Hawkeye Initiative: Alagaësia

[snarkbotanya]

The Hawkeye Initiative, for those who may not have heard of it, is an online project where artists show exactly how messed up female superheroes' poses are by drawing them being performed by a male superhero, usually Hawkeye. If you haven't seen it before, I highly recommend checking it out; the drawings are hilarious.

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Comments

[ggsauron]

I do not understand the need for the Hawkeye Initiative, do people want to Make a point or just enjoy male versions of the drawings?

[snarkbotanya]

It's mostly to make a point, since all rules of the human body seem to go out the window where female characters in comic books are concerned just so that the artists can draw them with both their boobs and their butt facing the reader. Male characters rarely suffer such anatomical mangling. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that someone enjoyed looking at the Hawkeye'd drawings. I'm too gay to appreciate them, but I'm sure someone out there appreciates Hawkeye's unrealistically-thrust-out gluteus maximus.

[snarkbotanya]

The thing about that is that both ridiculous standards are calculated to appeal to a male audience. Women are drawn as sexual fantasies, while men are drawn as power fantasies. Both are ridiculous and unfair, but it still ends up rather worse for the ladies.

[snarkbotanya]

Now that I think on it, Inheritance plays right into the text equivalent of this way more than I initially thought. Women are described in terms of their beauty, while men tend to be described in terms of how powerful they look. Just look at the passage in the prologue to Eragon where the elves ride into the clearing: the guards are almost entirely glossed over with something about "angled features" and being "slim but strong, like a rapier" while Paolini heaps in unnecessary descriptions of their weapons and armor; Arya gets a faux-artful description of her hair and eyes and a blatant assurance of her beauty, while her sword and bow are thrown in like an afterthought (the only adjective applied to them is "long" for the bow).

[baaar]

Roran perfectly embodies toxic masculinity to me. It's like Paolini didn't understand while writing the Cycle that men in fantasy don't have to be muscle-bound warmongers to still be men.

[snarkbotanya]

Remember that scene in Inheritance where Roran demonstrates what a gentleman is by doing the laundry... even though Katrina told him not to, that she could handle it, etc. and he just brushed her off because he's The Big Strong Man in their relationship? Yeah, that scene made me gag. I doubt it was intentional (or at least I hope it wasn't), but Paolini really managed to hit on the perfect horrible mixture of toxic masculinity and faux-feminism.

[baaar]

Yeah, I definitely don't think he has intentional sexist views, but there were some weird and objectifying things throughout the Cycle. I'm curious to see how he handles writing exclusively from a female POV in the science fiction novel.

[snarkbotanya]

so stuffed with testosterone he's basically a walking testicle with massive biceps stapled on

[snarkbotanya]

I think Paolini fell out of love with the series after Eldest was critically panned. He kept working on it to make money and satisfy his fans, but his heart wasn't in it anymore, and as a result, everything went sour. Well... sourer.

[snarkbotanya]

I don't think it was deliberate. He lost enthusiasm, and thus wasn't as motivated to make them adhere to previous characterization. He was never very good at consistency anyway.