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Triggerhappy: Hollywood female protagonist
🕑 Added 2022-08-10 14:25:29 +0000 UTCThis cycle of “Hollywood female character™” is getting very tiring, as it repeats over and over always in the exact same way. Some movie or series appear that is fucking crap, with a female protagonist written in this crappy modern Hollywood way, pushing a lot of proselytism, and the moment people mentions how bad it is, the female protagonist is used to claim that the criticism is misogyny. Every fucking time. And the defenses are always the same and always equally stupid, completely strawmaning the arguments and ignoring what people’s complains are. No one complains that a woman is the protagonist; that’s just a retarded gaslighting the woke crowd makes. What people complain is how the character is done.
These characters are presented as better than anyone at practically anything that is relevant in the movie, often without any kind of training on it. They then have some minor inconsequential flaw (that is gonna be ignored after a few minutes anyways) that it’s there probably only so people can defend the character by claiming “she isn’t perfect” as if that minor flaw somehow outweighs and solves the issue. Sometimes that flaw is something as outlandish as “she doesn’t accept how great she is”. Like, i’m not joking, the text in the comic isn’t even hyperbole humor; there are a couple popular characters out there whose only “defect” is quite literally that they’re afraid to accept just how great they are (Looking at you Teela).
They also for some reason have to get away with any sign of femininity and act like complete assholes for no reason other than modern feminism thinks that’s “empowering”
They also have higher than usual plot armor, so they don’t even get beaten up or fail as much as the men. It’s tiring to see how the male characters are worse at everything, maybe they have one thing they’re good at and even so they struggle on it and are surpassed by the woman. Almost every movie today has a scene with a man making a comment like “i don’t wanna hurt you” just to get his ass kicked.
Which leads me to another point; the narrative surrounding this characters. Everytime one of these characters appears, the story somehow circles around some “oppression” or “sexism” plot. Every male character will be a sexist who see her as harmless because she’s a woman and gets their asses eventually kicked, and the plot will somehow be related to women. Upon watching some of these women appear you know the villain is gonna be someone who kidnaps or brainwashes women or some shit in an in-your-face attempt at allegory for what feminists think the first world is.
They’ll also be constantly saving their male partners; who will be dumb; in yet another in-your-face attempt at “revenge” for what western feminists think movies in the first world where before 2014.
It’s often this dumb ass forced plots what make people angry, not a female protagonist; but they’re a direct consequence of having the female protagonist there. You don’t need to do that kind of plots just because the protagonist is a woman. And yet most of the time that’s exactly how they go. So obviously movies with female protagonists are gonna get criticized often, because they often do these things.
Which leads me to yet another dumb argument, as is “you only make this criticism of female characters”. No motherfucker, you’re projecting what YOU are doing. People have always pointed out bad male characters (heck, anyone who follows my twitter has seen me a hundred times shit on shonen and mcu protagonists), but when we do, no one bats an eye. There’s no wave of woke people and media accusing us of “hating men” because we shit on Kirito or Batman; two of the characters most often used to represent the concept of Mary sue; you’re the one who singles out the cases of criticism to female characters, while ignoring the men.
Oh that leads me to another point, the claim that “i don’t see Gary stu used as often as Mary sue so obviously people hate women more”. Well, i wonder if that’s because Mary sue is a UNISEX term. It’s used for both men and women. Also, as we have mentioned before, there’s a decade old trend of doing most female characters like that. So, DUH you’re gonna hear Mary sue more.
And not all of these characters are Mary sues. But even when they don’t fit entirely in that category for one reason or the other, they still have the elements of the “Hollywood female protagonist™”
Another stupid argument i see is the “you chuds would criticize Ripley if Alien released today”. Which is dumb because the criticism isn’t labeled at women, it’s labeled at how women are written. Since Ripley is well written, there wouldn’t be such complain. But these people don’t understand it (or pretend they don’t understand it), because they don’t even look at the differences in writing, they just look at “women”.
This is an argument that i’ve seen recently with the release of the “Prey” movie. People saying that the MCs of Prey and Alien are the same because both “kill a monster”, so complaining about the MC of Prey is stupid and reveals we would complain at Ripley. Or they claim that because Arnold killed a predator in the first movie, it’s sexist to complain at Prey…
My brother in Christ, both “kill a monster”, but look at HOW they do it. In the original Predator’s final fight, Arnold tries to attack the Predator with a stick, and gets instantly bitch slapped so hard he can only crawl to where he has set a lethal trap and bait the predator in. In Prey, there are some traps involved but she also has a long 10n1 duel with the monsters and she outfights him. She just dodges everything he throws and cuts him all the time with superior fighting skills. At some point i wondered why they bother with the final trap when she could just best him in combat. Previously to that she also defeats like a dozen soldiers in combat with no previous explanation as to why she’s such a great melee fighter when she was supposedly a herbalist.
In the original Alien movie, Ripley just tries to avoid the monster like everyone else, and in the end defeats him by opening a door to space. She never fights the alien. Even in the second movie, when she’s been hardened by the experience, she only uses a gun to destroy eggs (wow) and then a construction mecha to push the Alien to space. She never has a 10n1 martial arts duel with the alien queen and defeats her in knightly combat.
This is such an obvious difference but these people will just throw in the superficial “they both killed a monster” and leave it at that because if you go into details their argument crumbles. And this repeats for most modern movies. The way these confrontations are done just have no comparison. The older female heroe’s battles had a sense, they were normal people overcoming odds with smarts. Now it’s just quasi perfect badass beings beating the ever living crap of the poor villains in front of them. I practically pity the villains.
Prey is, in fact, an example of all of the process i’ve mentioned. The girl is presented from the beginning as good at most things. They even have characters stating this out loud, because showing it isn’t enough and it has to be in-your-face. She also is shown as being smarter than everyone else including the war-chief. Her only defect is being “bad at hunting”, but i put that in quotes because, actually, it isn’t. We get told by characters that she is, but then you see her try and she’s agile and has good aim; just not *perfect* aim so she misses by an inch. But this minor flaw doesn’t even count because 30 minutes into the movie she throws her axe a a dozen times to a tree and magically from then onward she has perfect aim.
The plot also moves around her not being taken seriously and the men throwing sexist comments on the line of “go back to the kitchen” because as we said every “Hollywood female protagonist™” movie needs to have that subplot. She instantly identifies that a monster is on the loose due to some minor details that would lead no one to that conclusion, despite every other seasoned male warrior laughing at her and she even somehow identifies how alien tech works.
I don’t know if you liked the movie as an action movie, but it definitely had all of the tropes of the Hollywood female protagonist™, and that’s why many people are talking about how dumb her fight with the predator was. It’s not “because she’s a woman”. Obviously a woman can defeat a predator doing the same that Arnold did. It’s not because “she defeats a monster” as if Ripley didn’t do it.
It’s because the way all these movies work is completely different, some of them are horror stories of normal people having to hide from an alien or highly trained soldiers being mowed down by a superior opponent and having to use wits to barely survive. And the other is about a better-than-anyone girl with almost nothing to grow up, laughable process at doing so, and just beating the ever living crap of the monster. If the protagonist had been a guy i would have also crap on the movie, and your projection of what YOU would do doesn’t change that. Fuck i think i labeled this exact same criticism at some Avengers and Justice league movies, complete lack of tension because the MCs are just superior to the villains from the get go.
I also felt the same watching the recent “The grey man”. The protagonist is a dude who has been trained to be the elite of the elite, and yet, despite having an excuse to making him badass, he’s constantly beaten up, captured, outsmarted, the movie even makes jokes about how much shit he receives. And then you have the co-protagonist girl, who’s supposedly a minor agent and yet is constantly saving him, succeeds at everything, receives no damage, has insane plot armor (even a sniper misses her for no fucking reason), perfect crazy aim, and the movie even throws in a dialogue with the guy saying his ego is hurt because she always saves him, in which seems to be an acknowledgment from the director that he knows what he’s doing but “suck it up you fragile male egos”.
Having people not complain about a female protagonist character is a simple as….don’t do that shit. There are tons of examples of people not getting angry because the character isn’t written like that. Holy shit people love anime female characters, because they’re badass simply as characters, don’t act like idiots neither reject their womanhood. They’re simply characters. There’s so much cognitive dissonance on the people who use the “misogynist” argument but then they call you an Incel if you like anime girls. Like if you use the term Incel un-ironicaly you instantly lose the conversation, but if you do it in that context you’re just idiotic beyond salvation XD
I probably should’ve made this an article, idk i just started writing and this came out XD. I’ll get called an incel a million times because that’s the only thing these retards without an argument can do. I don’t care, it’s not me the one who’s virtue signaling to hide the skeletons in the closet
Comments
Jake Lastname
Absolutely. What gets me about this is that someone being afraid of how powerful they really are CAN make for a compelling story. That's the core of a lot of characters' internal conflicts, and it can be done well. Bruce Banner is *terrified* of what happens when he uses his powers, so he is locked in an endless mental struggle to keep The Hulk bottled up. Yoda cautions Luke against the quick, easy solutions offered by the Dark Side of the Force, because using power irresponsibly leads to becoming addicted and enslaved to that power. Gandalf and Galadriel refuse to accept the One Ring from Frodo, because they understood that having such limitless power would corrupt them: before long, that power would become a hammer, and no matter how noble their goals, every problem would start looking awfully nail-like. But that's not how Hollywood writes these stories. Their female protags don't struggle against the temptation of using their power wantonly because it would twist them: no, *their* stumbling block is that they're mostly just unaware of their power in the first place, and they're just so naturally awesome that any use of it will by definition be perfect and have basically zero risks or negative consequences. Friggin' hacks.
Dennis Bershaw
No one could have said it better. If you have seen 'Peppermint,' it is slightly better in some ways in that she is shown being trained.
Klatuk4u
Wonderful explanation! You should post it on blogs or twitter. Watch the bug eaters crawl out of the wood works to say "Muh representation! Patriarchy!" and all that crap.
sithkhan
Excellent.
