Why do males complain about female-led stories or too many female characters when the majority are still dominated by males?

Because the majority of dudes complaining are incel man babies who need to feel like they are the focus of society. If its not exactly how they like it its not right. Its time we start shouting down on them loudly.

An interesting counter point to this.

Kids movies, I'm a dad, I only have boys. Trying to find new movies that have good male parts is challenging. There are plenty of "girl empowerment" movies, but ones with good role models for boys are few and far between.

Everything is based around violence. Like really, is that all boys are good for?

I don't accept the premise of the question. People don't complain about female led movies, as long as those movies are well written. What people complain about (and this should include people looking for increased female representation) is projects that prioritise having female leads over having good writing.

Take the trend of gender swapped existing male characters into female ones. If, as a writer, you're prepared to follow through on that concept and explore how it changes the story, then it can be interesting. A chance to experiment with the differences in motivation between genders and how obstacles can be navigated in different ways.

If you're just going to swap "he" for "she" in the script and call it a day... Well that's boring and doesn't deserve anyone's time. It's not interesting or clever. In fact it's often bad take. You can end up with a woman on screen showing that to be a hero they have to display hyper-masculine traits. How is that a good female role model?

Once female speaking time reaches 30% or more, males believe that the females are dominating the speaking time.

Female encroachment on what has traditionally been considered male spaces is not taken well. Female empowerment is considered taking from deserving males.

Essentially the general male population don't like females, and only tolerate them as a subservient subclass who should be seen and not heard.

EDIT: This should probably annoy you a little too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2qCjL6-n4

And it may also explain why people complain that there should only ever be one female character - it minimises the chances of males having to watch two females interact, because that would be excluding the male experience and they couldn't possibly relate to two females interacting.

EDIT2: comments in that video do claim there are more scenes... whether or not that really adds much is up to you.

imo

Main Points

1. most people (including most men) do not actually give a fuck.

2. a tiny insignificant group mumbling in a dark corner probably do care, but noone should give a shit or listen to them.

3. instead their voice is amplified in social/legacy media as a typical divide and conquer tactic (men vs women is 'powerful' as its half the planet vs the other half).

4. unoriginal drones parrot those amplifications because they'll get angry about whatever their screens tell them to this week.

5. society has leaned male-dominant for too long, so genuine efforts to be fair are perceived by some idiots (see #2,#4) as "unfair".

6. corporations don't actually give a shit about equality, so their maliciously half-arsed pretense at fairness rings hollow, adding more fuel to the flames.

Bonus

If you want to know more about this problem in general, see the Bechdel test, once you see it, you can't unsee it everywhere you go:

The test asks whether a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man.

Oh, it's pretty simple, really.

Had a friend who I realized would always complain about women in his movies, shows, video games, and whatever.

Turns out: he just hated women. Oh, he loved looking at "attractive" women and fucking women, mind you. But he just hated women. He didn't even really grasp it and would deny it every time I to brought it up.

If a woman isn't "hot" and/or willing to fuck them, the woman has no value. Anything they say or do also has no value if they're not providing some kind of sexual stimulation for a man.

That's why.

Who complained about the female led movie Alien (93% audience rating on rotten tomatoes)?

I think the issue is that the movies aren't written well. Rey in the third trilogy never saw a challenge she couldn't master on the first attempt. A story about a character born perfect and never faltering isn't fun

“Men who feel inferior to other men are always anxious to establish their superiority over women.”

Makes me think of this quote from Mary Wollstonecraft

Because when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Bad writing is to blame for most of the criticism I think. They are just point scoring if they push a female lead because it’s a female lead. Shitty male leads are pushed constantly but the criticism of them is often ignored because the pedestal is often lower. I couldn’t give a fuck about anything Kevin hart or Dwayne Johnson is in for instance, same with plenty of other badly written male characters. Well written characters do more for films/tv than any shoehorning ever could.

Sexism

There are a lot of female lead movies / tv shows, but on the internet there are also a lot of toxic, misogynistic little bastards. I think you're waking up a bit to the media you consume.

Black swan, alien, death becomes her, million dollar baby, thelma and louise, ghostbusters afterlife, crazy ex girlfriend, orange is the new black, schitts creek (50/50) Buffy, dead to me, xena, just off the top of my head. All massive hits, all majority / equal female presences.

That said, there are screechers and the whiners all over the internet..and they're dipshits being amplified beyond what they should.

Using males to mean men is as weird as men who says females when they mean women.

Don't overthink it.
It's because they're pussies.

I don't think there's a significant amount of people that complain about women led movies. Certainly not enough to just say "men" as a group.

Probably it's just a low quality ragebait post. Because I also don't think that there's a significant amount of people that believe that "men" don't like female led movies, first example that comes to mind is Kill Bill, most if not al men I know love that movie.

Edit: Funnily enough, I've been thinking and I don't think Kill Bill would pass a reversed Bechdel test: "two man talking to each other and the subject is not a woman". As there are little conversations between two man in the movie and probably most of them refer to the protagonist. Still a widely loved movie.

Because when the norm to these people is media that exclusively panders to them, even one single piece of media that doesn't represent them is a zero-to-100 change. Going from even 0 to 1 piece of inclusive media is startling, new, and scary to them, because they're simply not used to it.

It's the root of the entire conservative mentality (which is why you'll primarily see conservative men talking about this) since all conservatism is based in a desire for things to remain the same. Change is just scary to these people, no matter how benign the change may be.

You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.

Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had university students read the scripts (with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers’ names, gendered pronouns swapped for neutral pronouns, etc) and try to intuit the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the roles in the script. So if one role was filling a more traditionally feminine or masculine role, had more fem/masc speech patterns, etc, this part of the study was designed to check for that.

Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long they believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.

Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking 25-30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the script (literally) and had the actors play the opposite roles. So the female actor was now playing the “male” (determined by the earlier script reads) part of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination... But it’s not the entire reason.

It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.

Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.

Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that's just about people living live in an imaginary situation, so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren't white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males ones, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.

(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)

This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of "suspension of disbelief" going on.

If you want a neutral metaphor, it's like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that's there just feels natural.

Why do males complain about female-led stories

They don't? Or are you taking 4chan and Twitter as representative of the whole videogame audience?

It's because they're used to male perspective being the default focal lense for all media they consume. Male gaze is more about perspective than it is about aesthetics, something that has seemingly failed to translate into current online discourse.

In essence, all media in a genre they deem belongs to them must see them as their primary audience and must reinforce the perspective they feel is theirs. It's a kind of patriarchal social egocentrism. Women can exist in those pieces of media, but they have to be defined in relation to a male perspective. This can be a male character within the same work, or it can even be the audience itself by presuming the audience is male.

It's been so pervasive throughout media over the years that they think of this as being "just how media is". When media deviates in really any way that media becomes the aberration of the norm. It can be as simple as one of the female characters having a side plot about her that doesn't involve any of the men, or a female character who isn't sexually appealing to what the current male psyche desires. The media in question becomes inherently an act of political activism. A transgression.

It's notable that media from genres deemed not "belonging to the male perspective" is not judged the same way. Men do not become outraged at chick flicks or romcoms or romance novels. They don't become outraged at drama TV shows made for women about women. Because those things are socially permitted to exist outside of men's perspectives. It's usually seen as unique when a man enjoys media that has a female perspective. It's assumed that he won't. This essentially means that female perspectives in genres they do see as belonging to them comes across as an explicit attack on them. They avoid the female perspective as much as possible, they denigrate it and demean/belittle it constantly. They do not want to be forced to see the female perspective and will actively resist it.

There's lots of examples that go beyond this. Lots of media over the past hundred years has broken the rules and been lauded instead of denigrated. But we live in a time where an organized effort exists specifically to promote patriarchal thinking among men and those efforts mean that more scrutiny is being applied to this than ever before. There are entire content engines driving constantly to produce as much patriarchal outrage content as possible, all the time. And it works.

These problems existed long, long before the modern far-right movement started. It's partly why it works so well. This male egotism in media existed before, and less resistance to it also used to exist. That change in social atmosphere means that men can be manipulated into further and further misogynistic beliefs. All it takes is dogwhistles and a loud, angry, entitled male gamer, and you can radicalize thousands of people into misogyny. And they will repeat that cycle with more or less any boy or man they know.

To make a long story short, anxiety about their perspective not being the default in their favorite genres of media presents a great opportunity to turn young men into fascists. The far right has capitalized on this, and that's why you see so much outrage about it online. It's also likely that algorithms have picked up on you being male and will probably show you more of this exact type of outrage content.

A lot of it comes down to genre, target audience, and writer's personal experience. Even MC and DC are characters written decades ago. Batman is basically from the 1930s/40s.

Compare that to last decade's best selling YA novels. Hunger Games was constructed to be very balanced from the start including a female main lead, same for Percy Jackson.

My hot take is that most of these instances are actually fine as is because Hollywood in general sucks total ass at writing new characters into existing franchises, especially for the exact purpose of introducing diversity without any depth.

There's literally a 3+ hour series on youtube of how bad the new star wars trilogy is, and a solid third of that rant is about how poorly written the female lead is.

The issue here is that having an equal or majority female (or any other metric) set of characters wouldn't automatically make your story or writing better. You have to develop each character just like the rest, otherwise you end up with inserts that have no purpose other than to equal out a fraction.

Whether that is due to the writers being able to create male characters easier, or just a perceived audience target, you'd much rather have a well written character than a soulless one.

And that is likely not even correlated with male vs female writers. So much so that some critics even believe female writers are better at writing male characters than male writers, which is funny to think about. Ex: Harry Potter is still a 2:1 ratio.

Again though, there are plenty of good examples (mostly books) with very successful stories with equal or majority female characters.

If it makes you feel any better, this argument is old as hell lol. You can find ye olde forum posts discussing the exact same things mentioned in this entire thread from as far back as early 2000s, with plenty of in text examples from books and screenplay.

The general concencus though, is that if the characters are good, the plot is good, and the writing is good, no one really cares about the number because you're absorbed into the story. Your attachment to the story is a direct reflection of your own personal identity. If you notice the lack of X whatever while reading/watching and it breaks your immersion, then it's probably a viable critique of the writing. If it's something you notice after outside the story, then it might not matter as much as you think.

I actually have a person in my life complain about this shit with the last Bond movie (I havent watched it, i just heard complaining). Oh and Into the Spiderverse, he disliked spiderman being non-white - even though Peter Parker is in that fucking film. He also uses the phrase woke all the time.

I really don't value his opinions on these sorts of issues and neither should anyone. He's got so little in his life and these stories are a powerful escape from the shit he isn't dealing with. I won't go into it, not my circus etc.

Basically, he likes to imagine himself as Luke Skywalker and he can't imagine himself as Rey so she's woke and bad. It's a boring way of consuming media and he's an idiot. He says there's an agenda but can self identify the agenda is maybe letting the women and coloured people be on screen sometimes. However, they do not look like him so they are bad and the agenda is bad.

They're not worth listening to.

people who are socially functional do not actually complain about this. the internet does not represent humanity

The imbalance in numbers isn't just in movies. Think about the judiciary, legislators, business leaders... It's everywhere. In my own career I was the first woman to hold a senior position with one of my employers. Crazy. Achieving even what we have has been uphill all the way. I'm glad you've woken up to this - maybe you can keep spreading the word!

How do I feel about it? Really fucking exhausted. It's not just the movies, it's my everyday life. Being patronised, talked over, ignored, belittled... Ugh. A lot of men seem to outright despise women. On the bright side, most of this behaviour comes from men of my own generation (I'm old). Young men in general seem much less arrogant, more respectful of women. My sister suggested this is because we remind them of their grannies, lol, but they speak well about women their own age too, and regard them as equals. (Apart from this one young bloke who talked about "women and other minorities", sigh.)

A while ago, I read a sociology or social psychology study about children and how they were given attention by their teacher at school. The sample was like a bunch of 9yo, 50% girls, 50% boys.

It showed that when the attention given was like 30% for girls, 70% for boys, boys would feel the girls were given unfairly high and constant attention.

The way they're educated by their parents and, more potently maybe, society as a whole.

Welcome to feminist media analysis. It's an existing academic field and you can find books and YouTube videos on it (and it can go pretty deep into related topics).

One of my favorite examples was when the creators of Avatar the Last Airbender were deciding to create their sequel about the next avatar they decided to make their protagonist a woman and executives at nickelodeon complained that boys wouldn't be able to relate to a female protagonist.

The explanation I've largely heard that makes sense to me is that women are taught women are generally expected to learn to empathathize with male protagonists whereas the inverse is much more optional. You have plenty of men who do get into wonder woman and she ra and korra, my childhood best friends are among them, but you also get a lot of men who don't in a way where I can't think of an inverse that I've seen

In a word: Insecurity.

A couple of month ago I was volunteering in my youth centre. We always have the radio on. On air was an interview of a female author writing about a woman and her struggles as a mom and wife, falling for another man. The male interviewer had the audacity to ask if there are any themes in the book which could interest him as a male reader (imagine a very condescending tone).

Reducing “female” themes to lesser themes is so annoying, hurtful and stupid.

There's a saying, something like "When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression." It's the same with white folks who feel like it's a big deal when there's more than a token POC in something. It must be DEI, right?

I'm a straight, white, middle class male, but I'm fully aware that my life experience is much different from so many other peoples'. And I've never understood why some people feel like it takes away from them when someone else gets something, like the straight folks who feel like it takes away from straight marriage if gay folks can marry.

People are weird.

As also a man, I don't know any person in real life that complain about women in movies.

I only see it online in spaces that I avoid because those places are generally speaking transphobic misogynistic echo chambers. I would argue those places are also misandristic, by creating a place were you have to follow the doctrine, but it is very different to the active hatred towards women.

So I think the answer is "insecure hateful men will hate on anything that they were told is their enemy."

I have explored misandristic spaces online as well. And unsurprisingly, you see the same general behavior. So I really think generally it is true that:

People like to have an enemy and they like to be told who is that enemy and then they mindlessly hate even to their disadvantage and beyond. Once the social cost has to be paid, they feel validated and jump deeper into the abyss.

And where is that hatred coming from? Gamer gate, which made feminist hating popular, which made hating "the left" popular, which made anything anti-"woke" popular. As the source is based in a profession focussed on maximizing engagement, the need to generate "new" "shocking" Events was big. Therefore any gay character was a scandal and obviously with the questionable attempt to seem humane of e.g. Disney, aka adding diversity, these "new" "shocking" events were any kind of diversity. (Sidenote: diversity yay!!! Corporate diversity program just tend to be rather questionable) As the degenerate hate mob had its target to mindlessly hate, they looked for any excuse to hate anything "woke"™©® and "strong female characters" have to had been a feminist propaganda Tool and not a normal character type in movies for at least a couple decades, so they mindlessly hate that now. I would love to say "as they do anything for a treat of their master" but there is no treat, there is just the self-induced pain of hatred.

And why gamer gate? I guess right-wing Propaganda worked on a group of people who were still afraid/annoyed to be the ones to blame for e.g. violence. remember the whole "video games make you a school shooter" nonsense?

I can't speak for anyone else. But for me personally. I don't mind if they have a female or male lead. What I care about is if the story and characters are believable. Many times it's like they just said well here we are going to have a female lead just because. Yet when you look at the story and at the character it doesn't make sense.

Ex :

A strong female lead who is supposed to be commanding people and yet when she gives commands it just comes across as bitchy not assertive. And when you look at the story the character wouldn't have the training to be able to know even what to do.

It's like the director and writers just had to put a female on the screen.

The above example is just an example not meant to point at a specific movie or show.

A few of movies where they did it right.

The women in the movie Red. That was excellent writing and acting. The original Alien movie was awesome. Oh yeah and Mr and Mrs Smith kicked ass Angelina was awesome in that movie

To many current movies just feel like a board room full of people with an agenda of let's make a movie with a female lead without asking if the scenario makes sense.

This is just my opinion as I can't speak for others.

Insecurity. "Males" is a pretty wide brush in this case

I don't know if it's because i'm not a native speaker, but i consider people who use "male" and especially "female" instead of "men" or "women" very very weird at best.

Because they are assholes.

Because they are so privileged they REALLY believe that they should see themselves in all stories.

Because they were taught from a young age that empathy is not manly.

Because, at the end of the day they were failed by their parents and society as a whole.

Men that are scared of women leads are pussies

I've always thought it was absolutely insane that the kids show paw patrol has 6 dogs with just ONE girl dog, along with the human lead being a boy.

Me, a male reading mostly manhwa of the romance fantasy genre where 99% of it have female protagonists: yeah, this is not talking about me. This kind of discussions are more about creating conflict rather than understanding. If people have time to start fights about the sex of the characters they have no interest in the story itself. Statistics on who is drawn more are kinda useless...

because many people are uncomfortable with change and having women suddenly appearing more frequently thatn their use to upsets them. You'll find this fear of the unknown a very common source of much stupidity.

You're not over reacting. It is that fucked up. welcome to the insanity.

I think you're reading too much into intent here. The only reasoning that goes into these decisions is target audience. Who will buy what you are producing? When most of the comics that you mentioned were written, the perception was very much that their readers would be boys.

If there's anything to be mad about, it's that focus testing and demographic targeting makes for shit entertainment. It means companies are trying to make something that sells instead of trying to tell a story.

Just pure fragility. You’d think at least a film from a different perspective might be interesting, but no - can’t even deal.

I do not have a problem with a female lead in a show. One thing that may be overlooked her is when they make a movie with a female lead and make a bad movie.

My wife watches a lot of spy, military action type movies. A lot of the time, the stories are poorly written and cheesy when they put a female lead in the show.

One example of this was a movie where the girls dad who died was CIA. His daughter somehow ends up involved in some CIA thing and is able to survive the whole thing even though she has no formal training. So, while this issue occurs with male leads, there are fewer movies like this with female leads so it may look like there is a higher percentage of movies with female leads that people do not like.

Look at the movies with female leads that are great, (Almost anything with Michelle Yeoh), Star Trek Discovery, Star Trek Lower Decks, hidden figures, Alien, Zero Dark Thirty. I am sure there are more that I can't think of.

I think that the female lead may get blamed for a bad movie, or people just don't like bad movies and it is assumed it is because it is a female lead.

Patriarchy.

Privilege and with it an overinflated sense of entitlement, which result in the most fragile of egos (E: see downvote ration lmao).

That's at best.

At worst, and on top of the above, is conscious and deliberate misogyny and the unwillingness to give the privileges up.

This is the teeny-tiniest tip of the iceberg, but it sounds like you are willing to challenge your views and perceptions, so jump in, it (E: patriarchy, misogyny, feminism, intersectionality, and on and on..) is a terrifying, but also extremely well documented rabbit hole, just start looking..

I didn't complain.

The core complaint is for femwashed stories, where the male lead has been replaced by a woman.

It's very similar to Hollywood movies taking movies from Japan or China and then turning the Asian lead to a Euro-American.

The level of hatred for this type of content is very strong as it feels like a farce or fraudelent, like someone is trying to sell you a fake designer brand item. Everything that made the item great is absent in the fake one.

On top of that, there's a clear fascist takeover in the US from the rainbow liberal, evangelical and social capitalists. Fascists have weird superiority and inferiority complexes including towards women. But don't worry, Chinese movies will become popular soon, so both sides of the US political aisle will have to adjust.

First, you’re generalizing males. It comes off as you asking this question rhetorically and in bad faith.

Second, you do realize that movies are for entertainment purposes, right? How many non-activists do you know who watch movies with the mindset of caring which gender is dominating in lead roles or whatever?

I’m a male and I prefer to keep politics out of my escapism, thank you very much.

I could say there are plenty of movies I enjoy that have female lead roles. I could say that there are also movies with female lead roles that I didn’t enjoy. But in the end, would you even care? It’s clear with your post that you’re not really asking anything and just wanted to make a political rant.

Edit: It was fun watching the doots on my comment go up and down throughout the day before finally settling in the negatives. Internet whiplash let’s go. Didn’t realize it would be so controversial. lol

Depends on show type you choose. If you watch a series like Deep Water or DeadLoch its all woman driven stories, and minor roles for men. If you pick a superhero genre that has been male dominated forever, it is going to be mostly men still.

Maybe it's not being female led that's the problem, it's Mary Sue's that I think people are tired of.

Because -isms exist in a binary world (sexism, racism, etc...)

Any increase in visibility for whatever minority they happen to hate, is a decrease in visibility for them (in their feeble transactional little minds) and it drives them bonkers.

Insecurity.

Inherent sexism in society to control people into doing what the dominant majority of society wants (which got there by force and enslaving and manipulation of the "lesser" people)

Your comic book examples with one woman on a team of mostly men are probably due to the audience for conic books having been almost exclusively boys. I suspect the one woman was indicative of the market share going to girls

I wonder if umbrella academy's gender balance was due to the power archetypes being perceived as gendered

I’ve never met anyone who acted like this, nor even seen someone on the internet complaining about it, besides reviews in movie sections. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, it’s just I believe that you’re probably seeing a vanishingly small portion of society do this.

I have no idea, but I think this video is on to something.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CGL7_CO3YDg

Because men are babies.

Nobody notices things that conform to their expectations—but when anything violates their expectations, they assume it’s a deliberate message. (Even if it’s fiction violating their genre expectations in the direction of reality.)

And if they can’t figure out what the message is supposed to be, they let other people tell them. And if people tell them different things, they go with the one that makes them feel the strongest reaction.

I'll preface with I'll agree that for the most part, it's men being whiny about "woke" and other nonsense. They're assholes. I really don't have anything to add to that front.

So I'll add a perspective of the small other crowd in situations friends of mine and I have found ourselves in, that having criticisms of women led stories gets us lumped in with the above group when the same criticism of a male led roles/stories are fine and dandy. And we're not exactly a group that hates women led stories despite our love of scifi action. Sarah Conner, Ripley, Jesse Faden if anyone has played the game Control.

Some of it I get as a female led cast movie/show will get hate before the first previews even launch so legitimate discussions can happen. However, I can go on absolute rants about how terrible movies can be: Tom Cruise remaking The Mummy was, attempting to do Hellboy without Ron Perlman and Guillermo Del Toro, whatever the Conan the Barbarian attempt Jason Mamoa had, and no one bats an eye. (Lets be honest, those were all terrible movies) However I've been called a misogynist when I talk about in the list with those above ones how absolutely terrible the all women cast remake of Ghostbusters was. Again, I knew there was a lot of undue hate, but if I ever discuss it, I've had to outright asterisk it every time that none of my complaints were to the actresses themselves but the movie from worldbuilding to some of the concept of it being made itself (As in: It's Ghostbusters, an IP that's been around for decades, did we need to dedicate screentime to remaking it from scratch? A complaint I'll have at every reboot of a popular IP.)

And there's legitimacy to the why. As you point out, there's very few women led movies/stories which (I assume) means that with some representation there's the want to nicer to it, especially as there are people who are outright assholes about it. Vs Another White Guy Does Things is easy to deride a movie because... speaking as a white guy, I'm going to be there mocking that movie too. But that's why I put the "(I assume)" earlier, because it's not like I'm lacking in some form of representation, so it's easy to mock it.

I will wrap up this though with again, it's a small extra outside perspective for a different viewpoint. If people just complain "There are too many women in x", no, they've stopped having legitimate complaints and are just being jackasses.

Because men run entertainment, we can make sure men are making it. Because men are making it, their Mary sue stories are the ones that get released.

That’s how it happens, in my opinion, but I don’t get how more men aren’t completely fucking bored looking at it and listening to it! Seriously, as a middle aged, acerbic, bearded white man, I’m sick of seeing characters that only I can relate to. It’s not a compelling character anymore. I want different characters with different stories!

Because some boys are little bitches.

I think its just that people don't like shoe horned female empowerment, idk what percentage of female lead content is that but it does detract a lot from the experience.

I don't really talk to anybody

I complain about popularity of fantasy romance vis a vis non-fantasy romance, and that now most published (or advertised) fantasy books are fantasy romance.

That genre is typically written for women, with female lead and is heavy in certain tropes.

That genre isn't for me.

Am I a person that you're ranting about OP? If not, could you point me to an article or opinion piece that you're talking about, so I can read it and come back here?

Scene:

There's a huge monster attacking the city, it blasts a building and it's about to crash on a group of people. A female superhero flies in and starts rescuing people and placing them out of harms way. Quickly she gets to the incel who stops her with a hand gesture and says "I'm okay I'll wait for the male superhero"

I mean, look at the news; there's a LARGE number of anti-DEI people out there who would say exactly what you're complaining about.

That said, Hollywood is trying Wanda and Agatha were both very diverse. She Hulk was pretty diverse, and Wednesday was pretty mixed. Even captain marvel and ms marvel tried to fill out the stands better.

Of course, it's hard to tell what's going to happen now. Will government force the hands of the show runners to reverse the trends?

Being a woman is "marked" while being a man is just the default, so anything that strays from the "default" sticks out and it seems reasonable that it requires justification. This goes in reverse in some cases, like the need to refer to someone as a "male nurse" - why do we feel we need to say this? Because the default nurse is assumed to be female.

Most of those superhero teams were originally created by comic book companies staffed almost entirely by men. The heroes created are therefore how they visualize heroes being, which mostly takes inspiration from their own experiences, and therefore creates mostly men.

I've never heard anyone complain about it unless it was a remake or different from the original story.

I'm a woman. Yeah it's bothered me my whole life. I used to be really angry about it. Now I just accept it as the status quo. In the last few paragraphs of your post you are basically describing the Smurfette Principle, Two Girls to a Team,and other tropes. Also the Bechdel test.

I heartily recommend Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 1 is rough, but it's got good gender equality.

Nowadays though, you get a lot more racial diversity on western TV than you used to. I think that's something which has improved quite a lot.

Sometimes I do get what they mean though when there are women or other minorities when coupled with bad writing. I can kind of understand why people complain about "woke" media when I see shows like Supergirl or Star Wars: The Adept. Meanwhile, - Andor, Rogue One, Alien are great and have diversity, and people don't complain about these being "woke" so much. So, I guess, shitty writing can score an own-goal.

I don't understand how the genders of the lead characters is important in any way. It's not as if the films were about the genders of the characters.

I didn't complain about females whatsoever.

I complain about complainers.

Some people see themselves as the default, and any change is abnormal or pandering. Same thing happens in video games. Anything that brings attention to the idea that they aren't the default audience is seen as a an offense. They assume these stories are an attack, an expensive way for people to say their way of doing things is wrong and therefore they are wrong, so they get defensive. In reality, it just someone else telling a story for another audience.

To them, the argument is, "why add more poc/genders if we're all the same? Are you saying something is wrong with people like me so they have to be gotten rid of? How come it's always me that's getting removed? Why am I under attack!" They see the addition as the erasure of some, like, Schrodinger's self-insert that would have been there if they didn't have to force a" woke" choice.

I don't know. I live a good female lead. Ripley, Furiosa, Marge Gunderson. There's so many, that's just the first three that come to mind. Half the time when I'm playing Fallout, it's female characters.

There are definitely bad female leads in things, too. Just like there are bad male leads. Like, Borderlands 3, basically unplayable. I never finished it. And I really want to be clear, the characters aren't bad because they are women, they are bad due to poor writing. That game had such potential, but it felt like the script was written entirely by highschoolers.

One of the ways i select a movie or series is by watching the poster. That tells me enough about whether it will be about male heroes and (maybe) female sidekicks or mothers in the kitchen. Particularly american ones have a lot of those movies. So, these i will not even try to watch anymore.

I deleted part of my post and fucked up what I was trying to say.

All YA books for a while targetted woman, boys get progression novels and litrpgs, but those didnt show up on book stores

I'm man and one of my favorite type of stories are historical stories with women who defy the gender roles of their time. Also in general historical stories from perspective of someone else than white guys. I find them empowering even though they are not about my empowerment. Also I just find the stories more interesting than watching just another historical war movie with almost all men except main characters wife at home or smth.

Although there is this "girlboss" archetype I see in movies I really hate. Kind of one that feels like a committee wrote feminist character because it sells. Well we are likely to see less of those with all the anti DEI stuff, so I guess monkey paw wish came true.

I’m male, I’ve never complained about this. I think it’s not good to generalize everyone

I think it's cool, but I also really like strong women so.......

I don't know. I'm a guy and I really enjoy the horizon games including the dialogue and character development. I don't think the interactions and dialogue would work if Aloy were a dude.

To add to this, the "default" for a three-character ensemble in circa 90s kids media was: one (white) boy, one (white) girl, one (non-white) boy, for a 1:2 gender/race and 2:1 "diversity" ratio, which made the media feel diverse (back then this was generally considered a good thing) while still making male and white the default. In other words, a win-win that still was a setback to true diversity. Examples: Wishbone TV show and Harry Potter (if you count ginger as non-white).

I have seen this kind of behavior only on the internet. Maybe I just know people who aren't stupid misogynist or then people are hiding their opinions in real life because they know that what they are thinking is wrong. There should absolutely be more females on major roles in movies, series and videogames.

so much was comics at the start I was wondering if it was more a comics thing. I know I don't like when they change the characters in most cases (green lanterns being a job makes it easy to change it up). But then it went into other genres. is this really a widespread complaint. I have just not been watching much modern stuff really so maybe Im missing the drama.

Idk I'd guess for a lot of people it's just pinning their dislike which might come from anywhere to a superficialy unfamiliar part of whatever media they are watching. The other reason is like, conservative patriarchal propaganda, trolling, bait whatever and just sorta falling into the crowd on any of these.

Also there is media written for women that likely doesn't have this problem, or at least not as much. But then again the normative position to sell to is a male one.

Now being male I never really see an issue with my media representation(because there is none at least from numbers), but also I generally complain about media not for it's cast of characters. If I complain it's usually, either because I just feel uncomfortable/bored with it for whatever reason, or because it comes of as disingenuous or lazy, both of which will get me to drop it.

Art by committee/ marketing aim doesn't feel right to me usually and casting female/progressive can sometimes happen for that reason. As in a part of the cast makeup is decided in order to bait a particular reaction to generate publicity, and conservatives being angry is still publicity.

In this case then the real issue of bad art is doubly masked by one one hand people complaining about woke cast, while on the other hand people consume slop they would've never known if not for baited conservatives complaining. While the production behind it laughs it's way to the bank.

I'm just one guy tho who hasn't really even seen all that much what do I know about art, content and the world.

My favourite kind of movie is when they take a classic movie and recycle it by making a much worse version of it, but with female characters.