[meta: AtLA] Gender in The Promise
Dec. 20th, 2012 05:49 pmA ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
noldo and kaberett production.
I watched Avatar: the Last Airbender for the first time in August 2011;noldo and mustela_nivalis were very encouraging, and very patient about my flailing.
At the beginning of season 2, I started writing fic for the first time in about eight years.
I got to the end and they pointed me at the Avatar: the Legend of Korra trailer, and I collapsed into a small puddle of hyperventilating squee.
So when The Promise was announced, I promptly put all of it on pre-order. Like, oh, pretty much every other fan with the finances to do so, I suspect.
And, d'you know, I was heartbroken. Sure, characters had the same names... but where's the Katara who, two minutes into the first episode of the first season of this mainstream USois kids' TV show, called a dude out for sexism and was taken seriously? Where's Toph interacting with Katara? Why is Mai relegated to ~the girlfriend~? Why is Sokka so bloody cissexist?
And that, boys and girls and everyone else, is when I got upset enough to go through the books and do a line-by-line count of who says what to whom.
By the power ofnoldo, I bring you the distressing results in the form of brightly-coloured graphics. So far I've only done counts for Books 1 & 2; Book 3 will follow on in the not-too-distant future. For these purposes, one "line" is approximately one speech bubble.
( Part 1 )
( Part 2 )
y so faily ;______________________________;
This show had such a great pattern of being incredibly feminist, and giving us actual complex developed - & developing! - female characters, who weren't defined solely by their interactions and relationships with the men of the series. Unfortunately - all my other issues with characterisation aside - as underlined by the statistics, that really, really doesn't carry across to the books.
Thoughts very welcome!
noldo and kaberett production.I watched Avatar: the Last Airbender for the first time in August 2011;
noldo and mustela_nivalis were very encouraging, and very patient about my flailing.At the beginning of season 2, I started writing fic for the first time in about eight years.
I got to the end and they pointed me at the Avatar: the Legend of Korra trailer, and I collapsed into a small puddle of hyperventilating squee.
So when The Promise was announced, I promptly put all of it on pre-order. Like, oh, pretty much every other fan with the finances to do so, I suspect.
And, d'you know, I was heartbroken. Sure, characters had the same names... but where's the Katara who, two minutes into the first episode of the first season of this mainstream USois kids' TV show, called a dude out for sexism and was taken seriously? Where's Toph interacting with Katara? Why is Mai relegated to ~the girlfriend~? Why is Sokka so bloody cissexist?
And that, boys and girls and everyone else, is when I got upset enough to go through the books and do a line-by-line count of who says what to whom.
By the power of
noldo, I bring you the distressing results in the form of brightly-coloured graphics. So far I've only done counts for Books 1 & 2; Book 3 will follow on in the not-too-distant future. For these purposes, one "line" is approximately one speech bubble.( Part 1 )
( Part 2 )
Summary
y so faily ;______________________________;
This show had such a great pattern of being incredibly feminist, and giving us actual complex developed - & developing! - female characters, who weren't defined solely by their interactions and relationships with the men of the series. Unfortunately - all my other issues with characterisation aside - as underlined by the statistics, that really, really doesn't carry across to the books.
Thoughts very welcome!