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

[savannahd]

I just saw that Arya picture. What. The. Fuck. It's awful. Her hair isn't even black lmao. He has a very dated art style. It's not appealing

[snarkbotanya]

The anatomy is just horrible. Her waist is only barely thicker than Barbie-sized, the lines on her neck look more like fat rolls than musculature, her lips look like some kind of pink grubs, and her breast must be connected to her arm in some way if it's being pulled left to stick out at us like that.

Still, I guess we now know why Sienna Guillory dyed her hair red for the movie.

[dinogrrl]

I've said it before, but Paolini's art smacks of someone who has become quite skilled at copying, but lacks their own understanding of anatomy and theory, and how referencing is different from copying. Which, as far as I can tell, sums up his attitude toward any creative pursuit.

[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]

THIS. All of this. Including the bit about being a chubby woman. (I'm pretty much a column, and I am fine with that.)

I think the reason she isn't described in overtly sexual terms in the book ties into Paolini's "epic" aspirations. In a lot of fantasy, sex is kind of glossed over in favor of focusing on the ZOMG AWESOME PERFECT TWU WUV. This entails a lot of waxing poetic about the woman's hair and eyes, or about how she moves so gracefully, or just about her beauty in general without much specific description. It's the dressed-up Purple Prose equivalent of drawing a girl literally bending over backwards to show off her boobs and butt at the same time; it just doesn't get noticed often because it's so disconnected from the overtly sexual aspects.

Still, it is pretty obvious that Paolini thinks of Arya in very sexual, objectifying terms. Heck, he even spelled it out in Inheritance while they're training, probably just to pay lip service to the idea of seeing women as whole people. He thinks he's so progressive, throwing that in and

[snarkbotanya]

I haven't watched Scrubs (I don't watch much TV), but that sounds like a much better relationship than anything we see in the Inheritance bricks. If I ever get married, I want it to be to someone who's nice and funny and loves cats and doesn't mind me occasionally disappearing into my nerdcave to write for double-digit numbers of hours as long as we do something together later, not someone who's just "hot."

Relationships based entirely on physical attractiveness are relationships that can't survive going into the bathroom right after one's significant other and finding out firsthand that their shit does not, in fact, smell like roses.

[anontu]

Riza Hawkeye

[snarkbotanya]

To be perfectly fair, Riza Hawkeye is much cooler than Marvel Hawkeye.