Creating necessary characters

First, some required reading. Before I explain my thoughts on how to fix Strong Female Character problems in fiction (not the sociological or economic forces that sustain them, but the legitimate and thorny storytelling problems that drive well-meaning storytellers so often to use Strong Female Characters), as I am about to do, you should read the following (unless you already read them after I scattered them around in this post, in which case, good job).

https://medium.com/@directordanic/the-problem-with-false-feminism-7c0bbc7252ef

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/08/18/why-strong-female-characters-are-bad-for-women/

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters

Ok, back? Good. Now, a little context: a few weeks ago, a friend posted the first two of those on Facebook, which led to a very interesting discussion in the comments. I kept thinking about the issues raised in these (and the other two, which were linked off the others), and they helped me define the issues I saw with Astrid in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, as described in the post linked above. 

Because here's the thing: the articles are right. Strong Female Characters as they currently appear all too often in media are a flawed and ultimately unhelpful way to depict gender relations. At the same time, though, Strong Female Characters arose as an attempt to solve these problems, and to replace the even more flawed roles assigned to women before this new archetype was created. And I suspect that the vast majority of content creators who include Strong Female Characters in their works are doing so out of a sincere desire to do right by women, whether for ideological or market-driven reasons, because they have been told again and again about the need to avoid the problematic tropes about women that have been floating around ever since people first started using vocal grunts to signify abstract concepts. While their efforts are not entirely successful and demonstrate a certain lack of awareness and sensitivity on their parts, it's not really fair to demonize the creators who do so, unless they work for Disney, in which case for crying out loud, they should know better by now.

I also think that the debate about gender equity in fiction is too often approached from a perspective of things NOT to do. And to be fair, there are an awful lot of things on that list. But I wonder sometimes if the problem is that we spend all our time telling creators they're doing it wrong and not enough giving suggestions on doing it right. The Bechdel test is one of the more helpful offerings; it offers a basic, easy-to-follow checklist for creators to run through to see if they're doing it right. However, even the Bechdel test doesn't give terribly specific guidance about how to go about fixing a problem once diagnosed, and lord knows it's possible to write a thoroughly sexist and unenlightened story that passes the test; Bechdel is a helpful benchmark, but I think its primary value is as a statistical evaluation of fiction as a whole rather than a litmus test for individual works. And so creators - the test was originally and remains most often applied to movies, the vast majority of which are created by men - know that they AREN'T supposed to make women wimpy and submissive and reliant on men, but actual guidance on what they SHOULD be doing is sparse. And so they make female characters unwimpy and unsubmissive and (at least at first) unreliant on men, and if they're really daring, they try to create TWO such women, but they're still approaching the female sex as a list of don'ts rather than a list of dos.

So let's see if we can fix that.

The birth of nations, or why Iraq is on it's own now

(Alternate blog post title: Good money after bad)

I've already worded out pretty hard this weekend re: How to Train Your Dragon, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know enough about this topic to hold forth indefinitely. But I've been sitting on this for a couple weeks, and I do want to say a little bit about the current resurgence of violence in Iraq and what America ought to do about it. (And say it now, before things change again)

Supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria wave al-Qaeda flags in front of the provincial government headquarters in Mosul, Iraq. (Associated Press)
(IDK if I'm actually allowed to repost that here, but sue me.)

I was never a fan of the war. I remember during the build-up, when GWB pushed and pushed for Iraq to allow UN weapons inspectors into the country, and they did, and then in one particular news article, I remember GWB describing the no-weapons-here reports coming in from the inspectors as "like the replay of a bad movie." And it was clear to me then that Bush and his crew had decided they wanted a war and that they would find a way to get one. And so it proved to be; Iraq was not an al-Qaeda ally, Iraq was not building or hiding WMDs, and our invasion made a god-awful mess of things that it took us years to painstakingly reassemble. I wasn't a huge fan of John Kerry as presidential candidate either, but I was still horrified that even after Bush started an entirely unneccessary war that already was showing signs of bogging down into insurgency, American voters not only reelected him, they gave him carte blanche in both houses of Congress. I was enthusiastic about Obama's candidacy in 2008 for a number of reasons, but chief among them was that he was not Bush and seemed committed to reversing some of the most harmful things Bush was doing. His record there has been mixed, which is partly his fault and partly that of the Congresses with which we have partnered him, but he did get us out of Iraq.

And that was a relief. Exiting with something approaching dignity did not erase the shame I felt on behalf of my country, but at least it was behind us. And then, apparently just like the entire rest of the country, I moved it into my mental outbox and lost all interest, succumbing to a not-unreasonable case of Iraq fatigue. Sure, I saw occasional news headlines about suicide bombings, but I rarely even bothered to click on them; suicide bombings are just a thing that happens in the middle east, I suppose is how the reasoning goes, and it no longer has anything to do with us.

And then, last month, Iraq was right back into a civil war. Oh joy.

Bonus post: Dragons pt. II

We interrupt your regularly scheduled weekly program to bring you another ginormous How to Train Your Dragon post. If that's not your groove, go ahead and move on to the next interesting thing on the interwebs.

After writing the first post, I saw the second movie again in theaters (with a family member who hadn't seen it before), and doing so and discussing it afterward helped me localize and identify several things I felt watching it the first time. You will have surmised from my previous post that I very much liked this movie, and you would be correct; in some ways, it is superior to the first. In others, however, it is not quite as strong; my overall preference at this point leans slightly toward number one. In no particular order, here are my five favorite things about HTTYD 2, and with them my five least favorite. Obviously, MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUND for both the first and second movies; proceed at your own risk.

(Edit 7/8/14: Further investigation has helped clarify some of the issues raised in complaint #3; I've amended that section accordingly)

It's the second blog post, so I use the poster for the second movie. See? I'm clever.

A consideration of Dragons

Yeah, I missed my Monday/Tuesday target update, partly because I had company over, but mostly because the post I've been working on keeps getting overtaken by events before I can publish it. I've got a 3-day weekend coming up, so hopefully I'll get it off then. In the meantime, I want to talk about dragons, and specifically, how to train them.

3D optional

I got a speeding ticket from the thought police

First, some housekeeping: in the last 6 months, I have completed courses for a digital photo and video certificate through my local tech school, which should improve employment prospects; unfortunately, it also put a moratorium on job searching while I've been stuck in place. But done now: woo! I've also been promoted to full-time as a newspaper copy editor, which is a welcome development, and spent several months as a freelance writer on Elance before gradually backing out due to coursework and increased work hours; I may return now that classes are done.

I've not been posting much, obviously, in part because for a while I took a break from following much of the news (as much as one can while working as a copy editor). I think I was a little burned out after the high-grain focus of the govt. shutdown and Healthcare.gov rollout (I think I intended to write a blog post about that; at any rate, I had a draft with no text but the title 'who left the three stooges in charge' when I opened blogger after my long hiatus), and I've also been much more engaged in following local politics; our city government in general and mayor in particular have been up to shenanigans, most of which have been exposed and reported by us. In any case, I've lately been getting back on the horse, as it were, and resuming my regular perusal of national and international news, and once again am starting to encounter thorny issues about which I need to ponder. And as always, one of the best ways to test my own thinking is to write about it and see if my thinking holds up.

There are three recent incidents that I've been pondering: the brief and tumultuous tenure of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich; the racist spurging and subsequent ostracization of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, and the homophobic tweeting and shunning of Miami Dolphins player Don Jones. The third will undoubtably be a flash in the pan, and I'll not be surprised if the Wikipedia section I linked to is gone in short order, but it was big enough news to make it onto Google, and it ties into the other two.

The questions I'm puzzling over are to what extent, if any, the consequences these three gentlemen have faced for their positions are just, and whether or if at all their rights (moral, rather than legal) have been abrogated. I'm certainly far from the only one who is connecting these dots and asking these questions, but I've yet to see anyone come up with a result I'm fully satisfied with, so let's see if I can do better.

Why beat up the middleman?

So a few days ago at work, while I was pulling state wire stories, I came across one about an administrative ruling approving Enbridge to expand a pipeline across Northern MN and into Wisconsin. This MJS story is not the exact story I was looking at, but is on the same approximate topic and will serve to give readers an idea what's going on.

These WI/MN pipelines have been at a low burn for months or years; they make regular if unspectacular appearances on the AP wire, and I'm sure they are widely ignored by all readers save those already emotionally invested in the issue of pipelines. And even those readers likely give the issue short shrift when compared with the granddaddy of all pipeline issues: Keystone XL.

Keystone XL, of course, has been all over the news for years, and is hotly opposed by environmentalists and conservationalists across the country. Here is just one of the many articles, op-eds and treatises written to express that opposition. And I will admit that for a long time, I reflexively agreed with them, on the general assumption that oil is bad, oil companies are bad, we should fight them on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets. I've been thinking more about it, a process catalyzed by the AP story I came across at work, and I'm no longer sure that's the case.

Why Google will eventually take over the world

No, this is not a paranoid conspiracy theory. This is just a thought experiment at taking current trends to their logical extremes. I quite like the results, however.

One thing I quite enjoy about watching large tech companies is their rather straightforward approach to problem solving.  Having trouble breaking into a certain industry?  Just reinvent the industry.  Is one company causing you problems with their chokehold on the market?  Invent their competition and push them out of the way.  Consider how many industries Apple has essentially invented in the last decade.  This is a very different approach from large corporations in other industries.  GM, Ford, Honda, Chrysler, all the automakers, all expanded until they could expand no more, and then settled down to compete for incrementally larger slices of the existing market share.  (Unless you're talking about Tesla, which is as much a tech company as a car company, and acts like it.)

Recently, I was discussing this with my brother in relation to the video game company Valve.  Over the last decade, through the incremental growth and development of their Steam platform, Valve has managed to snap up something like 75% of the total PC video game distribution market.  As a consumer, I will admit that I think the last time I bought a hard copy of a PC game was Halo 2; everything else I could desire is either on Steam or can be downloaded directly from the developer.  And given the choice, I'll go with Steam.  They have an extremely well-integrated social and stat-tracking front-end, and more to the point, they have a ridiculous economic engine in the form of TF2 Hats, Dota 2 cosmetic items, trading cards, and all the other games that provide market items to feed the growing Steam economy.