As a matter of fact, I do have a magical effing library

[mcjulie]

So, I read this thing on Tumblr about why a particular blogger over there doesn't like female characters, and she got quite self-righteous about her right to dislike them, and I started to feel all ranty, and this is the result.

Comments

[mcjulie]

Sometimes I think "badly written" is too easy of a catch phrase for people to use meaning "I didn't like it." The thing is, "I didn't like it" is taking ownership of your own reaction, while "badly written" sounds objective, while still being too vague to really mean anything. When you say "badly written," do you mean dialog? Story arc? Character concept? Motivation? Do you mean you find the character implausible? Irritating? Dull? Overly stereotyped?

I ransacked my brain for a while to try to come up with any fiction where I thought the men were well-written and the women were poorly written, and barring the mid-century narcissistic dude lit-fic, which OTHER PEOPLE BUT NOT ME think is well-written, I couldn't find anything even approaching that. Usually, if the female characters are stereotypes, the men are too. If the dialog is bad, it's bad for everyone. If the underlying concept of the female characters makes no sense, the male characters rarely make MORE sense. If the story is dumb, it's dumb.

There's a few cases where a female character is used in comic relief or something in a way that I HATEHATEHATE (second Indiana Jones movie, I'm looking at you) but that kind of egregious badness tends to make me hate the whole thing -- I don't find myself loving Indy in the same movie where I hate his female sidekick.

Edit: except I do like "shirtless Indy" but he doesn't have any dialog at all.