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you know how some people are so annoying you end up separately annoyed at so many things they said it takes days to work through the queue?
So at the pub on Wednesday we were talking movies and I was talking numbers of women and he was countering with Strong Female Characters.
So he said Guardians of the Galaxy, and I said I liked that but it was sad when they changed the team from the comics they left out women.
And he got this really ugh voice on and was like, you don't think they're planning on bringing them in later?
Like, voice said it was obvious, why am I complaining.
You know what I'm sick of? Later.
Even if we'd heard so much of a whisper of such a plan - and I haven't - it would still be later. What, you want women now? You want parity now? You want equality now? Wait your turn.
I've been making the exact same complaints about my favourite genres for twenty years now, and I am sick of later.
We know Marvel's plans for the MCU for many years, and sure we're going to get one movie starring a woman, but later. If they want to slot in an extra movie, guess which gets bumped later? And if we want, oh, a second movie, well, that's a lot later.
In the mean time, here, have supporting characters, see them get ignored after one movie, have their canonical roles given to white men, their merchandise be non existent, them be painted out of pictures, toys that should feature them be remodelled and renamed, movie storylines that featured them be given to white men... that looks like I said it twice, I mean their jobs go to white men, their exact comic stories go to white men, women are getting erased.
We are going backwards. We are losing ground. Movies are being more sexist than notoriously sexist source texts.
Wait for Later?
What, and watch us get swept away tidy in the mean time?
Because you know what happens later. They look back and say, look, women just aren't popular, nobody's heard of them, you know who the audiences are asking for, more of the same, more of these white men.
It's up there with how ever story about women in F&SF I've ever read declares it the arrival of the women. The year of women. New women! New! There were never any women around here!
Authors I've been reading my whole life are getting left off lists because look, everyone knows women never wrote this stuff before, they're new!
And suddenly women!
Everything we're 'given' is called an improvement, status quo is always measured against utter absence, and whenever we ask for parity, for numbers, for actually existing, we get a token. But hey, she's strong! So new! We haven't seen that continuously since... I'm getting back as far as the original Avengers, both comics and Brit TV series, but I suspect that's a limitation of my familiarity with source texts.
Wait, Wonder Woman, of course, 1941, but she actually had a lot of women around and was at least in theory trying a bunch of diplomacy peace and love stuff they've since cut from her stories and background. Large contribution to my feeling we're losing ground, including bits that had always been ours.
Give us stories that are 50/50 men and women and writers have to find something to do with them. Right? I mean, if they have them standing around doing nothing while paid just as much as their male co stars, that kind of works too, but in theory their ongoing presence should call for scripts to actually use them.
But no.
Maybe later.
So at the pub on Wednesday we were talking movies and I was talking numbers of women and he was countering with Strong Female Characters.
So he said Guardians of the Galaxy, and I said I liked that but it was sad when they changed the team from the comics they left out women.
And he got this really ugh voice on and was like, you don't think they're planning on bringing them in later?
Like, voice said it was obvious, why am I complaining.
You know what I'm sick of? Later.
Even if we'd heard so much of a whisper of such a plan - and I haven't - it would still be later. What, you want women now? You want parity now? You want equality now? Wait your turn.
I've been making the exact same complaints about my favourite genres for twenty years now, and I am sick of later.
We know Marvel's plans for the MCU for many years, and sure we're going to get one movie starring a woman, but later. If they want to slot in an extra movie, guess which gets bumped later? And if we want, oh, a second movie, well, that's a lot later.
In the mean time, here, have supporting characters, see them get ignored after one movie, have their canonical roles given to white men, their merchandise be non existent, them be painted out of pictures, toys that should feature them be remodelled and renamed, movie storylines that featured them be given to white men... that looks like I said it twice, I mean their jobs go to white men, their exact comic stories go to white men, women are getting erased.
We are going backwards. We are losing ground. Movies are being more sexist than notoriously sexist source texts.
Wait for Later?
What, and watch us get swept away tidy in the mean time?
Because you know what happens later. They look back and say, look, women just aren't popular, nobody's heard of them, you know who the audiences are asking for, more of the same, more of these white men.
It's up there with how ever story about women in F&SF I've ever read declares it the arrival of the women. The year of women. New women! New! There were never any women around here!
Authors I've been reading my whole life are getting left off lists because look, everyone knows women never wrote this stuff before, they're new!
And suddenly women!
Everything we're 'given' is called an improvement, status quo is always measured against utter absence, and whenever we ask for parity, for numbers, for actually existing, we get a token. But hey, she's strong! So new! We haven't seen that continuously since... I'm getting back as far as the original Avengers, both comics and Brit TV series, but I suspect that's a limitation of my familiarity with source texts.
Wait, Wonder Woman, of course, 1941, but she actually had a lot of women around and was at least in theory trying a bunch of diplomacy peace and love stuff they've since cut from her stories and background. Large contribution to my feeling we're losing ground, including bits that had always been ours.
Give us stories that are 50/50 men and women and writers have to find something to do with them. Right? I mean, if they have them standing around doing nothing while paid just as much as their male co stars, that kind of works too, but in theory their ongoing presence should call for scripts to actually use them.
But no.
Maybe later.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-19 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-19 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-20 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-24 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-19 07:51 pm (UTC)Either you or Tumblr referred to Quasar as a woman...I'm only familiar with Wendell Vaughn.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-19 09:28 pm (UTC)Try wiki, I've only seen in the one ep of EMH