The Decay of the Female Character

[kirinin]

I know I haven't posted in awhile; shame on me!  But there's a lot to say.

Let me start with the thing that's toughest to explain: my sudden disenchantment (pun entirely intended) with the BBC Merlin franchise.

I should say I started out adoring this show.  Colin Morgan and Bradley James are eminently slashable, and both the stars and costars know it

Comments

[ojuzu]

I kind of stopped paying attention to Merlin once it was clear that Gwen and Morgana weren't going to be focused on all that much. >.> (I almost said 'when it became clear that it wasn't going to turn into the Gwen and Morgana Show', but let's face it, that kind of thing never happens.)

Then the writers took Teyla, the only surviving female of the bunch, through the usual she-is-pregnant-capture-her-and-threaten-the-baby thing

. . . Dammit. I guess I have no reason to watch SGA now.

I feel like my demographic is being led to watch the show with the following carrot: look at this interesting woman! Isn't she fascinating? Don't you want to see more of her?

Well, guess what? Denied!

The only English-language show I can think of that doesn't follow this pattern at all is Avatar: The Last Airbender. That's . . . pretty depressing. (I don't watch a lot of English-language shows, though, so can I hope I'm wrong?)

It seems positively rude to respond to a post about women in Merlin without linking the Gwen and Morgana fic of

[kirinin]

Oh, no, please *do* watch SGA. Just omit the last season, which is twelve kinds of suck. Teyla was an awesome character there for a long while.

Legend of the Seeker fits this (with the aforementioned Kahlan). Two amazingly kickass females who, despite the male protagonist, pass the Bechdel test with flying colors, discussing battle strategies and their own friendship as well as what's going on with the titular male. Moreover, it has a character trope that is rarely ever seen in movies or television, maybe because she's a little Oedipal: the strong, sexy, *motherly* type.

How about Buffy? Xena? Those are the other two that come to mind. Pretty much anything by Whedon.

But... yeah. We're... kind of bereft of awesome women to watch...

-K

[kirinin]

BTW, I must thank you for the Gwen and Morgana fic of awesome. It really WAS, just... just so full of the best kind of crack. I was quickly off on a search for all of dollsome's fanfiction. (Pimps, pimps, to ten people who read this journal.)

;)

-K

Aye

[ext_263115]

I came across this when searching for Merlin meta on LJ -- quite an interesting post. I fully agree with the issue of female characters, but I think it extends even further than television and filters into all modes of fiction. I was thinking of all my favourite characters from novels, and I was surprised when I realised that precious few of them were female. It's disappointing and a bit baffling to me, to be honest

[kirinin]

Yeah, the issue was that they did too good a job to begin with.

We've got Morgana making these tiny, moral, important decisions throughout Series 1 & 2: Uther is a bad man, and perhaps he should be killed, but do I have the wherewithal to do it? These people are being oppressed and killed for being who they are, and I might be one of them. Do I help them? And so on, until Morgana's turn to magic is believable. The poisoning was great, even a little Shakespearean in its tragedy: look, you can see it happening, and a million little things could have stopped it but nothing does.

...but after Season 1 something terrible began happening, insidiously, to the writing.

It's almost like we're meant to believe that Uther really is a good man, and the scheming Morgana is at fault. It's unsurprising that Morgana would want people to view Uther as mad. She spends most of the series believing he's crazy, and as such it would dramatically appeal to her to force others to view him the same way via the cursed mandrake. However, it's clear