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[stakebait]

jennyo had a very interesting post on misogyny in ATS, and my reaction got really long so I'm putting it here. I've been working on ensemble casting a little, and it's fucking hard.

You need some minority characters. You need to make their race/sex/gender/orientation/religion/handicap a significant, believeable part of their character, but neither stereotyped nor a substitute for individuality. You need to make sure you're not clumping too many characteristics into one person. Wow, five middle class white guys and a poor Latina lesbian in a wheelchair, what were the odds? But neither can you spread them out so evenly that you've got a Beneton ad.

Can't make all the anythings any one other thing (all the brains boys, all the muscle black) without sending a message you don't intend. Then you need to consider their possible plot points before you cast them. Can't make that one a girl, they're scheduled to be smacked down in a way that would then look sexist (don't kill the lesbian). But neither do you want to make them unbelieveably unscathed while everyone around them suffers and screws up. Also you have to take into account the actors you find and want to work with, and what parts they're right for.

It's hard. In an ensemble with a maximum of six main characters, I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that it may not be possible to maximize all my diversity goals and still tell the story I'm trying to tell.

Why am I telling you all this? Because this may be Pollyanna of me, but as between "ATS is showing Joss' deep woman-hating issues" and "oh crap, now what?" I'm going with option B. It's Mr. Occam and his famous electric shaver set, as far as I'm concerned.

Charisma lost hers. SR, who I miss too, had contract issues I'm told. Kate was long gone. I honestly believe that if Alexis had started to suck hardcore and J. August had refused to come back without more money we'd have had a season five of Cordy, Fred, Angel, Spike, and Lorne.

Which would have set up an interesting situation where vampire becomes a metaphor for traditional masculinity and humanity for femininity, with Lorne as the non-combatant and flaming demon in between, and people might have accused Joss of saying man=bad, woman=good, men have to be more like women. But my point is, two problems is bad luck, not a conspiracy.

I don't think it's all bad luck. I think the Mary Sueing of Fred is a very gendered mistake, the insistance that she's purer and better and the heart of all these gritty, compromised men is positively Victorian. But they, belatedly, fixed it -- they gave us Illyria, who has her own agenda and priorities and is anything but malleable and reactive, in her place.

They gave us two new female characters, of whom Harmony rocks when she's not being the voice of sympathy -- and that's a gendered mistake too, because that ought to have been Lorne, but that was also one episode and not necessarily to be taken as the position paper.

And while Eve unquestionably sucked, I really think the simpler answer is that the character concept doesn't allow for strength of will. Hamilton, to me, is essentially Eve in drag, minus the simper and the ridiculous pretense of sophisticated sexiness. True, the simpering was gendered, but in much the same way that Riley fell flat in a very male way, and for much the same reason -- playing to an ostensibly het main character of the opposite sex.

As long as any liason accepts the human-tin-can-telephone act, they're frozen into passivity -- they may be scary as operatives, but they're not interesting as characters. And the chances are you're a fairly passive person to think that's a fair trade in the first place.

True, they used love to be the motivator that pushed her out of that to have a agenda of her own -- but that's also been the major motivator for Angel, Wesley, Gunn, and of course Spike in seasons past. It's often, IMO, oversimplified, but that doesn't make it sexist.

I miss the strong female character too. But then, so do the guys. On a meta level, I mostly blame chance. On an in-character level, you can see that as the team gets harder there's less room for everything that isn't hard -- less room for unaugmented humans, less room for non-combatants (and therefore many of the women), less room for curiosity and trust and jokes and compassion and hanging out. It's undeniable that it's happening, but I don't think for a second that Joss or anyone else is trying to hold that up as better. If anything, I think it's meant to be an indication of the price they're paying at best, and at worst, of the mistake they made.

Mer

Comments

[vonniek.livejournal.com]

WORD. While I occasionally had issues with gender roles in ATS-verse over the years, I never thought the ME writers had some deep-seated misogynistic streaks. Thanks for putting into words what I've been thinking but unable to articulate.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Thanks!