So if there’s one thing I’ve focused on a lot in my six years of occasionally blogging, it’s female characters. Because aside from my own writing, I’m a huge consumer of media, I’m a feminist, and I care a lot about the way women are represented across media. So: female characters. I think about them a lot. And thus, non-shockingly, of the roughly seven billionty blogs that I read regularly, a fair amount discuss female characters.

This makes me happy: a lot of other people care, too! And it’s interesting. Reading other people’s thoughts have helped me sharpen and figure out my own, become a more active watcher/reader, and has given me recommendations that have led me to new shows/movies/books that I’ve loved. I’ve also had some interesting discussions when I’ve disagreed, but generally, I come away with a lot to think about. My opinion is: analyzing female characters = super cool.

Except for this one thing that I keep seeing with depressing frequency: explaining why one female character is awesome by talking about the flaws in another lady from the same genre. Or in other words, writing as if two female characters (often both generally pretty good characters, who are flawed in different ways) are in a competition to prove one of them is more awesome than the other.

Why? Why must we do that?

(Note: I’m not linking to specific posts from here because I’m talking about trends I’ve seen, not trying to call out anyone in particular.)

The first time I started to write this blog post (it’s gone through four drafts now) it was in response to a whole rash of articles I’d run into about how great Parks & Recreation is (and it is!). And specifically how great Leslie Knope is (omg SHE IS). And how that’s great, because Liz Lemon over on 30 Rock is a mess. Wait, what?

They’re both the central characters of NBC, Thursday-night comedies. And Tina Fey and Amy Poehler both were on SNL, and are friends in real life. People are used to talking about them as a unit. But unless you’re comparing specific facets of the two shows, why frame it as one character being better than the other? For that matter, if you aren’t talking about both shows to begin with, why detour into it just for that purpose?

I’ve also seen Community’s Britta Perry thrown into this mix occasionally. And here’s the thing: one of my closest friends really identifies with Britta. Another of my closest friends really identifies with Leslie.¹ But I actually think it’s super awesome that there are two very different female characters, both hilarious, so that two very different (but both hilarious) friends of mine have characters they can identify with.²

And just to drive home the point, here’s a video of Amy Poehler being awesome and refusing to fall into the sexist trap of pitting characters, shows, or her actual person against Tina Fey, because they are friends and they are both funny:

This is not an isolated issue of 30 Rock vs. Parks and Rec issue, though. I ranted about it on twitter a couple of months ago, when I ran into a cool blog post about how great Jane Foster of Thor is. And while Thor didn’t do much for me as a movie, I do like that Jane was a scientist devoted to her research above all. What distressed me was that someone immediately commented to argue that actually, no, the better female character from a superhero last summer was Peggy Carter of Captain America. Which again, why? Because they’re both women in superhero flicks? The characters have even less to do with each other than Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope, but the comment was definitely a case of “this character is better than that character.”

And then, more recently, I ran into the same thing again, in an article about how great Ellen Ripley is. And you know what? Ellen Ripley is pretty great! The Alien franchise is pretty great! But the article took a long detour through explaining how much Sarah Connor sucks. But, um. Sarah Connor doesn’t suck. And even if you think she does, her sucking doesn’t make Ripley a better character. The fact that they are both women from lady-led genre franchises does not mean that if you like one, you can’t like the other.³

Look, I am down with criticizing the Terminator franchise. And superhero movies. And 30 Rock, which I generally enjoy, but which also sometimes makes me go, “Yiiiiiikes,” and wince. I think critique is generally a good and important thing, yes, even when it’s critiquing a thing I enjoy. But critique can also fall into nasty narratives of its own: in this case, acting as if women have to be in competition.

They aren’t. They don’t have to be. Instead of talking about which awesome action heroine, or which hilarious sitcom lady, or which superhero’s ladyfriend is greatest… well, why not enjoy how many of those characters there are? Instead of fighting over who gets one slice of pie, let’s enjoy the fact that the pie is getting bigger. Pieces may have slightly different flavors, and some may still be undercooked or not to your taste, but the pie as a whole can still be delicious and filling. And wow that metaphor got overextended.

The point is: this isn’t Highlander. There can be more than one awesome female character at a time.⁴ Not all of them are to everyone’s taste, and denigrating one does not make another seem more awesome. But it does fall into the sexist tropes of thinking of all women as being in competition, and that one representation of women is enough. Neither of those things is true. Let’s please not write as if they are.

Last week, mlawski at Overthinking It posted a graphic titled The Female Character Flow Chart. I saw it, thought, “Huh, interesting,” and that was that. Then a couple of days later one of my friends posted me towards some criticism of it, leading to discussion and more thinking on my part.

I was surprised to see so much commentary on it because it never occurred to me that the chart was aimed at someone like me, who already spends time thinking about the representation of women in the media. I don’t think good intentions (which I assume mlawski had) or intended audience arguments excuse all flaws (more on those in a second), but I definitely read the chart as intended for readers who hadn’t already thought about women in the media. I could certainly see someone running across this who hadn’t noticed those problematic tropes, the lack of dynamic female characters, or that many, many female characters are defined solely by their relationships to men and children could have an eye-opening, “aha!” moment.

Regardless of who it’s aimed at, I don’t think anyone’s wrong for reading it critically. There are two different braches of criticism that I’ve seen (though I haven’t looked around extensively; I haven’t even read the comments on the original post, since I looked at the post when it first went up, ages before the comment count rose). One is about the privilege and lack of nuance in the chart; the other is about the chart as reductionist when it comes to the characters in question.

The first, I can’t put any better than this post from homasse at deadbrowalking:

A wee bit down on this mess of a flowchart, you will find “Useless Girl” with the example being Uhura from Star Trek.

And why is this fail? Because, once again, feminism shows a woeful lack of awareness of race and the impact race plays.

Uhura was “useless” not because of her gender, but because of race–this chart ignores the political and social situation of when the show was made and the decisions made in regards to her character because she was Black: They couldn’t ever put her in charge of the bridge because people in the south specifically would have flipped out at a black woman being in charge (this was why Ensign Chekov was given the bridge and she never was even though she outranked him).

I’d also like to point out bossymarmalade’s post about Yoko Ono, someone who I consider awesome. It sucks to see people buy into the cultural storyline that she broke up the Beatles, when that is just false, and further, when she’s great.¹

So yes, I think there are some problems with the chart in that regard, and I’m glad people pointed them out. But I don’t entirely agree with the argument about the chart being reductionist, and diminishing the characters who are on it. Or rather — I do, kind of. The best way to put it was something said by my friend Jess: “Basically, if that one box ending in ‘strong female character’ wasn’t there, I’d like the chart a lot better.”

For me, that sums it up. I think the chart actually branches out into a lot more specifics than I’d use if I made something like it — like, there are multiple slots for women whose motivations come entirely from their kids — but the main problem I have is that any one of these slots/archetypes/clichés/whatever you want to call them can indeed be written well. They can be thorough, three dimensional, story-carrying, awesome characters.

My go-to example is Sarah Connor. Sarah is listed the character representing “Mama Bear.” And when I saw that, I went “a-yup.” TV Tropes has her listed as both a Mama Bear and Action Mom. The first Terminator movie is based on this premise: Sarah Connor must live, because her son saves the world. Not “Sarah Connor must live because she saves the world.” While she’s the awesome character, the series is always about her (at that point unborn) son. When we next see her in T2, she’s had John, and devoted herself to preparing him for his fate — and keeping him safe. When he rescues her, an act that explicitly saves her life, she scolds him for putting himself in danger. She’ll do anything, up to and including sacrificing herself, if it saves John. While Sarah is the protagonist of the first two movies, her motivation — the entire premise of the series — is based on protecting John.

The thing is, though, that Sarah is awesome. In the first movie, she grows from damsel-in-need-of-rescue to bandaging injuries and learning to make bombs. She’s the one who finally destroys the Terminator. She has help along the way, but she’s still a character who learns skills and saves herself. In T2, she’s even more complex. She’s in an institution because people believe she’s insane, but we as viewers know she’s right. But being right doesn’t make her entirely mentally able, though — it’s clear she’s got PTSD or something akin to it (and understandably). She’s amazingly kick-ass (her escape is my favorite sequence in the movie) and morally complex. We know she’d kill someone to save John, but she isn’t able to kill Miles Dyson, though she thinks doing so will keep Skynet from existing — and though she expects herself to be able to do it. And that’s without even getting into the sadly too-short lived TV show.²

Sarah Connor is a great character. She’s three dimensional and dynamic. She’s capable of carrying a story. But as much as I’d be all over a the story about how Sarah Connor must live so she can lead humanity in the battle against Skynet, I don’t know that it would necessarily be a better story than Sarah trying to save her son. Different, yes; certainly unusual. But Sarah Connor is both an Action Mama Bear and a great character. (And further, just because Sarah Connor is great doesn’t mean there aren’t other characters who fall into that slot who aren’t poorly written, or that the Mama Bear archetype is never problematic.)

The way I see it, while there are indeed plenty of archetypes and tropes out there that are problematic simply for existing — racist and sexist stereotypes, for example, which come up all too frequently — once you’re beyond those,³ just because a character (female or otherwise) hits an archetype doesn’t mean the character is poorly drawn.

I keep trying to write an entry here about writing, but then getting too self-conscious about it. Maybe someday. In the mean time, when not able to come up with interesting content of my own, why not link to some other people’s content instead?

When I go through my Google Reader these days, I tend to go through interesting links using Read It Later, a FF add-on that I love. But unfortunately, this means I don’t have a way to tag posts with where they were linked from anymore, and so I don’t have credits for these. Suffice to say, they were all linked by awesome people.

Vague theme: feminism! Mostly but not entirely in sf/f!

And she’s cute, too!

So I opened up the email, and sure enough, it started off with a compliment about the usefulness of a particular article that I’d written. Great. Warm fuzzies abound. Unfortunately, the warm fuzzies vacated the premises in the next paragraph, in which the (male) writer concluded with the sentiment that it was nice to read such good articles written by “a cutie”.

I think I may have said something very rude at that point. It certainly left me feeling uncomfortable and a little creeped-out.

The problem I have with this isn’t just in the assumption that it’s OK for a total stranger (who I’ve never even seen in person) to comment on my appearance. It’s in the implication that the technical merit of my writing isn’t the important part here — that what’s important is how physically attractive I am. (And in particular with the form of words used, not just “cute”, but “a cutie”, which is a very neat way to suggest that everything important about a person can be encapsulated in their appearance.)

Yeah. It’s happened to me, too, and I don’t know what to say. Generally, women are socialized to want to be cute, to be recognized for that; but it’s so, so, so frustrating when that’s absolutely not what you want.

Off With Her Head? Why Fantasy Hates Good Queens

A few weeks ago we had a ball discussing the Top Ten Evil Queens of fantasy. But something occurred to me as I was doing my research: While I had no trouble finding evil queens, the only ones I could find that were depicted as being “good” were physically compromised in some way. (And I’m not talking about princesses here — I mean women in real seats of power.) The question this raises for me is, does power corrupt or are powerful women seen as dangerous in fantasy? Let’s take a look at the way good queens are hobbled to find out.

This makes me want to write a fantasy novel about a kick-ass queen immediately.

Are We Letting Boys Be Book Bigots?

We need to teach them to take an interest in all sorts of stories, not just the ones that feature kids like them. This means exposing them to a lot of different stuff. We should, of course, encourage kids to find themselves in books. That’s a wonderful and powerful thing. But we should help them find people who are different, too, so they learn to value other ways of being in the world. If we don’t support books, movies, TV programs and music that show these other ways of being, then we are contributing to the problem.

This is a debate I keep running in to: Will boys only read books about boys? I love this article for doing a take-down of why that’s an attitude that has got to go. Of course everyone wants kids generally to read more, and it seems like boys read less than girls; but focusing books more on boys and what’s culturally considered boy-themed stories is really not the answer.

Speaking of boys, girls, and characters…

Ladies, Please (Carry On Being Awesome)

I certainly have seen girl characters who were too perfect: who were beloved by all, beautiful (though they always thought their mouth was too wide or possibly their bosom too generous), and eventually elected queen of the universe. (Sometimes literally.)

Let us think of the Question of Harry Potter. I do not mean to bag on the character of Harry Potter: I am very fond of him.

But I think people would be less fond of him if he was Harriet Potter. If he was a girl, and she’d had a sad childhood but risen above it, and she’d found fast friends, and been naturally talented at her school’s only important sport, and saved the day at least seven times. If she’d had most of the boys in the series fancy her, and mention made of boys following her around admiring her. If the only talent she didn’t have was dismissed by her guy friend who did have it. If she was often told by people of her numerous awesome qualities, and was in fact Chosen by Fate to be awesome.

Well, then she’d be just like Harry Potter, but a girl. But I don’t think people would like her as much.

Indeed!

And finally…

now that we’ve got that clear, and you know that i’m not here…

One of the first things I ever did in the course of this dialogue was to reject the knee-jerk judgment of the Spock/Uhura relationship as a sexist reduction of Uhura to The Girlfriend role, some sort of sad step backwards from her empowered position in TOS as a professional woman with no need for a romance. …

However, the Just A Girlfriend nugget and the assertion that she is made less by her romantic involvement with Spock continues unabated, so I figured I’d give full voice to what I hadn’t before.

Simply put: Nyota Uhura is not a white girl.

(Via the previous article)

I really appreciated this. I grew up on TOS, and definitely super enjoyed (but didn’t 100% love) the reboot movie. ¹ But I definitely grew up on the narrative about Uhura as a career woman, and how that was totally progressive and awesome, and it never occurred to me to look at why she was depicted that way (let alone to question its awesomeness).

My eyes: opened. Always a good things.

So my blogging roll was killed by non-blogging-related stress, unfortunately. (Though hey, two posts in a month is better than I’ve managed at points in the past.) I don’t have anything real for tonight, but here’s some smart stuff other people have written:

The Dark Knight, Part 2: Yes, I’m Still Mad About This, another excellent post on The Dark Knight by Poison Ivory. (Psst: spoilers included.) I point this one out not only because it’s smart and interesting, but because there’s been a little discussion in comments here about the question of if and when feminism enhances or detracts from storytelling. I think Poison Ivory makes a good case for how, if TDK had been less sexist, it would have been a better movie.

Second, via Seeking Avalon, an International Blog Against Racism Week post: Smilla’s Not all cats are grey: 25 years of cover whitewashing in Joan Vinge’s “Cat” series. This post had my jaw pretty much on the floor because, here’s the thing: I’ve read Vinge’s “Cat” series. Twice, in fact; I was really excited when I found they were reprinted and bought copies (which I promptly lost somehow). I really enjoyed the series.

And I’d never noticed Cat was a character of color.

Yeah. The descriptions of Cat, while rare in the books, are pretty clear on that. And I’m a reader who skims for dialogue and action, a bad habit which I now realize is even worse than I’d thought. This post was a huge privilege check for me, because while I generally try to be conscious, I clearly have blind spots. It never would have occurred to me that being able to skim books and just plain not notice the characters’ ethnicities was one of them. I think — hope — I notice more than I used to, but it’s always good to have a reminder that I can do better and pay more attention. I will push myself to do so.

Apparently, when I promise to blog more I stop blogging for months at a time; when I say I’m too busy to blog, I get out a record number of entries (for me) in a month. Go figure. But one of the cool things to come out of the Dr. Horrible discussion (at least for me) was a long list of things to blog about.

Here’s one thing that came up a lot in that discussion: Strong Women. Because I felt very much that Penny was a weak character, and many people responded that she was very strong in nontraditional ways; in other places I saw a lot of angry muttering that not every female character needs to kick ass, and that Penny would have been ruined if she’d kicked someone in the face, in response to people wishing that she had been stronger. And the thing is, all of the above are true, and non-contradictory.

The heart of the problem is this: there are two meanings of “strong” in play here, and that’s making the discussion a lot harder to have. In one of my very first entries, I actually wrote this in a footnote:

I call them dynamic female characters rather than strong female characters to avoid conflating the idea of a well fleshed out, well written female character with a female character who is physically strong.

Still true! Basically, what we’re looking at is two definitions: physically strong (or emotionally/mentally/etc), referring to a character trait; and strong characterization, referring to well-written, three-dimensional characters. Penny from Dr. Horrible was, I think, emotionally strong — she was quietly, optimistically trying to make a difference in the world, from what little we saw of her personality — but was weakly written because we saw so little of her personality in a story that could have given us much more. What motivated her to help the homeless? What was it about Hammer that enamored her to him? What would her idea of a happy ending have been? I’ve got no idea. I know she was nice, and pretty, and very well-acted. But her presence in the story wasn’t as a character, it was as a prop; she provided motivation and a point of contention between the men. Penny may have been a strong person, but she was a weak character.

I suspect that the fact that Dr. Horrible was by Joss Whedon made the distinction even less clear — after all, Buffy is an iconic character. She’s strong, in that she’s able to throw her enemies across the room; she’s strong, in that she has her own motivations, a developed personality, and she was able to grow and change through the course of even just the handful of episodes that I watched. So I was disappointed that Penny was “weak”: not that she didn’t have Buffy’s superpowers, but that she didn’t have Buffy’s agency.

This is why I prefer the word dynamic to strong when discussing the quality of presentation of female characters. But overall I don’t think it’s a very hard concept — but often the two meanings of strong are mistaken and it’s rarely a good thing. I’d much rather read a story about a dynamic woman who is rescued from danger by a man than read a story about a physically strong female caricature who always rescues herself. Either way can be done well, but to tack physical strength on to a dynamic hero who doesn’t need it — who’s dynamic in other ways — can be confusing and detrimental. So to illustrate this, I’m going to critique a movie I actually really enjoy (Ever After) behind the cut.
Read this article »

This is a total blogging cop-out, but I’m in the midst of moving at the moment, and my cable is shut off until it’s hooked up at the new place, and I’m drinkingpacking all night tonight, so I just don’t have time to do a full post about it. (Also: I will answer the rest of the Dr. Horrible post’s comments when I do have time!)

Luckily, I saw the movie with my BFF Poison Ivory, and she hit all of my major comments in this post right here. Spoilers included, obvs.

And now back to taping boxes and finishing that bottle of wine.

I’m exceptionally busy with moving and work right now, so blogging is pretty scarce. However, I saw the exceptionally ridiculous movie Journey to the Center of the Earth last night, and wrote a brief review over at Hathor.

Mike Myers’ new vehicle, The Love Guru, comes out this weekend. I know this, though I’m not flocking to the theater, as it looks so incredibly, incredibly bad. But every subway platform and bus in the city is covered in posters for it, so I’ve been accidentally staring at them a lot. Staring in befuddlement, really, wondering when brown face became acceptable.*

But eventually I found something specific to fixate on. The movie’s tagline: “His karma is huge.”

Huh?

See, I know what double entendre is. It’s a phrase with a double meaning; something that can be read in two ways with distinct meanings (and specifically, one of the two meanings is sexual). “His karma is huge,” is not double entendre, because it doesn’t make sense in any way, let alone two. That’s not how karma — or a sentence — works. You wouldn’t say, “His karma is huge,” you’d say, “He has good karma.” Maybe even, “He has a lot of good karma.”

But no: Mike Myers, in his rush to tell us he has a big penis, forgot about the part where a double meaning requires having a primary meaning first. That must be so embarrassing for him! But I guess the movie’s PR machine must have rejected, “The Love Guru: his dick is huge,” for some reason.

Possible other rejected taglines:

The Love Guru: Foreigners sure are wacky!
The Love Guru: Cultural appropri-what now?
The Love Guru: Admit it, you like “My Name Is Earl”
The Love Guru: Justin Timberlake, it’s hard to love you when you do shit like this
The Love Guru: Some of my best friends are Indian, and they think it’s funny!

And my favorite…

The Love Guru: It’s cool, we live in a post-racism society.

* Yeah, okay, I’ve seen the preview and it looks like technically Myers isn’t playing an Indian character, he’s playing a white guy who embodies Indian stereotypes. Which really isn’t much better.

Summer blockbuster season is upon us. And here’s my confession: I love ridiculous action movies. I love movies where the premise is “stuff blows up” and plot and character are entirely secondary. I don’t watch them without criticism; there’s a reason big-budget action movies have a terrible reputation when it comes to race and gender. So while I love the genre, I still watch it critically, and would be exceptionally pleased if filmmakers would shape up and start making ridiculous action movies about stuff blowing up, without resorting to alternately ignoring and stereotyping anyone who isn’t a straight, white, male character.

With that said, I’ve been to see Iron Man twice. I obviously enjoyed it; there were a bunch of aspects about it that made me decide it was worth spending money to see again. But it isn’t without its problems, and I’ve found the critiques of the movie to be fascinating. (Spoilers follow through the rest of the article.) By far the most on-the-nose critical review of the movie I’ve found is this one, by WOC PhD. She writes with far more eloquence than I could about a lot of the movie’s issues, particularly with regards to race and jingoism.

I’d like to expand on some thoughts I had while watching the movie, and again when reading her article. WOC PhD* addresses the wasted opportunities the movie had with Yinsen, the doctor who is held hostage along with the movie’s protagonist Tony Stark. He saves Tony’s life and then sacrifices himself so Tony can escape their captors. WOC PhD points out not only that the movie could have used Yinsen as a way of showing the actual effects of the war on people in Afghanistan, but also the potential problems if he returns from the dead as a villain for the sequel, which has been hinted at.

I had two further problems with his portrayal. First, I was not sold at all on his decision to sacrifice himself for Tony. As he dies, he tells Tony it’s what he wants, and that his family is dead — but that seems odd in and of itself, since when he discussed his family with Tony earlier, he did not mention that they were dead. It’s implied he’s decided Tony’s life is more important than his own because Tony has a much larger influence and can right some of the wrongs of the world in a way that Yinsen can not — but Yinsen tells him that, “this was always his plan.” Yet Tony had designed the suit with the goal of getting them both out, so why Yinsen had always planned to die when it wasn’t necessary is unclear. His death actually resembles a typical comic book fridging in some ways, except that instead of a girlfriend being murdered to give the hero motivation (or angst), a character of color is murdered to give the hero motivation (and angst — implied angst, anyway, since Tony never actually mentions him again, though I think we’re supposed to realize he was moved by the death). I’ve been told by Iron Man comics-knowledgeable friends that in every version of the origin story, Yinsen dies, so the movie writers probably never felt the freedom to have him survive”… but as a movie watcher, I wasn’t convinced. I was disappointed.

Second, Yinsen never got to be a character in his own right. The other two major supporting characters, Pepper and Rhodey, are shown to have lives outside of Tony Stark’s existence. While they both center around Tony, they do at least do things on their own. In her introduction, Pepper alludes to evening plans outside of work, and she also attends a fancy event not only without Tony, but without a date at all. Rhodey, meanwhile, we see at work. He’s kept busy there even when Tony is not watching him, which we know from scenes where Tony walks in and Rhodey doesn’t expect to see him. Now, we see them both from Tony’s POV so we only get hints about these lives, but they do exist.

Yinsen, on the other hand, does not. We meet him when Tony is captured, and he dies when Tony escapes. He references having a family, but not that they’re dead until he himself is dying; and he doesn’t do it in the context of letting us know him better, but rather as a way to show that Tony is isolated and sad without having a family of his own.** We know he speaks many languages, but we don’t know if he learned them in school, or as a traveler, or what. We don’t know if he’s a surgeon, an engineer, a professor, or something else entirely. (He does save Tony’s life medically; but he also assists him as an engineer or builder, and he’s been to see Tony give a lecture — where? When? Who knows?) We don’t know how he was captured or how long he’s been held there. Yinsen exists only while Tony is with him; when Tony is gone, he vanishes. That was hugely disappointing to me.

One place where I disagree with WOC PhD is with regards to Pepper Potts. I do agree with just about everything else she writes with regards to gender in the film, particularly about the female reporter and Pepper’s “take out the trash” line. Ught. But about Pepper and Tony’s relationship, she writes:

“Granted, Stark does make some attempt to express feelings for her in the later half of the film, but she quickly shuts him down. While the scene is meant to show Potts’ ever critical eye toward her role as super hero hag, it reads as the masochism of a woman who does not think she deserves love. Hence she falls in love with a man who won’t give her any and yet demands so much of her time that she “has no one else.” – yes that is a real quote. Or the intelligence of a woman who knows she is not, ultimately, going to get love but hangs on.”

This is in reference to the end of the film, where Tony lets Pepper know he is romantically interested in her, after she has hinted that she feels the same towards him through the whole film. However, she rejects him, referencing an earlier scene in which they had danced awkwardly and started to have a discussion of how they feel — only for him to run off in the middle to deal with a major plot revelation. Now, as a watcher of the movie, I hadn’t even thought about Pepper being left without explanation at that point, because it is a major plot revelation and Tony reacts quite understandably. The narrative follows him and not Pepper, and no further thought was really given towards what she thought or felt at that moment, until she brings it up in her rejection of him.

I did not see that as her a woman who feels she does not deserve love, or that rejection as masochism on her part. On the contrary, I thought it was a great move on the filmmaker’s parts to further her character. Pepper actually had an emotional reaction to being left there, even though we didn’t see it, since the movie wasn’t about Pepper. She was a fully-realized character, who reacted understandably. Being left without explanation or apology was enough to make her realize that, while she may have feelings for Tony, he is selfish and even if he reciprocates those feelings, that selfishness will leave him unable to give her what she wants and deserves from a relationship. Rather than settling for that, even though she cares for Tony, she rejects him. I was impressed and pleased by that choice.

One further gender-based criticism of the film. We know a lot about Tony Stark’s father: he was one of the developers of the atomic bomb; he founded a major arms company that Tony inherited; he died when Tony was relatively young; there’s a lot of controversy about whether he was a patriot or simply war profiteering; people generally feel Tony has a lot to live up to with regards to his dad. How would his dad feel about the direction Tony took the company in? How would he feel about the weapons Tony has helped create? Or the under-the-table deals to give those weapons to bad people? Tony struggles with those ideas throughout the film.

Tony’s mother is never mentioned verbally. The only actual reference to her at all is in a montage of newspaper headlines about the Stark family, which provides us with Tony’s history. The headline reads, “Husband and Wife Perish,” or something very similar. She has no name, and she has no impact on Tony or his story, whatsoever. I am realize this is a fairly common problem, but it still annoys me greatly, since you’d think that even if he had no relationship with his mother, that would still affect his character. Grumble.

Okay. All that said? I really enjoyed the movie. It was fun, it didn’t take itself super-seriously. It was phenomenally well acted, and in many respects well written. Though never confirmed by Tony himself, it’s clear he suffers from PTSD after his time as a prisoner. It’s referenced by other characters, one a gossip show host and one the villain trying to cut him out of his own company. Tony himself is not written as a character who would acknowledge that he needs to attend to his mental health, but it was also clear to me as a watcher that his decision to build a new version of the Iron Man suit and use it as a hero was all driven by PTSD, in large part. His decision to try and do the right thing may have been driven by having seen the consequences of his actions first-hand, but the obsessive way he goes about it is indicative of greater problems. I loved the way the movie illustrated that without beating the viewer over the head with it.

The movie was clever. The action sequences engaging. The special effects managed to be brilliant and not cheesy. Tony’s character and Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of him were fantastic. I can’t say I recommend this as an action movie with no faults — they’re there and disappointing. But what it gets right, it gets right much better than other movies in its genre, and it is certainly a cut above standard action movie fare.

* I’m not quite sure how to address her or what name she generally goes by — the blog is on hiatus so it seems that a lot of the usual informational pages are missing, and I’ve only started reading recently. If anyone knows of a more accurate name/handle, please don’t hesitate to let me know!

** I do think it’s interesting to have that trope, that while a character appears to have everything, the character actually has nothing without a family, applied to a man instead of a career woman as a way of showing that she should get back in the kitchen, but that’s neither here nor there.

Via awesome new blog io9, alleged Dark Knight spoilers. Hrmph.

Is it me, or does the death of Rachel Dawes smack of fridging? Oh, but her death might serve two purposes–not only does it drive Dent over the edge and into a killing spree, but I’m sure Bruce will angst about how he tried his hardest, but just couldn’t save her!

Good thing I’m an optimistic person, because it takes optimism to hope that none of that will happen.