annoyedI got half of what I wanted: I got air conditioning. I will be as spoiler-free as I can, but I am unhappy.
The setup of the movie is thus: four magicians, all of whom are awesome in their solo acts, are Recruited To Do Something. This isn't a spoiler; it's the premise, which leads to them teaming up and being awesome and also robbing banks and shit (all in the trailers). We have a mentalist, a classic slight-of-hand trickster, an escape artist, and a pickpocket/misdirectionist. As they start to do their shit, they are pursued by an FBI agent, an Interpol agent, a professional debunker, and a dude who got robbed.
Of the characters listed above, two are female. They never speak to each other. No, never. No, not even then. There are two secondary female characters, who also never speak to each other (one is there purely to be a pretty status symbol). The female magician is the only one who never gets an awesome moment where her field of magic, her specialization is both key to the plan and saves the day. Literally the first thing one of the other magicians says to her is "you're pretty."
YOU'RE PRETTY.
Now here's the thing: while I disagree that some roles are particularly "gendered," I can accept that right now, in our current media climate, you will want at least 75% of your romances to be between characters of opposite genders. I don't like it, but I will roll with it. And that being said, there was not a single fucking character in this movie who needed to be male. Make the smug team leader a girl, and make the ex-girlfriend an ex-boyfriend! Make the action character a girl (I basically spent every moment one of the magicians was on screen wishing he would turn into Beth Reisgraf). Make more than one important member of your team a fucking female.
And we now stand, again, at the edge of one of my biggest complaints about media today: a team with three men and one women wasn't seen as imbalanced, but the opposite team would have been. It's very possible that even a two-and-two team would have been seen as dominated by women. I am not calling for gender equality in every movie. I saw The Fast and the Furious 6 earlier this month; it was male-dominated, and it was fantastic. Not without its issues—what is?—but well-balanced, casting-wise, with multiple interesting, nuanced female characters who were allowed to interact.
When I go on these "why was so-and-so a guy" rants, someone always says "would you have this complaint if the cast were exactly gender reversed?", and I always say no. I still say no. Because there are so many male-dominated action movies and caper flicks and summer blockbusters that adding a few female-dominated examples would not be "reverse discrimination," it would be balancing the backlog. What I really want is gender neutrality. I want a team of two girls and two guys robbing banks with slight-of-hand and being awesome, rather than another movie that reduces me to a prize or a non-entity.
It's exhausting being this unhappy all the time.
The media won't let me stop.
June 9 2013, 12:23:45 UTC 4 years ago
I (and a few other people--gratifyingly enough, all male gamers, showing that the stereotype that all male gamers are dudebros who want women in the kitchen pouring the mountain dew is false) argued him down by getting him to really get that this game, in and of itself, taken apart, is a design choice, but you can't just take it like that because it's not, it's representative of what gets made and marketed and promoted. It's not "an option among a wide palette of options", it's an extreme form of the only functional option there is. I can't just say "I don't want to play a game that's character design and gameplay is aimed at the fantasies of a fourteen year old boy with more imagination than awareness of functional human body proportion, I want to play a game that's character design and gameplay is aimed at the fantasies of a *fourteen year old girl*."
I can't say this, because it doesn't exist*.
And if they tried to make it, it would fail, and it would fail because it would be designed by a group of adult men who haven't given any significant thought to the matter and don't think they need to because what girls want are pretty boys and sparkly dresses and ponies. Or, age them up a few years, babies and a clean house and to have a greener lawn and a better pool party than their snooty rival and how do you even make a game about that that isn't the Sims? And I gotta say, when I was fourteen? If I was daydreaming something realistic I wanted to go to college, and then go to some more advanced schooling thing, and then I wanted a real career job I didn't absolutely hate, and then I wanted a certain level of material stability, and then I wanted a cat, and then I wanted a boy, pretty much in that order. If I was daydreaming not so realistically I wanted a giant stompy flying robot which I would then use to save known space.
I don't think I was a freakishly weird fourteen year old girl.
I can't even say I'd want to play the absolute inverse of Dragon's Crown (the game that set off this whole discussion). I'm not fourteen anymore. But you can't say "you can go watch something that doesn't do that" or "you can go play the opposite after all" when that doesn't get made, and won't get made, and if it freakishly does get made, it won't get a design or marketing budget worth a damn, and if it gets made and it freakishly succeeds despite all that, they'll make a sequel to appeal to a 'wider audience' and suddenly everything that made it appealing gets ripped out so the boys will like it even more.
--
*During the whole Dragon Crown kerfuffle a lot of people brought up Beyond Good and Evil as proof that said game does exist. Okay fine. Yes. At fourteen I'd have LOVED Beyond Good and Evil. It's got a great female protagonist. She's not a sexy sexy kitten, she's a genuinely compelling and interesting person whose plot doesn't revolve around "you took my boyfriend" or something. I like it as an adult plenty too. It's a great game. It's ONE GAME. ONE. UNO!!!!! The existence of "token one thing" doesn't negate a problem, all solved, we can go home now, sexism over. It was also a commercial failure and is one of the games people point to when they go "this is why we can't put a female protagonist who isn't a Sexy Sexy Kitten in a game: nobody will buy it" so it strikes me as crazy unfair to also point to it as an example of Why Games Aren't Sexist.
June 9 2013, 15:42:54 UTC 4 years ago
http://telebunny.net/talkingtime/showth
Unfortunately, due to a massive influx of spam bots the forum is currently only visible to registered members. But we're a friendly and intelligent group with large female and LGBT presence and a higher than normal human-to-asshat ratio. I don't believe in "safe spaces" but as locations on the internet go, it's a good place to hang your hat.
July 29 2013, 15:39:42 UTC 3 years ago
<3