The Strong Female Character Paradox

now I'm going to start this video out seemingly way off topic and talk for a moment about professional athletes of all things but trust me when I say this will be very relevant to the topic if you had just given me a minute to explain anyway it's about something even if you're an avid sports fan who's watched I don't know maybe thousands of games in your life you may have never realized noticed or just given any real thought to despite how many times you've probably heard it talked about and it's something the late comedian George Carlin used tubes shall we say poke a little fun at and if you've never heard of him I'd only suggest looking him up if you're not easily offended and if you're both easily offended in very religious you're probably not going to like me referencing something he used to talk about here and using it as an example but hopefully you'll understand I'm only using it to try and make a point and not being malicious even though nowadays we usually just assume the worst out of people which will kind of be the point of this video anyway have you ever noticed how in professional sports athletes who win have a tendency to thank God for helping them win or give him all the glory for the victory but when they lose they always talk about their own faults and failures or blame themselves or come up with some other reason why they lost the game that doesn't involve God simply favoring the other team that day I mean have you ever in your entire life or two players say we couldn't win the game because God was on the side of the other team even though in theory if you believe God helps you win some games you'd pretty much have to come to the logical conclusion that when you lose you help the other players on the other team win but of course you can't blame God for losing that would almost kind of cast him in a negative light and you simply never do that right so you have to come up with another excuse for why you lost that completely excludes him and basically the moral of the story here if you will is that you can't or at least shouldn't only believe something when it's convenient for you or only highlight it or the parts of it that fit in with the narrative you want to tell about something that you shouldn't make up excuses for or ignore something that exists or comes along that doesn't fit with your beliefs or that maybe just flat-out contradicts them and right now there is this crazy belief that men simply do not like or cannot handle or just are rejecting based solely on gender strong female care in movies and especially when they're inserted into franchises that have been enjoyed predominantly though not exclusively by men and one of the prime examples of this that some will point to as proof is of course rey in the new Star Wars sequels and they'll say the dislike for her is only coming from misogynist man and has nothing to do with perhaps her just being a poorly realized character and these same people will then also have to ignore the fact that Leia easily one of the greatest strong female characters in the history of film also happens to be one of the most beloved and popular characters in the entire Star Wars franchise and you'd be very very hard for us to find any male fan out there who would have anything bad to say about her character outside of the her Mary Poppins incident in the last Jedi of course which had nothing to do with the character itself and it was just a silly idea and let's try and forget that ever happened anyway you simply can't acknowledge that the same male fans who disliked right also love Leia because that doesn't compute or fit with the narrative I mean how can you love one strong female character in a franchise but not another unless maybe it's not the gender of the character but something else entirely if you want to dig a little deeper into the Star Wars franchise you'll find the expanded universe now called legends is chocked full of amazing female characters that in all my years of following it I never heard one single gripe about because they were good well thought all characters in fact if you ask pretty much any fan of the old EU some of if not most of the best characters to come out of it were indeed female but again that doesn't fit with the narrative so we simply ignore it nor does the love in the Star Wars fan base for the character ahsoka tano fit if you've watched enough of my videos you've probably figured out she's one of my personal favorite characters in fact when you really stop and look at it the only female characters that seem to get any flack at all from fans were all featured in the last Jedi those of course being array roles and a whole dough it's almost as if well I don't know some fans really just didn't like that movie and those characters and I know this is where some will want to bring up all the hate kelly marie tran who of course played rose got on social media and use that as some type of proof that everyone who hates the last today is a terrible person and be condemned which is the most ridiculous thing ever because here's the thing I didn't like the last Jedi my also didn't very much care for the character of Rose but I never sent her any hate on social media nor did a vast vast majority of the other fans who didn't like the movie that's because by and large we're all pretty rational people who can separate an actor from the role that they play and we shouldn't in any way be held responsible for what a small minority of people who have something in common with us did I mean think of it this way if your next-door neighbor commits a murder is it fair for you to be arrested and convicted as well because of your close proximity to them No so then shouldn't we just place the blame for her harassment solely on those doing the harassing and not try to implicate a larger group of people because they may have some loose attachments to the perpetrators after all that kind of sounds like stereotyping to me but hey it's only bad when it doesn't fit your own personal narrative right furthermore here a newer movies like Wonder Woman and the recently released Elita battle angel not to mention older movies like aliens Terminator 2 and many others really begin to shatter this belief that men won't embrace and love strong female characters but again acknowledging that doesn't fit or line up with the narrative so we just ignore that and focus on the movies and characters that are getting quote-unquote hate because how can anyone with a preset belief about men's hatred for female characters or maybe just women in general ever hope to rectify with logic anyway then a man could love the movie aliens for example and think Ripley is one of the best characters in the history of film but then doesn't like the last Jedi and doesn't think Rey is a good character how can we possibly make that person out to be sexist unless we only focus on the evidence that fits our narrative and ignores everything else and therein lies one of the biggest problems with the world today ignoring the facts or evidence we don't like and taking things out of context to push a narrative that fits our agenda and the crazy or maybe just the sad part about it all is the more you push an agenda and base it off half-truths or just flat-out lies or misinformation the more pushback and rejection you're going to get from the side you're attacking or trying to prove wrong because they obviously don't misinformation spread about them or to be misrepresented which of course then gets used as evidence against them to affirm those initial complaints levied against them for example here if I say I don't like the character of Rey and you counter by saying it's because you're a misogynist I'm going to defend myself and stress I just don't like the character and then I have no problem with her being a woman if you then say well fans who didn't like the movie are harassing Daisy Ridley on Twitter and since you don't like the movie you must hate Daisy Ridley - well I'm going to defend myself and say no that's not the case if you then come at me again and keep insisting over and over that I must hate Rey and there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with the character or the movie itself that she was in well eventually even the calmest person is going to get tired of it and they're going to get angry and they're going to snap back and when you do that when you get angry then they use that as evidence that you've just been an angry irrational woman hater all along even though you've been provoked and don't get me wrong here are there some men out there who hate female characters or just women in general absolutely of course there are do they make up anywhere near the majority of men who didn't like Rey or the last today absolutely not most men who don't like her well most people men or women who didn't like her just didn't think she's a good character and guess what that's okay and it doesn't say anything about them as a person if they don't like Rey beyond them just not liking one character in a series of movies and the even crazier part about all of this is making enemies out of potential allies if you will because if I were president of Lucasfilm and I was in a meeting a few years back now discussing what to do with the sequel trilogy and someone in that room said to me you know what both the prequels and the original trilogy only really had one main female character those being Padme and lay out respectively and I really think we should try to get a few more female characters into the mix and maybe even make our new main character a woman you know what I probably and any other Star Wars fan out there would have nodded in agreement and said yeah that's a good idea however I would have stressed that we still have to put a good story first and we can't or shouldn't make the movie itself and or the ad campaign or anything we executives say about the fact that we're running a female lead here instead we should make it feel like her place in the story is completely organic that the decision to make our new lead female was actually a secondary one or even an afterthought one that really didn't matter because yeah of course a woman can be a powerful Jedi hello there are already other examples of them within the Canon so why would we make a big deal out of this because the thing is the more we try to put her on a pedestal the more we say the point of the trilogy is about her being a strong woman and seemingly not about the actual story the larger problem we're likely going to have with fans who wouldn't have cared about her being a female in the first place if we would have just done it without all the hype around it and if they just focused on telling a great story and not making any sort of point about her being a woman do you really think it would be a big deal right now though to be fair and completely honest here the movies themselves never really make a big deal out of ray being a female in other words there is no overt moment where ray says something that she can do it just because she's a girl the story itself is really not about her being female however the big deal made about it outside of the movies seems to have impacted what they will or won't do with the character with it the story and whether that's true or not I suppose can be debated but it's certainly the impression many people get and finally here we come to Captain Marvel which has become like the ultimate battleground movie and at the time of making this video it hasn't even come out yet and look I know it's hard for some people out there to believe this but a vast majority of men not only don't really care if strong female characters get more screen time and I don't mean that in a negative way but they actually like and embrace the idea because they love those type of characters believe it or not a lot of the time men will even gravitate towards more towards a good female character over a male one and the reason why Captain Marvel is getting so much pushback before it even comes out is because for many male fans this has been the breaking point they're tired of being told they're misogynist and that they reject and hate all female characters when there's plenty of evidence out there to the contrary that simply gets ignored people not only hate being told how to think but they also hate someone trying to tell them how they're already thinking especially when it's way off base it might not seem fair or right to you personally or how it should even be but the harder you push strong female characters or any agenda for that matter the more rejection of them you're ultimately going to get not because people are against them but because they don't want to watch movies we're pushing them feels like the point of the movie and you can say well these movies aren't for them anyway problem is these movies are in a franchise that they are already huge fans of and have been for many many years and as a company interested in making money is that really the message you want to send do you really want to tell Star Wars fans that a Star Wars movie isn't for all fans anymore that sounds like the perfect way to not only destroy your franchise but to also get the message you want to send utterly rejected well that's all I've got for this time now it's your turn to tell me what you think about all this is pushing female characters just causing more harm than good or are male fans really just women haters who can't stand strong female characters despite all the evidence to the contrary let me know what you think in the comments below and until next time thanks for watching

Channel: Thor Skywalker

Views: 706,048

Rating: 4.7805204 out of 5

Keywords: Star, wars, star wars, marvel, disney, lucasfilm, captain marvel, rey, the last jedi, kennedy, sjw, abrams, johnson, female, agenda, luke, darth vader, skywalker, feminist

Id: NbjfAQFxmio

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2019