New Year's Resolution: As Wrapped Up in an Angry Emotional Womanly Rant

disappointment
/dɪsəˈpɔɪntm(ə)nt/
noun
sadness or displeasure caused by the non-fulfilment of one's hopes or expectations.

I learned an important lesson in 2019: that I'm a deeply stupid person. I am stupid because I continually let myself get invested in stories that are destined to fail their female characters, people of colour, and LGBT communities.

It's not the worse thing that can happen to a girl: I have a job I enjoy, friends I love and a comfortable place to live. I'm keeping all this in perspective. But 2019 brought into focus a very disturbing trend of how female characters are treated when they're in the hands of male writers.

It's always been there, but the ways in which the stories of women have concluded in three of our biggest franchises, all of which came to their conclusions this year, have helped me find a way to articulate it properly for the first time.

We have a very serious problem with the proliferation of three deeply ugly tropes. TV Tropes calls them Stuffed in the Fridge (women dying so a man can be sad, angry or motivated), Drop Dead Gorgeous (depictions of beautiful dead women) and Interplay of Sex and Violence, the worst of all considering it often combines the first two. They were all over some of the most iconic female characters of the decade, in some of the most popular films and shows that aired this year.

So my motto going forward into 2020 and beyond is this: male writers can't be trusted with female characters.  

Before you all rush to disagree with me, I know this is an exaggeration. There are plenty of male writers who write great female characters, and just as many women who write terrible ones (Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey come to mind). Heck, women have even been known to buy into the whole "beautiful death" nonsense, as with L.M. Montgomery's description of Ruby Gillis's death:

Mrs. Rachel Lynde said emphatically after the funeral that Ruby Gillis was the handsomest corpse she ever laid eyes on. Her loveliness, as she lay, white-clad, among the delicate flowers that Anne had placed about her, was remembered and talked of for years in Avonlea. Ruby had always been beautiful; but her beauty had been of the earth ... spirit had never shone through it, intellect had never refined it. But death had touched it and consecrated it, bringing out delicate modelings and purity of outline never seen before.

Lucy. What the fuck?

But let's not pretend that it isn't male writers who are the main distributors of these shitty tropes, and that they have the power to spread them to the widest audiences. Men constantly kill off women so their male counterparts can be sad about it. They write about men murdering the women they supposedly love, either for the women's own good or to save the world. Women are shoved into toxic relationships with abusive men because that's the only way for his redemption to be achieved. It's not any singular example of this that's the problem, it's the constant and unchanging repetition.

And so Thanos throws Gamora off a cliff. Black Widow follows soon after. Missandei got her head cut off. Daenerys got stabbed because bad genes/womanly emotions/thwarted love/the sound of bells/bitches be crazy.

Tyrion strangles Shae. Logan stabs Jean Grey. Merlin poisons Morgana. Guy murders Marian.

Xena Warrior Princess is beheaded. Buffy is nearly raped. Dana Scully is impregnated by aliens.

Abbie Mills dies. Laurel Lance is shanked. Tara and Lexa get shot. Veil is stabbed. Mako Mori dies. Padme loses the will to live.

Mystique tells Charles: “the women are always saving the men around here. You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.” Then she's impaled.

Sansa is raped, Daenerys is raped, Cersei is raped. Lisbeth Salander is raped, Beatrix Kiddo is raped, Anna from Downton Abbey is raped. 

Dead dead dead. Raped raped raped. It never fucking ends.

And then there's Rey. Kidnapped, tied to a gurney, threatened and terrorized, private thoughts ripped from her mind, thrown into a tree so hard she looses consciousness... it was a cathartic joy when she swiped a weapon from beneath the man who inflicted all this upon her and proceeded to beat the snot out of him with it, but of course it wasn't to last.

In the next movie she gets cozy with him, in what can only be a few days after she witnessed him murder his father and beat her only friend into a coma, in a scene the writer/director later bragged was the closest thing Star Wars has ever had to a sex scene. Gross dude.

It gets worse in the third film, though I can at least appreciate that after the fates of Natasha and Daenerys, Star Wars knew that its female protagonist was more worthy of a second chance at life than its male villain, and said villain does what it takes to give that to her. I can live with that.

Still, at the end of the first movie Rey grabs a lightsabre and beats up her enemy up with it.

At the end of the second she slams the door of the Millenium Falcon in his face.

At the end of the third movie she kisses him.

The diminishing returns of how Star Wars thinks teenage girls should deal with abusive shitbags is pronounced.

Rey got lucky when the universe intervened and permanently removed Kylo Ren from her life, but too many male writers seem pathologically unable to imagine a woman who exists outside his grasp of sex, death or both, and his power to inflict both upon her. They cater to their own interests, which more often than not requires strong female characters to die, be sexualized, or die while being sexualized. Remember this?

Or these?

How bout this?

The writers called this "the consummation of Guy and Marian". 
In case the subtext wasn't clear.

Even if they start out with promise, with the very best of intentions, male writers will succumb to their worst impulses eventually.

But why are they so fascinated by this all? Why does it keep happening? Vanessa Ives voices an idea in Penny Dreadful:

To be beautiful is to be almost dead, isn't it? The lassitude of the perfect woman, the languid ease, the obeisance, spirit-drained, anemic, pale as ivory and weak as a kitten. There's a brisk trade for photographs of dead women, did you know that? In certain quarters. The corpses are improved with cosmetics, then posed in postures of abject surrender and photographed. 

She is eventually shot to death by the man she loves in order to save the world from her evil and dies tragically in his arms. Of course she does.

It's inevitable. It's fucked up. It isn't changing. I'm sick of subjecting myself to it. I QUIT.

So here is my New Year's Resolution. In 2020, I'm limiting my intake of stories to those written by women, or those written by male writers I TRUST that have a female character as a clear protagonist (that's a short list of Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve and Garth Nix).

Male writers no longer get the benefit of my doubt. The onus is on THEM to prove to me that they can write female characters with depth and respect. My assumption is that they won't.

So no, I'm not going to watch The Witcher or The Mandalorian or Gatkiss/Moffat's Dracula. These shows will fail women. Sooner or later, violence and death will be inflicted on their female characters. This is a fact.

***

While we're on the subject, did the Russo Brothers grasp how truly disturbing it would be to see Gamora get murdered by her abusive father in an act he claimed was proof of his love, and for the universe itself to validate that love by giving him what he wanted in exchange for her death? Or that Natasha sacrificing herself for Clint because of the red in her ledger was nonsense since he had spent the last five years murdering people? (I promise you, this never occurred to them).

Did David Benioff and D.B. Weiss think about the implications of what they were doing with Daenerys? That she's raped at the end of her first episode and murdered at the start of her last one? That the story frames Jon as the REAL victim after he kills the women he supposedly loves? That there's a deeply nasty and barely subtextual lesson about what makes for an acceptable female monarch in pitting Daenerys (hard power, revolutionary, defiant against her abusers) against Sansa (soft power, conservative, grateful to her rapists)?

And the more you look at their treatment of Daenerys, the more stupid is becomes. What exactly made her burn down King's Landing after the battle was already won? The sound of bells? Targaryan genes? Big emotions?

In interviews they claimed it was the sight of the Red Keep, a building she had never seen before and had no emotional attachment to. And if that was the trigger then why on earth did she start burning down everything EXCEPT that specific building? It's almost funny that they never cut to her face while burning people to death, because what on earth would that look like? Was she laughing maniacally? Screaming in anger? Yawning because it all gets a bit boring after a while?

And afterwards, no one asks her the supremely obvious question: "why did you just do that?" Because there is no answer to that question beyond the fact they were writing backwards from the idea that Jon would murder the woman he loved for the greater good, and in order to keep him as "heroic" as possible, Daenerys not only had to do something evil, but also completely illogical.

It's Tyrion killing Shae all over again. They didn't want Tyrion to come across as the bad guy in this scenario, so they depicted Shae grabbing a knife in a pitiful attempt to make Tyrion strangling her feel like self-defense. (And then they never mention her again. Because you can bet your ass Dany wouldn't have made her his Hand if she'd known about this).

As with Shae, Dany’s morality and integrity is destroyed in order to protect Jon's, so that their murders feel justified and righteous. But then they went so hard with the Nazi imagery and Satanic descriptions, it became obvious even THEY weren't buying it.

And back in 2015 I honestly thought that The Force Awakens was heralding a massive change in the way blockbusters would be cast, and would do something truly special with what they'd assembled. The protagonists were a teenage girl and a black Stormtrooper, whose arcs were crystal clear: she would train to be a Jedi, and he would organize a Stormtrooper uprising. The two of them were perfectly positioned to tell a compelling story about overthrowing tyranny, breaking down conventions, and bringing faces to the iconic figures of this franchise who were never allowed to exhibit free will or individuality.

And I was so impressed with their take on evil. To repeat one of my favourite quotes by Simone Weil: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring." And yet this is precisely how they imagined Kylo Ren: initially intimidating and terrifying; he takes off his mask and is revealed to be a petulant, entitled, pathetic let-down. He threw tantrums, he whined about his parents, he was the embodiment of contemporary white male rage, as mirrored in the very fans who were railing against the existence of a teenage girl and a black Stormtrooper in "their" story.

It was so clever. I was so excited.

I was an idiot. Ultimately the moral of the story isn't "some people aren't interested in being good, and it's not your responsibility to save them" but yet another rendition of how we must all validate and feel sorry for violent privileged men who murder innocent people. (Hey Loki. How's that spin-off coming?)

It hurts, because I really thought the people behind this were smarter than that, that they actually had something intelligent to say about the world we live in and the treatment that faceless soldiers, people of colour, and young women face in comparison to grown men.

(And can I just say that even knowing FULL WELL that it's just fiction, that shipping isn't morality, and that no one has the right to harass other people for their preferences, the fact that so many women were campaigning for a teenage girl to live happily ever after with a mass murderer who physically assaulted and emotionally manipulated her for four years has been the worst fandom experience of my life. And I was in the Merlin fandom.

Our first female Star Wars protagonist, and they couldn't think of anything better than inflicting a lifetime of Kylo Ren on her, and are currently in meltdown mode because she's... surrounded by friends who love and respect her, at the start of a life that'll be filled with love and adventure and discovery? Christ, we're our own worst enemy).

***

Perhaps the worst thing when it comes to overarching stories that start with narrative promise and fascinating female characters, is how stupid you feel afterwards for ever caring about them in the first place. How could I not see all this coming? It always comes, and it's always the same.

I am so tired of being disappointed, especially when I'm baited with scenes such as Rey grabbing that lightsabre and beating Kylo with it, or Daenerys pulling a long-con with her dragons in order to free the Unsullied from slavery, or that white-hot moment in Avengers: Endgame when I honestly thought victory over Thanos was going to be handed to the women. But no, they were just breadcrumbs designed to placate and silence.

And even in the face of all this, I know I'm luckier than most. As a white woman, there are tons of options available for me, as I've barely even touched on the problems mainstream movies, shows and books have with people of colour or LGBT representation.

Like how Finn went from the sequel trilogy's male lead to a supporting character in irrelevant subplots, despite the painfully obvious potential for a Stormtrooper uprising narrative. Or how Rose Tico had less then two minutes of screentime in the last film after the huge backlash against her. Or the grotesquery of Missandei beginning and ending her story in chains.

Or how Disney's idea of gay representation is LeFou, an unnamed gay man at a grief counselling session and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it lesbian kiss.

The responsibility is mine to stop trusting mainstream entertainment, and to look elsewhere for rewarding, intelligent storytelling. As they say:

There, I've had my vent. I feel better. To exist is to survive unfair choices. 

As ever, it's up to me to take all my frustration and anger and channel it into my own writing. There's no other choice.