[meta: AtLA] Gender in The Promise

[kaberett]

A 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.

The Promise: Part 1

Here's the headline statistic for you:



Sixty-two per cent of spoken lines are by male characters. To which I can only say: no wonder it felt male-dominated. (By way of entertaining contrast, the paper Stereotyped Perceptions of Gender Differences in Male-Female Communication [.doc] DIVERSITY IN ON-LINE DISCUSSIONS:
A Study of Cultural and Gender Differences in Listservs [updated 22/02/2013 as better source] finds that men tend to perceive conversations as female-dominated... when women are taking up more than 30% of the "air-time".)



But It Gets Better (... well, worse): the vast majority of conversations are about - or focussing on - men. There's only one Bechdel pass: Katara and Toph saying they've missed each other. (Even that requires you to squint - Toph's statement is actually addressed to Sokka, too.)

For your delectation, we also prepared breakdowns by character (note that we included Smellerbee under "female"; we agree that Smellerbee seems to be presented as trans* in canon; at one point, Sokka uses masculine pronouns with respect to Smellerbee and Katara appears to correct him. I trust Katara more than Sokka when it comes to not misgendering trans* people.)





Note, once again, that women speak almost exclusively to men - and the majority of men's lines are... also addressed to men.

The extent to which female characters are sidelined is underscored by some actual quotations and interactions:

• Azula appears once and only once - as "Fire" in the introductory sequence.
  
• The majority of the lines Katara addresses to "Other" are her narrating the opening sequence.
  
• During the sequence overlapping with the very end of the A:tLA finale, Sokka yells at Katara for kissing Aang. Katara gets (understandably!) cross with him; an argument ensues; Aang proceeds to try to get Sokka's attention... and when he eventually succeeds, Sokka's response is to place his hand in Katara's face and say "Time out."
  
• During a fight sequence, Katara hangs back being ineffectual and motherly... until she switches out into kicking arse (with the line "STOP TRYING TO KILL MY BOYFRIEND"). Aang is, naturally, surprised by her competence.
  
• Tellingly, the majority of female characters are defined primarily by their relationships with men; Mai, in her cameo towards the end, explicitly characterises herself as Zuko's girlfriend, and Ty Lee and Suki only show up because of Mai's role as Zuko's girlfriend. (Do we even get Mai and Ty Lee interacting? No, no we do not.) Tellingly, Toph is the only person this isn't done to - but that's okay, but she's a bullying masculinised character with a school instead.

The Promise: Part 2

The good news is - matters do actually improve in part 2!

... the bad news is that it's, er, by a very slender margin:



Yep! Men only get fifty-nine per cent of the lines this time!

Again, female characters talk predominantly with men... but at least this time men spend less time talking only with men...?


I'm afraid I'm not exactly much happier about the breakdown by character, either:

• The. Fangirls. Why. Are they entirely. Fangirls. (I refer here to the Aang fan-club members... I find their being predominantly female especially creepy in the context that they end up forming the Air Acolytes - who, as we see in Korra, are not predominantly female.)
  
• Penga spent the entirety of Part 1 being portrayed as a whiny brat. This time round, she gets more lines - 55 in total! - ... of which 8 mention "shoes" and ten mention "boyfriend".
  
• Mai did stand up for herself, but, er... is kind of portrayed as irrational for so doing, and Suki for some reason thinks that she's done something wrong by telling Mai. (And, of course, we don't get to see the actual conversation between Mai and Suki - because the fallout involving An Dude is much more important...)

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!

Comments

[noldo]

Placeholder to remind myself to send you the version of the male characters' graph for Part 1 that actually has all the axis labels.

[ambyr]

Sixty-two per cent of spoken lines are by male characters.

For what it's worth, this is actually a better gender balance than in the original TV show. I did an analysis back in the spring, and it's not pretty. Fewer than half of the episodes pass the Bechdel Test, too.

[kaberett]

... *facepalm*

Interesting that it's a better gender balance on pure stats terms while being quite so misery-inducing when it comes to what's actually being said.

Thanks so much for that analysis - I had been Wanting One for a while and am DELIGHTED that it exists :-)