prove themselves to be better fighters than him, he is forced to confront his own prejudices. (Conveniently, there is no parallel story in which Sokka sees men who enjoy sewing and performing stereotypically feminine tasks, although the show does give him a love of shopping.) As a reward for learning that women can be warriors, he receives a kiss and a future love interest. This is the part that bugs me. Without the kiss, she is telling him that femininity and fighting ability are not mutually exclusive, and that he should respect both of these aspects of Suki. With the kiss, however, the message becomes more complicated and arguably less progressive. “But I’m a girl too” signals Suki’s romantic interest in Sokka, making her designated love interest status more important than the message that she deserves to be treated with respect because girls are people too. It also suggests that being treated like a girl necessarily means being valued as a potential romantic partner. In addition to all of this, the fact that Sokka is still spouting nonsense about treating girls and warriors differently proves that he didn’t really learn his lesson. Instead of a kiss, he probably should have been given the Not-As-Much-Of-a-Jerk-As-You-Could-Have-Been Award.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The next time we see Suki is in “The Serpent’s Pass,” where we learn that she and the other Kyoshi Warriors have taken work as security officers at the ferry terminal leading to Ba Sing Se. When the members of Team Avatar decide to forego the ferry and travel to the city using the infamous Serpent’s Pass, Suki accompanies them. Sokka, having experienced a terrible loss, becomes overprotective of her, and Suki confronts him about it. She can take care of herself, and she needs him to see that. She proves this claim when Toph falls into the path of a sea monster and Suki immediately dives into the water, armour and all, while Sokka is still removing his shoe. She saves Toph, and later reveals that she went along to ensure Sokka’s safety. She knows that she is highly competent, and she will only indulge Sokka’s misguided attempts at chivalry up to a point.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The next time we see her, she and the other Kyoshi Warriors are trying to protect Appa from Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee. Though they lose, the warriors do manage to send Appa away. Suki demonstrates tremendous courage: first, when she approaches the abused and terrified sky bison, and then when she takes on Azula in combat. Considering the fact that by this point, Team Avatar and its three powerful benders have been unable to do any real damage to Azula, Suki’s single-handed attempt to take her down is both foolishly brave and terribly impressive.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, if inevitably, Suki loses. She turns up again in the Boiling Rock, a Fire Nation prison that houses political dissidents. The Boiling Rock is famous for its inaccessibility; no escape attempt has ever been successful. Still, when Sokka and Zuko decide to escape with Sokka’s father, they are certain enough of their success that they neglect to figure out how to enact one of the most important parts of their plan. Suki takes this opportunity to have her Crowning Moment of Awesome, during which she travels over a prison brawl by running on the inmates’ heads, performs incredible parkour moves to scale a wall, and makes her way past four guards to tie up the warden. And she does all of this in the span of thirty-five seconds without getting out of breath. And she tops it all off with the line, “Sorry, Warden, you’re my prisoner now.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It is because of this scene that it’s such a disappointment when she does almost nothing during the final battle. She accompanies Sokka and Toph onto an airship, but she doesn’t help them take out the crew or destroy the other airships. While the reason for her general lack of action clearly lies in the fact that Sokka and Toph are principal characters and therefore require our attention, I like to think that none of the writers could think of anything to top her display at the Boiling Rock. (Edit: Except that I am sometimes an idiot and forget that Suki actually saved Sokka and Toph from certain death when she brought an airship around to pick them up. Still, even this heroic rescue can't top her acrobatic feat at the Boiling Rock.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While Suki’s characterization sometimes suffers due to her love interest status, she nevertheless manages to be an engaging, active character. She and Sokka work as a couple because she challenges him, matches his wits, and refuses to let him get away with his sometimes careless behaviour. She comes across as Sokka’s equal, not his accessory. One thing I particularly appreciate about Suki is that, even when we don’t see it, her story doesn’t stop. She doesn’t hang around on Kyoshi Island, waiting for Sokka to come find her; instead, she decides that she wants to help change the world. Even at the Boiling Rock, when she claims that she knew Sokka would come for her, it’s clear that she would still manage to get by on her own if he didn’t.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Strong Female Character™ (because she’s amazing, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that her story largely revolves around Sokka)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Princess Yue</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Sokka’s other love interest, Princess Yue, doesn’t fare quite as well. At the end of the first season, Team Avatar arrives in the North Pole, seeking a waterbending master to train Aang and Katara. While they’re busy with that plot, Sokka distracts himself with a love-at-first-sight attraction to the Northern Water Tribe princess.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We are introduced to Yue via Sokka’s male gaze. His attraction to her seems to stem entirely from her appearance; while Suki was introduced as a clever, sarcastic, strong-willed person, Yue initially appears to be nothing more than a beautiful mystery. He admires her status and looks, but gives no personality-related reason for his attraction to her. For the entirety of Yue’s first episode, she exists primarily to frustrate Sokka, expressing interest in him only to run away quite literally as soon as they are together. Because we see her through his eyes, we can only see her as a girl who can’t make up her mind.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This changes, however, when she reveals that she is engaged. Yue’s story, while still entangled with Sokka’s, shifts from a tale about romance to a lesson about duty. She tells him that they can no longer see each other, and he defends their non-relationship on the grounds that she doesn’t love, or even like, her betrothed. She responds that she does love her people, and he reminds her that she’s not marrying them. Still, she persists, telling him that he doesn’t understand the duties that she has to her father and to her tribe.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This exchange and the shift it signifies are subtly subversive. Yue is the antithesis of a Disney princess; while she does want to follow her heart and marry for love, she understands that being a princess requires her to put aside her individual desires for the sake of the tribe. She’s learned the Spider-man lesson, but in this case, it’s the knowledge that with great privilege comes great responsibility. Sokka argues in favour of romance over civil duty, and in so doing demonstrates his naivety. He tries to tell her what choice to make, and urges her to defy social convention; she seems to recognize that her position of power is itself a matter of social convention, and that she must therefore live by it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Her devotion to fulfilling her obligations becomes clear when we hear her backstory. When she was born, she was very sick and likely to die. No healers were capable of saving her, so her father pleaded with the spirits to save her. He took her to the oasis where the moon and ocean spirits live in the form of koi fish; they gave her life, and she took the name Yue, for the moon. Knowing that spiritual help made her life possible, Yue is aware that she owes the moon spirit a debt. Up to this point, it seems that she has repaid it by devoting herself to her people, who draw their power from the moon.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When Admiral Zhao kills the koi that embodies the moon spirit, Yue discovers the true nature of her debt and its payment. As Aang observes, “Without the moon, everything would fall out of balance. You [Zhao] have no idea what kind of chaos that would unleash on the world!” Yue figures out that she can restore balance by giving her own life to the moon spirit, and she recognizes this as her real duty. Aang defeats the Fire Nation armada using the Avatar State, but Yue ultimately saves the day.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The show deals with the topic of women’s sacrifice on a few occasions. For the purposes of this post, it would be best to limit the discussion to the situations in which a woman trades her life for the lives of others. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Kya performs the quintessential maternal sacrifice, giving up her own life to save Katara’s. What separates her death from those of a large number of fictional mothers is the fact that she includes the village in her bargain. She saves her child, but she also secures the safety of her people. However, the truly subversive aspect of Kya’s sacrifice lies in its consequences. She’s obviously fridged, but, while many stories would use her death to drive a man’s character development (either her son, Sokka, or her husband, Hakoda), </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A:TLA</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> makes Kya’s sacrifice the foundation of Katara’s characterization.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Yue’s sacrifice is a little different. First, its most obvious narrative implications lie in its effect on Sokka’s character development, as her death and rebirth as the moon spirit at least superficially fulfill the requirements of a classic fridging. Sokka’s loss leads him to be overprotective of Suki because he believes that he should have done more to protect Yue. What the show neglects to address is the fact that, despite its effect on his life, Yue’s sacrifice had very little to do with him. She didn’t die because he failed to protect her; she died because she chose to give her life in service to something greater. The show’s focus on Sokka’s feelings, however understandable, nevertheless undermines Yue’s agency.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There’s a trend in superhero movies of the past few years, in which the individual white male hero performs the ultimate sacrifice in order to save the world. Captain America does it when he crashes the plane in the Arctic, Batman does it when he flies the nuclear bomb away from Gotham, and Iron Man does it when he carries the missile into space. Except none of them actually die. When iconic white male characters sacrifice themselves, they somehow manage to save everyone and live to take credit for it. When equally courageous women of colour sacrifice themselves, they stay dead, and the narrative tends to focus on the emotional response of the men their sacrifice affected.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Supporting Role (because the narrative doesn’t spend nearly enough time acknowledging her as a person before it shows her to be a hero)</span><br />
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-13291488957417132022013-08-03T19:00:00.000-07:002013-08-03T20:51:42.702-07:00The Last Waterbender<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All screencaps: Piandao.org</span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When I became an aunt, I volunteered to compile a list of suitable children’s programming. Living in the age of DVDs, Blu-rays, and Netflix, I knew that I had decades of shows to draw from, and I wanted to pick the best of the best. To qualify, shows had to be enriching, empowering, and intelligent, though bonus points were available for sheer coolness. Above all these things, however, I looked for ladies.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The show that topped the list -- and the one that we’ll be analyzing this month -- is chock-full of them. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar: The Last Airbender</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is set in an Asian-inspired fantasy world separated into four regions: the Air Temples, Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, and Water Tribes, analogous to Tibet, Japan, China, and Inuit territory. In each region, a significant percentage of the population is born with the ability to control their respective element. One person, the Avatar, can bend all four elements, and their mission is to maintain balance between the four nations and to serve as the bridge between the natural and spirit worlds. When the Avatar dies, he or she is reincarnated into a newborn baby of the next nation in order (Air, Water, Earth, Fire -- lather, rinse, die, repeat).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When we join the story, this cycle has been disrupted. The last Avatar, an airbender named Aang, disappeared, and in his absence, the Air Nomads became the victims of genocide at the hands of the Fire Nation. The Fire Nation selected the Water Tribes as their next target and, a hundred years after the eradication of the airbenders, only one waterbender remains in the south. This is Katara who, with her older brother Sokka, discovers the Avatar and joins his quest to save the world.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Katara is not only the first female character we meet, but the first voice we hear. She explains her world’s history in the opening credits of every episode, going into greater depth in the introduction to the pilot. It is her point of view that frames the show. In addition, she is responsible for breaking Aang out of the iceberg in which he was frozen for a century, thereby acting as a catalyst for his narrative. While the show is named for Aang, it is very clearly Katara’s story as well.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When we first meet Katara, she is fourteen years old and frustrated. She has a father who left two years earlier to fight the Fire Nation, a brother who dismisses her bending as child’s play, and a power that she cannot harness due to a lack of training. She is prone to outbursts of rage that are accompanied by uncontrolled displays of bending. Because bending requires specific movements, the fact that Katara can crack ice apart with nothing but the force of her righteous fury speaks to the depth of her power.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Katara’s storyline in the first season revolves around her quest to become a trained waterbender, as she defies the sexist traditions of her culture to achieve her dream. This quest begins in the first episode, when Sokka not only dismisses her bending ability as a weird trick that she should keep to herself, but blames her for the destruction of their canoe. “Leave it to a girl to screw things up,” Sokka says; Katara responds by calling him out on his sexist attitude and his dependence on her. When he tells her to calm down, she refuses, and her anger releases the Avatar from his iceberg. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A:TLA</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> explicitly has its hero enter the narrative through the force of one girl’s unapologetic feminist rage.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This arc reaches its conclusion in the final episodes of the first season, when Katara, Sokka, and Aang reach the Northern Water Tribe and its thriving community of benders. Having worked with Aang to develop her ability, Katara seeks a master to train her. Unfortunately, the best instructor available, Master Pakku, refuses her entry to his program. In the Northern Water Tribe, he tells her, female benders learn how to heal while their male counterparts learn how to do everything else. Katara rejects this model, saying, “I don’t want to heal, I want to fight!”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">She soon gets her chance; Pakku dismisses her as a “little girl,” and Katara challenges him to a duel if he’s “man enough” to take her on. Aware of her own inferior bending technique and the reality of her inevitable defeat, Katara nevertheless chooses to face Pakku and forces him to fight her. She refuses to be dismissed and, while fighting, she exclaims, “You can’t knock me down!” It’s meant literally, as Pakku has just sent a torrent of water over her, but she intends for him to understand her full figurative meaning. She won’t give in, she won’t bow down, and she won’t be made to feel like anything less than what she is: an already accomplished waterbender who deserves the chance to master her element.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Still, it takes a plot device in the form of a necklace, representing the need to defy tradition when the tradition is flawed, to change Pakku’s mind. He takes Katara on as his student and, by the end of Book 1, declares her a master of waterbending (and the practical application of feminist rage). Because Aang has not been as diligent with his own studies, Katara becomes his teacher, serving another important role in the salvation of the world. By the end of the first season, she has achieved her lifelong dream, and she has done so by refusing to abide by men’s rules.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In a lesser narrative, this admittedly awesome moment would have been the zenith of Katara’s character development. She would have broken through the glass ceiling, struck down the most overt forms of sexism possible, and then settled into her role as Aang’s love interest. Having established herself as a Strong Female Character, she would never again have to prove that strength. Instead, the show uses its next two seasons to explore the nuances of her character, revealing an array of compelling strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One aspect of the principal characters’ connection to their respective elements is the reflection of the properties of that element in their own personalities. Zuko is hot-headed, impulsive, and destructive, and Toph is tough, blunt, and resistant to change. Aang is gentle and generally non-combative, but his grief and anger have an almost cyclonic quality, sweeping him up and tearing apart the things that get in his way. Like water, Katara can assume a variety of forms, ranging from a nurturing caregiver who keeps the team together, to an inspirational force empowering the downtrodden, to a vengeful spirit committed to punishing wrongs.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first form is best exemplified in “The Desert” and best described in “The Runaway.” In the former, the team is lost in a desert, having lost Aang’s flying bison, Appa. Toph is unable to see through the shifting sands, Sokka is high on cactus juice, and Aang is downright murderous. Without a firm hand to guide them, they would die and the information they carried would be lost with them. Katara takes it upon herself to save the group, saying, “We’re getting out of this desert and we’re going to do it together.” By remaining calm and helping her friends, she manages to get them out.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The remarkable thing about this episode is the ease with which Katara leads the group. As the oldest person with the most tactical know-how, Sokka tends to lead most of the time. As the Avatar, Aang takes the lead in official Avatar business. However, in a situation where staying together gives everyone a chance to stay alive, it is Katara’s status as the glue that allows them to survive.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In “The Runaway,” Sokka reveals that he relies on Katara’s strength and responsible nature. He describes the role Katara has played in his life since their mother’s death: “I’m not sure I can remember what my mother looked like. It really seems like my whole life Katara’s been the one looking out for me. She’s always been the one that’s... there. And now, when I try to remember my mom, Katara’s is the only face I can picture.” The show explicitly acknowledges Katara as the team mom, but at the same time, it defines the motherly role. It is not merely about nagging her friends or bossing them around, but about being the source of strength on which they can rely, no matter the situation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Katara plays this role even for those outside the group of principal characters. In the first season, she gives a rousing speech in an attempt to motivate imprisoned earthbenders to rise up against their Fire Nation oppressors, risking her own safety in an effort to secure theirs. She tells Aang and Sokka, “I’m not leaving. I’m not giving up on these people.” In a third season episode, “The Painted Lady,” she echoes this sentiment: “I will never, ever turn my back on people who need me!” True to her words, Katara helps the people of a Fire Nation fishing village nearly destroyed by polluted water. Taking on the guise of a local legend, the Painted Lady, she becomes a superheroic force for good.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“The Painted Lady” also serves as the first in a triptych of episodes that encapsulate Katara’s Book 3 character arc. The arc focuses on the issues of revenge and forgiveness, culminating in Katara having to decide what to do to the man who killed her mother. In this first episode, Katara demolishes the factory that is pumping pollution into the river; she thinks that destroying the factory will save the town it has suffocated. Instead, she causes soldiers to invade the village, seeking vengeance for their lost property. They promise to “cure the world of this wretched village,” forcing Katara and her friends to save it once and for all.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Here, Katara inserts herself into the situation without considering the consequences of her actions. Thinking that she is helping them, she takes revenge in the villagers’ stead. Had Sokka not figured out what she was doing, she would have been responsible for the destruction of the village. While the episode’s primary message is basically “when helping others, first do no harm,” “The Painted Lady” also sets the stage for the show’s treatment of the destructive power of revenge.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the second episode, “The Puppetmaster,” Katara and company encounter an elderly woman named Hama, who confesses to being the former last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe. They bond quickly, and Hama offers to teach Katara the bending techniques of the south. Hama’s methods turn out to be quite destructive, as she teaches Katara to steal water from plants, leaving large swaths of dead, desiccated vegetation. On the night of the full moon, Hama explains that the most important technique she will teach Katara is one of her own invention. Having been captured during a Fire Nation raid, a young Hama was imprisoned and forced to live in terrible conditions which prevented her from using her bending. Eventually, she realized that life requires water and that animals are “nothing more than skins filled with liquid.” This led her to invent bloodbending, a form of waterbending that allowed her to control the movements of any other creature.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Initially, Katara rejects this teaching, saying that she doesn’t know if she wants that kind of power. Hama responds, “The choice is not yours. The power exists, and it’s your duty to use the gifts you’ve been given to win this war!” She appeals to Katara using their shared loss, reminding her that the Fire Nation is responsible for wiping out their culture. Then she goes further, including the death of Katara’s mother as reason for her to punish the Fire Nation. She reveals that she has been imprisoning civilians just as she and her fellow waterbenders were imprisoned. As she states, “We have to fight these people whenever we can, wherever they are, with any means necessary.” Finally, she asks Katara to continue to enact her revenge.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For Katara, this is a powerful appeal. She and her friends face nearly impossible odds in their battle against Fire Lord Ozai, and she stands to lose everything if they fail. Still, I think that it is the loss already suffered that most threatens to make her give in. Katara’s quest to become a waterbending master was, in part, about connecting to a culture to which she had been denied access, living as she did in a small village of non-benders. She never experienced the community of benders that Hama lost, and even the Northern Water Tribe is not a sufficient replacement. Beyond this loss, however, is the loss of her mother, Kya. As we learn in the final episode of the triptych, Katara is willing to do just about anything to avenge the death of her mother.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Still, she refuses to learn bloodbending, telling Hama that she will stop her. Hama bloodbends Katara, who manages to fight back due to the superior strength of her own bending ability. When Aang and Sokka arrive to fight Hama, she bloodbends them into a fight to the death. To stop this, Katara uses the technique on Hama herself; despite being untrained, Katara immediately masters waterbending’s most difficult form. In this moment, she essentially cements herself as the greatest waterbender in the world.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">However, her moment of triumph is also a moment of defeat. Despite losing, Hama tells Katara, “My work is done. Congratulations, Katara, you’re a bloodbender.” Katara sinks to the ground, weeping. Katara may not have agreed to take up Hama’s crusade, but she now knows that she is capable of doing similarly terrible things. In a way, Hama has infected her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the final episode of the triptych, “The Southern Raiders,” we see that the infection has taken hold. At this point in the series, Zuko, who spent most of his time tracking down the Avatar in an attempt to regain his honour, has joined forces with our heroes. He has accompanied both Sokka and Aang on important personal quests, and he has proven his loyalty to them. He has not, however, earned Katara’s trust, and she has gone so far as to threaten to kill him if he steps out of line. She trusted him once before, and he betrayed her; she does not easily give second chances.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Her important personal quest is getting revenge on the Fire Nation soldier who killed her mother. Both Sokka and Aang try to dissuade her, telling her that she should forgive the soldier and move on, but Katara says that that would be impossible. When Zuko tells her to save her strength, she tells him that she has plenty: “I’m not the helpless little girl I was when they came.” Implicit in this statement and in Katara’s recollection that her mother sacrificed herself to protect her is Katara’s feeling of guilt. She has immense power now, but she couldn’t protect her mother when it counted. She had to rely on her mother’s strength so that she could one day increase her own. For Katara, a child who not only suspects, but knows that her mother exchanged her life for her own, it would be impossible not to think of her death as Katara’s fault. Tracking down and punishing the man who physically did the deed might allow Katara to feel less responsible.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This doesn’t mean that Katara is above doing terrible things in her quest for revenge and redemption, which becomes evident when Katara bloodbends the man she suspects is Kya’s killer. When it proves to be the wrong man, she appears disheartened, but not particularly remorseful. The weapon that once horrified her is now just another in her arsenal. Still, when she finds the killer, she uses only normal waterbending, which suggests that some of that initial reticence has been restored. She still resists becoming Hama’s successor.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When it comes time to make a decision, Katara decides not to kill the former soldier. She explains the situation to Aang: “I wanted to do it. I wanted to take out all my anger at him, but I couldn’t. I don’t know if it’s because I’m too weak to do it, or if it’s because I’m strong enough not to.” Aang tells her that she did the right thing, and that forgiveness is the first step toward healing. Katara replies, “But I didn’t forgive him. I’ll never forgive him.” She does, however, forgive Zuko.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is a significant point in Katara’s characterization. Whole episodes are devoted to Aang learning how to let things go, and we know that he has had to overcome the loss of his people in order to become a better Avatar. We appreciate his thoughts about forgiveness because we know that he knows what he’s talking about. But Aang and Katara are very different people, and her inability to forgive is just as important to her character as his unwillingness to take revenge. After watching three seasons of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A:TLA</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, the viewer knows that she holds grudges, that she has immense stores of rage, and that the loss of her mother has informed much of her personality. To take violent revenge would be to become Hama, but to forgive Kya’s killer would be to stop being Katara.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It is this Katara that defeats Azula, Zuko’s younger sister and the most compelling villain in the show. She risks her own life to get close enough to trap Azula in ice, then shackle her to a metal grate. Even against an Azula who is not at the top of her game, this is an impressive feat, considering the fact that she spends just about the entire time she’s on screen soundly thrashing Team Avatar. Katara also heals Zuko, the person she once described seeing as the face of the enemy. In this sequence, she displays the tremendous growth she has undergone as a person and as a bender.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I should mention that Katara accomplishes all of this while technically being Aang’s love interest, proving that the best kind of love interest is one who is just as dynamic and interesting as the main character. My major complaint about their romance -- other than the fact that they are really, really young -- is that we generally see it only from Aang’s perspective. In these scenes, Katara tends to transform into the Mysterious Girl, a creature whose sole aim in life is to frustrate the male character who just wants her to stop seeing him as a little boy. The most explicit commentary we hear from Katara on the subject occurs in “The Ember Island Players,” when she tells Aang that she is confused and wants to focus on more pressing matters like, you know, the battle that they’re about to fight. When the show ends with a kiss between Aang and Katara, it feels like the culmination of a major arc in his storyline, and nothing more than a subplot in hers.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally, it is important to note that, voice actor and film casting notwithstanding, Katara is a young Aboriginal woman. She is not only an active, compelling female character whose value to the narrative goes far beyond her function as a love interest, but a strong, intelligent, nuanced woman of colour. She represents a fictionalized version of a population that is too rarely depicted in mainstream television and film, and the Fire Nation’s attempts to eradicate Southern Water Tribe culture and disempower its people echo a very real oppressive history. As a character, Katara is not only strong, but important.</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-41858927504694801762013-07-05T21:56:00.000-07:002013-07-05T21:56:02.498-07:00Gone Writin'<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-18c7e3de-b252-161b-b92b-a1f4695205ac" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As you may have guessed by the formal address, the title, and the lack of any character-related pictures, this is not a usual Friday post. Nor is it an apology for not having a Friday post up on the appointed day. Instead, it’s really just an overly wordy “gone fishin’” sign.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Strong Female Character will be going on hiatus for the rest of the month. I need a break to get some other writing done, but I will be back in August with my take on the ladies of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Avatar: The Last Airbender</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. To celebrate SFC’s first anniversary at the end of August, I will also be doing another request month. If you have any character suggestions, please leave a comment on this post.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the immortal words of everyone who’s ever signed the yearbook of an acquaintance, have a great summer!</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sincerely,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The Management</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-8298156597519109452013-07-03T01:00:00.000-07:002013-07-03T01:18:08.416-07:00Miscellaneous Mondays: No More Mild-Mannered Alter Egos<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It seems a bit disingenuous to give this post the “Miscellaneous Mondays” label, what with it being posted on a Wednesday. However, because I’m not willing to make “Words-I-Should-Already-Have-Posted Wednesdays” a thing, I’m just going to pretend that it’s still Monday. Hey, it almost worked for Texas Republicans.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That brings us to this week’s topic: the recent displays of political badassery by women in the United States. From Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/best-lines-ginsburg-dissent-voting-rights-act-decision" target="_blank">who wrote an epic dissent to what has been called the “evisceration” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act</a>; to Rep. Tammy Duckworth, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/tammy-duckworth-strong-castle_n_3504531.html" target="_blank">who soundly schooled a fraud who was gaming the veterans’ disability system</a>; to Texas State Senators Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte and the gallery of women, <a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/06/wendy-davis-scotus-and-speaking-out-as-women.html" target="_blank">who filibustered legislation that would gut abortion services across the state</a>, American women have been making a point of speaking up against the politically sanctioned mistreatment of women and minorities.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">With the exception of the cries for revolution that were voiced across the Internet following the Texas filibuster, my favourite commentary about that event occurred in <a href="http://andthenisay.tumblr.com/post/53906738605/captainmarvel-170-000-people-tuned-into-the" target="_blank">an exchange between Tumblr users Captainmarvel and Andthenisay</a>. Captainmarvel observes that “170,000 people tuned into the texas senate livestream and hollywood still thinks women can’t carry a superhero film,” to which Andthenisay replies, “i think 170,000 people just </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">watched</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> a superhero film.” Instead of a cape and tights, this hero wears Mizuno Women’s Wave Rider 16 running shoes (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mizuno-Womens-Wave-Rider-Running/product-reviews/B008KFY53K/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1" target="_blank">“guaranteed to outrun patriarchy on race day”</a>).</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://superdames.tumblr.com/post/34944609843/barbara-the-boot-gordon" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Congresswoman Barbara "The Boot" Gordon</span></a></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve already expressed my thoughts about cinematic superwomen, which essentially echo those expressed by Captainmarvel, but I think that Andthenisay’s comment is important to consider. The livestream figures tell us that people are interested in watching women fight against a patriarchal system that uses the political power of largely straight, white men to revoke the rights that we earned in decades past. While it might be tempting to use this example of real-life heroism to lobby for a Batgirl movie, what I think it shows us is that there might be a market for a film about Congresswoman Barbara Gordon. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It takes one kind of courage to take on criminals in the streets while wearing a mask of anonymity, and a very different kind to confront legislated injustice as a public figure. Instead of yet another square-jawed man defending Earth against a fictional supervillain, I’d like to go to the theatre and see a heroic woman defending women, people of colour, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people from the very real threats we face from our own governments. Until then, however, we can watch and support Wendy Davis, Leticia Van de Putte, Tammy Duckworth, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and all the other Women of Steel.</span></div>
Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-27120035631459164632013-06-29T23:00:00.000-07:002013-06-30T00:30:48.680-07:00No Matter How Bad the Dreams Get, When I Wake Up It's Always Worse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“My mommy always said there were no monsters -- no real ones -- but there are.” When Newt speaks those words in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aliens</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, she is a young girl who has been confronted with horrors the likes of which euphemisms can’t describe. When Ripley speaks the same words in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien: Resurrection</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, it is as an alien-human hybrid, forced to confront the monstrosity in both her creators and herself. In the latter case, I’m inclined to believe that Ripley is also talking about the film itself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien: Resurrection</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> took corporeal form, it would be the kind of creature you wouldn’t want to find lurking in your bed or hiding in your closet. Just ask its screenwriter, Joss Whedon; it’s been hovering over him for years. Back in 2005, eight years after the film’s release, Whedon <a href="http://www.bullz-eye.com/mguide/interviews/2005/joss_whedon.htm" target="_blank">claimed that the script became a monstrosity only after it left his hands</a>:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“It wasn’t a question of doing everything differently, though they changed the ending, it was mostly a matter of doing everything </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">wrong</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. They said the lines... <i>mostly</i>... but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. ...It wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As recently as April of this year, Whedon <a href="http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/JoshWildingNewsAndReviews/news/?a=77814" target="_blank">is still answering for the film</a> that, if it were a person, would be old enough to get a driver’s license:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“When you are making a movie you are making something that is going to last forever, especially now with the internet. So there is always going to be a shitty Alien movie out there. A shitty Alien movie with my name on it.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien: Resurrection</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> displays Frankenstein’s monster levels of doggedness in pursuing its creator.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And so it should, because it is a mess. The film begins with Ripley speaking those loaded words as we see her body floating in a tube, growing from child to adult. It turns out that she is on the USM Auriga, a medical research vessel where a group of ethically challenged scientists have been attempting to clone Ellen Ripley, in order to replicate the alien queen she died to destroy. They find success on their eighth attempt, and they decide to let Ripley 8 live, conducting a series of tests which show not only that she is a fully-functioning adult, but that she has retained some of the original Ripley’s memories. This turns out to be helpful when the aliens predictably turn against the scientists who sought to tame them, and the time comes for Ripley to take out the aliens for good (for the third time).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first thing to get out of the way in this analysis is the fact that Ripley 8 is not Ellen Ripley, and I will admit that I consider this one of the great flaws of the film. The original Ripley survived almost entirely thanks to her wits, so it is difficult to see her become one in a long line of Whedon’s dark-haired, damaged, ass-kicking superwomen in a box (or tank, as is the case here). Ripley established herself as a hero without the benefit of powers, but the creative team behind this film clearly thought that that wasn’t cool enough. Instead of allowing her to remain a shining example of unaltered humanity, they beefed up her power set. The new and ostensibly improved Ripley has super strength, acid blood, a lightning quick healing factor, and a “highly evolved instinct,” all of which she acquired as a result of the cloning process combining her DNA with that of the alien queen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now, I love superheroes as much as -- and probably more than -- the next person, but many of my favourite heroes are the Badass Normals. There is something incredibly appealing about a person who struggles to save the world without the security of invulnerability or superspeed, about a fragile human who risks their life to save people like them, not because great power demands great responsibility, but because the right thing to do is the right thing to do. This is the appeal of Ellen Ripley, a woman who was third in command on a mining ship, but nevertheless stood up to the military, the uncaring capitalist machine, a group of dangerous criminals, and an alien threat that could eradicate human life. Giving her superpowers makes it seem like she needs superpowers, and anyone who’s seen the first two films knows that isn’t true.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The objectification that forms an important part of the cloning plot further complicates the film’s treatment of new Ripley. We first see Ripley 8 as naked, slumbering specimen, surrounded by four scientists who are observing her. She is an object of scientific study, referred to by one of the major scientists as “it” as he coolly explains her memory loss -- likely incurred as a result of her traumatic situation as “connective difficulties caused by a biochemical imbalance causing emotional autism.” General Perez talks about “putting her down” and calls her a “meat by-product” of their quest to remake the queen. Even Annalee Call, who comes to respect Ripley, initially tells her, “You’re a thing, a construct. They grew you in a fucking lab!” Admittedly, this is a bit rich coming from Call, who is herself revealed to be an android designed by androids: a thing made by other things.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As the film progresses, the question of Ripley’s nature becomes less a matter of thing versus person than of alien versus human. A pivotal moment occurs when Ripley 8 is confronted with a room full of failed clones, all of which are horrific combinations of human and Xenomorph physiognomy. Ripley 8 is appalled by the collection, and responds to the seventh clone’s request for death by burning down everything in the room. Immediately afterwards, she threatens one of the scientists with her flamethrower, turning her anger on the representative of the people who created her. Call talks her down, denying her the opportunity to punish those responsible for the Ripleys’ suffering. After this scene, which ends with a particularly awful moment in which a man dismisses her actions as a waste of ammo caused by “a chick thing,” Ripley has ample reason to hate the humans.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Despite this, she retains some recollection of the original Ripley’s devotion to humanity, and she tries to understand it. In order to do this, she turns to another somewhat human person, Call, and asks her why she cares what happens to the humans. Call tells her that she is programmed to do so, and Ripley replies, “You’re programmed to be an asshole?” It’s a strange connection to make; how does caring about people make someone an asshole? Is this an attempt to show the difference between Ripley 8 and the original, who cared deeply about people as individuals and as a group? It may be, but it could also tell us that Ripley 8 is finding it difficult to cope with the failure that seemed to accompany her original’s every success. Ripley explains that she once understood how it felt not to be able to let humans destroy themselves: “I tried to save... people. It didn’t work out. There was this girl. She had bad dreams. I tried to help her. She died. Now I can’t even remember her name.” She tells Call about the effects of her original’s experiences: “When I sleep, I dream about them. It. Every night. All around me, in me. I used to be afraid to dream, but not anymore. … Because no matter how bad the dreams get, when I wake up it’s always worse.” Caring about people doesn’t necessarily make someone an asshole, but the miserable existence that Ripley 8 associates with caring about people might.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Unfortunately, her life doesn’t get much better following this discussion. Just when we learn that she is still trying to cope with the death of her adopted daughter, the alien queen she sort of gave birth to demands her attention. Ripley is called into the aliens’ nest, where the queen is giving birth, thanks to a human reproductive system she developed as a result of the hybridization that occurred during the cloning process. From her womb emerges the Newborn, a more fully realized alien-human hybrid, who immediately kills her and adopts Ripley as its new mother. It clearly feels betrayed when Ripley nevertheless causes it to be sucked out, piece by piece, into the vacuum of space.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I initially intended to analyze these final scenes as a continuation of the series’ treatment of motherhood, but nothing in these scenes really tells us anything new about Ripley, except, perhaps, that this version of her is willing to choose the human race over a creature that isn’t really her child. Sure, she’s genuinely sorrowful and apologetic, but she’s still getting rid of the alien threat, securing the cradle of human civilization just before the Xenomorphs can reach it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Except she doesn’t actually save Earth, because there’s no Earth left to save. Technically, the planet still exists, but the people she spent four movies protecting are already gone. Earth appears to have been abandoned for decades.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Throughout the series, Ripley has two goals: destroy the Xenomorphs and go home to Earth. In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien: Resurrection</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, she finally achieves both of these goals, but what should be a happy ending is ultimately a betrayal of the series. Ripley wanted to eradicate the aliens in order to prevent them from getting back to Earth and wiping out humanity; though she suffered tremendously, she knew it was worth it to keep people safe. However, when she arrives on Earth, it seems that humans have done a fine job of destroying it all on their own. Despite her efforts, the planet she gave her life to protect is still in shambles. Strengthening the blow is Ripley’s final line: “I’m a stranger here myself.” By having Ripley remind us that, as a clone, she has never actually stepped foot on Earth, the film cheapens its hero’s triumphant return. She does not go home; instead, she emerges into a new kind of strange alien landscape. She doesn’t lose, but she certainly doesn’t win.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the interest of staying on topic, I’ve left out many of the the truly monstrous aspects of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien: Resurrection</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">: its often hammy acting, its awkward dialogue, and its parodic disregard for earlier instalments in the series, including the random replacement of MU-TH-UR with FA-TH-UR and the announcement that the omnipotent corporation, Weyland-Yutani, had been bought out by Walmart. It is a confused movie, a parody of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> films that nevertheless sees itself as the final part of the series, like a terrible version of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Galaxy Quest</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> whose creators intended it to be a proper </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Star Trek</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> sequel. It’s the kind of monster you’d consider keeping under your bed, if only to keep it away from your television screen.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Strong Female Character™. I’m not giving full credit to a version of Ripley that the original character would detest.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/7367ddb9.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/7367ddb9.png" height="320" width="181" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span>Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-35298921603322726372013-06-24T00:00:00.000-07:002013-06-24T00:00:52.806-07:00Why We Don’t Need a Wonder Woman Movie (Yet)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/wonder-woman-2006-24_zps797b65cd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/wonder-woman-2006-24_zps797b65cd.jpg" height="400" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Aaron Lopresti and Hi-Fi</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: Contains spoilers for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Man of Steel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Dark Knight</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> trilogy.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Every
time a new superhero film comes out, someone will inevitably publish an
article asking why a live-action Wonder Woman film has never been made.
With the recent release of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Man of Steel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, this question has again been raised, and this time, some vague answers have actually been given. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For
the most part, these answers have been as promising as vague,
noncommittal, unofficial assurances can be. David S. Goyer, the
screenwriter responsible for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Man of Steel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
and all three of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, <a href="http://www.comicsalliance.com/2013/04/26/wonder-woman-movie-david-s-goyer-dc/" target="_blank">was recently asked about rounding out his portfolio with the third member of DC’s Trinity</a>:
“I think Wonder Woman is a very difficult character to crack. More
difficult than Superman, who is also more difficult than Batman. Also, a
lot of people in Hollywood believe that it’s hard to do a big action
movie with a female lead. I happen to disagree with that. But that tends
to be the prevailing wisdom. Hopefully that’ll change in the next few
years.” A few days ago, The Wrap <a href="http://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/man-steel-warner-bros-jeff-robinov-henry-cavill-97021" target="_blank">reported that Warner Bros. is planning to make Wonder Woman the focus of a film following the release of the fabled Justice League movie</a>. There is also further evidence of the
studio’s interest in getting a Wonder Woman-focused project off the
ground in their repeated attempts to make the character work in a
television show. While the 2011 attempt proved disastrous, plans are
still in the works to prepare a series for the CW, whose president, Mark
Pedowitz, <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/cws-wonder-woman-prequel-amazon-524002" target="_blank">has stated</a>, “We do not want to produce something that doesn’t
work for that particular character -- it is the trickiest of all the DC
characters to get done.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That’s
precisely the problem: it’s hard to get Wonder Woman right,
particularly when there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the line.
My solution? Don’t try.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/1026_ww25covera_zps13cba126.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/1026_ww25covera_zps13cba126.jpg" height="320" width="237" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Aaron Lopresti</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This
may seem like a shocking assertion to be made by a comics fan who runs a
blog all about strong female characters. By all rights, I should be the
first person in line for a Wonder Woman film, bracers on my forearms
and the double W emblazoned on my chest. And I will be, when the right
time comes, but now is not that time. (Neither is 2017, which is the
earliest we can hope to see the film released.) In fact, while this may
be a good time for Diana of Themyscira to take another crack at
television, it is the worst possible time for her to break into the
Man’s World that is mainstream Hollywood cinema.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before you pelt me with fruit and force me to perform my own version of bullets and bracelets, let me explain.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Reason #1: This is not the creative team we are looking for.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Christopher Nolan, the director of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Dark Knight</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> trilogy and producer of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Man of Steel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,
makes dark, overly realistic superhero films with fairly flat,
lacklustre female characters. He’s all about the male “lonely god”
figure. Wonder Woman, by contrast, is both a complex woman and a
character of community.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Zack Snyder, who directed Superman’s latest foray, previously made </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Watchmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,
which suffered from being an almost too accurate adaptation. He made up
for that dedication to getting things right by getting Superman all
wrong, namely <a href="http://news.moviefone.com/2013/06/21/alternate-man-of-steel-ending-christopher-nolan/" target="_blank">by advocating for Kal-El to murder Zod</a>, despite the fact
that this goes against everything that the character stands for. Snyder
also wrote and directed </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Sucker Punch</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, which is enough reason to keep him far, far away from Diana. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As
the writer of all four of the aforementioned Batman and Superman films,
David S. Goyer is both clearly not the person we want to write the
Wonder Woman movie, and the person who will ultimately get tapped for
the job (if it doesn’t go to the writers of the Green Lantern movie that
flopped). This is beyond concerning, considering the fact that Goyer
said himself that Wonder Woman is more difficult to write than Superman.
Keep in mind that Goyer gave us a Superman who snaps his enemies’
necks, willingly fights said enemies in densely populated areas with no
concern for the humans he purports to want to save, and, perhaps worst
of all, doesn’t engage in witty, sarcastic banter with Lois Lane (who
knows his identity almost from the outset). It was bad enough when Goyer
and Nolan ignored decades of sidekicks to make Batman the hero who
works alone, but completely disregarding fundamental aspects of
Superman’s character is unforgivable.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If
this is what they do to Superman, imagine what they would do to Wonder
Woman, who snapped a man’s neck in the same issue where she was punched
from outer space to Earth, and prayed not for her own safety, but for a
landing that caused no human casualties. The complexities of her
character would be lost on a creative team that fails to grasp even the
basics of the Big Blue Boy Scout. </span><br />
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<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/Avengers_Black_Widow_zpsce12a6aa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/Avengers_Black_Widow_zpsce12a6aa.jpg" height="242" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Reason #2: A failure will put female superhero films on hold for years, if not decades. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If
you go to a multiplex this summer, you will see ample evidence that
Hollywood doesn’t need an excuse not to make a film about women.
Consider the fact that, following the release of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Avengers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
and the near universal praise of the Black Widow character, Marvel and
Disney decided to make sequels to all of their male superhero
franchises, as well as a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Guardians of the Galaxy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> film, instead of going with the more obvious choice of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What Happened in Budapest Or, Why Natasha Romanoff is More Compelling Than Yet Another White Dude</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Because of a (very short) string of terrible woman-led superhero movies, including </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Catwoman </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Elektra</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
(nine and ten percent on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively), we need an
unqualified hit to show that superheroic women can sell tickets, and a
stand-out in an ensemble film apparently isn’t enough.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What complicates the situation further is the fact that Wonder Woman is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
female superhero. When you ask a person who doesn’t read comics to name
a woman superhero, Diana’s is likely the first name that will come up.
She’s just about the only woman familiar to the masses whose alter ego
isn’t a riff on a previously established male hero. She’s the one woman
who has to be on the Justice League roster for the general audience to
consider it complete. Because of this, she is also the greatest risk.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If
a poorly made film featuring a minor female superhero is a box office
flop, Hollywood executives will claim that audiences don’t want to see
women donning capes and tights and fighting crime. We will know better,
and dozens of articles will be written explaining the real reasons
behind the failure. Eventually, someone might try again. However, if a
Wonder Woman movie fails, especially one made by the current “dream
team,” executives will have a more legitimate reason to shy away from
super-powered ladies. If even the biggest name can’t draw in the crowds,
why try?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s not terribly sound logic, but it’s the logic that will likely be applied.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Solution</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I
had initially planned to provide more reasons, but it really does boil
down to those two: a failure to do Wonder Woman well would have
disastrous results, and the creative team most likely to be assigned the
job seems to lack the capacity to do the character well.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/reneebadass_zpsd6ed2d7e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/reneebadass_zpsd6ed2d7e.jpg" height="268" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Kano and Stefano Gaudiano</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This
brings me to my proposed solution: DC/Warner Bros. and Marvel/Disney
should make a bunch of superhero movies starring women, using creative
teams that know, love, and understand the characters. If the studios are
concerned that they won’t make enough money, they should make the first
few films with smaller budgets and let the audience prove that they are
willing to pay. In the age of Kickstarter and the Facebook campaign to
get people to see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Bridesmaids</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,
we are well aware that our dollars act as votes in favour of the
production of similar content. If enough of us pay to see movies about
female superheroes and let executives know that we saw those movies
specifically for those women, we make making those films worth their
while.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I
also think that the studios should capitalize on the franchises they
already have, not by adding sequels starring Yet Another Straight White
Guy, but by fleshing out the universe. Marvel has already grasped this
idea, and DC should follow their lead. Christopher Nolan is done with
Batman, but that doesn’t mean that his Gotham can’t be used to tell the
stories of people like Helena Bertinelli or Cass Cain. The presence of
an already established Commissioner Gordon gives Warner Bros. the
opportunity to create two new franchises: Batgirl and Gotham Central. </span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Although </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Dark Knight</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
suggests that Gordon’s son was more profoundly affected by the family’s
encounter with Batman, it wouldn’t take much to show how the same event
influenced his daughter, Barbara, the Gordon offspring we already know
and love. In a film trilogy, we could follow her from the beginning of
her career as Batgirl, through the shooting that left her partially
paralyzed, and finish with the establishment of the Birds of Prey.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Gotham Central</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> would be a television spin-off of a successful franchise. The series could take place just after the events of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Dark Knight Rises</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,
when Batman’s sudden absence drives the GCPD to shift the Major Crime
Unit’s focus exclusively to the criminal activities of the Caped
Crusader’s rogues gallery. We would see Robin finding his footing from
the perspective of the officers who knew his predecessor, and we would
watch Renee Montoya’s development from a police officer to a superhero
over the course of the show.</span></div>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/ww13_zps888b40dc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/ww13_zps888b40dc.jpg" height="400" width="190" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Bernard Chang</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My
last suggestion is to tell diverse stories in order to attract diverse
audiences. An indie-style film about Batwoman -- a gay, Jewish former
West Point cadet kicked out under DADT -- would sell very well, and it
wouldn’t require the entire population of the United States to see it to
make money. The Marvel comic, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Runaways</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,
featuring a teenaged cast full of racial and sexual diversity -- not to
mention four girls in its original line-up -- was on its way to being
made a few years ago, and it’s time for it to get the Hollywood
treatment (sans the usual whitewashing and fetishization of queerness). A
white, male, cisgender, heterosexual hero may have a whole host of
abilities, but he doesn’t have the power to satisfy every kind of
viewer.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So,
no, I don’t think we need a Wonder Woman movie yet. I think that we
need to prove to the Hollywood money-making machine that people want to
see women saving the world while wearing slightly ridiculous outfits. I
think we need to show every naysayer that women are capable of being
more than love interests who play second fiddle to their saviour
boyfriends. And then, when we have proven that women are every bit as
heroic as men, that’s when we make Wonder Woman, because that’s when
we’ll be ready to tell her story right.</span></div>
Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-65788998481570976982013-06-21T23:00:00.000-07:002013-06-22T01:08:26.697-07:00You've Been in My Life So Long, I Can't Remember Anything Else<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/alien3poster_zps647949cf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/alien3poster_zps647949cf.jpg" height="400" width="280" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-7547cc1f-6ad1-12a9-aa6e-7fec40bea401" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: For this analysis, I will be referring to the 2003 Special Edition of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 9px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super;">3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, written hereafter as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, because it’s clearly not intended to be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien Cubed</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Then again, it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1992...)</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Trigger warning: discussion of attempted rape)</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Hollywood loves franchises. This summer alone, there is a prequel to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Monsters, Inc.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, a re-imagining of the Superman mythos, and the sixth installment in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Fast and the Furious</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> series. Some series -- such as Richard Linklater’s trilogy of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before Sunrise</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before Sunset</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and the recently released </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before Midnight</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> -- may go almost a decade without a new film, but most modern franchises operate with very short turnaround times. The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Lord of the Rings</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> trilogy was released in annual installments, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Harry Potter</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> never went more than two years without making an appearance at the theatre. Even the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Dark Knight</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> trilogy only took seven years.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So a franchise like the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
series -- written and directed by different creators for each film,
transforming from a horror into an action flick into an existential
thriller into a parody of itself -- seems a bit strange to the modern
viewer. There are only two things that tie the four together and, in
turn, become increasingly tied together: Xenomorphs and Ripley.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/Ripley2_zps8169ec68.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/Ripley2_zps8169ec68.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
begins with the crash landing of the Sulaco on the prison planet,
Fiorina “Fury” 161, caused by a fire that may have been produced by
alien activity. Once again, Ripley is the sole survivor, making all of
her efforts to save Hicks and Newt completely meaningless; it’s a cheery
place to start a film. Things only get worse when Ripley learns that
the prisoners are a bunch of double Y chromosome men who were put away
for a number of violent crimes, including rape, murder, and child
molestation. Having found God (and lost women) in exile, they view
Ripley as a kind of temptation. Kept in an infirmary “for her own
protection,” Ripley grieves her lost companions as the alien threat once
again closes in.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As
always, before she can defeat the aliens, Ripley must first confront a
human enemy. In this film, that enemy is almost everyone, including our
old favourites, the Company and the male-dominated chain of command. The
latter is represented primarily by the prison superintendent, who
orders Ripley’s imprisonment in the infirmary. He is incredibly
condescending, saying things like “That’s a good girl” and “Get that
foolish woman back to the infirmary.” Luckily, the narrative’s
intolerance for the underestimation of Ripley kicks in, and he is
dragged away by an alien immediately after uttering the second line.
Unlike the earlier films, where Ripley is stymied again and again by men
in power, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> very quickly weakens and eliminates male authority.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At
the same time, however, it strengthens the men themselves; the film’s
emphasis on the men’s double Y chromosome appears to exist primarily to
emphasize their maleness. Whereas Ripley once fought figurative battles
against the male heroic archetype, the sexual objectification of women,
and the male-dominated power structure of the capitalist machine, here
she fights the men themselves. For these men, who haven’t seen a woman
in years, she initially represents both the apple and the serpent, both
the forbidden fruit and the voice that urges them to consume it. This is
not because Ripley encourages their attention in any way, but merely
because she exists in close proximity to them. When the superintendent
orders her to remain in the infirmary, he explains that he doesn’t wants
a woman walking around, “giving them ideas.” Before a crime has even
been committed, the prison’s inhabitants are in full victim-blaming
mode.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It
should come as no surprise, then, that Ripley is sexually assaulted and
almost raped. While she gathers up the remnants of Bishop, she is
ambushed by a group of inmates who bend her over a railing, cut her
clothing, and prepare to enact an almost ritualized rape. Before they
are able to follow through, however, another inmate, Dillon, attacks
them. He continues to beat on them, claiming that he needs to
“re-educate some of the brothers.” While he does that, Ripley punches
one of them in the face. </span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/bd_alien3_10_zps48281d07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/bd_alien3_10_zps48281d07.jpg" height="165" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There’s
a lot to say about this scene. First, there is the matter of the
rescue. Dillon introduces himself to Ripley as “a murderer and rapist of
women,” but we’re supposed to sympathize with him because he’s
reformed, and because he pummels attempted rapists. Regardless of what
you believe about the rehabilitation of sex offenders and murderers, it
says a lot about a film when it expects us to side with such a
character. It is especially disturbing because the narrative clearly
places Dillon in the deuteragonist role; he is nearly as intelligent and
heroic as Ripley. It is Dillon who gives the stirring speeches to rouse
the men to the fight against the Xenomorph. It is Dillon who refuses to
kill Ripley when she asks, instead telling her that he will kill her
after the alien dies, because he knows that leaving even one alien alive
would have disastrous consequences. He sacrifices himself so that she
can complete this very task. He dies to protect the human race, so a
little rape and murder can be forgiven, right? It’s troubling.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Also
troubling is that fact that Dillon is the one who gets revenge on
Ripley’s would-be rapists, while she gets only a single punch to make an
attempt to re-claim her agency, and she doesn’t even get to punch the
man who was going to rape her first. Later, the same man that she
punched, Morse, helps her to evade Weyland-Yutani’s clutches, so, again,
all appears to be forgiven.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m
not saying that the film condones the men’s overtly sexist behaviour.
In one scene, two inmates discuss their plans to approach her, which
includes such gems as “I’d be happy to kiss her ass; I’d be happy to
kiss it any way she wants,” “Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen,” and “Treat a
queen like a whore and a whore like a queen.” Because they are carrying
around a dead, insect-covered animal, we can be fairly certain that we
are meant to interpret their words as disgusting and vile. Still, when
the film only condemns men as overtly misogynistic as this, and expects
us to support characters like Dillon and, to a lesser extent, Morse, it
becomes problematic.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It
also prompts us to ask an important question: Why is it necessary to
include an attempted rape scene in a film about a heroic female
character? Having defeated a whole colony of aliens, is Ripley too
strong, too invulnerable? Does Ripley have to be “brought down a peg”?
Is the loss of her two friends and her adopted daughter not sufficiently
awful, so she needs to have her own body violated? Or is the attempted
rape merely a device to get us to accept a male rapist and murderer as
Ripley’s co-hero, simply because he saved her?</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/alien-3-scan1_zpsa7acce68.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/alien-3-scan1_zpsa7acce68.png" height="167" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
only justification I can see for this scene’s inclusion lies in the
contrast between the unsuccessful rape and the successful implantation
of the alien queen. Over the course of the film, we see Ripley becoming
increasingly ill; she feels sick to her stomach, becomes fatigued
easily, and finds that her hands shake uncontrollably. When she
undergoes a scan to diagnose the problem, she learns that there is an
alien queen growing within her. She describes the situation in terms
that link the alien implantation with unwanted pregnancy resulting from
sexual assault: “I was violated, and now I get to be the Mother of the Year.”</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
significance of this development, in terms of both Ripley’s character
and the series’ themes, cannot be overstated. We know from the first act
of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aliens</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
that Ripley’s worst fear is becoming an alien’s host. The nightmare we
witnessed showed the alien bursting from her chest while she lay in a
hospital bed, and that film’s theme of motherhood allows us
retrospectively to view the scene as an unnatural birth. More than
death, Ripley’s fear is giving life to a creature that will bring death.
</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For
a person who values her agency and her mission, this situation is
particularly difficult to face. Ripley has basically made it her life’s
work to eradicate the Xenomorphs, and now, against her will, she has
become the potential grandmother to a whole race of killer aliens.
Instead of destroying the aliens, she is helping to create them. What
makes this even worse is that she had no opportunity to fight back; she
was attacked in a moment of vulnerability and had her agency stripped
from her.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ripley
concludes that the only way to regain her bodily autonomy is to destroy
her body. Initially, she asks Dillon to kill her, echoing a request she
made of Hicks in the previous film. He refuses, saying that he will
only end her life after she destroys the Xenomorph that has been hunting
his men. She is the only person left alive who can annihilate the
aliens, and she must complete the task she set herself before she can
end her suffering. What is interesting about this deal is that the
narrative does not allow it to come to fruition; Dillon sacrifices
himself before Ripley kills the alien. Ripley is left to decide whether
she will remain a vessel for the harbinger of humanity’s destruction or
finally relinquish her “sole survivor” status. The narrative forces her
to take her agency back, just in time for the final showdown.</span></div>
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<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/alien3_3745_zps9062d55a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/alien3_3745_zps9062d55a.jpg" height="167" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In
the first two films, there are generally two possible outcomes: Ripley
will live and eliminate the alien threat, or Ripley will die and the
Xenomorphs will wipe out humankind. Either Ripley will win, or
Weyland-Yutani will have its prize. In this final confrontation, Ripley
comes face to face with a team sent by the Company, who claim that they
can retrieve the queen inside of her without causing her harm. They tell
her to “let [them] deal with the malignancy,” as if the creature were a
cancerous tumour. They promise her that they will destroy it, though
she and we know that that is unlikely. Suddenly, the script has shifted:
Ripley can live, so long as she allows the alien an opportunity to
survive, or she can eradicate the Xenomorphs, as long as she is willing
to sacrifice herself. She chooses the latter.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As
Ripley throws herself into the furnace, she assumes a crucifix pose,
becoming an explicitly Christ-like figure in her moment of
self-sacrifice. Yet, even as she assumes this heavenly aspect, she falls
into what appears to be the fires of Hell. It’s an image rife with
symbolism, and you could view it in a number of ways. Personally, I’ve
chosen to interpret the infernal furnace as the rather hellish </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien: Resurrection </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">and
Ripley as the character herself, left to burn in the flames of
incompetent writing until she is an unrecognizable mass of tissue that
might once have been a hero. Of course, that’s just me.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If we ignore the fourth film and treat the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
series as a trilogy, it allows us to read Ripley’s heroism as part of a
long tradition, dating back to the Anglo-Saxons. That’s right; I’m
telling you that Ripley is Beowulf. It’s not a perfect fit, but there is
a fascinating parallel. In the first film, she takes on a single,
mysterious monster who preys on her crew and, in so doing, establishes
herself as a hero. In the next film, she destroys the monster’s mother, a
creature who was well within her rights to seek revenge for the deaths
of her offspring. In the third film, she faces a foe known by one of the
inmates as the “dragon.” Like Beowulf, who is an old man when he fights
the dragon, Ripley is weak, a shadow of what she once was. She can
vanquish her enemy, but, in the end, her life is also forfeit. Her death
leaves her people vulnerable to future attacks; dying a hero doesn’t
make you any less dead, and a dead champion can champion very little.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Actual strong female character (even if the film’s treatment of women in general is dubious at best)</span></div>
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-2409220425120595752013-06-18T01:36:00.000-07:002013-06-18T01:36:10.542-07:00Miscellaneous Mondays: In a World... Where Monday Posts Go Up on Tuesdays...<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-2f4f4fca-5664-c115-d7e1-7a4fb4626cd7" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’d
like to offer my apologies for posting this Monday update in the wee
hours of Tuesday morning; I was distracted first by a powerful need to
see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Man of Steel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and then by an equally powerful need to figure out everything that was wrong with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Man of Steel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. (More on that next week.)</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">However,
while that cinematic experience ultimately disappointed, I did discover
a film potentially worth watching this week. It would be more accurate
to say that my sister discovered it, as she not only found the trailer,
but forced me to watch it by nudging me via text every few minutes. It
is thanks to her that I’m now telling you to schedule some time to go to
a movie theatre in August.</span></div>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EiCwrjV06fI" width="560"></iframe>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
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<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In a World...</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
tells the story of a group of fierce, mutated, female Amazonian
warriors battling prehistoric cavemen hybrids in a scenario based on the
Prussian War. Well, sort of. At least for a few minutes. And I’m sure
those minutes will be awesome. The rest of the time, however, it tells
the story of the woman booked to do the voice-over for the trailer of
that film and her struggle to break into the male-dominated field of
movie trailer narration.</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Lake
Bell, the writer, director, and star of the film, <a href="http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/lake-bell-world-asks-why-women-don-t-192946964.html" target="_blank">has said that she wanted to explore the reason for the exclusion of women from the trailer voice-over field</a>: “The male voice is just deemed, ‘the omniscient
voice,’ whether it’s because we coin God as a He, and it could [be] that
sort of culturally significant, or it’s just literally the resonance …
[is] easier and more authoritative to hear. Which both are interesting
conversations, and ones that I wanted to explore in the movie.”</span><br />
<br />
</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As
a person who wants to hear women’s voices telling me what ridiculous
hijinks I can look forward to seeing in the next Hollywood blockbuster,
and as someone who spent far too much time during my childhood affecting
a terrible Russian accent, I will definitely be checking out </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In a World...</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, and I hope you do too.</span></div>
Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-67650742925442122502013-06-14T23:00:00.000-07:002013-06-15T02:33:22.679-07:00Apparently She Saw An Alien Once<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/aliens_zpsd3fa6d66.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/aliens_zpsd3fa6d66.jpg" height="400" width="262" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(Note: This analysis is based on the 1991 Special Edition of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aliens</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Also, stay away if you don’t wish to be spoiled for certain summer superhero flicks.)</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’d
like to tell you a story. Once upon a time, there lived a dark-haired
hero who fought against an alien threat, risking their life to save the
people of Earth. Following the alien attack, the hero was tormented by
the experience and found it difficult to sleep. They turned to action as
a way to move beyond their psychological trauma, getting assistance
from both the military and a resourceful child. Finally, they fought
their enemy in a violent showdown while wearing a mechanized suit, and a
woman ultimately saved the day. Now, name that story.</span></div>
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<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/ripleyasironman_zps3bf1ca24.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/ripleyasironman_zps3bf1ca24.jpg" height="256" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re up to date in your Marvel Cinematic Universe travels, you probably answered </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Iron Man 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve probably deduced that we’re
going through this month’s films in chronological order, and therefore
answered </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aliens</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Both are correct.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aliens</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
takes place fifty-seven years after the events of the first film,
beginning when Ripley’s shuttle is found by a salvage crew, with the
hypersleeping Ripley still inside. She is taken to Gateway Station,
where she is called to answer for the destruction of the Nostromo. The
people who conduct the inquest, a group of executives employed by the
insidious Company, Weyland-Yutani, don’t believe her story about the
Xenomorphs, and they revoke her flight officer license. Demotion proves
easier to deal with than the dreams that haunt Ripley’s sleep, dreams in
which she sees an alien burst from her chest. When the Company loses
contact with the colony that they have established on the aliens’
planetoid, LV-426, they mount a mission to destroy the aliens once and
for all. It is this objective that convinces Ripley to join the mission
as a consultant, which she hopes will give her some peace of mind. (It’s
a good thing she didn’t know about the sequels, or she might have just
stayed home.)</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Whereas </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> builds up to the reveal of its protagonist, the creators of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aliens </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">know
from the get-go that we’re here for Ripley. The first film subverts
convention and forces the audience to identify with a female hero, and
the second strengthens this identification, even going so far as to
align the audience with Ripley’s subjectivity by having us witness one
of her nightmares.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Almost
the entire first act is devoted to seeing Ripley try to cope with the
consequences of her actions in the first film. What was a heroic triumph
becomes complicated by the passing of decades and the return to
civilization. Having defeated the representative of the Company on the
Nostromo, Ripley now has to face Weyland-Yutani’s executives and justify
the financial losses incurred by her actions. Here, again, she is
dismissed by those who think they know better, and she defies them just
as she did before. When they end the inquest, she responds, “Goddamn it,
that’s not all! Because if one of those things gets down here, then
that will be all! Then all this, this bullshit that you think is so
important, you can just kiss all of that goodbye!” As before, she finds
that she and the Company are operating within completely different value
systems; she saved humankind, and they claim that she “acted with
questionable judgment.” Her heroism is re-interpreted by the
bureaucratic, capitalist machine as incompetence.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/aliens_mq_076cd_zpsae2d2fab.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/aliens_mq_076cd_zpsae2d2fab.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">By
denying the existence of the aliens, the Company also undermines the
legitimacy of her psychological trauma. Their conclusion appears to be
that some kind of latent mental illness caused her to destroy the
Nostromo, not that she developed PTSD as a result of her harrowing
experiences with a very real alien. The Company clearly views her mental
disorder as a form of weakness, but the audience knows that it is the
consequence of a great display of strength.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Nevertheless,
when a Company employee, Carter Burke, tells her that they’ve lost
contact with the colony on LV-426 and offers her the chance to come
along, she initially declines, saying, “I’m not a soldier.” This line
becomes significant over the course of the film, as Ripley is contrasted
with the Marines whose mission she joins. Like the Company executives
and her former crew members, the Marines dismiss Ripley, one of them
giving a misguided, condescending interpretation of the events of the
first movie: “Apparently she saw an alien once.” When that same Marine
dies at the hands of an alien, it becomes clear that the easiest way to
guarantee your death in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> series is to underestimate Ellen Ripley.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
Marines are a brash, bold, hyper-macho bunch, including the three women
in the group; one of the women, Vasquez, is even asked by one of her
comrades whether she’s ever been mistaken for a man, to which she
replies, “No, have you?” They are also, for the most part, just as
incompetent and capable of “acting with questionable judgment” as the
Company claims Ripley is. They are led by a lieutenant whose experience
comes almost entirely from simulations, and at least a few of them
directly disobey orders intended to keep them from damaging the colony’s
cooling system. Still, as one of them observes, they perceive
themselves as a “squad of ultimate badasses” who will protect Ripley.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Instead,
it’s the other way around. In the first place, it is Ripley, not the
lieutenant, who sees the team’s location near the cooling system and
deduces the possible effects of a stray armour-piercing bullet. Then,
when the aliens close in on the Marines, Ripley disregards Burke and the
lieutenant and drives in to save the remaining soldiers. She continues
to demonstrate her superior tactical knowledge when she plans the
defenses that they mount using their remaining ammo. At every
opportunity, she displays a military mind superior to those of the
actual soldiers.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Once
she has proven herself to the Marines, she still has another human
hurdle to clear: Carter Burke. As a representative of the Company, Burke
replaces Ash as Ripley’s primary non-alien antagonist. Ripley agreed to
go on the mission on the condition that they were going to destroy all
of the Xenomorphs and not, under any circumstances, bring any back. It
is therefore no surprise that she becomes furious when she learns that
this is precisely what Burke intends to do. When she confronts him about
his plan, he says that bringing home a specimen will set them up for
life and make them heroes.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/Aliens-Cast_zps9d5e5f54.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/Aliens-Cast_zps9d5e5f54.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In
this conversation, we see the stark difference between the respective
value systems of Ripley and Weyland-Yutani. Burke describes heroism and
financial gain in the same sentence, equating the two; they would be
heroes because they allowed the Company to make money, and they would
profit from their actions. Heroism, to Burke, is acting in his own
self-interest and the interests of the capitalist machine. Ripley takes
the opposite approach, framing Burke and the people he’s working for as
monsters. (A few scenes later, she makes this connection explicit when
she tells him, “You know, Burke, I don’t know which species is worse.
You don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.”)
She refuses to cooperate with him, instead vowing that she will let
everyone know that he was responsible for the colonists’ deaths. She
makes it clear that she will not let him get away with describing
villainy as heroism, or achieving financial gain through the loss of
human life.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Although
the film has a high death toll, one of its major themes is the
preservation and continuation of life; more specifically, the film deals
with the concept of motherhood. In the special edition, this begins in
the first act, as Ripley arrives at Gateway Station, only to learn that
the daughter she left behind almost sixty years earlier has died an old
woman. It finds its most obvious expression in the bond between Ripley
and Newt, a girl of about the same age as Ripley’s daughter was when she
last saw her. While Newt, the sole survivor of a colony of over 150,
seeks a mother to replace the one lost to the aliens, Ripley finds a
daughter to replace her own, lost to Ripley as a result of her
experiences with the Xenomorph. However, Newt is more than Ripley’s
adopted daughter; she is her heir apparent. Ripley’s ability to survive
is echoed in Newt, who managed to keep herself alive for weeks while the
aliens took over the colony.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">At
one point, when Ripley is trying to comfort Newt, the girl asks if one
of the aliens grew inside her mother, and then observes, “Isn’t that how
babies come?” While it may be difficult to get past the horror inherent
in any conversation in which a human girl wonders if a bloodthirsty
alien that burst out of her mother’s chest could technically be
considered her brother, this question is important. In both </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alien </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aliens</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, motherhood can be a problematic issue. </span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/RipleyampQueenBackUp_zps786f69b6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/RipleyampQueenBackUp_zps786f69b6.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://edmundhernandez.blogspot.ca/2011/06/aliens.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Edmund Hernandez</span></a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
first film tackles it primarily through MU-TH-UR, the computer
controlling the Nostromo. MU-TH-UR initially seems to be a benevolent
force, giving birth to the mostly nude crew as they emerge from
hypersleep, but there are some interesting implications that emerge over
the course of the film. First, while the system that the crew calls
“Mother” can communicate with them at any time through the intercom,
only the ranking officer can access Mother directly. Because of the
maternal name, it’s a bit like the mainframe is playing favourites, and
Ripley is only worthy of her attention after both Dallas and Kane die.
It is from Mother that Ripley learns that they have been deemed
expendable, and it is Mother who ultimately turns against Ripley by
turning off the cooling unit, as if in retaliation for Ripley blowing up
the ship. Mother comes across as more than a little cold and
vindictive.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In
the second film, the treatment of motherhood is made more complicated
by the presence of three different kinds of “mother.” The first is the
group of human incubators, who “give birth” to the alien fetuses who
gestate within them. This is a brutal definition of motherhood,
beginning with a kind of rape and ending with the violent, bloody death
of the parent.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
second type is represented by Ripley, who loses one daughter only to
gain another. She is presented as an ideal mother: loving, devoted, and
willing to do just about anything to protect her child. The final two
action sequences are driven by Ripley’s need to save Newt, as she
descends into the nest when the objectively smarter course of action
would be to let the whole place burn in the impending nuclear explosion.
The last big set piece is a physical battle that takes place between
Ripley and the alien queen, who only follows her onto the ship because
Ripley torched all of her eggs. Ripley uses her skill and ingenuity to
win a fight against a much more overtly lethal opponent, and her success
in eliminating the threat and protecting her child implicitly labels
her the superior mother.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What
is particularly interesting, however, is the film’s treatment of the
third kind of mother: the alien queen. By paralleling her with Ripley,
the film almost humanizes her; Ripley’s love for Newt is reflected in
the queen’s concern for her offspring. We side with Ripley because she’s
one of us and she is fighting to secure the survival of humankind, but
it’s difficult not to sympathize with someone who just watched an alien
invader burn her children alive. The Mama Bear badassery that we admire
in Ripley is answered by a similar quality in the queen, whose goal in
boarding the ship is not spreading the species, but getting revenge. By
reflecting aspects of Ripley in the queen, the film makes a species that
was once terrifying in its very alienness disconcertingly familiar.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/ironmanasripley_zps5ccce14b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Ripley/ironmanasripley_zps5ccce14b.jpg" height="320" width="252" /></a></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In
some ways, it does the same with the female action hero, especially for
a modern audience looking back. Ripley rocked the John McClane look two
years before </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Die Hard</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
was released, and her story resembles films about male superheroes that are
currently in theatres. She paved the way for Sarah Connor, Black Widow,
and the women of whom Hollywood’s favourite Strong Female Characters
are merely a pale imitation. What is even more remarkable is that she
did this in a film that featured other women. Of the small group of
Marines that goes on the mission, three are women. One is a pilot, one
is a medic, and the last one makes it through the majority of the film
and dies a heroic death. All three of them get lines. The intelligent,
resourceful kid that shows up as a boy in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Iron Man 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
is depicted here as a girl perceptive enough to see through the happy
lies she has been told by adults. For a modern viewer, who will
encounter at the cinema only <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/06/14/191568762/at-the-movies-the-women-are-gone" target="_blank">“a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes,”</a> this film does seem truly alien.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Verdict: Actual strong female character </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5738187815163402043.post-43656043571204578922013-06-10T12:00:00.000-07:002013-06-10T14:35:09.047-07:00Miscellaneous Mondays: The Clone Wars<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/orphan-black-poster_zps76fe24da.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s462/femalefortitude/Misc%20Mondays/orphan-black-poster_zps76fe24da.jpg" height="320" width="215" /></a></div>
<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-2f4f4fca-2ff3-8c81-ebc5-f01759f81a02" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">On June 1st, the BBC announced that Matt Smith would be leaving </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Doctor Who</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,
paving the way for another actor to don the bow tie (or another
ostensibly “cool” accessory). Immediately, suggestions began pouring in,
and many of them called for the Beeb to take this opportunity to make
some real changes. The show has been deservedly criticized for its
sexism and racism, and a number of disenchanted fans want to see the
white, male Doctor regenerate into a woman, a person of colour, or both.
(My vote is for Lenora Crichlow.) WhatCulture! even posted <a href="http://whatculture.com/tv/doctor-who-10-more-actresses-who-could-play-the-12th-doctor.php/1" target="_blank">a half decent, half gimmicky list of women who could play the part</a>.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
best suggestion, however, came from <a href="http://spiffymuffin.tumblr.com/post/51936576650/plot-twist-the-12th-doctor-is-tatiana-maslany" target="_blank">Tumblr user Spiffymuffin</a>, who joked
that Tatiana Maslany should play the twelfth Doctor... and the
companion... and the aliens... and the audience. Maslany, who plays
multiple roles on the BBC America/Space joint production, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Orphan Black</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,
has become the subject of a meme the likes of which the Internet hasn’t
seen since we learned the facts about Chuck Norris. Where once we
asserted that “Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep. He waits,” now we claim that,
while <a href="http://sheblet.tumblr.com/post/52438410463/factory-workers-worry-about-being-replaced-by" target="_blank">“factory workers worry about being replaced by machines, actors worry about being replaced by Tatiana Maslany.”</a> However, the show is
worth watching for so much more than Maslany’s masterful performance(s).
</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Orphan Black</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
tells the story of Sarah Manning, a small-time criminal who steals the
identity of a woman whose suicide she witnessed. Because the recently
deceased Beth Childs looks just like her, Sarah slips into her life
nearly undetected, only to find herself having to deal with the problems
Beth killed herself to escape. As if that weren’t enough, Sarah quickly
learns that there is a reason why she and Beth are identical: they, and
at least seven other women, are clones.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s not difficult to see why </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Doctor Who</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> fans who are tired of the show’s sexist shenanigans would want to borrow a little of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Orphan Black</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">’s
feminist magic. While the first episode is a bit dude-heavy, the
introduction of a whole host of clones, as well as several other women
not played by Tatiana Maslany, quickly turns the show into an oasis of
complex female characterization. In an interview about the show, Maslany
<a href="http://collider.com/tatiana-maslany-orphan-black-interview/" target="_blank"> points to the quality of the women’s roles as what drew her to the project</a>:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
wonderful thing about this show is that each of the clones has their
own voice. They’re not just cannon fodder. They’re not just expendable.
They’re completely their own human being. And so, for me, I was
salivating at the challenge to get to play all these characters and
define each of these women because each of them are so well written. You
could have a series about each of them. They’re so complex and human
and funny and dark.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">While other shows struggle to represent even one or two women as complex, flawed human beings, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Orphan Black</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> makes the complexity, the flaws, and the humanity of its female characters the focus of the show.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There’s
a lot more to say about the show’s portrayal of women and women’s
issues, but, as one poorly written female character on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Doctor Who</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> would say, “Spoilers.” What I will say, however, is that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Orphan Black</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is well worth your time. Even if Tatiana Maslany can’t play every character on every show, it would be wonderful to see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Orphan Black</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">’s approach to female characters replicated across both individual shows and entire networks.</span><br />
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Megan Croutchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04693638400550928952noreply@blogger.com0