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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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This sort of reminds me of an article I read on Cracked years ago. It argued that male writers are terrified of writing a female character with meaningful flaws for fear of being accused of sexism or misogyny. So instead, they write female characters who are perfect in every way that matters. The end result is that the male characters are fully fleshed-out rounded characters (whom the audience actually likes and cares about, because they seem like real people), while the female characters are one-dimensional Mary Sues who can do no wrong (whom the audience despises, because perfect people are boring).

Furthermore, I'd say that many people want to avoid the accusations of Mary Sue, and they want to write female characters who are not perfect. So the only way they end up writing these characters is that the female character is bad or flawed, but only because she's been put down by the patriarchy and men her whole life.

Gillian Flynn was attacked for sexism for writing "Gone Girl," where the antagonist is evil in a distinctly feminine manner, and Flynn, an old school feminist, argued that true equality means being able to portray both men and women as complex evil psychopaths.

Gone Girl is amazing, both the book and the movie. It is strange that she hasn't written a novel in ten years.

Except that female writers also write female characters as one-dimensional Mary sues, because yaaas queen slay.

The dynamic I notice in media today is that there's lots of Representation, but none of the minorities being represented are allowed to have negative character traits or be unsympathetic antagonists (for the same reasons as above), so straight white male characters wind up as sinks for all the narrative negativity.