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Old 2012-10-24, 15:23   Link #109
relentlessflame
 
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Join Date: Dec 2003
Age: 41
Quote:
Originally Posted by 4Tran View Post
The solution itself isn't really all that difficult: just write women as full-fledged people with their own ambitions, desires and foibles. Real people don't tend to be solely adjutants of other people, so the result should be far more enabling.
That sounds simple, but I think I'd go back to what I said earlier about this requiring the author to really think through the characters in multiple dimensions, and to re-imagine the plot presentation to converge multiple separate timelines into one narrative. Basically, I think it's trickier to do. The fact that the author did manage to do this more convincingly in his subsequent work probably shows increasing maturity and the benefit of experience.

Quote:
Originally Posted by 4Tran View Post
Something similar can easily apply to specific example of Asuna. Many of the obstacles brought up involve her directly, so simply make her more of a locus for the action. Explore how these various events affect her, and give her the power to effect change.
In truth, I think the show has actually done this to a fair degree (she got a number of rather detailed explanations of how actions affected her personally, and her actions certainly propelled the plot). But the counter-argument being offered is that it doesn't count because it was presented in the context of her relationship with the protagonist, and because the protagonist's own actions overshadowed hers (because again of the protagonist-centric nature of the story). (She is in fact stronger than most of the men in the game... just not the protagonist.)


And incidentally, I would also point out again that I don't think the real issue here in this specific case actually has much to do with gender. I don't think any of the other characters in the story, gender-notwithstanding, are treated any differently. You could probably argue that it's a story with only one character, and a whole lot of supporting characters. And that's why I have a bit of a problem construing it as a truly sexist portrayal.



Edit: Now that I think about this a bit more, I think part of the problem is also the age of the characters portrayed. If we were talking about adult characters in their 20s/30s/40s, then it's a lot easier to portray them as full of independent, ambitious, and distinct: they can have jobs, they can have past relationships, they can have a whole mess of scars from the past, and so on. There are all sorts of natural circumstances emphasizing their independence that are easy to portray without much explanation. But here we're talking about teenagers, and more specifically in this case we're talking about a teenage girl's first love. Do we expect more maturity, independence and ambition than we should expect from characters their age?

Spoiler for Accel World comparison:
So, I wonder if part of this is just wanting more maturity in the characters portrayed. It's interesting to me that a lot of the characters mentioned as models are older.
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Last edited by relentlessflame; 2012-10-24 at 15:53.
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