Furthermore!
Dec. 22nd, 2009 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaI suppose if I'm going to rant about Disney, I might as well go the rest of the way and grouse about how much their female characters suck.
Even with Princess and the Frog, their female leads have tended to be rather uninteresting and undynamic. A woman exists primarily to fall in love and realize her dreams through a man.
Even Wendy and Alice who step into another world. Do they have a great adventure and enjoy it or do they mope and generally just want to go home? Belle is probably the worst of course. She flees one odious oaf and encounters another but because he can blackmail her father into making her his prisoner, she somehow discovers through Stockholm Syndrome that it's okay to love your kidnapper and that all men, no matter how assholish can change for the better if they just have some gentle guidance and love from a pretty girl.
No matter how unique and independent a girl is, all her personality drains away when she finds Mr. Right. Even Mulan is not immune from the power of Mr. Right. Let's not even mention the Little Mermaid. Bleh.
Perhaps the most tragic example of this is Pepper Ann. Before she was bought by Disney she was a strong, independent, socially awkward woman who did what she wanted and had to live with the consequences good or bad. When Disney bought the show, she became more insecure, wanting boys to pay attention to her, and generally became less interested in flights of fancy.
I guess I should just be happy that Disney never made a movie about Pippi Longstocking, I guess. *sigh* I really should stop complaining and create a character to my own tastes, I guess. Not as if I don't have all the required skills.
Even with Princess and the Frog, their female leads have tended to be rather uninteresting and undynamic. A woman exists primarily to fall in love and realize her dreams through a man.
Even Wendy and Alice who step into another world. Do they have a great adventure and enjoy it or do they mope and generally just want to go home? Belle is probably the worst of course. She flees one odious oaf and encounters another but because he can blackmail her father into making her his prisoner, she somehow discovers through Stockholm Syndrome that it's okay to love your kidnapper and that all men, no matter how assholish can change for the better if they just have some gentle guidance and love from a pretty girl.
No matter how unique and independent a girl is, all her personality drains away when she finds Mr. Right. Even Mulan is not immune from the power of Mr. Right. Let's not even mention the Little Mermaid. Bleh.
Perhaps the most tragic example of this is Pepper Ann. Before she was bought by Disney she was a strong, independent, socially awkward woman who did what she wanted and had to live with the consequences good or bad. When Disney bought the show, she became more insecure, wanting boys to pay attention to her, and generally became less interested in flights of fancy.
I guess I should just be happy that Disney never made a movie about Pippi Longstocking, I guess. *sigh* I really should stop complaining and create a character to my own tastes, I guess. Not as if I don't have all the required skills.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-23 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-23 02:59 am (UTC)I bet Mama Odie was fun to animate also. I love those kinds of characters: Madame Mim, Medusa (Rescuers), Cruella Deville, Maleficent, Ursula... good or evil, they are more interesting from an artistic POV than the boring and bland lead characters.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-23 03:42 am (UTC)http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/123684.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN2op_wlGlM
http://seananmcguire.com/songbook.php?id=238
Seanan McGuire's song Wicked Girls
The first two verses and a copy of the bridge
"
Wendy played fair, and she played by the rules that they gave her;
They say she grew up and grew old -- Peter Pan couldn't save her.
They say she went home, and she never looked back,
Got her feet on the ground, got her life on its track.
She's the patron saint priestess of all the lost girls who got found.
And she once had her head in the clouds, but she died on the ground.
Dorothy just wanted something that she could believe in,
A gray dustbowl girl in a life she was better off leavin'.
She made her escape, went from gray into green,
And she could have got clear, and she could have got clean,
But she chose to be good and go back to the gray Kansas sky
Where color's a fable and freedom's a fairy tale lie.
Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we're calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like -- we're determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.
"
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-23 03:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-23 06:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-23 07:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-24 02:35 am (UTC)I guess there are about six lead characters, aren't there?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-23 05:37 pm (UTC)Okay, so the default writer is usually a guy, and he knows he has to stick a woman in the story, and so he has a girl, and he doesn't know what the hell to do with her. I mean she's the girl, so she has to be likeable, right, so you can't portray her with anything that might be truly disagreeable or make her seem like a flake or really truly weird, so hey, she likes boys as an interest. Especially in Disney, where Girls Find True Love and Get Hitched, and it's expected. And then to make it all worse, she's the heroine so she has to be accessible to all viewers (you've read Scott McCloud right?), which means she's going to be EVEN MORE GENERIC.
I feel like this shows up everywhere - comics, books, etc - and that the best way to handle female characters is to make interesting characters first, and some of them will happen to be women.