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women in fiction
Jun. 18th, 2012 04:10 pmThis came up in the context of that reading of Star Wars by a batch of different voice actors at Emerald City Comic Con a little while back. You can find it on YouTube. There's about eight voice actors with hugely long careers and only one of 'em is female. And the guys come across as having a range of much, much funnier characters - like the characters the one lady has had to do have been much less diverse.
This connects up to a bigger thing I've noticed with women just not showing up. For years I'd assumed that most creators were male, and usually white, and this meant that the default character in sci-fi/comics/fantasy/etc was a default based on the creator. Certainly I've caught myself drawing a batch of Caucasian types in fantasy (but that may be because it's easy to get stuck in this "generic fantasy world is medieval Europe" mindset). Theoretically, there should be more women around. There's no reason why most characters couldn't be female (half of humanity is, theoretically about half of all fictional characters are female). And you'd think that if the default reader/viewer is assumed to be male and heterosexual, they'd really like to have more women in their fiction, right?
Well... in Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud devotes a lot of space to talking about how the heros in comics are kind of generic, so that the reader can plug themselves into that role at some level. Once you get away from the main character comic characters get less generic - the old people, the guy with the big nose, the big guy, etc. I think that may be a little of what's going on here. And when you have a whole batch of comic characters intended to be a little more generic for the default assumed male white reader, you get a ridiculously homogenous team of superheros or whatever. I figure creator types would have to be pretty conscious of the diversity of their readers to consciously exploit that genericism and still come out with a more diverse cast of main characters.
Just a thought.
This connects up to a bigger thing I've noticed with women just not showing up. For years I'd assumed that most creators were male, and usually white, and this meant that the default character in sci-fi/comics/fantasy/etc was a default based on the creator. Certainly I've caught myself drawing a batch of Caucasian types in fantasy (but that may be because it's easy to get stuck in this "generic fantasy world is medieval Europe" mindset). Theoretically, there should be more women around. There's no reason why most characters couldn't be female (half of humanity is, theoretically about half of all fictional characters are female). And you'd think that if the default reader/viewer is assumed to be male and heterosexual, they'd really like to have more women in their fiction, right?
Well... in Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud devotes a lot of space to talking about how the heros in comics are kind of generic, so that the reader can plug themselves into that role at some level. Once you get away from the main character comic characters get less generic - the old people, the guy with the big nose, the big guy, etc. I think that may be a little of what's going on here. And when you have a whole batch of comic characters intended to be a little more generic for the default assumed male white reader, you get a ridiculously homogenous team of superheros or whatever. I figure creator types would have to be pretty conscious of the diversity of their readers to consciously exploit that genericism and still come out with a more diverse cast of main characters.
Just a thought.