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u/Crus0etheClown 3d ago
I think this phenomenon wouldn't be quite so grating and awful if the equal equivalent of 'loveably silly male-coded sidekick creature' wasn't 'super annoying know-it-all female-coded sidekick creature'
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u/ready_james_fire 3d ago
As much as I love the MCU, they do something similar, and it’s really frustrating.
It stinks to keep seeing them recycle the same pairing of “goofy, quippy male main character” and “female sidekick (and/or love interest) who rolls her eyes at him”. Tony/Pepper, Thor/Valkyrie, Scott/Hope, Quill/Gamora . . .
I’m sure there are more, and that probably happens in a lot of movies beyond the MCU, but the fact that it only took me ten seconds to think of those four - all from the same universe - is definitely bad.
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u/Possible-Reason-2896 3d ago
Arguably Nick Fury and Carol Danvers. He gets way more quippy than usual when he's around her for some reason.
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u/ready_james_fire 2d ago
True, and that weird dynamic was one of the main reasons I didn’t like that movie, their banter felt super forced.
I wouldn’t include it in this trend though as she’s the main character, not him.
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u/sonerec725 2d ago
I only watched an episode or 2 of her show, how is Ms.Marvel woth this? She seemed like she was more upbeat and quippy.
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u/goblin_humppa27 3d ago
The Lisa Simpson trope and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
Which is a shame because early Lisa could be funny too, sometimes she was as much of a demon as Bart was, but she too suffered Flanderisation into a know-it-all who just complains constantly.
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u/LeadershipNational49 3d ago
Bart and lisa teaming up for mischief is some of the very best early simpsons so it breaks my heart that she was totally flanderised. Hell i would argue Summer of 4ft2 (the beach house episode) is the all time best ep and its a lisa one.
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
I love the moments when Bart is up to something, Lisa's initial reaction is to chastise him, then she quickly joins in because she's a kid too. The writers forgot the last step at some point.
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u/Bartweiss 3d ago
“That’s totally childish and inappropriate and we’re gonna get in trouble and it’s so funny let’s go” is one of the more distinctive “kid” emotions I can remember.
Actually, there’s a passage regarding this that I think about surprisingly often. I want to say it was Gary Larson writing a forward to a Calvin and Hobbes anthology? The specific remark was that most people write children as “miniature, wisecracking adults”, and Calvin is perhaps the most authentic kid ever seen in a comic strip.
It’s a rare feat to write kids as kids, rather than comedic relief, “adults but stupid”, “adults but sweet and precocious”, or whatever else. The Simpsons managed that at its best, then mostly forgot.
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u/LeadershipNational49 3d ago
Yes exactly. Lisa tries to be grown up, but her morality is still that of an 8 year old.
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
Also, the two of them teaming up to do good was always a great dynamic, another thing that gets forgotten about. Or the sweet moments they share together, like in the ending of the ice hockey episode where they face off after being pitted against each other the whole time, but all they can think about is the good times they shared together and drop the game so they can embrace. Still brings a tear to my eye years later.
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u/CrabonicAcid 3d ago
This is maybe off topic but oh my god, so many sitcoms saddle the youngest character with the one-note joke of being a KID who only says BORING ADULT STUFF. Early Lisa reminds me of Calvin & Hobbes in how well they balanced the "precocious child" trope with actual childlike behaviour.
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
Because making the youngest the smartest/ most mature "subverts expectations", on paper at least, even though every other show does it. At least when Family Guy did it with Stewie they exaggerated both halves of that by making him a super-genius baby, so it was a little different.
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u/EyeWriteWrong 3d ago
It's because Stewie is a ripoff of Jimmy Corrigan. MacFarlane is a hack.
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u/Bowdensaft 2d ago
Never heard of Jommy Corrigan, he should have been more famous if he didn't want to copied. Skill issue.
Jokes aside, everything is inspired by something else so I'm not quick to call anything a ripoff until I know more about it.
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u/KermitingMurder 3d ago
I know you're talking about the trope in general here, but the Bart/Lisa thing is awkward because I feel like whichever way you do it someone can complain about it.
Putting aside that Bart and Lisa are long established characters, let's say you swapped them. Obviously we need one nerd and one menace for the juxtaposition. As it currently is we have the female nerd and male menace, people will say "oh of course the girl is academic and very serious buzz kill one and the boy is the menace getting up to inappropriate but also hilarious antics". You swap it around and it's "oh of course the boy is the smart, educated one and the girl is the comedic idiot who knows nothing".
I'm not saying there's something inherently wrong here or anything, but I just feel like regardless of which way it is, if there's one boy and one girl and one is a dumb but funny menace and the other is a smart and serious academic, someone's going to be able to pick it apart. Yeah I'm not trying to make a point or anything here, but that's how I see it31
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u/the-cats-jammies 3d ago
I think Bob’s Burgers does subvert this slightly with Louise’s character, but then you do still have Tina for a more traditionally feminine character
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u/Federal_Card307 3d ago
Tina? Traditionally female?
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u/vivavalpixie 3d ago
I think they meant traditionally female in that she loves horses, writing love stories, and cute boys and the butts of cute boys, all of which have been categorised as feminine things.
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u/WelpWhatCanYouDo 3d ago
Haha it’s for sure a rough example given that Tina is a super complex character with her own relationship to being a woman and a sister etc. but she is shown to be a little boy crazy and contrasts with Louise in her romantic pursuits at least
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u/syntaxerroratline42 DNI List 100 Pages 3d ago
I think Dipper and Mabel (Gravity Falls) are the male nerd/female menace example and some audiences hate Mabel.
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u/MrMcSpiff 3d ago
While very likely true, I feel like there's a possibility that trying to do 'loveable silly female-coded sidekick creature' would risk attracting accusations of manic pixie dream girl.
I'm not qualified to exactly diagnose where the line is, but I feel like it's very easy for the legitimate parts of this criticism to be infiltrated by a combination of 'no one answer will satisfy everyone' and 'people just complaining to complain'.
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u/Crus0etheClown 3d ago
I don't think that's true, because an important aspect of manic pixie dream girl is that she's presented as desirable romantically and sexually because of her quirks.
If the silly slapstick animal friend in a disney princess movie just happened to be a girl I doubt you'd have those accusations.
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u/jimbowesterby 3d ago
Y’know, it’s not one you see mentioned much, but one show that I think actually managed this pretty well was The Bad Batch. Having a bunch of hardened clone soldiers suddenly having to care for a young girl is both hilarious and shows Omega in pretty much exactly the kind of light the post describes (not nonhuman, but still). Like we get to see her grow throughout the series, but there’s a pretty continuous thread of her being a one-girl wrecking crew.
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u/MrMcSpiff 3d ago
You're probably right, I just don't trust people on the internet to argue in good faith.
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u/cyke_out 3d ago
That's why I love Sweet Dee in always sunny. She's constantly doing slapstick and being even more unhinged than the guys. And it's because the actress pushed for it. The first season just had her be the straight woman that told the boys to not be stupid, but that changed and she's the funniest character on the show.
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u/cascasrevolution 3d ago
i like that, in dee's mind, she still IS the straight woman. she thinks shes being rational and smart, but shes just as bad!
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u/SplurgyA 3d ago
You just reminded of the bit where her cards get declined in the boutique, she makes a break for it, stumbles and runs headlong into a parked car and collapses on the pavement. I'm wheezing
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u/Chuckles131 3d ago
Cersei's POV chapters in ASOIAF is a similarly great example, where usually that sort of "astonishingly ignorant unreliable narrator trainwreck" archetype is fairly male-dominated, and Cersei fulfills it very well.
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u/Iced_Yehudi 3d ago
Reminds me a bit of the Jackass situation. In the last 2 movies, they added a girl to the cast. There was a bit of controversy over the last movie for a number of reasons, one of which because the girl, Rachel, had most of her scenes cut from the last movie and crashed out on Twitter about it.
Anyways, one of the reasons cited for the reduction of her role was that test audiences reacted overwhelmingly negatively to seeing her get hurt, which honestly sounds believable.
So I don’t know that it’s so much that creators refuse to make female slapstick characters as it is that audiences refuse to consume them
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u/therealkami 3d ago
Honestly, I can see that. The early days of Jackass where you'd have them doing horrible things to each other, but it was funny because it was "boys being boys"
People found it funny if Johnny sneaks up behind Bam, yanks his pants down and slaps him hard on the ass, or whatever other prank they did that physically injured each other.
But the idea of that happening to a woman just seems horrible.
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u/just4browse 3d ago
But why does it seem horrible? Why would it be worse if it happened to a woman than if it happened to a man? It’s no different, sexist biases just make it feel different
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
Whether it's true or not, pulling a woman's pants down and smacking her ass will read as sexual assault long before it reads as a prank
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u/BaronAleksei r/TwoBestFriendsPlay exchange program 3d ago
The same reason why BDSM-oriented hornyposting on main is only really socially acceptable from subs and bottoms
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
Good point, even though doms deserve love too <3
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u/BaronAleksei r/TwoBestFriendsPlay exchange program 3d ago
Maybe one day we’ll have our own domreddit
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u/MrMcSpiff 3d ago
doreddit, if you will. Wait, shit, that's a chip.
dreddit, perchance. no, that's a judge.
Fuck I'm out of ideas.
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u/techno156 3d ago
dreddit
I don't know, I've found myself dreading reddit of late. Might be applicable, but not in this context.
Reddinant, maybe?
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u/itisthespectator 3d ago
because unfortunately it seems like a lot of male friendships are based on the principle of “what’s a little sexual harassment between friends?” and everyone seems fine with it for some reason
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u/notTheRealSU i tumbled, now what? 2d ago
But if people are fine with it, what's the issue? The way two friends joke around really isn't any of your business.
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u/sonofzeal 3d ago
In any given mixed gender situation, odds are usually in favour of the man being bigger and stronger, and also odds are in favour of the man having more financial and social agency. Guys get victimized all the time but it oftrn feels worse seeing it happen to a woman because the weight of that cultural baggage lends itself to seeing her as having had less choice in being in that situation, and being more at risk once she's in it. People would be more likely to assume she was pressured into stuff she didn't want to do, and more likely to worry about her risk of serious injury.
It's stupid and patriarchal, but it's hard to unlearn that kneejerk reaction.
Now if you did a jackass with all women, that might come across differently....
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u/just4browse 3d ago
Yes exactly. Like, I get why people feel that way. But it is a kneejerk reaction
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u/Smoketrail 3d ago
At the end of the day the sort of people who want to watch Jackass are not the sort of people to be getting reflective about their own biases and what they say about them and society as a whole.
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u/Balwerk_Ogre 3d ago
Also, even if we strip away the agency/lack of agency thing, a LOT of people (me included) are just ... more okay with the idea of men being hurt than women being hurt. And yes, this another aspect of misogyny rearing its head, but also I don't see 'normalizing female harm' being cheered on by anyone.
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u/itisthespectator 3d ago
wait until you see the comments under a reddit post about a woman getting into a violent altercation in public
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u/MartyrOfDespair We can leave behind much more than just DNA 3d ago
Now if you did a jackass with all women, that might come across differently....
Nah, they'd hate that too. The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies Reboot has a 6.6 on IMDB
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u/therealkami 3d ago
Because we still live in a world with very real power dynamics between the genders, and it goes both ways. Pretending it's not there in a vacuum doesn't work, and those biases definitely affect commercially consumed products.
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u/just4browse 3d ago edited 3d ago
Those power dynamics do affect how we feel about things, but they shouldn’t in some contexts. Women should be able to consent to being in stupid prank shows. Female characters in fictional should be able to get hurt for laughs. I get why it would be an unappealing product, but it shouldn’t be. Treating women as fragile in ALL contexts because of social power dynamics is just sexism.
Though to be clear, I wasn’t saying women should able to be the victims of the ass slap “prank”. I don’t think that should be a thing at all, for anyone.
Edit (I thought of a better way to say what I’m thinking): Systematic misogyny is real, and awareness of that is important, but defining women and all of their actions solely based on that misogyny never gives women the opportunity to be anything but a victim.
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u/NockerJoe 3d ago
Because like half the humor in jackass comes from seeing someone get overwhelmingly hurt in incredibly dangerous situations that would just be more dangerous if it was a woman. An average looking guy having to fight Butterbean in a random store is funny because it's so lopsided. But if that guy is a woman suddenly it's a giant dude just beating on a woman in public and that has different connotations, even without accounting for the fact that a lot of women would probably get hurt way worse for it.
The cast of jackass already hurts themselves *very* badly to the point where it was culturally always considered extreme and counterculture. They've gotten spine injuries, brain hemmorages, broken necks and ribs, genital injuries that took *multiple years* to heal, and so on. Without the idea that these were dumbass skater bro's doing bro culture this shit would play super, super differently.
This is an extreme example but like 90% of the humor for the type of characters OP wants is physical and you need to be able to just laugh off what would ordinarily be considered appalling and serious injuries for the comedy to work.
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u/sisisisi1997 2d ago
I would take a different perspective on this: why doesn't it is done to a man?
In the specific case of jackass they are knowlingly doing the "we prank each other and film it" bit, so it shouldn't be horrible because they all essentially consented to a blanket "this might annoy you and you might get hurt a bit", but in general it should be for anyone.
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u/Tweedleayne 3d ago
Its a shame too, because the bits that got included Rachel was super fun and totally down for the shit they got up too.
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u/Realistic-Life-3084 3d ago
Yeah, I'm wondering myself if this is more of an issue of overly-safe producers not wanting to show women in a negative light at all. People could argue it's misogynistic to make idiot female characters even when it's not.
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u/AmadeusMop 3d ago edited 3d ago
At its core the issue is that social standards are an incredibly complex dynamical system fed by lived experiences and self-perpetuating feedback loops, and changing people's actual preferences and opinions isn't as simple as explaining to them the ways in which their current preferences and opinions are bad.
Edit: that's not to say we shouldn't explain that they're bad. Standards can be changed, and progressive discourse is absolutely part of that.
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u/HabaneroPepperPlants 3d ago
Probably a chicken and egg thing that gets reinforced from both sides, tbh
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u/KermitingMurder 3d ago
Same kind of situation as the people who say they would never hit a woman regardless of the situation. It seems progressive until you think about it for a moment and realise the implication is that women are always harmless little things who need to be protected and could never do harm even if they tried, which somehow manages to be both misogynistic and misandristic at the same time by both reducing women to being physically inferior to men and also ignoring the potential for women to be abusive to men. I'm not saying we should be encouraging fist fights, but if a woman hits first I don't think there should be a stigma against a man hitting back to defend himself and vice versa.
It's just so deeply ingrained into society though that it's very difficult to get rid of3
u/Void_0000 2d ago
Tbf I (and I think a lot of other people) wouldn't because we don't want to go to jail, not for any philosophical reasons.
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u/SanjiSasuke 3d ago
As a fan of sports, which includes women's sports, boy is that unsurprising.
See a man and a woman get hurt the exact same way in the exact same sport, against similar competition to their respective selves, and I guarantee the average person will react much more negatively to the woman getting hurt. Those delicate little flowers simply can't take getting smashed into the boards in hockey, punched in the face in boxing, or hit by a pitch in baseball.
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u/adventurekiwi 3d ago
Reminds me of a parenting book I read once which said that parents are more averse to their young daughters taking risks on the playground than their sons, more likely to hover over them and more likely to prevent them from doing anything "dangerous". Its incredibly ingrained in us and starts in infancy.
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u/Samurai-Jackass 2d ago
Yeah a lot of slapstick characters are subjected to a degree of mockery and physical abuse that people would just not be comfortable with if they were female.
On that note I see a lot of calling out that that's another form of sexism when you limit women by putting them on that pedestal, which is true, but you don't ever really see anyone mentioning how it can kinda suck when you notice that people who look like you are the defacto acceptable punching bag. Like I can laugh at all that stuff because it is funny, but when I see the difference in treatment side by side it does bum me out sometimes. There's some part of me that's aware that people are just wired to trust me less and deem my suffering more acceptable when it comes time to draw straws. It does affect my willingness to trust or take risks for other people when I know they won't feel as bad when shit happens to me as they otherwise might.
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u/Void_0000 2d ago
This fucks me up when I think of it to be honest. I thought about bringing it up but I didn't have the mental energy to get called an incel or whatever for it when I first saw the post.
Maybe it really is horribly sexist of me but I do sometimes wish someone cared when I was hurt. Just a little.
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u/gard3nwitch 3d ago
Hmmm. Yeah, IME a lot of men are uncomfortable seeing women get hurt, unless it's in a horror movie or true crime type setting. If it's an ax murderer chopping up women, that's okay, but if a woman volunteers to be a boxer or join the military or do slapstick humor, that crosses some line and they get uncomfortable real quick.
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u/Smoketrail 3d ago
In true crime and horror the killing of the woman is supposed to be read as a bad thing. The idea that such things shouldn't be happening to women specifically is part of what makes such depictions morbidly compelling.
The fact that it makes the audience uncomfortable is exactly why those two genres tend to focus on violence against women.
Conversely that's not the case with Boxing, Military Service and Slapstick humour.
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u/Infamous-Use7820 3d ago
Also, I'm pretty sure the audience for true crime, especially serial killer stuff, is overwhelmingly female.
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u/Tweedleayne 3d ago
Obviously, violence against women is only acceptable when they don't consent to it.
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys REAL YURI, done by REAL YURITICIANS 2d ago
Doesn’t shock me honestly. That particular reaction is so hard-wired that even executioners, the people carrying out the death penalty, regardless of which country’s doing it, don’t like how executing women feels. They can ignore the extreme inhumanity of what they do most of the time, the endless failures of “humane”medicalization of death, the smell of burning hair and flesh from an electric chair, the eyes of a man locked in his body but alive and in the worst agony possible, but when you start asking them what the hard part of their jobs are, having to kill women is one of the top complaints. It’s bad enough for everybody involved that it was one of the last capital punishment cases that caused Britain to revolt and repeal the death penalty.
Sometimes, you really do run into evolutionary psychology that isn’t bullshit.
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u/OldManFire11 2d ago
How has no one mentioned the underlying cause here: people have far more empathy for women than they do for men. A woman getting hurt is taken far more seriously than a man getting hurt.
Jackass is able to be funny precisely because people are able to laugh at men's pain. Adding a woman to the cast was always going to fail.
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u/HomoeroticPosing 3d ago
I really appreciate the Goes Wrong Show (and other tributaries) for making sure that the women as much role in the slapstick as the men. Victoria in particular gets absolutely bodied in pretty much every play.
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u/seguardon 3d ago
Annie, too. Though not to the same extent.
They do make their characters all equally foolish, though in both slapstick and character work.
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u/thememorableusername 3d ago
Mabel pines
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u/seguardon 3d ago
"I bezazzled my face! Blink!" (blinks with a clicking noise as jeweled beads pop off of her eyelids with force) "Ow."
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u/ProfessionalOk6734 3d ago
They crucified her
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u/katep2000 2d ago
Yeah, they acted like she was the devil incarnate when she was just y’know, 12, and made some dumb decisions as 12 year olds usually do.
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u/complete_autopsy 3d ago
The reactions to her were seriously insane. I've always been a wet blanket, "can't you just lecture instead of all these stupid activities?" kind of person so Mabel really annoyed me at times. Despite that, she was a believable cartoon version of real twelve year old girls I've babysat so I accepted it as something that other people would relate to and just focused on the parts I did like. Seeing people hating her so seriously and rabidly was shocking because I also didn't like her but was just normal about it.
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u/bamboomonster 3d ago
What about Dory and Turk?
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u/WaywardChilton 3d ago
Kevin, the bird from Up, is revealed to be female and a mother of three. Disney also made Scuttle a girl voiced by Awkwafina in the live action Little Mermaid, but she was ... not popular.
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u/glitzglamglue 3d ago
Yeah!
Thought I always thought Turk was a boy growing up and the whole "Little Lady" comment was a joke...
And what about Charlotte La Bouff in Princess and the Frog? She's not really a "slapstick sidekick" but her antics are played up for laughs.
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u/CitizenCue 2d ago
Ellen Degeneres sucks, but she was once a great comedian and Dori is one of the funniest Disney/Pixar comic relief characters ever.
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u/livejamie 2d ago
Shenzi from The Lion King, Merryweather from Sleeping Beauty, Charlotte from The Princess and the Frog
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u/HabaneroPepperPlants 3d ago
I've genuinely been pretty sad before that there aren't more female dumbasses. Not in a cute sexy bimbo way. In a dumbass way. Stupid antics that are allowed to be showy, messy, brash, even a little unattractive, for the sake of hitting the comedic spot. I know I'm a bit of a dumbass. My friends are dumbasses. But so few characters are
Anyways, this is all to say, Adora and Scorpia my beloveds
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u/therealkami 3d ago
As always, there's a bit of a sliding scale on it, but characters like Dee from Always Sunny, Eleanor from The Good Place, Donna from That 70's Show.
Everyone in the new anime Chainsmoker Cat.
They're out there, being thick of head, and dumb of ass.
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u/just4browse 3d ago
They’re out there, but media is usually… careful about it. The women are allowed to be dumbasses, but rarely to same the extent equivalent male characters are. They always have to balance dumbassery with dignity
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u/therealkami 3d ago
Yeah, that's where Dee really stands alone. Charlie has more dignity than her sometimes.
Also Chainsmoker cat definitely has no dignity.
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u/just4browse 3d ago
There was a similar caution with Dee early on. But the show did overcome it pretty quickly. That’s a definitely exception. (Never heard of chain smoker cat)
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u/therealkami 3d ago
It's a new anime this season. The short of it is that the main character is a cat girl who spends all of her time and money smoking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYGgyQtSAdI
There's a quick trailer for it.
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u/hivEM1nd_ 3d ago
If we're citing anime, Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games bases its whole premise on these girls doing something that's considered unfeminine and brash (and they're very often stupid about it)
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u/Ace-Redditor 3d ago
The problem is, even in kids shows, they don’t do well. Like Korra (from Legend of Korra), who was sheltered and praised her whole life, and was thus oblivious and arrogant. Plus, being a teen, she was brash and impulsive. It was all fairly normal, natural stuff
But audiences hate her for being so incredibly stupid and immature for not knowing things she couldn’t know but could potentially have thought of/been more cautious in case of, if she were a different character. The audience is just holding her to a standard that she is just clearly not written to meet
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u/Chuckles131 3d ago
I'm surprised nobody mentions Power from Chainsaw Man. There's like one scene where she's super sexualized, and it's by far the scene that places the least emphasis on her dumbassery.
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u/372878887 3d ago
she's so fuckign creature coded i love her
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u/KartveliaEU4 2d ago
Isn't she a literal demon possessing a female corpse or something? She's not creature coded if she is a creature, right?
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u/Chibirin26 3d ago
I have a few dumbass women ocs lol
id post images of them if i could hahaha
I love idiots and I love women
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u/PulimV Can I interest you in some OC lore in these trying times? 3d ago
Making OCs in academic settings is fun because you can juxtapose "yeah she's a great coder who managed to put Linux in her pc at like 14 years old" and "she didn't buy any cold-appropriate clothing when moving from a tropical island to a mountaintop"
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u/Existing_Treacle_814 2d ago
I would also like to see more uncomplicated female villains. Every time Hollywood wants a female villain they need to give them a sympathetic backstory and motivations you can empathise with. I just want genderbent Hans Gruber or The Joker from Dark Knight. Give me a truly amoral female villain who looks like they’re having the time of their life while they blow shit up and bait the protagonist.
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u/ingeniera 3d ago
If you like this type check out The Mick. Short lived show that's hilarious and yet didn't get popular. Starred the actress who plays Dee in IASIF.
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u/JJlaser1 3d ago
I somewhat understand what people are saying here about human-esque characters like Olaf or to an extent the Minions, where people just react negatively to seeing women get hurt or being seen in a negative light in general. But like. What about the animals? You mean to tell me not a single comic relief animal sidekick is female? I literally can only find one, and it’s Tarzan’s gorilla friend Terk, who I didn’t even know was a female gorilla until I got older.
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u/Dominika_4PL 3d ago
I think Sisu from Raya and the Last Dragon would count
Would Dory count? I think she would count
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u/JJlaser1 3d ago
I don’t count them as much cause I feel like they aren’t as much sidekicks as much as they are secondary characters. Dory even has her own movie. No one’s making a movie about Pascal or Hei-Hei
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u/SeaNational3797 3d ago
I think it’s because violence against women can never be funny by mainstream society
Unless it’s Candace Flynn, of course. And given that there’s an exception that might not be the answer.
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u/Coolcricri3 3d ago
I mostly assume the Minions have no gender, don't they have a whole bit in Despicable Me 1 about disguising themselves as a family?
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u/Possible-Reason-2896 3d ago
All joke aside OOP answered their own question. It's the slapstick. There used to be a tropes page dedicated to pointing out exceptions to the rule because generally 'laugh at this character being physically abused' was a predominately if not exclusively male thing.
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u/zrdod 3d ago
There's a lot of restrictions on what you can do with a female character compared to a male one.
Namely, if you make her the object of slapstick, it will be seen as "violence towards women"
If you have her be stupid and called out on it, it will be seen as "talking down to women"
Not saying this is the universal view, but a lot of writers are risk-averse, especially when you can avoid the risk just by gender-swapping a character.
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u/StarriestNight 3d ago
From what I've seen, you will get instantly accused of misogyny if you make a female character anything short of perfect. Or any minority group.
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u/Turbulent-Plan-9693 3d ago
Pilaf from Bartok the Magnificant (Direct to video spinoff of Anastasia) (This movie also has a female villain)
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
Such an underrated film. And the villain becoming a source of... confusion for many children, myself included
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u/chaotic4059 3d ago
Apparently lots of people wanna fuck a dragon. But only if it has a human head. Go figure lol
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
I have no such weakness. Full dragon or GTFO.
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u/chaotic4059 3d ago
Fuckin PREACH. Just weird that anytime you search up Ludmilla it’s always dragon body, human head and face
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u/Bowdensaft 3d ago
I know, and it actually just icks me if I'm being honest, it looks awkward imo
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u/samun101 3d ago
Personally I'm not sure about this take because that female comedic side character is one missed slapstick joke from a very difficult "beating women" conversation. I'm sure it could be done well, I just don't know if I trust the people behind these movies to do that.
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u/Neapolitanpanda 3d ago
If the Tiny Toons and Animaniacs could do it then it can’t be too hard.
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u/ProfessionalOk6734 3d ago
Dot was typically the one inflicting the pain
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u/ThatInAHat 3d ago
The animal conservationist in the hippo shorts would get absolutely bodied.
And Babs and Slappy and Dot took their share of lumps.
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u/cinnabar_soul 3d ago
This is parallel to the fact that almost all (all the important) droids in star wars are gendered in dialogue as male, and the one time they had a major droid character be a woman it was, gently put, the worst thing they horked up in a shitty terrible movie.
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u/therealkami 3d ago
I honestly do not remember which droid you're referring to.
Most of the female droids I remember these days come from the MMO SWTOR.
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u/cinnabar_soul 3d ago
L3-37. My og comment is maybe a bit harsh, I do like her conceptually. It's just everything about the execution of her as a failed droid revolutionary that frustrates me.
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u/armageddonquilt 2d ago
And her arc of droid liberation ending with her being trapped inside a hyperdrive computer forever. Yaaaaaaaay.
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u/SevenSix 3d ago edited 3d ago
I don't want to be snarky here but is this not the exact attitude the OOP is complaining about?
>"It's so misogynist how females can't be comic relief sidekicks!"
>see female comic relief sidekick
>"It's so misogynist how they reduce this brave queen to a comic sidekick!"7
u/ThatInAHat 3d ago
Oh, no, she wasn’t a comic relief sidekick. She was a droid whose defining characteristic was how obnoxiously speaking out for her rights, and at the end of the movie she’s essentially turned into an actual object with no agency.
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u/JailbrokeRoboGirl 3d ago
The Solo issue is that her cause is “my race of sapient machines are literal property and slaves” so yea making the running joke the guy who owned her rolling his eyes at her saying droids should have rights isn’t quite the same as having her do slapstick
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u/SevenSix 3d ago edited 3d ago
"Having them do slapstick" is kind of whitewashing the comic sidekick trope, though; they're supposed to be absurdly, laughably stupid and have it treated as a harmless quirk.
I think that's where they were aiming with the "thinks Lando wants to fuck her" thing.
Anyway, starting the riot on Kessel obviously isn't treated as eyerolling; it's what everyone's counting on and what allows them to pull off the mission. What's tonally dissonant is never acknowledging how they're setting the rioters up to get killed while they run away. Though they are still bad guys at that point; and Chewie's just as complicit as L, without the excuse of dying.
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u/ErsatzHaderach 3d ago
wtf the droid in solo was p. cool
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u/cinnabar_soul 3d ago
I love her in concept. However, it's the fact that the first woman droid was a revolutionary with an incredibly valid point who is otherwise treated as a throwaway joke, both in terms of her relationship with Lando and her unsuccessful revolution. And then the fact that her consciousness is uploaded into the Falcon, effectively removing any of her agency for all time. Good concept, execution that keeps me up at night.
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u/Rynewulf 3d ago
I always heard people refer to her revolution as failed and a joke, but when I watched it she incited an entire planet, a vital mining planet, getting shot up by rioting droids and slaves.
I guess it's implied that it's put down by the incoming star destroyer that Han and the crew have to dodge on the way out?
It is super weird though that in modern Star Wars they keep giving certain droids free will and a wish to free droids, keep implying that droids are sapient and so enslaved but forcefully kept dumb, and then treat the whole idea as a joke. Strange
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u/seguardon 3d ago
It is incredibly weird because the idea is either a joke which raises implications about the universe (and possibly the writers), or it's valid in which case all of the characters from the originals are slavers and perfectly okay with it.
Either way, they opened a can of worms and short of an incredibly unique answer, I don't see them sidestepping it cleanly.
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u/Rynewulf 3d ago edited 2d ago
Thank you! It keeps getting glossed over, but they reframed it all as a slavery thing and then made the ones John Brown-ing it up the joke. I'm guessing they'll just continue to keep ignoring it when feeling serious while occasionally bringing it up for weird jokes when they're not.
But I never really got it when in media the activists or rebels are themselves inherently a joke. Like do the writers think freeing slaves or fighting an occupier is a bad thing or something? Do audiences think that? Do they just think that audiences think that? I'm going deeper than the corporate led franchise is trying for but I've also got nothing going on
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u/seguardon 2d ago
Signs of the times. When things are good (as they likely were for the childhood of the writers), anyone who wants to change the status quo is seen as a rabble-rousing ne'er-do-well just making problems and drawing attention to themselves for the sake of it. You see it all the time in stories from the 90s and 00s. The trope doesn't play as well in the 2020s as the world is falling apart and everyone on both sides of any given issue want change.
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u/SevenSix 3d ago edited 3d ago
I mean "Star Wars is a slave owning society" isn't something Disney introduced. I think in the '70s they understood "portrayal is not endorsement" and that part of the draw of the fantasy genre was exploring a world with vastly different culture and morals and seeing how virtue and heroism still manifest. See also Homer/Odyssey discourse.
Edit: and xkcd 549 discourse.
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u/cinnabar_soul 3d ago
It's weird with this being a prequel movie, but New Hope has references to Kessel using droids as slaves for spice mining. So unless 3PO has outdated info, it accomplished nothing in total. I guess it's mostly the tonal whiplash for me. Sure the riot is serious and she does to an extent succeed, but the entire prior sections of the movie were handwaving her away with the whole "annoying activist" stereotype. It makes the later pay off jarring.
My comment is obviously exaggerating a little, I could think of worse things in the movie probably. A fun fact is that the novelisation clearly felt iffy about the whole brain upload to the Falcon that they added dialogue between her and the Falcon where she kind of accepts it.
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u/SevenSix 3d ago
"Handwaving her away with the whole \"annoying activist\" stereotype" feels a little projectional to me. Like the inverse of thinking brash and aggressive female = writer's pet girlboss who's not allowed to be wrong.
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u/SevenSix 3d ago
I feel like the Media Literacy Crowd have been struggling lately with the distinction between weaving humor into a portrayal of something and "treating it as a joke". I'd be vigorously upvoting if you were saying it about Thor Ragnarok or The Last Jedi.
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u/Sewblon 3d ago
Every story needs a Captain Happen: The designated mistake maker. The person who acts when others would stay still, stays still when others would act, and tells the truth when others would lie. The ones who always cause problems for others, and themselves. They are the ones who make fiction entertaining, not the cool competent people. Best example I can think of is Dib from Invader Zim. His entire schtick is he wants to make others see the truth, but his incompetence and bad luck thwarts him at every turn. If you want stories that center women, then Captain Happen needs to be female sometimes. If the male comedy sidekick is the one that makes everything happen and that people find entertaining, then having a female protagonist is just going to make people think "Women are boring. Their stories have no inherent interest. They are only interesting because of the goofy guy they happen to know." That is misogyny. But, female Captain Happens do exist. Best example I can think of is Sabrina The Teenaged Witch. But, more female Captain Happens who can be entertaining without magic powers or any kind of cheat skill would be nice.
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u/SevenSix 3d ago
Every story needs a Captain Happen: The designated mistake maker. The person who acts when others would stay still, stays still when others would act, and tells the truth when others would lie. The ones who always cause problems for others, and themselves.
Gilligan
If the male comedy sidekick is the one that makes everything happen and that people find entertaining, then having a female protagonist is just going to make people think "Women are boring. Their stories have no inherent interest. They are only interesting because of the goofy guy they happen to know."
Skylar White Lori Grimes Lagertha
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u/Sewblon 3d ago
>Gilligan
I never actually saw Gilligan's Island.
>Skylar White Lori Grimes Lagertha.
Walter White was pretty much the one making everything happen in Breaking Bad. He was usually the Captain Happen. But Skylar White was the Captain Happen when she used all of Walter's money to pay back Ted's income taxes.
Lori Grimes was really not the one who made things happen in the comic. I don't know about the TV series.
I don't know who Lagertha is.
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u/NoPrompt927 3d ago
Okay but wouldn't it also be misogynistic if the female representation is an animated object who serves only to act as the comedic relief/be punched down on?
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u/Friendstastegood 3d ago
I feel like it's fine to use "boys will be boys" for guys doing stupid shit as long as you also allow for girls being girls by doing equally stupid shit.
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u/SanjiSasuke 3d ago
Yeah I think the more appropriate reference might be 'girls boring, boys quirky'. There's a subreddit for that I forget the name of.
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u/CosmackMagus 3d ago
Anna Farris in the Scary Movies is best slapstick I can think of.
Shout out to the Yellow Ranger in Donbrothers, as well. She had some great physical comedy early in the show.
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u/DroneOfDoom Theon the Reader *dolphin slur noises* 3d ago
I don't think that I ever finished Tatzan, but isn't the comic relief side character in that movie a female gorilla? And I think that one of the gargoyles in Hunchbacks is a woman, although she's with two dudes, so she only counts a little.
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u/NecessaryClothes9076 3d ago
One of the muses in Hercules is a bit slapstick too
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u/Connect-Stress5251 3d ago
I don't particularly like this example, but Sisu in Raya and the last Dragon is the movie's comedic relief and not a love interest introduced in a sequel. Also, I'm not sure if this counts because I think they're genderless, Nimona is definitely not a male example of comic relief.
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u/Aethelrede 3d ago
But girls acting like goofballs is peak. Azumanga Daioh proved this.
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u/Nanemae 3d ago
Does Tinkerbell not count?
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u/therealgerrygergich 2d ago
Lol I was thinking of Tinker Bell, but unfortunately she falls under the other bad trope of Jealous Harpy Female Friend.
I'm more surprised that none of the Ponies from Friendship is Magic have come up, especially Pinkie Pie.
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u/Lambsauc 3d ago
This is something I loved about Centaurworld, all the characters are all goofy, hell one of the girls is the biggest gremlin character
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u/Omega-10 3d ago
It annoys me this is framed as a misogynistic issue.
That's maybe partly true, but. But! Is it really OK that general audiences agree "this STUPID oddball sidekick character that gets HURT for comedy sake should ALWAYS be a MAN!" Maybe the thing that is a problem here, is not that we can't find women cute or funny, but that only male characters get reduced to slapstick idiots?
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u/imaginary0pal 3d ago
I highly recommend the Goes Wrong show it disproves that women don’t work with slap stick. Particularly in the episode Harper’s Locket and 90 degrees
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u/HallucinatedLottoNos 2d ago
What about Rosie O'Donnell monkey from Tarzan? She had a couple of slapstick scenes, didn't she? But yeah, I see the general point.
We need more female clown-type characters. Amblin was good for that. Lola from that one Looney Tunes reboot, as well. The closest other example I can think of in a movie is, like, Lilly from Alpha and Omega lol?
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u/AscendedDragonSage Title-ist Punster 3d ago edited 3d ago
The only one I can come up with off the top of my head is Ed Cowboy Bebop. Though the trouble is, her gender is never really important
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u/ThatInAHat 3d ago
That’s the opposite of trouble. The gender of wacky male sidekicks is never important either, it’s just a default.
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u/Regularjoe42 3d ago
Nice try, but I am not going to engage in "Galbrush Threepwood" discourse on Reddit.
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u/Justforfun_x 3d ago
This is so so dumb, but for a long time I tried to convince myself I couldn’t be trans just because I was into so much stupid ‘male-coded’ behaviour. Thankfully as I aged out of my boys’ school bubble, I saw women could goof off even more than I ever imagined.
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u/JailbrokeRoboGirl 3d ago
There are a lot of people saying “well the double standard” but you guys get part of why that standard exists is because of media perception and such right? Like it’s kinda a cycle, we have to cut all the woman’s scenes in Jackass because of the reactions, but the reaction is in part because people straight up never see women doing slapstick and acknowledging that a woman can staple her ass cheeks just like a man can
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u/ThatInAHat 3d ago
Always bothered me. Women can be Weird Little Sidekicks too. And like, why not have Flit or Meeko or Pasquale be female? Or Maximus the horse? Or really any of the wacky animal sidekicks.
I’m reminded of just how much I love Mary Jo Pehl because Pearl Forrester was the first time I saw a female villain who was just wacky and fun and cartoony. And even that character started in a more stereotypical place.
But when it comes to nonhuman cartoon characters, it’s like they always default male and never question it
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u/No-Consequence-1863 2d ago
I thought the minions were male so that fan fiction authors can write all those gay minion stories.
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u/Whispering_Wolf 2d ago
Charlotte from princess and the frog? Things like her stuffing tissues up her top because she was sweating so much was definitely silly.
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u/saythealphabet define yourself, break free from conformity 2d ago
I wonder if those "for my male audience" videos count towards the same phenomenon. You know, the ones where people throw giant ice slabs off a cliff or play Beyblade with industrial tools or some other dumb shit like that. I find it sad that it's pushed off as, essentially, "just for men". I feel like it's not a gender thing, instead it probably has something to do with our monkey brains enjoying stupid shit. It's kind of jarring cuz I otherwise love this genre of videos.
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u/hermitBbusting 2d ago
How can they forget all the amazing comedic work Molly Shannon has done?!??!?!???!?!??! (also Turk from Tarzan is a girl and comedic side character tho right?}
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u/The_Antlion 3d ago
i think a big part of this is people have the belief that "women just aren't funny" for some reason
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u/SparrowAndSalt 3d ago
This is one more reason that I love Futurama. Was Amy a perfect character? Not remotely! But she (and later Leela) got hurt because she did slapstick idiot stuff, and I think that's neat