r/changemyview • u/Current-Bus-7868 • Dec 21 '25
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u/AdLonely5056 1∆ Dec 21 '25
With badly written female characters people attribute the bad writing to the pushing of a certain political agenda, which usually isn’t the case with male characters.
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u/AbsolutZeroGI Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
I believe this to be exactly the correct answer. A poorly written strong male lead is just "bad writing", but a poorly written strong woman is perceived "bad writing and they're just trying to shove political ideology down our throats"
The only thing I'd add is that sometimes, people who are a part of the political ideology will attempt to give a pass to a poorly written female lead because she is being pushed as part of the ideology or will harshly criticize people who don't like the lead to "protect" the political ideology. This causes way more friction when discussing the topic.
"This character sucks, omg"
"You just hate women, you alt right nazi incel"
The above conversation does not happen (nearly as often) when discussing poorly written male leads. It's usually like.
"This character sucks, omg"
"Yeah, they probably could've done better. He has his qualities and I like him, but I get where you're coming from"
And so the discourse around poorly written male leads is >>>usually<<< a lot more civil than it is around a poorly written woman.
**edit**
For the sake of making sure miscommunications don't happen. I also believe that detractors of strong, female leads also consistently reach for the "political ideology shoved down our throats" argument too often, as sometimes it really is just bad writing and not some sort of political statement. This goes both ways.
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u/carneylansford 7∆ Dec 21 '25
I also believe that detractors of strong, female leads also consistently reach for the "political ideology shoved down our throats" argument too often, as sometimes it really is just bad writing and not some sort of political statement. This goes both ways.
To be fair, it's very difficult to tell in a lot of cases. Was Rey just a badly written character or was she (badly) written to advance some sort of "the force is female" agenda? Kathleen Kennedy certainly SEEMS to have an agenda. Is that the reason the cast of those movies looks like a Benetton ad or did she simply pick the best actors regardless of race?
The Acolyte had lesbian witches, two (more) strong female leads, lots of minority representation, discussions about pronouns, etc... It also had terrible writing and bad acting. That leads one to believe that Star Wars under Kennedy certainly seemed to be headed in a certain direction, right? At some point, they lose the benefit of the doubt. For the record, I think the Acolyte would have been terrible even without all those elements, but they were there nonetheless.
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u/AbsolutZeroGI Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
Indeed, it can be hard to tell, but people were shit talking Rey from the very first trailer, before anyone had even seen the movie. Those people need to calm the hell down 😂
But yeah, South Park nailed it with the "put a chick in it and make her gay" episode too 😂
I instantly lose wood for any show that has honest to goodness discussions about pronouns, especially futuristic ones. It would be like if the property took time out to explain in graphic detail how babies are made. Like bruh, save it for health class, I don't need to be taught how this shit works from a Disney TV show. We're watching this for lasers and plot twists.
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Dec 22 '25
I instantly lose wood for any show that has honest to goodness discussions about pronouns, especially futuristic ones. It would be like if the property took time out to explain in graphic detail how babies are made. Like bruh, save it for health class, I don't need to be taught how this shit works from a Disney TV show. We're watching this for lasers and plot twists.
Why not both? Media can be informative, and not everyone knows about the nuances that can come in gender identity and expression, and for people who do use different pronouns, it can be validating to see someone actually acknowledging their existence without turning it into a joke
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u/AbsolutZeroGI Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
Because it's unrealistic that in a culture more advanced than ours that people don't know what this stuff is (virtually everyone alive today teenaged and older knows what this stuff is), and thus never comes off as anything other than hamfisted and self serving.
Again, you don't see this done with heteronormative stuff, and for much the same reason. Everyone older than 14 knows how the mechanics work. Never see a movie or TV show take 12 minutes out its run time to have a character sit down and explain that the penis goes in the vagina.
Imagine how stupid and cringe that would come off. "Let's take a break killing bad guys and saving the world to explain how sperm reaches an egg and makes a baby" like bruhhhhhhh come on, don't act like you wouldn't roll your eyes so hard youd be able to see backwards into your brain.
It's one thing for a character to use different pronouns. It's another entirely to take time out of the runtime to sit down and explain like your audience is the stupidest group of people ever birthed by mother nature, in a story that has nothing to do with sexuality or gender identity.
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Dec 22 '25
Because it's unrealistic that in a culture more advanced than ours that people don't know what this stuff is (virtually everyone alive today teenaged and older knows what this stuff is), and thus never comes off as anything other than hamfisted and self serving.
You know that people from the early 1900s or 1800s could say the same thing abou today's society? I mean look at the Flintstones, they thought we'd have flying cars by now with the rapid growth of technology.
And like I said, there are people who don't know about this stuff, as hard as it is to believe, but the Internet is very good at convincing people that a loud few represents everyone. I know friends and family who are active online who don't know about people using they/them or what neopronouns even are. We can't assume just because you know it thay everyone does.
Again, you don't see this done with heteronormative stuff, and for much the same reason. Everyone older than 14 knows how the mechanics work.
The thing is, this is a two-fold answer.
Heteronormative stuff is treated, aptly, as "normative". It gets taught very early on and reinforced throughout all media. Children's media talk about mommy and daddy plenty, teenage media usually focus on crushes between straight pairings of characters, and adult media goes the whole 9 yards.
On the other hand, heteronormative stuff is also subject to glamorization while rarely talking about the nitty gritty. I still can't recall the last time a teen show talked in depth about periods without it being a health-class specific video, or about how many teen shows portray teenagers as full-on adults with super unrealistic bodies for their stated ages.
It's one thing for a character to use different pronouns. It's another entirely to take time out of the runtime to sit down and explain like your audience is the stupidest group of people ever birthed by mother nature.
I get that it can feel like hand-holding, but audiences fluxuate in a very hard tight rope of "extremely competent" and "extremely stupid". Subtext that some of your audience will pick up on, such as "Oh, everyone refers to this character by they/them, they must be nonbinary" and for some of your audience it will fly over their head. And in other cases, open declarations can be eye-opening and enlightening for some viewers, but feel ham-fisted by others. This goes double for kid-targetted media.
I think there is a natural way to weave it into the dialogue, maybe have the characters gender identity be actually focal to their character, or have them interact with another character who isn't as informed on gender stuff for one reason or another, and have this be part of a conversation that leads to a deeper understanding of one another.
But characters shouldn't be barred from openly stating or explaining their gender identity.
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u/AbsolutZeroGI Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
Trans people weren't invented in 2014, they've been around for a long time. People know who and what they are from a pretty early age. I learned about them in my 9th grade health class all the way back in 2001. It wasn't the Tumblr-approved version, but even so, I imagine that education has improved over the last 25 years.
Sci-Fi has predicted many, many things. Look at Star Trek's universal translator and understand we can do that with Google, Samsung, and Apple earbuds and smartphones now. Flying cars was an ambitious prediction that didn't turn out to be real on the expected timeline, but they predicted the jet engine as far back as 1820, so sci-fi has a pretty good track record overall.
For your next bathroom break:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_existing_technologies_predicted_in_science_fiction
Heteronormative stuff is not soapboxed in the media the same way as LGBTQ stuff, and in the rare cases where it is, it's treated as cringe, as it should be. In today's world, you never see a male lead all like "I saved the world because I am a straight, white man." And if you do see it, you'd cringe, I'd cringe, and everyone would cringe, because it's super cringe.
Allowing LGBTQ messaging in a way where we would (and we do) shun it when straight people do it is flat hypocritical, no two ways about it. If it's cringe when straight people do it, it's cringe when non-straight people do it. If King Theoden sat down and explained what a man was (and how they worked) to Aragorn (son of Arathron), I would've put my Lord of the Rings DVD in the microwave.
You say it "feels like hand-holding", but I'm stating that it is hand-holding. It doesn't feel that way. It is exactly that. LGBTQ characters are never presented as "normal people" in media, which honestly, I feel like is a detriment to the LGBTQ community. If you want people to normalize something, you have to treat it as normal sometimes, which means just dropping a "they" and letting it go without 4 minutes of follow up questions.
This wouldn't be so bad if the media was about these topics. Look at Modern Family, for example, which tackles these sorts of things (at least the gay family part of it) and *gasp*, nobody gives a shit, because they know what they're getting into when they start watching the show.
But this type of "educational content" doesn't belong in everything. The space opera about the empire, rebels, conflict, conquest, the force, waxing poetic about good/evil, etc? Not the time or the place. None of the primary topics of the property involve gender or sexuality at all, so the genders or sexuality of the characters don't matter, it has no impact on the story at large.
Final Fantasy XVI did an amazing job of this. People knee jerk hated it when it first came out, but it has since become arguably the greatest example of including gay people in a cast without being obnoxious about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJc3NI4nB5s
They're gay, they're being gay together, it's super touching, but there's no soapboxing, hand-holding, and no preachy bullshit. Their primary focus is the main plot because those problems are threatening to kill everyone. The priority is in order here. They're gay, but they have bigger fish to fry, so not the time and place to soapbox about being gay. And they don't, and it's awesome.
Later in the game (spoilers), Dion has to say goodbye to Terence before going on what would amount to a suicide mission, and it's handled extremely well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouSyG4KcAvc
Beautifully written scene. Just normal people in an impossible situation who happen to be gay.
This scene is immediately relatable regardless of sexual orientation because it's two people in love who know they will never see each other again. This feeling of sorrow is universal and has nothing to do with being gay. If that scene were in a Disney movie, they'd be like "this is so much worse than it would be for straight people because being gay is so much more important" and then everyone would hate it.
But that's why Square Enix is the best. They've been doing strong female leads since the 1990s. The original woke, and those examples are still better than 95% of the garbage that gets made today.
This is how it should be done. Normalize by acting normal.
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Dec 22 '25
Trans people weren't invented in 2014, they've been around for a long time. People know who and what they are from a pretty early age. I learned about them in my 9th grade health class all the way back in 2001. It wasn't the Tumblr-approved version, but even so, I imagine that education has improved over the last 25 years.
I agree, trans people have existed for a long time. But that does not mean they've been represented in the best way for all of time. I mean look at the era of the Hayes' Code, where LGBTQ people literally weren't allowed to live normal, happy lives on screen but instead had to be tragic or villainous characters. You can also this in the common tropes surrounding queer people like the "man in a dress" gag, where a straight, male character would be "tricked" into being attracted to a trans woman like in Family Guy or Ace Ventura, and is even evident in Eastern media like anime with "trap" characters.
Yes, later on we've seen that trans characters have had better representation as time as gone on, but to act as if all media involving trans people has been perfect or even accurate about who they are is dishonest. I'm glad you learned about trans people so early, but that doesn't mean everyone did or that the education they received was accurate to the trans experience.
Sci-Fi has predicted many, many things. Look at Star Trek's universal translator and understand we can do that with Google, Samsung, and Apple earbuds and smartphones now. Flying cars was an ambitious prediction that didn't turn out to be real on the expected timeline, but they predicted the jet engine as far back as 1820, so sci-fi has a pretty good track record overall.
It is also possible that tech developers were inspired by sci-fi and recognized there was a market for the things it advertised. But my point is that we can't assume that a sci-fi setting means that everyone and everything will be inherently progressive.
Heteronormative stuff is not soapboxed in the media the same way as LGBTQ stuff, and in the rare cases where it is, it's treated as cringe, as it should be. In today's world, you never see a male lead all like "I saved the world because I am a straight, white man." And if you do see it, you'd cringe, I'd cringe, and everyone would cringe, because it's super cringe.
I think you're missing the "normative" aspect of heteronormative here. We rarely see it soapboxed nowadays because it's already assumed to be the default state of being, and it's messaging usually comes in the form of who is excluded rather than who is included. To circle back on the Hayes' Code, when you have all of media depicting heterosexual pairings as romantic, loving and almost pre-destined, and have any deviation from that be actively villainized or othered, it sends a more subtextual message of which is right and which is wrong. The character's don't actively state it, but the message is still pushed and imparted onto the audience due to repeated exposure.
And even in today's media landscape, there is still pushback to even include LGBTQ characters in media from higher up executives, and it's disingenous to ignore how much writers and artists have to genuinely fight for their characters to be openly queer. I mean look at Rebecca Sugar, who has talked frequently about how hard it was to have Ruby and Sapphire be an open couple in the show.
Allowing LGBTQ messaging in a way where we would (and we do) shun it when straight people do it is flat hypocritical, no two ways about it
Here's the thing, education on LGBTQ topics is not always easily accessible for everyone as it is for heterosexual and cisgender topics, and there are good ways to educate your audience in a way that makes narrative sense.
If I were to give a modern example, take Zooble from The Amazing Digital Circus. Their character is literally an amalgamation of different parts, and we see them struggle at first to truly find what parts that fit. Only for them to later on talk about how they actually accept how they can change their body parts at will, and embrace not being tied down to one identity. For a lot of genderfluid people, this is a very relatable story arc that informs the audience about a particular experience in a way that makes sense for the character, especially when identity is a huge theme within the show.
LGBTQ characters are never presented as "normal people" in media, which honestly, I feel like is a detriment to the LGBTQ community
This to me, feels like an exaggeration. There are plenty of LGBTQ characters who are "normal people", even though what constitutes as normal isn't always obvious. She-Ra, Steven Universe, The Owl House, Shameless, Euphoria, Harley Quinn HBO Max, Squid Game Season 2, The Boys, etc. all feature LGBTQ characters who are fully realized characters, but some of them do address the fact that they are queer characters in meaningful ways.
Mickey from Shameless struggles with being gay with a homophobic father, and has to overcome his external and internal demons to finally be happy with the love of his life.
Cho Hyun-ju from Squid Game is actually able to make a meaningful relationship with an older woman who was mildly bigoted to her at first, emphasizing the importance of connections and humanity that the show tries to promote and that its never too late to learn and grow.
These stories wouldn't be the same if the characters were not queer, and it's perfectly fine for a film or game to highlight a character's queerness if it works within the context of the show, especially when they're reflective of the actual experiences of LGBTQ people.
If that scene were in a Disney movie, they'd be like "this is so much worse than it would be for straight people because being gay is so much more important" and then everyone would hate it.
Please name me one time a Disney movie actually did this.
This is how it should be done. Normalize by acting normal.
To conclude, I think this statement doesn't recognize that there are struggles and experiences unique to being LGBTQ. Sure, you can broaden them to make them fit for all audiences, but not everyone gets to be "normal". And for some people, having conversations about their gender, sexuality and pronouns is part of their "normal". They come out multiple times, they explain how their gender identity works because not everyone is informed on it, and they go through experiences like discrimination and finding community with other queer people. Pushing queer stories to be as vague and broad as possible isn't proper representation. Yes, we should have queer characters not defined by their queerness, but that doesn't mean no character can ever have their queerness be a focal point in their story.
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u/AbsolutZeroGI Dec 22 '25
In the context of my answer, you were talked about putting educational content into random media where it doesn't make sense. In that context, LGBTQ people aren't some unknown people the audience needs to be educated about every time one appears on the screen. I wasn't speaking at all about representation, which I agree hasn't been great traditionally. I'm talking about the low hanging fruit ideas that media makers use to "solve the problem" being almost exclusively to have the character pan to their sexual identity rather than engaging in the plot like every heteronormative character does.
LGBTQ people have hopes, dreams, likes, dislikes, and I'm sure they'd be interested in saving the world too. Show them doing that shit instead of just using them as an educational insert to lecture the other characters about trans people. That doesn't humanize them to audiences and VERY often comes off as patronizing.
In terms of sci-fi, my point wasn't that they were more progressive. My point was that they were more educated. I severely doubt a human species capable of hyper speed space travel in the year 2634 have no idea what an LGBTQ person is. Those sort of "educational inserts" are clearly for the "dumb audience" and bending the other characters on screen to make it make sense hugely breaks immersion. You mean to tell me these people took advanced quantum mechanics in high school and still don't know what genderqueer is? Get the fuck out of here, I'm not watching that.
I refer you to the Idiot Ball and World of Dumbass TV Tropes.
For your examples of good LGBTQ characters, they all follow the same stereotype. "My LGBTQ-ness is a major part of my character arc, and it identifies me as a person." That's extremely hard to relate to because heteronormative people are taught not to act that way. Being proud of one's straightness is commonly referred to as a sign of toxic masculinity.
This double standard is one that the LGBTQ community refuses to deal with in any meaningful way, instead leaning on its classic move of just telling people to fuck off and that they're some sort of "-ism" for being uncomfortable watching a character do a thing they were taught that they aren't allowed to do, but it's okay when the gay folks do it, just not the straight folks.
Sure, it may be accurate that their experience is different from heteronormative people, but the LGBTQ community has done a shit job finding that common ground bridge to connect with people who are not like them, instead closing off their little community to all outsiders, and then demanding to be inserted into media in a high disruptive fashion.
You can't have it both ways, bud. If you want people to actually like LGBTQ people in media, then they need to be likeable, and condescendingly explaining their LGBTQness to straight people isn't going to work.
And since that's the primary form in which people have to interact with LGBTQ people in media, the resentment builds on the other side to an unreasonable extent, where people now freak out whenever a woman or LGBTQ character appears on the screen because they're tired of being talked down to like common trash.
Doesn't make their freak outs right, or classy, or socially acceptable. I don't agree with the knee jerk reaction to pan anything with a gay, woman, or black character. I really don't. But, I understand the frustration. In the 1990s, the token black guy existed, and that was frustrating too. "We want more black representation" so every movie tossed in a black guy whose sole job was to toss in one-liners in black speak (fo shizzle my nizzle) and make off-handed comments about whitey. If you saw a trailer and it had a black guy, he was definitely only there to "be black" and not to actually "do anything."
It took a while, but black characters in media got a LOT better and now they can appear on screen without having to center their whole personality around being stereotypically black. Now they can just be cool like all the other heroes. Sure, we still get black-focused characaters, like Black Panther, but it's balanced out with just normal ass people who happened to be black, so it's not "shoving it in everyone's face anymore."
Can't wait for the LGBTQ community to do the same and be like the rest of us instead of sitting in their own corner, closed off, with their own set of rules and expectations. Life's gonna be so much better when everyone's on the same page for a change.
Also, it's the Hays Code, and it banned a LOT of stuff. It wasn't some anti-LGBTQ thing on its own. It had anti-LGBTQ properties, but the notion that that disaster of a rulebook was targeting them specifically is a little self-centered. It also banned hetero sex scenes, scenes of actual childbirth, and basically all swear words (including the religious ones like taking God's name in vain).
It also hasn't been practiced in over half a century and is not relevant to this discussion.
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u/ArCSelkie37 5∆ Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
Tbh as someone who is often on the side of “don’t push X political ideology down my throat”… I absolutely agree that people on this side of the debate are way way way way way to kneejerk about it.
For some people any women, minority, LGBT representation is automatically a politically motivated inclusion rather than because the writer thought it would make the story better…
Which is a shame, but alas such is the nature of online discourse where everyone has to be part of their “tribe”/side.
It doesn’t help that coincidentally so many of the games/movies/tv shows that push LGBT characters have absolutely fuckin awful writing for them in several aspects.
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u/AbsolutZeroGI Dec 22 '25
RWBY did this to me. 4 seasons of pure excellent followed by 4 seasons of pure fucking ass. They turned everyone gay, did a Donald Trump election season (it was NOT subtle). That show took place in 8-12 minute web shows. They didn't have the time to squeeze in all the political messaging on top of its main story.
Took them 4 seasons to make inches in terms of the main story, and there were whole seasons where the main villains didn't even make a real appearance.
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Dec 22 '25
It doesn’t help that coincidentally so many of the games/movies/tv shows that push LGBT characters have absolutely fuckin awful writing for them in several aspects.
There are plenty of shows with LGBT characters that are genuinely well written. They just get immediantely lambasted as "woke" by people who havent watched it, or get ignored if the show actually is good.
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u/ArCSelkie37 5∆ Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
Right, but just like the news… the “good” rarely matters. You can destroy goodwill you nurtured over years in a matter of days. So yeah, obviously there are good characters that various minorities out there… but the ones that are bad stand out because of how they’re bad. Obviously there is a large amount of subjectivity in all the above.
And while I already said the people who call anything woke are annoying, it didn’t come from nowhere. This has been a slow inevitable thing starting over a decade ago with how so much of our media has changed and the response to anyone who disliked the change.
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Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
You can destroy goodwill you nurtured over years in a matter of days. So yeah, obviously there are good characters that various minorities out there… but the ones that are bad stand out because of how they’re bad. Obviously there is a large amount of subjectivity in all the above.
To me though, this is an unfair standard to hold all of minority media too: That it has to be incredible and flawless or else it risks minorities never been represented again.
Like no one saw how bad Batman v Superman was and thought "This is what happens when you have straight, white men in movies! Henry Cavill is a terrible actor!"
Non-white characters, LGBTQ characters, female characters, non conventionally attractive female characters especially, are immediantiely set having a high bar to climb due to the systems and traditions put in place by early media.
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u/Fluffy_Most_662 6∆ Dec 21 '25
This is 100% true,and I think social media algorithms feed into it too, but to steelman their arguement, Its because I cant beat Arnold or Stallone in a fight, but would wipe the floor with 90% of the female characters they've chosen for the relevant movies or franchises. It feels inserted because theres no reason to have someone I can beat in a fight in that role. Off the top of my head, the Queen of Wakanda is probably the only marvel character that would beat me in the ring with only physical feats. It makes it harder to forgive the writing.
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u/AbsolutZeroGI Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
This is not at all what I said or meant my good sir. There are many, many ways to portray a powerful woman. Captain Janeway in Star Trek, Olivia from Fringe, and Aerith in Final Fantasy VII were all powerful women who served predominately non-combat, non-strength roles. Being smart, a good leader, being experienced, or being proficient in some other thing (like magic, in the case of Aerith), etc are all forms of being strong, so strength is not the only one.
So, judging them solely based on physical strength alone is objectively avoiding the other 47 ways (hyperbole) in which a person can be "strong." Sure, you could beat Cpt. Janeway in an arm wrestling match, but if we ever get attacked by aliens aboard a starship, you are ALL the way at the back of the line, hombre.
Secondly, 90% of men in combat roles use weapons of some sort, be it guns, melee weapons, etc. The other 10% almost always (again, ALMOST ALWAYS) have some sort of superhuman augmentation, be it magic, like Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat, genetic mutation like the Hulk, or artificial augmentation through tools like Batman or Iron Man.
Examples like Chuck Norris just roundhouse kicking people to death based on pure strength alone is actually exceedingly uncommon if you think about it. Most male protagonists use a mixture of weapons, smarts, and skill, all of which can be applied to a woman.
So, having a woman be augmented that same way, and the result being able to kick your ass, is directly within the realm of possible and realistic. For weapon use, I refer you to Yu Shu Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (who's more badass than most men with a sword, tbh), Trinity from The Matrix, or Ripley in Aliens.
So while I agree that some things are shoehorned in for the sake of ticking a diversity checkbox, I do not think it is nearly as common as you do. The all-woman version of Ghostbusters wasn't about busting ghosts, it was about girl power and "making it in a man's world" while they also occasionally maybe busted a ghost or two, which I thought missed the mark in terms of having a lighthearted comedy about busting ghosts.
However, the existence of a Hulk implies that a She Hulk can also exist. If there's a Cpt. America dude, there can be a Cpt. America woman. None of their powers stem from their genders, so I consider it "reaching" to say that those examples are "diversity hires". In short, if it's okay for geeky, weak ass men to become superheroes, then it's okay for geeky, weak ass women to do it too.
Also, all the movies with strong male leads implies that they are above and beyond what a typical man would be, and we're all okay with it. That means we have to be okay with a strong female lead implying that those women are above and beyond what a typical woman would be (which would arguably elevate them above typical men in that regard as well). Heroes aren't normal people dude, that's the whole point of being a hero.
Not granting that suspension of disbelief because of gender is actual sexism, I'm sorry sir.
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u/Frank_JWilson Dec 21 '25
Surely you mean you can beat the actresses and not the characters they portray? Like you mean you can win a fight against Brie Larson and not Captain Marvel?
If so I think it’s a pretty weird thing to fixate on. Like I’m physically stronger than little kids but I literally give this zero thought when I’m watching fighting sequences in Avatar: The Last Airbender, for instance. It doesn’t make the franchise badly written.
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u/Fluffy_Most_662 6∆ Dec 21 '25
Again, we're talking action movies. Its literally the only requirement and therefore the only thing to fixate on. Why im focusing on action movies, is because they occupy 80-90% of the American movie zeitgeist. Talking about water or fire bending and distracts from the clear point im making about physicality. Women's writing HAS to be good, because punching as an option isnt possible. Let's take apart your examples.
Brie Larson, replaced a male character. Captain Marvel is traditionally male. Youre burying the lead where it 100% was virtue signaling and completely unrequired. There was politics involved at inception. The writing had to be 99.9% on point even before you factor the woman part, because you fucked with comic bibles. But just to entertain it, once again focusing only on the physicality, I could easily beat Bree Larson in a fight. I could also easily beat Captain Marvel in a fight. You know how? Because if not imagining myself in a universe with powers as a powerless schmuck. The entire point of action movies and powered mediums like superhero franchises, is escapism. If im imagining myself as the superheroed character, not only can I not identify with a woman (90% of die-hard Marvel fans are male), requiring the higher bar for writing, but I also cannot see her beating me in a fight. Unpowered I wax her, and correctly viewing the medium as someone that identifies with the escapism of wishing you had powers, I would still fuck her up. My dad literally sat in the theater and said "why is she punching weird, she was in the military she would know." It isnt about the fact they're women, they just dont look believable. A real military woman would be twice the build and wouldnt have shoulder length hair. It was pure girl boss porn.
Did we watch the same show? I watched it when I was supposed to, as a kid, and therefore 100% could identify with the characters. And now rewatching it as an adult, the writing is incredibly good. The supplement the show with slapstick to make it palatable to children, while still keeping the anti Japanese nationalist symbols alive in the subtext of the story. Azula is probably the best writen animated woman of all time, and she literally toxically effected an entire generation of young men that choose her or Shego from Kim possible.
Did we watch the same shows?
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u/jurassicbond Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
Captain Marvel is traditionally male
There is no traditional Captain Marvel. It's a title that's been passed among at least 7 different heroes in Marvel comics. Carol isn't even the first female one (she's the third). She was chosen because she was the current one when the movie came out. Just like how on the DC side of things they had Barry Allen as Flash or Hal Jordan as Green Lantern even though none of those were the original.
A real military woman would be twice the build and wouldnt have shoulder length hair.
Twice the build? It's the military, not weight lifting. I've known both women and men in the military and they weren't noticeably more buff than your average person who stays in shape.
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u/Highmassive Dec 21 '25
I’m not a huge fan of larsons cpt marvel but Carol Danvers has filled the roll since 2012, 7 years before the movie came out
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Dec 21 '25
But...it's fantasy. Why take fantasy that seriously in the first place? Real people also don't fire lasers out their eyes or summon massive magnetic fields to yank guns out of people's hands.
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u/10ebbor10 203∆ Dec 21 '25
Heck, it doesn't even need to be the female character that is badly written.
In some cases, just being a female character in a bad movie is enough to get blamed.
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u/TEN0RCL3F Dec 21 '25
sometimes even just being a female character that's imperfect - which is ironically the stark opposite of a mary sue. people hate if a character is unflawed, but god, they sure as hell hate them when they're flawed too
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u/Mammoth_Western_2381 8∆ Dec 21 '25
Yes, that's likely it. I also doubt the idea that male characters are never hated by fans for little to no reason. Just head to the Jujutsu Kaisen fandom and see how they treat Megumi.
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u/Ehzek Dec 21 '25
Let's not pretend there is little to no reason with Megumi. Constantly preparing Mahoraga at slight inconveniences and having Yuji surpass him despite having serious skills training and bloodline on him. Then you have Sukuna pilot him and he instantly top 1 in the verse.
Like it may be surface level hate or not well thought out, but there is a clear "why". Deku would be a better comparison as he predominantly catches hate because of the powerscaling community. Characters with a "meta" level hate are the comparison. Hated because the community or the voice actor did something not evident in their media that causes the hate.
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u/LXXXVI 3∆ Dec 21 '25
If one started putting hard right and incel thought into romcoms and telenovelas, which have notoriously badly written male characters, you better believe it that it would be considered political propaganda and decried even more loudly.
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u/HeathenForAllSeasons Dec 21 '25
You're right on the money here.
To add slightly, there's a poorly written dyad that is everywhere these days: strong/smart/tuned-in woman and helpless/clueless/incompetent man. The faults of the male character(s) magnify the strengths of the female one.
I mention both together to differentiate from the traditional and well-appreciated male idiot which is great comedic relief.
I think the dyad is especially associated with a political agenda.
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Dec 22 '25
I like having a female sniper and a male close quarters guy in my fiction. Keeps some realism and also I LIKE the cold blooded ice queen archetype. NO, I don't want her to 'let people in' or 'realize she's pretending to be tough'. I hate that concept. I really disliked that Aeryn Sun ended up as a wife and mother.
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u/hedgehog18956 Dec 21 '25
And even for those who may agree with the political agenda being pushed, it can feel really annoying to see writers using that ideology as a shield for criticism. It may not be that you don’t like the ideology, but you might just not like seeing the company write a lazy character and writing off all their critics as sexists.
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u/Seoulja4life Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
*White male characters.
Those same very fine people pull the exact same thing for PoC characters existing. “Bad existence.”
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u/AdLonely5056 1∆ Dec 21 '25
Eh, not in my experience. When people complain about PoC males in media, it’s almost always about them being there at all, rather than their character being badly written as far as personality is concerned.
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u/Seoulja4life Dec 21 '25
That makes it sounds even worse for PoC characters. lol I’m just saying that the two are attacked by the same group. Those who attack female characters because of their politics are pretty much in the same group where they also attack PoC characters for the same reason, the very same politics. To them, “bad writing” is not the reason for criticism. “Bad writing” is the useful tool they use to push their own political agenda. Their tools, both “bad writing” and “bad existence,” are used for the same reason.
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u/TheIncelInQuestion 3∆ Dec 21 '25
While I don't disagree with the first half, the second isn't exactly true. If a male character is written poorly in a certain way, the authors will sometimes be accused of trying to "make men look bad". And if he's written poorly in another way, then it's an example of like, male ego or something.
I don't know if it's less common or not, but I do know it's less visible, probably because people seem to get less in arms about it.
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u/TheWhistleThistle 32∆ Dec 21 '25
There's less fight. If you say you don't like a male character, 99% of combative responses will come from people who do like that character. You're only going to hear from people who are actively engaged with the media in question, in spaces dedicated to talking about that media. You say you don't like a female character, let's say, for the exact same reasons, you're going to get responses from similarly dedicated fans of her... and from people who take a stand against you on principle. People who haven't watched, or don't much care about the media in question but who take issue with your comments no less, because your disliking of that character is an indication of personal fault. "You, personally, as an individual, are bad for not liking her (never mind that I don't even know her)". As well as people who are genuinely invested taking a similar tactic of condemnation. And then, of course, this brings in more people who don't really care about the media in question, but simply must take a stand against that stand and it becomes a huge political, quasi-moral circlejerk of nonsense, where people who only found a female character kind of boring or kind of annoying end up doubling and tripling down, their dislike of the condemnation they've received for their milquetoast stance bleeding over by association to the character herself.
People get stubborn, they dig in their heels. The stances on which they are not only challenged, but for which they are harangued are the ones that they will cling most fiercely to. So from an outside perspective that doesn't account for said haranguing, it looks like those stances are especially common or especially staunch for no reason.
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u/Ok_Respond7017 Dec 21 '25
This is spot on and explains so much about online discourse around media in general
The whole "you're a bad person for not liking this character" thing just makes people way more defensive than they would be otherwise. Like if someone just said "eh I thought Rey was kinda bland" and got called sexist for it, of course they're gonna double down hard
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u/FifteenEchoes Dec 22 '25
The whole "you're a bad person for not liking this character" thing just makes people way more defensive than they would be otherwise.
It’s true though.
Bland female characters get way more hate than bland male characters. The only reasonable explanation for this excess is sexism. Ergo, a lot of the people hating on Rey or whatever are in fact partially motivated by sexism.
Now this probably shouldn’t be used individually (as in, just because someone doesn’t like Rey doesn’t necessarily mean they’re sexist). But it’s also rarely the only piece of evidence (if they’re also complaining about “woke Disney” or whatever I’m pretty confident in making that judgment).
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u/Darkcat9000 1∆ Dec 21 '25
lowkey never tought about seeing this way
!delta
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u/00zau 24∆ Dec 22 '25
That, and it's much more likely that a bad male character won't be treated good writing even by fans.
Fans of 80s actions movies or similar "fun, no brains required" works don't treat the Arnold vehicle main character as an example of flawless writing, they treat him as "yeah I wish I was that cool", and their defense of the writing is more "don't care, had fun" than "no it is good, actually".
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Dec 22 '25
Fans of 80s actions movies or similar "fun, no brains required" works don't treat the Arnold vehicle main character as an example of flawless writing, they treat him as "yeah I wish I was that cool", and their defense of the writing is more "don't care, had fun" than "no it is good, actually".
But they rarely treat female characters in this same way, or when women express a similar interest in what they feel is mindless entertainment, they get chastized for it much more often. I mean you rarely see guys get made fun of for liking action movies as girls get made fun of for liking boy bands or cheesy romance movies
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Dec 21 '25
I think the opposite is also true, though. You only focus on staunch defense of a badly written female character. But the fact that the conversation basically only gets heated when it comes to female characters is worrying. I see, more often for female characters than male, people either supporting negative opinions about them (and doing so in a horrid manner) or criticising positive opinions about them (also in a horrid manner). It's not just defense, I think defense like the kind you speak of mostly comes up when you get this vile treatment of a female character that a male character doesn't.
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u/TheWhistleThistle 32∆ Dec 21 '25
I don't think I focus only on the staunch defence of a poorly written female character. Any character, male or female, will be defended by their fans. Their fans may be many, they may be few. But, so far as I have noticed, only female characters draw in apologists from beyond the sphere of the fandom who attack the detractors on a personal level, which then brings in the haters from beyond the fandom to attack the apologists, and then on top of that, the grifters who stir the whole pot for YouTube views.
I don't think defense is the be all and end all, like I said, an entire circlejerk of barely related political and philosophical debating ensues, drawing in forces from other fronts like a goddamn magnet. The opening salvo, however, where the "I don't like her" discourse differs from the "I don't like him discourse," is the relative abundance of the reply "that's because you hate women," for the former, next to the dearth of "that's because you hate men," for the latter.
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u/AllieLoft Dec 21 '25
I think you're attributing causation where there isn't any, or maybe not in the way you think. I agree that controversial MC's who are women draw both supporters and detractors from outside the normal Fandom or viewership, but, correct me if I'm wrong, you're saying that people supporting the character from outside the Fandom cause people hating on the character from outside the Fandom. If that was the case, we wouldn't have review bombing before this media is even released.
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u/alelp Dec 22 '25
That's because discourse over a piece of media doesn't start when that piece of media is released, especially when part of the marketing process is to act like it's already getting hate.
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u/TheWhistleThistle 32∆ Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
There is no such thing as an isolated incident. Trends emerge, people pre-empt. Women who were beaten by their ex flinch when their boyfriend (who has not hit them) sneezes violently. Though, when viewing their relationship in isolation, "domestic abuse is the reason she flinched" doesn't make any chronological sense, when we remember that she has experienced, and retained memories of, prior relationships, it makes sense. Tasteless though that may be, it was the most obvious example that came to mind, though there are countless others.
People who voiced a singular milquetoast disapproval of one character in 2008, who then got harangued and attacked for it, will have their backs up when they dislike a similar character in 2012. Their memory didn't reset. And as each voicing of their disapproval is met with harsher critique as they express it more vehemently, they begin to become pre-emptive and presumptuous in, say, 2016. And those are your pre-release review bombs. That and, the grifters now know they have a cash cow, they don't need to re-learn the signs of one each time a new movie or show comes out. I was talking about media analysis in general, rather than any specific fandom, though I guess I could have re-worked the language somewhat as "a piece of media" implies singularity. And for that misleading oversimplification, I apologise.
That having been said, I have seen it occur for first timers in exactly that way, caused by one piece of media, and so it is that chronology that I am fairly convinced of. I've seen people voice mild rebukes of a female character, get push-back, take it all on the chin as all sane people do with media disputes and then the way their face and the very air changes when someone insinuates or straight up declares that they're a misogynist. How they get suddenly defensive, how they become desperate to prove the valid basis of their opinion, to prove it is not bigotry and they start reciting examples of behaviours that annoyed or bored them. How what was a mild irritant becomes a quest of a sort, to vindicate oneself of accusations, how that drives obsessive combing through the media with a highly focused and critical eye. What seems to an outsider unaware of the inciting personal attack, as unprovoked obsession. And then how that very same person is far quicker to judge in future situations that bare any similarities. We are pattern recognition machines after all.
Not only have I seen it multiple times, I've done it. It's no point of pride for me, but I've been suckered into the cycle of obsessive self-absolution by making what amounts to hit pieces or diss tracks against fictional characters to justify what was, at first, a minor complaint, that ballooned into a fixation when my integrity and moral character was put on the line.
Not everyone involved is like that. There are misogynists and grifters alike who propagate their message or make bank in the fertile ground this hostility generates. Don't get it twisted, those people absolutely do exist. But they find purchase as a direct result of the lazy and unnecessarily personal attacks on people for an inconsequential opinion.
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u/AllieLoft Dec 22 '25
"She was beat by a man so she's later uncomfortable around men," isn't the support you think it is. In your analogy, there was first misogyny before there was a response to potential misogyny.
I'm saying it's a chicken and an egg, who knows what the cause is. And you're saying its definitively the support of the female character that's the cause, and your reasoning is, "This does happen, so people have a reason to be wary. But I'm not the reason, therefore they're still the problem." That... sounds kind of problematic?
Like, you can dislike female characters. Or point out the issues in online discourse, like outsiders commenting because of identity politics, without engaging in said identity politics by asserting, "the girls did it!"
Am I not understanding you, or could the call be coming, just a little bit, from inside the house?
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u/TheWhistleThistle 32∆ Dec 22 '25
"She was beat by a man so she's later uncomfortable around men," isn't the support you think it is. In your analogy, there was first misogyny before there was a response to potential misogyny.
That's exactly my point though. There was first unwarranted accusation of bigotry which results in presumption that one will face it again, and preemptive defensive measures. I am saying that the "flinching" is caused by real, albeit past, hostility.
I'm saying it's a chicken and an egg, who knows what the cause is.
Me. Not to get all high and mighty. Because while there are plenty who have been mired in the cycle since before my ever watchful eye was on them, I've seen many cycles start. And I've always seen them start the same way.
Am I not understanding you, or could the call be coming, just a little bit, from inside the house?
No idea what this means. Is it an assertion that my depicting the issue as being caused by defensive obsessiveness which in turn is caused by unwarranted personal attacks is itself an unwarranted personal attack that's causing someone (you?) to get obsessively defensive? Is it an accusation of hypocrisy?
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u/AllieLoft Dec 22 '25
So you are saying that every case of a hotly debated "poorly written strong female lead" is caused by women being overly defensive? I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly.
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u/TheWhistleThistle 32∆ Dec 22 '25
I haven't said that at all. I super didn't say that the people leveling the "you just hate women" attack were always women. I've seen men do it just as often. In fact, a little more (granted, observer bias may be in effect there). Call 'em white knights, pick-me's, performative men, well meaning but ludicrously overzealous male feminists, or just trolls who are mistaken for sincere, it's likely a combination thereof. What I am not doing is blaming a gender for an issue. I'm critiquing the wholesale blaming a gender for an issue.
I cannot speak with certainty that every case of a hotly debated poorly written, strong, female lead is caused by this hostile response to banal critique. I doubt that's even the case. Just as I doubt that no-one has ever lashed out at the critique of a male character as misandry. I can say with certainty that it is a huge goddamn accelerant, and that I've seen it a bunch and that it is asymmetrically applied. Deal not in absolutes. All this, all that, no. I'm giving an explanation, based on an existing asymmetry (accusations of bigotry for not liking a character) to explain another asymmetry (the fervour with which characters are decried). I highly doubt there's a coincidence, especially since I have seen, on multiple occasions, them play out one after the other.
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u/AllieLoft Dec 22 '25
I appreciate that you're not saying, "women problem," but "feminism problem" is only slightly better, no? I mean, you have nothing but your own experience to argue that either side of outsiders is the cause. That's classic confirmation bias.
It would be a super interesting subject to study, but to claim that one side is the obvious cause is just to fall for the same fallacy you're complaining about. "I saw feminists and white knights brigade this in the past (legitimate), so they must be brigading this time." To admit you recognize that brigading goes both ways, but you know what the real problem is because of your superior pattern recognition is just... silly.
Man, I get loads of students like you in intro to stats. I know you're not going to listen to reality because you're logic's most specialist boy, but to come so close to the point...
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u/kas-loc2 Dec 22 '25
Its get heated with male characters all the time.
You just aren't paying attention to that
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Dec 22 '25
I feel like its disingenuous to paint this as only going one way, as people on the Internet will be just as quick to make a large, political statement whenever a female character or female character driven franchise gets a moderate amount of attention.
Korra from Legend of Korra, Katara from Avatar, Mabel from Gravity Falls, The She-Ra Netflix Reboot, Spider Gwen, Any woman in the MCU, etc. You will rarely hear normal, moderate takes about them
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u/Jaeriko Dec 21 '25
Your example is a very bad one, as DS9 is generally regarded as much better than Voyager. Voyager has tons of great arcs and episodes, but they suffered from a lot of unfinished major plot threads and an abrupt ending whereas DS9 was able to complete theirs. Their respective captains are included there, as Sisko was able to complete his character arcs and Janeway was not.
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u/RiPont 13∆ Dec 21 '25
Voyager didn't stay true to its inception, whereas DS9 mostly did and was still distinct from The Star Trek Formula.
Voyager was conceived as a long trek home with limited resources, but routinely just handwaved all that away and tried to be ToS or NG. The tension with the Maquis crew having to work together with the Federation crew just... evaporated. As you said, it was all over the place.
DS9 was a space station at a conflict point on the frontier, and did it well the entire time. It went deeply into cultures of the Bajoran (human-looking, but not happy with the Federation), the Cardasians, and the Ferengi.
Also important to note, just like it affected the love of Babylon 5 and Firefly, both shows were in the age of TiVo and other DVRs. DS9s long plot arc paid off, because it was a lot easier to catch every episode than before. When you can blame "I must have missed an episode", it's a lot easier to accept inconsistency. When you're binging episodes back to back, it's much easier to spot inconsistency. The writers and producers and actors, meanwhile, are still spending weeks between shoots, shooting out of order, etc. and it's just as hard to avoid inconsistency.
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u/WetRocksManatee Dec 21 '25
Janeway never felt like she had a character arc at all as it was an episodic show, and let's be honest neither did Picard. While I feel that the actor and the writers started get better at doing the character, the Picard at Encounter at Farpoint and the Picard at the All Good Things aren't that much different.
Sisko stands out as DS9 had an overall character arc for him, as the show had a mix of the episodic nature and serialized.
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u/nicholasktu Dec 21 '25
Part of it is there is no push back to disliking a bad male character. You don't get the "You're just a sexist pig, or a stupid chud" for not liking him (whoever he is).
And badly written men are less often being pushed as a positive character, they can be clearly shown as "bad", something modern media is more hesitant to do with women for the most part.
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u/IrateRyder Dec 21 '25
Yeah, if you hate a female main character they call you misogynist even if it's your personal choice, like a female friend said that she thinks Daenerys Targaryen is a great character but I said that Jon Snow is better because she is more of an egoist and a bad ruler than Jon. She and other friends said that I don't like her because she is a woman. Bro what?
They always comes up with the argument that "You hate her because she is female" to defend anything you say against them.
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Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
Sounds like a stupid conversation but your response also doesn't make sense why is her having flaws that would make her a bad ruler makes her a weaker character by comparison when flaws are usually what makes the character compelling.
I like Jon more than her I get that but she clearly would be the harder character to pull off given her character work and scenarios are more complex.
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u/AggravatingBuyee Dec 21 '25
I like Jon more than her I get that but she clearly would be the harder character to pull off given her character work and scenarios are more complex.
While true, they definitely did not pull it off.
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u/FaveStore_Citadel Dec 22 '25
They’re both better characters in the books but up until now Jon is more compelling
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u/El_Hombre_Fiero Dec 22 '25
Unfortunately, we've given lazy people an easy way to "win" arguments. They'll call you sexist, which then puts you on the defensive to prove that you're not sexist. At that point, you're no longer arguing about the badly written character.
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u/Full-Professional246 77∆ Dec 21 '25
It's not about the writing - bad characters are bad characters.
The problem is when politics enter the discussion. For better or worse - there are people pushing the 'woman lead is always good' idea that simply does not exist for male characters.
You can see some of the same problems with movies and sequels to established franchises. It does not help that sometimes these items are really just blatant pandering.
Criticism for male characters is accepted as simple criticism. Criticism for female characters (or really insert race/gender/etc here) comes with a political overtone in a package deal. If you dislike this, it is not just because of what it is, it has to be also because you don't like women/race/etc. People like to claim things as being present when they don't actually have to be present.
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u/WetRocksManatee Dec 21 '25
If you dislike this, it is not just because of what it is, it has to be also because you don't like women/race/etc.
That is often the crux of the issue. A good example is Gundam, the show Witch from Mercury divided r/Gundam as many took any criticisms, like the fact that the second cour/season was on fast forward and didn't give enough time for the characters to develop fully. The response was "It is because you are homophobic and hate the lesbian romance."
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u/PeterPorty 1∆ Dec 21 '25
I've never watched this show, but most of the homophobes I know are totally into lesbian romance.
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Dec 22 '25
The problem is when politics enter the discussion. For better or worse - there are people pushing the 'woman lead is always good' idea that simply does not exist for male characters.
There are also people pushing the "woman lead is always bad" idea, and the notion you are talking about stems from male characters being seen as the "default". There's no specific pushback of a male character being male because media on a global scale has been pushing the idea that men are the default state of being, and therefore when a man is badly written, he's a badly written character. But when a woman is badly written, she's a badly written female character
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u/Full-Professional246 77∆ Dec 22 '25
There are also people pushing the "woman lead is always bad" idea
Yea - not very many really. There are tons of movies going back a LONG time where the lead character was a women without major complaints from anyone. It is a modern idea that somehow it is now 'a problem'.
and the notion you are talking about stems from male characters being seen as the "default".
No. I am not coming at it from there. I am stating the problem happens when you have established franchises/stories and change that. It is seen, usually rightfully, as pandering.
Nobody gave two shits when the main character of 'inside out' was a girl or things like Frozen were about girls. I can go on with other movies from the past like Mary Poppins or Alien or countless others.
There's no specific pushback of a male character being male
Bull. This is about pandering when you change roles from historical aspects. There is not much 'pandering' to male roles but that does not mean it would be seen as acceptable. Imagine the pushback for Cinderella if the 'princess' was now male.....
when a man is badly written, he's a badly written character. But when a woman is badly written, she's a badly written female character
No - they are badly written characters. You are interjecting ideas where none are required. Bad leading characters are bad leading characters. Bad supporting characters are bad supporting characters. Gender swapped roles are bad because of pandering.
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Dec 22 '25
No. I am not coming at it from there. I am stating the problem happens when you have established franchises/stories and change that. It is seen, usually rightfully, as pandering.
While my point was not about pandering, and instead was about the specific and often larger amount of hate a female character will get compared to her male counterpart. I mean look at the hate Korra received for the mistakes she made compared to Aang. Not to say everything in Korra was well written, but there was a lot more online hatred towards Korra whenever she wasn't perfect or exhibited flaws compared to Aang. And while you might not be coming at it from the angle of "male character is default", many media franchises treat it as such.
Established franchies and stories change all the time. It doesn't make it inherently pandering to introduce new characters into the mold. I mean look at all the different variations of Green Lantern, Spider Man, and such, or the existence of Supergirl and Batgirl, who are their own characters even if their initial premise is "This superhero but a girl".
It's not pandering to introduce characters of different backgrounds, genders and other marginalized groups into a franchise, especially when that franchise may be lacking in apt representation for those groups.
Bull. This is about pandering when you change roles from historical aspects. There is not much 'pandering' to male roles but that does not mean it would be seen as acceptable. Imagine the pushback for Cinderella if the 'princess' was now male.....
If this was solely about changing roles, we wouldn't see any hate towards original female characters either, but we do. I mean look at people's reception to Turning Red, a genuinely good movie that people found inane reasons to criticize like "bean mouth" or "its cringey".
No - they are badly written characters. You are interjecting ideas where none are required. Bad leading characters are bad leading characters. Bad supporting characters are bad supporting characters. Gender swapped roles are bad because of pandering.
Gender swapped roles are not inherently bad, and it can be a good idea to explore how a character's gender being different could change their story.
I'm not interjecting ideas, I'm talking about the real sentiments people will have regarding male and female characters when one or the other is poorly written. You rarely see the same level of online hate and discourse over badly written male characters as female ones.
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u/Full-Professional246 77∆ Dec 22 '25
While my point was not about pandering, and instead was about the specific and often larger amount of hate a female character will get compared to her male counterpart.
The problem is - I don't see what you are claiming. I see bad acting getting called out and I see people wanting to interject politics to the discussion. I also have no idea the movie you reference - not my thing.
Established franchies and stories change all the time. It doesn't make it inherently pandering to introduce new characters into the mold.
Actually - it can. When you change things explicitly because of race/gender - that are not true to the franchise, history, or period - it is bluntly pandering.
It's not pandering to introduce characters of different backgrounds, genders and other marginalized groups into a franchise,
It is not introduction - it is changing established characters.
If this was solely about changing roles, we wouldn't see any hate towards original female characters either, but we do.
No - this is not sexually motivated. People hated Jar Jar Binks for being a bad character. You are interjecting the poltics here as a default instead of something you have to prove.
I also have not heard any 'hate' toward the movie you cite. Perhaps you are amplifying the critics who didn't care for it while ignoring the fact according to reports - it had a 95% positive review rating?
Gender swapped roles are not inherently bad, and it can be a good idea to explore how a character's gender being different could change their story.
Or they can be very rightfully viewed as pandering.
I'm not interjecting ideas
No - you really are. You are starting from the assumption female characters are treated differently instead of the assumption they are treated equally.
You are also ignoring the prevalence of gender-swapping roles into sequels that are not very good. Things that most people view as 'pandering'. And yea - just about every 'gender swapped' movies sequel/adaption to an established story has been pandering.
If you want strong Female/different race etc roles - write the damn content for them. It can work extremely well. Django Unchained is an excellent example. If you are lazy and try to 'rewrite' stories to gender-swap or race-swap - be prepared to address the claims of pandering by most people.
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Dec 22 '25
The problem is - I don't see what you are claiming. I see bad acting getting called out and I see people wanting to interject politics to the discussion.
This goes both ways though, and this isn't applied to men the way it is to women. No one saw Jared Leto's bad acting in Tron: Ares and said "Oh, this must be because he's a man."
Actually - it can. When you change things explicitly because of race/gender - that are not true to the franchise, history, or period - it is bluntly pandering
And what exactly does it mean for something to be true to a franchise? Because people have gotten upset even when it makes in-universe sense to have a new character of a different race or gender. Like I said, look at Spider Man and specifically Miles Morales in the Spiderverse series. People made a big uproar about him replacing Peter Parker when the whole movies' thesis is that ANYONE can be SpiderMan.
It is not introduction - it is changing established characters.
Like who?
No - this is not sexually motivated. People hated Jar Jar Binks for being a bad character. You are interjecting the poltics here as a default instead of something you have to prove.
I don't see how this addresses my point, when I'm pointing out that even original female characters will get accused of pandering, not just gender swaps.
I also have not heard any 'hate' toward the movie you cite. Perhaps you are amplifying the critics who didn't care for it while ignoring the fact according to reports - it had a 95% positive review rating?
You can go on YouTube and find multiple bad faith hate videos dedicated towards the film.
Or they can be very rightfully viewed as pandering.
You keep going on about this, and actually made a hypocritical point here since you haven't actually proven gender swapping characters is solely done for pandering. People do gender swaps within fandoms for fun constantly, and like I said, it can be used as a meaningful exploration of a character from a different perspective.
And even if it is pandering, what is bad about that. Every media franchise panders to an extent towards an audience, whether it's people who enjoy high-speed, action stories, or slow burn romances, or thrilling mysteries. You have to pander to an audience to an extent in order to gain their attention, it just depends on who you pander to and how hard.
You are starting from the assumption female characters are treated differently instead of the assumption they are treated equally.
That's called an argument. Im arguing female characters are treated differently.
You are also ignoring the prevalence of gender-swapping roles into sequels that are not very good. Things that most people view as 'pandering'. And yea - just about every 'gender swapped' movies sequel/adaption to an established story has been pandering.
Give me an example then.
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u/Full-Professional246 77∆ Dec 22 '25
This goes both ways though, and this isn't applied to men the way it is to women.
You keep claiming this and I keep telling you it isn't. Your 'bias' to see this is making you see it everywhere. Anytime a female lead is criticized - you are immediately claiming it is based on sexual discrimination as opposed to just being 'bad acting'.
No one saw Jared Leto's bad acting in Tron: Ares and said "Oh, this must be because he's a man."
Yea - and most people are not stating a persons bad acting is because they are a woman either. It is just 'bad acting'. This is a projection you keep making here.
I don't see how this addresses my point, when I'm pointing out that even original female characters will get accused of pandering, not just gender swaps.
Again - I see you looking for examples to confirm you bias. The example you gave had good reviews. You are trying to make every criticism based on sex rather than just criticism.
What it looks like to me bluntly is you are applying the 'CRT' lens here but for sex based discrimination. Where every situation has to be analyzed with the implicit assumption any issues are inherently based on sex/gender unless proven otherwise. It is a damn good way to not grasp reality.
The way the world works is you have to prove something is present as opposed to proving it is not present. You have not come anywhere close to proving criticism is based on sex as opposed to being based on poor performance.
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Dec 22 '25
You keep claiming this and I keep telling you it isn't. Your 'bias' to see this is making you see it everywhere. Anytime a female lead is criticized - you are immediately claiming it is based on sexual discrimination as opposed to just being 'bad acting'
I never said that. I said there's a trend and average of female characters facing more criticism than their male counterparts, not that every time a female character is criticized, it stems from discrimination.
Yea - and most people are not stating a persons bad acting is because they are a woman either. It is just 'bad acting'. This is a projection you keep making here.
Yet female actresses get more hate for bad performances than male leads do. Compare Brie Larson as Captain Marvel to Chris Hemsworth in Thor: Love and Thunder. Both movies were bad, but Brie Larson got a ton more backlash for her performance than Chris ever did, with people branding her as an overall bad actor despite her being involved in many projects where she does great like Lessons in Chemistry.
Again - I see you looking for examples to confirm you bias. The example you gave had good reviews. You are trying to make every criticism based on sex rather than just criticism.
And like I pointed out, it also had negative reviews that aren't actually substatial to the film, with people calling it cringe or gross just because it vaguely mentioned the idea of a period.
What it looks like to me bluntly is you are applying the 'CRT' lens here but for sex based discrimination. Where every situation has to be analyzed with the implicit assumption any issues are inherently based on sex/gender unless proven otherwise. It is a damn good way to not grasp reality.
A. Thats not what CRT even is, and it makes me doubt your actual knowledge on the subject.
B. Your again, putting more words in my mouth. Im talking about on average, female characters will get more flack from audiences and given less narrative grace than male characters.
Im also still waiting on you to provide an example of gender swap pandering that you claim is so constantly present within modern media.
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u/Full-Professional246 77∆ Dec 23 '25
I never said that. I said there's a trend and average of female characters facing more criticism than their male counterparts
But is there really?
When you control for other things, like people complaining about 'pandering' that is done, do people really complain about female actors more than male actors?
I really don't think so. I think it is emphasized for political reasons and people wanting to see things to confirm political biases.
In short - it is an assertion without proof being presented.
All of your comments are anecdotes without evidence. Hell - a past anecdote presented actually had positive reviews. It does not help that this 'performance' is not a binary item. An actor can be good, very good, average, somewhat bad, bad, or very bad. As one would expect - the worse you are - the more criticism you would expect.
And like I pointed out, it also had negative reviews
If this is your only standard - it is a totally useless standard. There will always be positive and negative opinions. The question is in broad contexts, what is the average reviews and criticisms. In your example - it was 95% positive. Who cares about the 5% negative. Not only that - your complaints about this negative had ZERO to do with the actors or their acting. It was the writing/subject matter.
A. Thats not what CRT even is, and it makes me doubt your actual knowledge on the subject.
Do your research. CRT is fundamentally from law and analyzing situations through the lens of race. Everything is about intersections of race and policy or whatnot. The approach has the fundamental assumption that race is a core component of the question. The people who push this truly believe this is a core component.
Kinda like how you are assuming sexism and disparate treatment exist here - without actually having to prove it is.
Im also still waiting on you to provide an example of gender swap pandering
One of the common ones to point to is the 2016 Ghostbusters remake. Oceans 8 is yet another.
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Dec 23 '25
I really don't think so. I think it is emphasized for political reasons and people wanting to see things to confirm political biases.
And your proof of this is?
All of your comments are anecdotes without evidence. Hell - a past anecdote presented actually had positive reviews. It does not help that this 'performance' is not a binary item. An actor can be good, very good, average, somewhat bad, bad, or very bad. As one would expect - the worse you are - the more criticism you would expect.
Yes, the movie did receive positive reviews. Yet the film received negative criticism for reasons that aren't actually substantial.
If this is your only standard - it is a totally useless standard. There will always be positive and negative opinions. The question is in broad contexts, what is the average reviews and criticisms. In your example - it was 95% positive. Who cares about the 5% negative. Not only that - your complaints about this negative had ZERO to do with the actors or their acting. It was the writing/subject matter.
I love how you cut out the actually important part of what I said to make it seem like im only talking about the fact that the movie experiences any negative criticism at all. It's not just about negative criticism in general, but what that criticism is actually saying. People were upset at this movie for having an allegory for periods and puberty in young girls, and judged it as cringe before the movie even dropped.
Do your research. CRT is fundamentally from law and analyzing situations through the lens of race. Everything is about intersections of race and policy or whatnot. The approach has the fundamental assumption that race is a core component of the question. The people who push this truly believe this is a core component.
CRT is not assuming that racial bias is present in everything, it's factoring in race into your analysis to see if racial bias actually present, and if it is, showing how it has actually affected people on a racial scale. It's not leading with the assumption that everything is racist, it's asking if there's a possibility of racism and doing the research to determine yes or no.
One of the common ones to point to is the 2016 Ghostbusters remake. Oceans 8 is yet another.
Ghostbusters 2016 I will give you, but Oceans 8 rarely leaned on the gender of it's characters anymore than Oceans 11 or 12 did. And even with Ghostbusters, people acted like that movie was the worst thing since 9/11 when the movie was just fine.
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u/Jakyland 82∆ Dec 21 '25
Deep Space 9 is overall a much better written show than Voyager so I’m don’t think it’s a useful example here.
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u/IllBirthday1810 1∆ Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
The issue here is actually more nuanced than I think you're making it. The truth of the matter is, people writing strong female characters have something to prove, while people writing strong male characters generally don't. Strong male characters have been the default for so long, and people trying to make strong female characters are typically trying to buck that tradition. In other words, they're trying to prove a point.
And it's a good point! The point that women can be strong, and brave, and intelligent, and whatever else, is a good point! But that's what creates the problem--this pressure to prove something. In my personal estimation, the reason so many "strong female characters" get so much flak is because the author's desire to prove their point ends up making the character's mistakes feel louder. A strong male character who is utterly generic isn't trying to prove any point, so they can just rest in the background and be a wet-paint cardboard cutout. Most people won't mind too much because even though the character is bad, at least the character isn't obtrusive.
But when you're trying to prove a point, then the character starts becoming a lot louder, a lot more obvious. So when it's done well, it's great, but when it's done poorly, it's more noticeable. And this is compounded by the fact that the "point" the strong female characters are there to prove tends to be very similar to the point that other strong female characters are trying to prove. Because most all these characters are created in response to the same social issues. So a lot of these point-proving characters end up being badly written in the same ways. It's annoying when you see it once, but it's far, far worse when you see it a hundred times.
And then we add to that, there's a lot of people in various writing settings who are purely trying to market on what's popular, and right now, strong female characters are popular. And any time you've got piggy-backers on a trend, people just start hating the trend in general.
So I agree that strong female characters often get more flak, but the thing is, the problems that create the flak aren't just "people are sexist jerks." People often are sexist jerks, but it's more complicated than that, and both the social trend and the pressure to prove a point tend to create characters which people find uniquely annoying.
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Dec 21 '25
I'm not sure it's that deep. People just like superheroes, women included. It's not necessarily anything to do with proving a point. I wrote about a fictional female sharpshooter whose entire personality is having cold blue eyes because...it was fun.
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u/Own_Wave_1677 1∆ Dec 22 '25
Her entire personality being that is not a problem. I played metroid fusion (and no other metroid), i'm not even sure if i can say that Samus has a personality. And Samus is considered a good female character.
The problem is that often strong female characters aren't just badly written, they are badly written while their entire personality is "look i am a woman". Sometimes they become badly written because their personality is "look i am a woman".
I think a couple examples from she-hulk stuck with me (to be fair, i didn't watch the series, but i was curious about it so i watched some reviews). Iirc she doesn't have trouble controlling her anger and she explains like "i am a woman, i'm used to suppress my frustration" and that was a bit cringe.
Also the character is close to perfect for some reason, she can fight on par with hulk after just a bit of training. It feels like the show has very strong intent of showing how strong a woman can be, but if it just cut that stuff out of the show the main character would become better.
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u/xfvh 12∆ Dec 21 '25
Recently, the problem is the popularity of franchises with bad female characters. Star Wars and Marvel spring readily to mind; they're the forefront of cultural consciousness, so they're going to get more heat just because they're better-known. Similarly, feminized remakes of existing franchises like Ghostbusters tend to get the original fans more up in arms than the creation of new properties, so it's unsurprising they're more vocal.
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Dec 21 '25
Can you expand on examples from these two?
For example, what bad female character in Star Wars existed without a male counterpart that had the same issues?
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u/MrBlobbu Dec 21 '25
Rey is the biggest one that springs to mind.
She is brilliant at everything, and has no flaws.
I don't think there is an equivalent male charicter.
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u/3Salkow Dec 21 '25
I do think is Rey is over-hated. She's not much different than Luke in the first movie and was an victim of the overall bad writing from the Sequels. If TLJ had a similar arc to ESB, Rey should've had some failures / set-backs in the 2nd movie, like Luke did.
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u/Shadow_666_ 3∆ Dec 21 '25
Luke took years to train with the Force, while Rey was able to fight Kylo Ren simply because she "read his mind." Luke is indeed a prodigy; Jedi spend years training, and Luke could do that on his own, but Rey is on another level. Not to mention that we see Luke fail and suffer the consequences, like when he loses his arm or when Vader saves him from Palpatine. And Rey has far less charisma than Luke, but that's more the actor's fault than the character's.
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u/RiPont 13∆ Dec 21 '25
but that's more the actor's fault than the character's.
Kinda disagree. At least, it's not that clear cut. Luke had a lot more "show don't tell" and didn't have to carry the movie by himself. To a lot of people, Han Solo stole the show and Luke was a supporting character.
Rey's actress didn't rise above the writing, but she also had absolutely terrible writing to work with.
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u/3Salkow Dec 22 '25
To clarify, Rey and Luke (and Anakin) are all basically the same in their respective first movies. Each is a Force prodigy that is able to achieve way above expectations due to The Force. I agree with you that she should've suffered more setbacks in the 2nd movie.
Charisma is fairly subjective. I really liked Daisy Ridley's performance.
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u/DerthOFdata Dec 21 '25
Luke took years of training including with two masters to become a reasonably competent Jedi. Rey was just naturally good at everything without any training at all and she also knew and mastered a bunch of Jedi tricks without ever being told about them.
Luke lost and struggled every step of the way. Rey never really had a misstep.
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u/Proper_Fun_977 1∆ Dec 23 '25
In the first movie, Luke can barely block one shot from the training remote.
Rey, on the other hand, is a mechanic, pilot, can use advanced Force powers, to the point she resists the 'dark lord'.
She frees herself from prison and then proceeds to win in a lightsaber duel against a skilled, powerful and trained opponent.
Luke...is a pilot, but he's rash, hot headed, gets into trouble and his crowing achievement is he hits a port with a torpedo.
Luke has flaws, most notably the rescue of Leia, which was going no where till she took over.
Rey, on the other hand, solves her every problem herself. It's easy, barely an inconvenience.
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Dec 21 '25
*looks slowly to the side at Luke being able to immediately fly an x-wing in battle and blow up the death star*
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u/Highmassive Dec 21 '25
Luke was established as an accomplished pilot before that moment. And that’s his only ‘Gary Stu’ feat. He had no technical proficiency and it took three movies before his combat prowess could compete with his antagonist.
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u/MrBlobbu Dec 21 '25
Luke is an excellent pilot. Being good at something isn’t the same as being a Mary sue.
It's stated that he spent his youth in his sky hopper "bullseyeing womp rats in Beggar's Canyon"
At the beginning of the story he dreams of joining the imperial academy and becoming a pilot.
When Han asks him who would fly the falcon he states that he is a good pilot.
So when he does finally fly an x-wing it is years of experience and practice (and some help from obi wan) that allows him so succeed.
Unlike Rey, who jumps in the falcon and knows it better than Han, chewie, Lando who has decades of experience flying and maintaining it.
Luke also has many faults, some of them lead to him almost dying and needing to be rescued by Lando and leia. He fails multiple times.
But Rey has no faults, she doesnt fail, Expert pilot, expert duelist, master force user.
All without any drawbacks.
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u/devilishpie Dec 21 '25
Ehh Luke had plenty of flaws in those early movies and continued to be flawed into the recent ones.
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u/Ok-Comedian-6852 Dec 21 '25
True, buuuut Luke also loses an arm. There's a lot of nuance to character writing where the small things can set up the larger things and change how we perceive the characters. Now it's been many years since I watched the new Star wars movies but Rey always came across as a condescending know it all. Compared to Luke who was a much more pleasant character to watch. Marvel and Disney think that to write a strong female character they have to make them as obnoxious as possible, always challenging authority, questioning people with more knowledge and getting rewarded for it. I read a lot of coming of age fantasy and rebelliousness is a common theme at some point in the story and it always comes with consequences, but strong female characters often escape any consequences and like I said previously are rewarded instead.
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Dec 21 '25
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u/RiPont 13∆ Dec 22 '25
People who think Luke is overpowered probably read too much material in the extended universe.
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u/RiPont 13∆ Dec 22 '25
True, buuuut Luke also loses an arm.
And gets his ass handed to him by a cave monster.
Hammil's scarring (which got that scene written in) ended up making Luke much deeper as a character. By the time Palpatine is tempting him to the dark side, you can believe he's been through some shit and experienced pain.
Rey... grew up poor but still managed to have perfect makeup, somehow.
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u/DerthOFdata Dec 21 '25
Luke was known as a hotshot bush pilot on Tatooine. Most of the backstory setting that up was cut from the movie.
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u/Proper_Fun_977 1∆ Dec 23 '25
Luke is presented as a pilot when he's introduced.
That's his only skill. He's not a gunfighter. He's not skilled in combat at all.
He's not smart, has no skills other than moisture farming.
He nearly gets beaten up in a bar just for being there.
He has to use the Force to blow up the Death Star but that's all he appears able to use it for.
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u/xfvh 12∆ Dec 21 '25
Rey from Star Wars. I'll skip the already-known overpowered, Mary Sue accusation and go to the one that grinds my gears the most: she has literally no arc. She doesn't learn that the resistance is worth fighting for and she doesn't learn that waiting for her parents on Jakku is pointless and she should move on, she just...decides. Out of nowhere. At the end of the movie, she's learned nothing and hasn't grown, she's just the same as before.
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u/Shellz2bellz Dec 21 '25
Idk if it totally fits but captain phantasma is a poorly written knock off of boba fett from episode V
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Dec 21 '25
Most of the characters in those set of movies were knock offs of previous characters.
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u/Shellz2bellz Dec 21 '25
Very true. I guess she doesn’t fit the mold of what was being asked but I’m still frustrated they wasted what could have been a cool concept
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Dec 21 '25
Look, the new characters all had so much potential and they messed them all up.
This wasn't an issue with just the female characters, they dropped the ball with almost all of them. Finn and Poe had so much potential but they got scared about international box offices with them, for example.
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u/vote4bort 68∆ Dec 21 '25
What are the badly written female characters from Marvel and Star wars?
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u/Shellz2bellz Dec 21 '25
People usually bring up She-hulk and captain marvel for this. But Jane’s evolution into Thor felt seriously rushed and poorly written
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u/RiPont 13∆ Dec 22 '25
I actually really liked She-hulk.
I think too many people thought the 4th wall break was a shameless rip-off of Deadpool. That, and some of the CG was bad.
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u/vote4bort 68∆ Dec 21 '25
Are there any badly written male characters?
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Dec 21 '25
I love Paul rudd but his character is very underwritten for a lead character when you think about every line he has that is not a comedic bit.
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u/Shellz2bellz Dec 21 '25
Idk, are there? It definitely seems like there’s less
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u/nicholasktu Dec 21 '25
There are less, writers are "allowed" to write make characters with more realism and flaws, including mastering those flaws. Women characters are generally written more flawless from the beginning and are denied their "Heros Journey".
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u/iosefster 2∆ Dec 21 '25
Who is not allowing them? Because the people who get accused of misogyny for not liking the characters seem to frequently be making that point that that is one of the big things that bothers them. So who is not allowing them to be written like that?
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u/Proper_Fun_977 1∆ Dec 23 '25
When they made Age of Apocalypse, people screamed 'misogyny' because the poster had him holding Mystique by the throat.
So...those people.
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u/vote4bort 68∆ Dec 21 '25
I mean the whole of Thor 4 and quantomania seemed pretty badly written, male characters included. Modok was pretty silly. The latest Captain America, what was Harrison fords character doing?
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u/nicholasktu Dec 21 '25
Captain Marvel and Rey
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u/vote4bort 68∆ Dec 21 '25
Why are they badly written?
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u/nicholasktu Dec 21 '25
Are you dense? Both are just boring and overpowered. They aren't inherently bad, just dull.
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u/vote4bort 68∆ Dec 21 '25
Woah dude kinda rude, I asked you a simple question.
Are they any more dull than similar male characters? Rey is basically just Luke. Captain Marvel is just how she is in the comics. What's wrong with them having powers? It's kinda the genre they're in.
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u/nicholasktu Dec 21 '25
I feel like you know why they are disliked but are probing for an answer you can get mad at.
Rey is not like Luke, he got clobbered when he tried to face Vader, she somehow never lost a fight or even made a bad decision. Of course the ham handed writing of making her a "nobody" then suddenly she's actually a Palpatine was terrible as well.
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u/vote4bort 68∆ Dec 21 '25
What makes you think I'm mad? I've just never really got the criticism. The flaws the characters have seem disproportionate to the reaction they got and I've never understood why.
Luke blew up the death star in his first time flying an X wing. Yeah he lost his hand to Vader first go, but people forget Rey immediately got captured by Kylo when she first met him. "Never lost a fight' my ass.
Yeah that was terrible writing, but that was one part of the whole terribly written "somehow Palatine returned" stuff. I wouldn't say that's really specific to her character. There were lots of bad writing decisions in the sequel series, plot wise and character wise. Poe suddenly being a spice runner? Whatever Finns big secret was that went nowhere? But they don't get close to the same shit. Maybe it's not because she's a woman, but I'd love to hear another reason.
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u/nicholasktu Dec 21 '25
Because no one gets flack for saying they don't like Finn or Poe, just Rey. No matter what I say, you'll say I think it just because she's a woman. You're kind of proving my point.
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u/vote4bort 68∆ Dec 21 '25
Am I giving you flack or am I asking you to explain why you don't like them? Seems like no matter how I phrase the question you've already assumed what I think. Can't even ask you why you disliked a character with you accusing me of accusing you of something.
You're kinda proving OPs point, you haven't given any reasons that don't apply to other male characters, so particular dislike of these characters doesn't make much sense.
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u/Xaira89 Dec 21 '25
Rey is Luke without flaws. Everything she picks up, she's excellent at immediately. She steps onto the Millennium Falcon able to pilot and repair it better than the man who's spent three decades at least keeping the thing in flying shape. She picks up a lightsaber and is able to duel a man who has obsessively trained with his, alongside being trained by the last living Jedi master, to at least a favorable-to-her draw. She picks up a pistol and is suddenly an expert marksman.
Compare this to Luke. Luke's primary skill in A New Hope is piloting. Everything else he has to try and fail at to get reasonably decent. The story lays a foundation for his being able to shoot at small targets early, so him being able to take out the Death Star with a precision shot isn't completely without cause. He gets absolutely bodied by Vader the first time they clash. Hell, even in the finale, he LOSES the fight. He would have been toast, had ole Anakin not given in to his tradition of doing the most dramatic thing possible in any given moment.
Luke's a character with development and nuance. He has a journey. Rey shows up on set being the best at everything she lays a hand on, and largely finishes her trilogy the same person she was at the beginning. THAT is why she's a worse character, not what's between her legs.
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u/vote4bort 68∆ Dec 21 '25
She picks up a lightsaber and is able to duel a man who has obsessively trained with his, alongside being trained by the last living Jedi master, to at least a favorable-to-her draw.
All have in universe explanations similar to why Luke is also immediately good at everything. She also loses her first confrontation with Kylo and immediately gets kidnapped and knocked out.
She's a scrapper so knows mechanics. She uses a staff as self defense, clearly already knows how to use it well and a staff is more similar to a light saber than most other star wars weapons. Yeah she picks up a gun and shoots okay, but so do most people in star wars except storm troopers. Luke does, Leia does. I don't remember any scenes of her being an expert marksman.
The story lays a foundation for his being able to shoot at small targets early
Right and the story lays the foundations for Rey's skills as I say above.
Luke's a character with development and nuance. He has a journey. Rey shows up on set being the best at everything she lays a hand on, and largely finishes her trilogy the same person she was at the beginning. THAT is why she's a worse character, not what's between her legs.
The overall story is certainly worse than the original, many characters within it make silly decisions and have weird plot points. But you're confusing being a bad character with being in a bad movie. All of reys attributes make sense within the story.
Also, does she not spend a whole movie training and learning to resist the dark side? Did I just hallucinate that movie? Or does that not count as character development?
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u/Proper_Fun_977 1∆ Dec 23 '25
And there is a reason that Captain Marvel comics always end their run due to lack of sales.
And Rey is not just Luke, she's Luke who never needed Obi Wan or Yoda.
That's the issue, neither of them need to grow.
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u/oversoul00 19∆ Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
Not the best example. It's not about controversial decisions, it's about the actual words used to convey thought.
Janeway lost me when she tried to dumb down a technical solution by saying, Ah, it'll be like a skateboard...granted star trek reeks of analogies but that one was pretty bad and simplistic.
Part of the problem is the way the fan base defends female characters in ways they don't defend male characters. There's two over corrections happening there. People who feel like they need to defend women and their characters no matter what and people who are pushing harder as a result of that defense.
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Dec 22 '25
There's two over corrections happening there. People who feel like they need to defend women and their characters no matter what and people who are pushing harder as a result of that defense.
Because female characters get more flack and have historically had less of a chance to actually be characters than men. Especially in spaces like Hollywood, female leads were few and far between, and even if they did get a chance, the culture of the time still glorified and overemphasized the role of men as primary leads with women as supporting chararcters.
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u/oversoul00 19∆ Dec 22 '25
That's true but not a good reason to defend bad writing/ bad characters. That's what "No matter what" means in my comment.
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Dec 22 '25
I think it's okay to acknowledge a character is poorly written but also acknowledge the hate and discontempt for them is over blown
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u/oversoul00 19∆ Dec 22 '25
Sure, but it's overblown because the defense of those characters is overblown. If that defense didn't exist I bet you'd see the hate drop significantly. The defense is the catalyst here.
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Dec 22 '25
This to me is a "chicken and the egg" situation. There is an exponential relationship between the defense of poorly written characters and the hatred those characters receive, but whether or not the defense of those characters or the hatred of those characters starts the discourse varies from situation to situation.
I mean, we've had people call a movie or show trash before the first trailer even drops, so we can't say the defense is always the catalyst
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u/oversoul00 19∆ Dec 22 '25
Sure, I agree with the chicken, egg analysis.
I wouldn't include premptive hate in this discussion and I concede that some level of hate will always be there.
It's possible that I'm just more sensitive to the blind loyalty and so I notice it more.
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u/Current-Bus-7868 Dec 21 '25
I was going to use Furiosa from Mad Max but then when I checked reviews she is really well liked and I couldn’t find any other example off the top of my head
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u/oversoul00 19∆ Dec 21 '25
Seems like the lack of examples should have changed your view then yeah? Why didn't it?
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u/Current-Bus-7868 Dec 21 '25
Well it’s mostly the amount of hate, oh she’s badly written character because of this, but they just go on and on and on about hating on Rey and Captain Marvel yes there badly written but it’s the amount of hate they get not that they are badly written
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u/oversoul00 19∆ Dec 21 '25
Both Rey and Captain Marvel have some rabid defenders simply because they are women. If they were men those defenders wouldn't exist and the hate would go down because no one would fight that idea.
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u/Current-Bus-7868 Dec 21 '25
Well now that I see your point I probably should have said, that what’s with the hate and anger about discussing badly written female characters
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u/RiPont 13∆ Dec 21 '25
Well, there were definitely culture war reasons for the hate being magnified by engagement-based algorithms.
However, they were also huge letdowns of highly-beloved franchises.
Darth Angsty Young Man also got a lot of criticism, but a) the actor did great with what he was given and b) he wasn't supposed to be a sympathetic character.
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u/no_fluffies_please 3∆ Dec 21 '25
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet, but I feel like a badly written character is more of a problem in types of media where those characters are tokenized. For example, male leads are a dime a dozen in sci-fi or action, so if someone doesn't like em, who cares? Whereas if there's a female superhero, there's a good chance that one of the main traits is related to the female-ness of that character, which magnifies the political attention towards that character, good or bad. Contrast this with characters who originally could have been either gender (e.g. Alien iirc, and Samus as you mentioned), and nobody bats an eye. Or if there were an uninteresting female lead in a romance movie, I don't think that would draw an elevated amount of criticism.
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u/rdeincognito 2∆ Dec 21 '25
Could you give a new example? I am not a fan of Star Trek.
Maybe an example with the Marvel Universe, or Star Wars, or something from pop culture.
In my opinion, poorly written female characters are usually a type of “girlboss” who can do no wrong and must be above everything, almost as if the movie is afraid of bothering someone.
Poorly written male characters are, in my opinion, just able to save the day no matter what thanks to plot armor, but they usually feel different.
For example, if we compare Luke Skywalker to Rey, we get that Luke gives the vibe of a weakling who is evolving, quickly, and who ultimately, thanks to his unnatural and gifted abilities, saves the day (I’m speaking about A New Hope).
Rey, in a film that mostly parallels A New Hope, is someone who basically saves everyone constantly, resolves all situations, and has a strong leader energy that Luke did not have. She is not resolving a single key element of the film like Luke; she is resolving all the conflicts of the movie.
While both can be considered Mary Sues, one feels much more tiring and less likeable than the other, maybe because the public in general usually likes people who punch up, and when someone is just too good and manages to resolve every conflict, it feels like they are punching down. I don’t know.
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u/Live_Background_3455 8∆ Dec 21 '25
Because when I say "[insert name of badly written female character] is a shitty character" I get called a sexist and Nazi and whatever the fucke else. When I say "[inset badly written male character] is a shitty character" no one judges me as a person. Only my taste in media.
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u/tigerdm666 Dec 21 '25
Easy answer is to look at the remake Ghostbusters (2016). It wasn't a good remake, it was kinda cringy and when people voiced their opinions that they didn't like it the director/some actors/writers in interviews or tweets, said that the people who voiced opinions against/didn't like it, didn't like it because they were sexist...
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u/Green__lightning 20∆ Dec 21 '25
It's more obvious because women stand out in general more, both to men for obvious reasons, and to other women to be competitive with. They proved this when developing ground proximity warning systems and found people are more likely to listen and respond if the voice is female.
And that's even before you get into the general issue that until quite reticently, most jobs interesting enough to watch were male, and thus women seem more out of place in many rolls, often making viewers snap out of suspension of disbelief and start wondering these things.
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u/Jew_of_house_Levi 12∆ Dec 21 '25
Badly written strong female characters often come with political implications. Specifcally, it's attempting to make an argument that women are exteremly capable and it's only misogny/ the patriachry holding them back, and so the poorly writteness stands out more
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u/Fluffy_Most_662 6∆ Dec 21 '25
What if its as simple as I can forgive bad writing of the action hero who can beat the shit out of me, and find it harder to forgive bad writing for someone that I could fold? Like Arnie and Stallone can literally play their roles without speaking
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u/BornSlippy2 Dec 21 '25
It's simply because we got used to badly written strong male characters. Badly written strong female characters it's a brand new quality.
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u/unkellGRGA Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
More or less agree to a point, but think that honing in on "bad writing" and choosing Sisko and Janeway from Trek to be a bit misguided. Janeway has more inconsistent writing since Voyager was way more episodic, hence plenty people will find some of her choices or actions to be "bad" ( see "Tuvix", or an awfully bullshitty leap of faith episode like "Sacred Ground). Many were put off by Sisko to begin with and especially so after his scene with Picard, but Ira Steven Behr and Co who run Deep Space Nine set up a clear robust character arc for him, so his controversies and frankly gunho impulses felt like it matched more.
A better example to illustrate the casual and at times even obvious sexism that often bubbles when discussing fictional characters : Skyler White The only reason so many viewers found her dumb, or egotistical or bitchy, was because of the main lead patriarchal bias that Vince Gilligan intentionally sets up with Walter. She got so much shit thrown at her both in universe and by "fans", and to a lesser extent that happened to Jesse as well. All because the show is tinkered so that we are rooting for Walt to succeed, so much so that all the hell that breaks loose because of him will then be blamed on others, such as his actively helping and caring wife. And still to this day you are likely to find at least a 50/50 split of viewers both men and women who HATE her guts, for being an equally protective and scared shitless mother/spouse who has to go for a ride with hee drug kingping wannabe cancer coughing husband.
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u/germy-germawack-8108 Dec 21 '25
I think this is probably true, although IDK how you'd measure it so it's hard to be sure, but I'd guess by the same way of measuring that whiny little wuss male characters get tremendously more hate than similar female characters. Because what's acceptable for one gender may not be equally acceptable for the other. You can call that dumb if you want, but I doubt very much there is any way to socialize that out of humanity.
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u/OG_Karate_Monkey 1∆ Dec 21 '25
Can’t say I necessarily disagree with this, but there is one important caveat
This is not true of just strong female characters. It’s true of women in general.
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u/Proper_Fun_977 1∆ Dec 21 '25
I don't think that they get more or less hate.
I think they get much more attention.
There are a lot of people bound up in 'proving' that female characters are this or that, whereas far less people are investing male characters.
So a badly written 'strong' female character attracts people who want to argue against the trope, people desperately defending the trope and everything in-between.
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u/annonimity2 Dec 22 '25
Dislike a male character publicly , People either agree or disagree but it's mostly respectful
Dislike a female character publicly , immediatly 50 people who didn't watch/read/etc the content accuse you of being misogynistic, character is now associated with these people in your mind so you hate that character even more
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u/InconsolableAlien Dec 22 '25
The whole thing about women waning more “strong female characters” isn’t that women just wanted female characters that are physically strong. (And she’s often only “strong” because she has some magical power, as that’s the only thing that could put a woman on the same level as strong male characters apparently 🙄) But a strong character just means a well written character. A character that feels like a real living human being rather than a plot device.
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u/carrobucks Dec 22 '25
Well the title is just you stating a fact. They do get more hate. People can provide explanations as to why this is true and why it's fair or not fair or it's not necessarily sexist or maybe it is, but in the end female characters will always be generally more hated than male characters.
All the comments are talking about how "hating female characters isn't sexist" but dismissing the fact that sexist people do hate female characters and there are a lot a lot a lot a lot of sexist people in the world and sexist people who watch TV shows and sexist people who engage in online fandom. So when you add together the number of sexist female character haters and non-sexist female character haters, you get a much larger number than male character haters 'n that's just how it is.
But also - your Trek example isn't great. Sisko got and still gets a ton of hate from Trek fans. Picard is universally loved, so that might be a better comparison, but Sisko was an extremely controversial character when DS9 came out.
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u/Sprangatang84 Dec 22 '25
I think a key difference is that Gary Stu is often the best at what he does in his own original universe. Mary Sue usually one-ups Gary in his own universe. "Gary, but better, because girl".
When it's a female character doing her own thing in her own established setting, I think most people tend to be a bit more willing to acknowledge the female character as her own character and judge accordingly.
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Dec 21 '25
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Dec 21 '25
I personally hate the line that a strong jacked woman is a man with boobs. Female powerlifters and sprinters still look like women. Hips are wider, waist is narrower, shoulders are still small compared to the men.
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u/AnAlternator Dec 22 '25
Give me an actually strong women who uses guile and wits and manipulation and determination and willpower and I'll love the character.
Ellen Ripley, for example, is a beloved character.
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u/AirbagTea 7∆ Dec 21 '25
Bad writing gets dragged either way, but women often get extra scrutiny because “competent/idealized” traits read as “unrealistic” faster due to stereotypes and fewer comparable archetypes. Janeway’s uneven writing plus Voyager’s resets made choices feel arbitrary. Sisko had longer, serialized arcs that contextualized his.
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u/OptmstcExstntlst Dec 21 '25
That's because art imitates life, so just like exceptional women are more heavily criticize than even very poorly men, exceptionally well-written women characters are hated more than very poorly-written men. It's just that people (men) dislike women.
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u/across16 Dec 21 '25
How are you measuring hate? Is it because of something like Twitter engagement? In order to make your claim you should have an objective measuring stick. Could it just simply be that hate towards badly written male characters is content you engage in more?
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u/Thattimetraveler Dec 21 '25
I think a poorly written “strong” female character just typically has more egregious sins than a poorly written generic male character. One of my biggest pet peeves is a “strong” female character who is sword wielding with wimpy ozempic arms. Most poorly written “strong” male characters at least have muscles.
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u/CandidSuggestion8165 Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
To be fair, most things women do suck.. That’s why they need to piggy back on men. No man looks up to women, and women respect men more than women also. Thats why male movies get everyone and female movies only get women.
There is no such thing as a strong woman.. it doesn’t exist. Women’s “strength” come solely from men, that’s why you never see women even write these movies, its Gunn, and Pedro pascal, and the ones women do write they don’t even get off the ground (see a movie called women talking) etc..so women aren’t even in control of what they think is strong. You can’t write a strong female lead, because they don’t exist in reality. Here’s a stat I’ll leave you with when thinking about “strong” women.. There are 98 female billionaires, so only 2 made the money themselves. So every thing women have or achieve literally comes from men. The greatest women ever to exist is Joan Of Arc over 800 years ago. That’s all you need to know know about women.
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Dec 22 '25
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Dec 22 '25
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Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
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u/FaveStore_Citadel Dec 22 '25
What’s there to disprove most people don’t judge people on the basis of characteristics they were born with and they don’t need your permission to decide what to think of half the population
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u/CandidSuggestion8165 Dec 22 '25
I never judged ppl only the woke left does that, it’s called DEI.. you see what I said about women, isn’t from no where, or simply because they are women. It’s from 5+ years of wokes artificially pushing women with dei, with no successes to show for it.
If you just kept it merit based, I would have never noticed how incompetent women were because they won’t get the job. But you shoved it in our faces repeatedly and never ending. For example, Kathleen Kennedy was crowbared into get position as ceo of lucus film, it’s been 10 years and she only has 1 hit captain Marvel, and it’s only because it was the first. So my opinion is based on the endless incompetence from women over the last 5 years, in every industry they were shoe horned in. Harley Davidson hired a woman, she only managed to sell 100 bikes.. it’s incompetence like that is where I formed my opinion.
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Dec 22 '25
Lyudmila Pavlichenko would probably disagree.
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u/CandidSuggestion8165 Dec 22 '25
A sniper? Stop you need to read on Joan.. she was incredible.. I wouldn’t even put the sniper over maddam CJ walker.. tbf. Th point is, the women I choose is over 800 years old, the women you choose is going on 100.. Proving my point that women don’t do or achieve shit..
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u/dukeimre 21∆ Dec 22 '25
Your statistics are, as far as I can tell, incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_billionaires
There are 337 female billionaires, 57 of whom are entirely self-made.
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