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labingiI just finished season 1 of Foundation, and it's inspired meta in me. Rather like with ST: Discovery season 4, Foundation left me feeling like I was watching (at least) two shows: one that was spectacularly good science fiction and one that okay-ish. I'm bursting to write a gushing fannish essay about the good show, but I'm going to make that my reward for starting out with the okay-ish, and to do that, alas, I need to address "wokeness." Because my discontents with Foundation land along its arguably "woke" female hero. Moreover, it's not just Foundation. Frustration with "woke" women heroes is a pattern for me, and that bothers me because I consider myself progressive. I want to have better representation in media. I want to see diversity celebrated. I agree we've had far too many white male heroes in our narratives. So why do my frustrations so often align with those of more conservative folks? I want to do a meander through some things I see going on, both in me and in our society.
Disclaimers: This essay ended up not really discussing men of color. There's much to say; it just ended up being a bit too much to tackle in one essay. This essay is also very much about my personal response as a viewer; others' will vary.
(Major spoilers for Discovery and Babylon 5, minor spoilers for Foundation, Star Trek: TOS, possibly others)
Yes, Racism and Sexism Are Present in Me
To begin with, my own racism and internalized misogyny are factors. I have tons of internalized misogyny. It's there, it's significant, and it's probably something I'll be stuck with for life. One upshot is that it makes me more nervous about female characters than male characters, more primed to be disappointed, more judgmental. I don't have the same degree of insight into how race skews my view. As a white woman, I have more blind spots about race, but I know that with characters of color, I tend to see the color first and learn the character later. Conversely, white characters, by default, still tend to be more "raceless" to me; I'm more likely to see the character first and analyze race later, though this is slowly changing. One consequence of this racial orientation is that when I encounter a character of color, I'm likely to think almost at once, "What are the writers trying to say about race?" whereas I may not ask this about a white character at first. Obviously, that's an added racial burden for characters of color. So do I judge female protagonists of color more harshly than white male protagonists? Yes, almost certainly. But it's not the only thing going on.
And Also Mary Sues Are Freakin' Annoying
The folks who call a lot of these female leads badly written Mary Sues are unfortunately kind of right. This isn't true of all of them, of course. Sticking with fairly recent series/movies, I like Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman. She's larger than life, but she's half goddess, after all. She's also quirky and naïve in ways that are fun and make sense. I'm also totally fine with Angela from the Watchmen TV series, who is a female black protagonist in a series centered on race. I didn't adore her, but I was decently interested in her and found her well written: she's reasonably complex and relatable. And I think my positive response to her is a data point that I'm not just subconsciously out to get all brown female heroes. Writing quality also matters.
It's no secret I tend to dislike Burnham in Discovery, though in four years, there's been a lot of variation in my feelings. What I consistently detest, however, is her Sue-ishness. One characteristics of a Mary Sue is that she warps the narrative around her. She becomes the center of attention where she shouldn't be. That's why I like Burnham better in S4. She's still front and center implausibly often, but not egregiously so. The season lets others breathe. But in many earlier appearances, you just can't get away from her specialness: she's the foster daughter of the Terran emperor, the one destined to wear the magic suit because she has another special mother; she's Spock's sister with the special relationship to Vulcan, where she learned to be a super math and science whiz, but also she's a kick hand-to-hand fighter and tactician and passionate and speechifying, and men fall madly in love with her almost overnight, and she's a great Starfleet officer but also great at being smuggler type, and every other day is a massive sacrifice or daring feat or breaking the rules, and then being rewarded for it because she's so awesome. Prior to S4, I found this exhausting and infuriating.
Though my annoyance is not as great, I do feel similarly about Rey in Star Wars. I feel bad saying so because the levels of sequel trilogy hate in the fandom are bizarre, yet there is a critique to be made. I'll sum up what others have said: she has no real arc because she has no real weaknesses. Yes, she has some abandonment issues and, rarely, she may be too prone to anger. But compared to either Luke or Anakin, she's got nothing. She doesn't start "normal" like Luke and grow into heroism; she's always astounding. Like Anakin, she's a Force freak with a traumatic childhood, but, unlike him, she suffers none of the psychological damage that would logically be a consequence. She has good scenes, but in broad strokes she's poorly written, with neither realism nor growth.
Some have identified Foundation's Gaal as a Mary Sue. I don't find her so actually. I can see where the critique comes from: that's super good at stuff and super important and special, but for me, she passes muster as a plausible human being. She is a math genius (so is Hari), but that's a defining trait. She has pre-cognition, but the show explicitly lumps that under her math aptitude, so I'll suspend my disbelief for that. She's good at swimming, but of course she is: she comes from a water planet. She also has weaknesses though: she can be snippy and arrogant and tends to lose her self-control (not radically but enough that it's does seem a personality tic). I think she feels like a plausible genius character. (Her romance with Raych is contrived and shallow, but at least it's over quickly.)
I cannot say the same for Salvor, however. It's curious to me that some identify Gaal as the Sue and Salvor as the better written character, because I find Salvor a proper Sue! She's one of those zero arc protagonists (at least in S1*), who is amazingly talented, brave, good, kind, loved, and special in the first moment she's on screen and is never anything else. She has the special magic powers (without the explanation of the math genius connection, yet). She's smart but no one listens to her, even though she's also really nice and most folks really like or love her. She also has a boring boyfriend who pretty much exists to adore her, and she's always the one who must do the thing in order to save all the people, and so on. It's unremitting. There are no shades whatsoever. The best thing I can say for the way Salvor is written is thank God she doesn't speak all the languages and know everything about how all the ships work! She's well acted—all these characters are—and their actors deserve better material.
(*I've read commentary from the show runner stating that Salvor is, indeed, going to have an arc in later seasons, and that could be good. I'd love it if it is. But even if S1 is just "backstory" Salvor, she still could have been written as a more plausible human being.)
So what's going on? A standard "anti-woke" argument on social media is that "woke feminists" are insinuating that women are superior and men inferior and white men, in particular, should be stamped out of existence. That's not what's happening.
Mary Sues Are Annoying When They're White Men Too
For one thing, this kind of bad writing is by no means unique to women of color or women in general. This is another iteration of a long history of worshipping the hero protagonist at the expense of plausibility, good storytelling, and other characters. White male heroes have been doing this for a long time. There's more than a small echo in the likes of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, "truth, justice, and the American way" Superman, old-school Captain America.
Though I like James Kirk taken as a whole character, just remember back to his quoting the Constitution or the way he's always the last to succumb to any random alien stun beam (even though by rights, it should be Spock), or—beautifully referenced in Lower Decks—that time he overcame the godlike powers of Gary Mitchell by hitting him with a rock. Or how about all how heroic he's meant to look for robbing the poor Vaal-worshipping people of their whole culture and reason for existing? Or for that matter, how virtually every alien woman instantly falls for him? All I'm saying is he does some universe warping of his own.
These older fellers, I confess, don't experientially make me very angry, and that's probably partly down to my racist/sexist double standards. But I think it's also down to my having grown up with them; that normalized them for me and keeps me somewhat emotionally uncritical to this day. I also have zero emotional investment of any kind in the aforementioned comic books heroes, whereas I want to invest in diverse characters in current media, and it's hard when I can't.
Closer to the present, however, my frustration with this Sue-ish writing has definitely had white male targets. A prime example is Babylon 5's John Sheridan. As a captain/war hero, he strikes me as boring but reasonably plausible. As a love interest for the likes of Delenn, he's a doofus and her fascination for him makes no sense to me. As a messiah, I find him utterly absurd; G'Kar has more gravitas in his pinky finger. Yet there I was, stuck with Sheridan, because, gosh-darn it, he was going to be the hero who defines the course of galactic history.
Though I find him a better-rounded character on the whole, Farscape's John Crichton has also been a recipient of my ire. I do like some things about him, but I cannot stand his "I'm an Amurican" act and the way it miraculously bowls over his enemies so that they just stare at him instead of shooting him. I can also get a good rage going for the way that Aeryn gives up her entire culture (mentally, I mean) to become his girlfriend because American values are just better. That manages to be simultaneously sexist and ethnocentric in a way I can only praise Ben Browder for recognizing in his one-episode attempt to correct it in "Green-Eyed Monster." (He really is one of the best writers on the show, and it's a shame he only got to write for it twice, as I recall.)
Speaking of warping the universe, I once wrote a review of The Wolverine in which I identified its chief problem as being the necessity of making Wolverine the hero all the time. I argued this vitiated the female characters, not because the writers wanted to hold them down but because they felt such a burning imperative to prop Wolverine up—to keep him at the center of all the action and emotion and key decisions, etc. That's Sue-ish. (And I'd blame a similar mindset for the colossal crash of X-Men: Last Stand, which would have been a perfectly lovely Jean and Charles movie, had it been allowed to be about them, not Wolverine—again.)
So, no, it's not all about (brown) women being set up to take over the world. It's more like (brown) women are just moving into the bad writing slot set aside for shallow hero worship. There may be shades of difference, but a lot of broad strokes are the same.
Yet Women Overall Are Still Written Worse
While (brown) women may be get toehold in the realm of shallow superheroes, women in general continue to be underrepresented among actually interesting characters. When I think of some of the truly fascinating and brilliantly written characters in TV science fiction, I come up with characters like (Nimoy) Spock, like Londo and G'Kar, like Kai from Lexx, like Scorpius from Farscape. I recently wrote a love letter to Tarka from season 4 of Discovery. I am going to write a love letter to Foundation's Cleons soon. What do all these characters have in common? Yep: they're white men—I mean, the actors. Now, admittedly my list is a little bit curated, and if I were to expand it out to all the truly fascinating TV sci-fi characters who pop foremost into my head, the net would broaden to include Zhaan from Farscape and Delenn from Babylon 5, probably Dax from DS9, so a few white women too. But the white men seem to be getting most of the action—at least for my taste. Why is this?
Now, I'm talking about me as a viewer, and since I'm fundamentally a het female viewer, it's fair to ask if my view is skewed by sex appeal. Do I only think these male characters (note lack of men of color) are so much more awesome because I find them attractive? I'll be honest; I don't find Londo super attractive, sorry, Londo. But, yes, that's fair to an extent. I am not attracted to women, and I think that's a factor that requires female characters to work harder to gain my appreciation. I remember observing the inverse of this with a het male fan on LiveJournal back in the Battlestar Galactica days. He found the character of Six really sexy, and that sparked an interest in thinking about her character, which generated some very thoughtful meta. The sexiness was a factor, but it wasn't what defined the character as intriguing for him. And here, too, I would say, yes, these male characters really are, on average, written better. Why?
One factor is critical mass of representation. When only a few of a given group are represented, they are under differential pressure to represent the whole group in a positive light. Any character who comes off as a villain or morally gray or weak runs the risk of identifying the whole group with villainy, moral ambiguity, or weakness. White men, however, have dominated so much of Western narrative for so long that for every guy with a flaw, there are a hundred examples of others who don't have that flaw. No one is going to say, "Well, Spock has some epic identity issues; therefore, white men must be naturally neurotic." But I feel like there's a lot more of, "Burnham is so pushy, just like those black women always are." (It's not usually said out loud like that, but, boy, I feel the undercurrent.)
This is related to the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Effect," a concept for which I thank Mr. Foletta and his high school History through Film and Literature class. The 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner stars Sidney Poitier as a black man invited to have dinner with his white fiancée's parents, and racial commentary ensues. The film argues that their bi-racial marriage should be acceptable, and one way it does this is by making Poitier's character nigh perfect. He's a talented doctor helping the poor, a widower working hard to raise his son as a single dad, an "articulate" (yes, I know) civil rights advocate, and so on. There's no room for flaws because, again, every flaw could be interpreted as a stroke against the whole group. He doesn't have a great education? It must be because black people aren't smart. He got divorced? It must be because black people can't do committed relationships. And so on. This tradition is far from dead, and I'd argue that we see it with T'Challa today. (I do like him as a character, but he's pretty perfect.)
Similarly, I think the uber-perfection of the current Mary Sue female hero is not a consequence of feminist domination but, on the contrary, a consequence of continuing (white supremacist) patriarchy. She can't slip up because any slip could be interpreted as evidence that either (a) the writers are (racist) misogynists or (b) (brown) women just can't hack it.
I think we see this pressure on the writers as early as episode 1 of Discovery. Here, Burnham disobeys her captain to take an unauthorized swipe at the Klingons, and the script cannot decide what to say about it. On the one hand, it tells us that her insubordination is a mistake for which she must go through a plot arc of soul searching and redemption. On the other hand, it tells us her actions were right and her knowledge of the Klingons saved the Federation from far worse damage. It can't be both. Sure, actions can have positive and negative inflections, and if the narrative were, for example, that her action was right but the insubordination broke her friendship with Georgiou, that would be coherent. But that's not what the storyline does. At least as I experienced it, it just bops back and forth between telling us she's wrong and telling us she's right. I put that down to the GWCTD Effect. I would posit that the writers wanted Burnham to have a nice, compelling arc of overcoming a big error—and they were desperately afraid that any sniff of imperfection would create backlash against either black women or themselves as writers. And so they tried to have it both ways—she's grappling with her errors and tortured by guilt and also perfect and has nothing to feel guilty for. From the very first episode, this damaged the coherence of the character.
Rey suffers similarly. As a case in point, the other day, my partner and I were engaged in that popular pastime of modern Star Wars fans: having a dinner discussion about how to fix Rey's story. And every plotline we came up with, some stereotype of female disempowerment prohibited it. We couldn't do this because it would mean a man defeats her, and her couldn't do that because it means a man saves her. We could possibly make the dynamics all about Rey and Leia, but then structurally, we'd have to kill Leia off pretty early (like Obi Wan), and then we'd lose Leia! And also, what about all the other characters? Now, one can imagine ways around these problems, but their very existence points to the GWCTD Effect: there's a massive pull to make Rey perfect, not because women have (or should have) more power than men but because we have less, and we are constantly having to fight against those old specters of disempowerment.
This is a shame because, at the end of the day, I do believe the answer is to write women as complex, interesting heroes (or villains or others), to just find the courage and do it. We've seen it before (though I fear all my examples are going to be white). In addition to the handful I mention above, we've seen it with Buffy, Xena, Scully, Battlestar Galactica's Starbuck, DS9's Kira, and others. We've had villains like Blake's 7's Servalan and Game of Thrones' Cersei. And, indeed, the relentless whiteness of all these examples probably points to some protection from the GWCTD Effect, because white women have had fairly reasonable representation by now. The Reys of the world notwithstanding, there is at least some critical mass of white female characters that allows for diversity and complexity. Likewise, a silver lining to the increasing numbers of brown female heroes is undoubtedly that they are moving toward that critical mass, and I hope it will begin to enable more and more nuanced, creative on-screen presences.
Disclaimers: This essay ended up not really discussing men of color. There's much to say; it just ended up being a bit too much to tackle in one essay. This essay is also very much about my personal response as a viewer; others' will vary.
(Major spoilers for Discovery and Babylon 5, minor spoilers for Foundation, Star Trek: TOS, possibly others)
Yes, Racism and Sexism Are Present in Me
To begin with, my own racism and internalized misogyny are factors. I have tons of internalized misogyny. It's there, it's significant, and it's probably something I'll be stuck with for life. One upshot is that it makes me more nervous about female characters than male characters, more primed to be disappointed, more judgmental. I don't have the same degree of insight into how race skews my view. As a white woman, I have more blind spots about race, but I know that with characters of color, I tend to see the color first and learn the character later. Conversely, white characters, by default, still tend to be more "raceless" to me; I'm more likely to see the character first and analyze race later, though this is slowly changing. One consequence of this racial orientation is that when I encounter a character of color, I'm likely to think almost at once, "What are the writers trying to say about race?" whereas I may not ask this about a white character at first. Obviously, that's an added racial burden for characters of color. So do I judge female protagonists of color more harshly than white male protagonists? Yes, almost certainly. But it's not the only thing going on.
And Also Mary Sues Are Freakin' Annoying
The folks who call a lot of these female leads badly written Mary Sues are unfortunately kind of right. This isn't true of all of them, of course. Sticking with fairly recent series/movies, I like Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman. She's larger than life, but she's half goddess, after all. She's also quirky and naïve in ways that are fun and make sense. I'm also totally fine with Angela from the Watchmen TV series, who is a female black protagonist in a series centered on race. I didn't adore her, but I was decently interested in her and found her well written: she's reasonably complex and relatable. And I think my positive response to her is a data point that I'm not just subconsciously out to get all brown female heroes. Writing quality also matters.
It's no secret I tend to dislike Burnham in Discovery, though in four years, there's been a lot of variation in my feelings. What I consistently detest, however, is her Sue-ishness. One characteristics of a Mary Sue is that she warps the narrative around her. She becomes the center of attention where she shouldn't be. That's why I like Burnham better in S4. She's still front and center implausibly often, but not egregiously so. The season lets others breathe. But in many earlier appearances, you just can't get away from her specialness: she's the foster daughter of the Terran emperor, the one destined to wear the magic suit because she has another special mother; she's Spock's sister with the special relationship to Vulcan, where she learned to be a super math and science whiz, but also she's a kick hand-to-hand fighter and tactician and passionate and speechifying, and men fall madly in love with her almost overnight, and she's a great Starfleet officer but also great at being smuggler type, and every other day is a massive sacrifice or daring feat or breaking the rules, and then being rewarded for it because she's so awesome. Prior to S4, I found this exhausting and infuriating.
Though my annoyance is not as great, I do feel similarly about Rey in Star Wars. I feel bad saying so because the levels of sequel trilogy hate in the fandom are bizarre, yet there is a critique to be made. I'll sum up what others have said: she has no real arc because she has no real weaknesses. Yes, she has some abandonment issues and, rarely, she may be too prone to anger. But compared to either Luke or Anakin, she's got nothing. She doesn't start "normal" like Luke and grow into heroism; she's always astounding. Like Anakin, she's a Force freak with a traumatic childhood, but, unlike him, she suffers none of the psychological damage that would logically be a consequence. She has good scenes, but in broad strokes she's poorly written, with neither realism nor growth.
Some have identified Foundation's Gaal as a Mary Sue. I don't find her so actually. I can see where the critique comes from: that's super good at stuff and super important and special, but for me, she passes muster as a plausible human being. She is a math genius (so is Hari), but that's a defining trait. She has pre-cognition, but the show explicitly lumps that under her math aptitude, so I'll suspend my disbelief for that. She's good at swimming, but of course she is: she comes from a water planet. She also has weaknesses though: she can be snippy and arrogant and tends to lose her self-control (not radically but enough that it's does seem a personality tic). I think she feels like a plausible genius character. (Her romance with Raych is contrived and shallow, but at least it's over quickly.)
I cannot say the same for Salvor, however. It's curious to me that some identify Gaal as the Sue and Salvor as the better written character, because I find Salvor a proper Sue! She's one of those zero arc protagonists (at least in S1*), who is amazingly talented, brave, good, kind, loved, and special in the first moment she's on screen and is never anything else. She has the special magic powers (without the explanation of the math genius connection, yet). She's smart but no one listens to her, even though she's also really nice and most folks really like or love her. She also has a boring boyfriend who pretty much exists to adore her, and she's always the one who must do the thing in order to save all the people, and so on. It's unremitting. There are no shades whatsoever. The best thing I can say for the way Salvor is written is thank God she doesn't speak all the languages and know everything about how all the ships work! She's well acted—all these characters are—and their actors deserve better material.
(*I've read commentary from the show runner stating that Salvor is, indeed, going to have an arc in later seasons, and that could be good. I'd love it if it is. But even if S1 is just "backstory" Salvor, she still could have been written as a more plausible human being.)
So what's going on? A standard "anti-woke" argument on social media is that "woke feminists" are insinuating that women are superior and men inferior and white men, in particular, should be stamped out of existence. That's not what's happening.
Mary Sues Are Annoying When They're White Men Too
For one thing, this kind of bad writing is by no means unique to women of color or women in general. This is another iteration of a long history of worshipping the hero protagonist at the expense of plausibility, good storytelling, and other characters. White male heroes have been doing this for a long time. There's more than a small echo in the likes of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, "truth, justice, and the American way" Superman, old-school Captain America.
Though I like James Kirk taken as a whole character, just remember back to his quoting the Constitution or the way he's always the last to succumb to any random alien stun beam (even though by rights, it should be Spock), or—beautifully referenced in Lower Decks—that time he overcame the godlike powers of Gary Mitchell by hitting him with a rock. Or how about all how heroic he's meant to look for robbing the poor Vaal-worshipping people of their whole culture and reason for existing? Or for that matter, how virtually every alien woman instantly falls for him? All I'm saying is he does some universe warping of his own.
These older fellers, I confess, don't experientially make me very angry, and that's probably partly down to my racist/sexist double standards. But I think it's also down to my having grown up with them; that normalized them for me and keeps me somewhat emotionally uncritical to this day. I also have zero emotional investment of any kind in the aforementioned comic books heroes, whereas I want to invest in diverse characters in current media, and it's hard when I can't.
Closer to the present, however, my frustration with this Sue-ish writing has definitely had white male targets. A prime example is Babylon 5's John Sheridan. As a captain/war hero, he strikes me as boring but reasonably plausible. As a love interest for the likes of Delenn, he's a doofus and her fascination for him makes no sense to me. As a messiah, I find him utterly absurd; G'Kar has more gravitas in his pinky finger. Yet there I was, stuck with Sheridan, because, gosh-darn it, he was going to be the hero who defines the course of galactic history.
Though I find him a better-rounded character on the whole, Farscape's John Crichton has also been a recipient of my ire. I do like some things about him, but I cannot stand his "I'm an Amurican" act and the way it miraculously bowls over his enemies so that they just stare at him instead of shooting him. I can also get a good rage going for the way that Aeryn gives up her entire culture (mentally, I mean) to become his girlfriend because American values are just better. That manages to be simultaneously sexist and ethnocentric in a way I can only praise Ben Browder for recognizing in his one-episode attempt to correct it in "Green-Eyed Monster." (He really is one of the best writers on the show, and it's a shame he only got to write for it twice, as I recall.)
Speaking of warping the universe, I once wrote a review of The Wolverine in which I identified its chief problem as being the necessity of making Wolverine the hero all the time. I argued this vitiated the female characters, not because the writers wanted to hold them down but because they felt such a burning imperative to prop Wolverine up—to keep him at the center of all the action and emotion and key decisions, etc. That's Sue-ish. (And I'd blame a similar mindset for the colossal crash of X-Men: Last Stand, which would have been a perfectly lovely Jean and Charles movie, had it been allowed to be about them, not Wolverine—again.)
So, no, it's not all about (brown) women being set up to take over the world. It's more like (brown) women are just moving into the bad writing slot set aside for shallow hero worship. There may be shades of difference, but a lot of broad strokes are the same.
Yet Women Overall Are Still Written Worse
While (brown) women may be get toehold in the realm of shallow superheroes, women in general continue to be underrepresented among actually interesting characters. When I think of some of the truly fascinating and brilliantly written characters in TV science fiction, I come up with characters like (Nimoy) Spock, like Londo and G'Kar, like Kai from Lexx, like Scorpius from Farscape. I recently wrote a love letter to Tarka from season 4 of Discovery. I am going to write a love letter to Foundation's Cleons soon. What do all these characters have in common? Yep: they're white men—I mean, the actors. Now, admittedly my list is a little bit curated, and if I were to expand it out to all the truly fascinating TV sci-fi characters who pop foremost into my head, the net would broaden to include Zhaan from Farscape and Delenn from Babylon 5, probably Dax from DS9, so a few white women too. But the white men seem to be getting most of the action—at least for my taste. Why is this?
Now, I'm talking about me as a viewer, and since I'm fundamentally a het female viewer, it's fair to ask if my view is skewed by sex appeal. Do I only think these male characters (note lack of men of color) are so much more awesome because I find them attractive? I'll be honest; I don't find Londo super attractive, sorry, Londo. But, yes, that's fair to an extent. I am not attracted to women, and I think that's a factor that requires female characters to work harder to gain my appreciation. I remember observing the inverse of this with a het male fan on LiveJournal back in the Battlestar Galactica days. He found the character of Six really sexy, and that sparked an interest in thinking about her character, which generated some very thoughtful meta. The sexiness was a factor, but it wasn't what defined the character as intriguing for him. And here, too, I would say, yes, these male characters really are, on average, written better. Why?
One factor is critical mass of representation. When only a few of a given group are represented, they are under differential pressure to represent the whole group in a positive light. Any character who comes off as a villain or morally gray or weak runs the risk of identifying the whole group with villainy, moral ambiguity, or weakness. White men, however, have dominated so much of Western narrative for so long that for every guy with a flaw, there are a hundred examples of others who don't have that flaw. No one is going to say, "Well, Spock has some epic identity issues; therefore, white men must be naturally neurotic." But I feel like there's a lot more of, "Burnham is so pushy, just like those black women always are." (It's not usually said out loud like that, but, boy, I feel the undercurrent.)
This is related to the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Effect," a concept for which I thank Mr. Foletta and his high school History through Film and Literature class. The 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner stars Sidney Poitier as a black man invited to have dinner with his white fiancée's parents, and racial commentary ensues. The film argues that their bi-racial marriage should be acceptable, and one way it does this is by making Poitier's character nigh perfect. He's a talented doctor helping the poor, a widower working hard to raise his son as a single dad, an "articulate" (yes, I know) civil rights advocate, and so on. There's no room for flaws because, again, every flaw could be interpreted as a stroke against the whole group. He doesn't have a great education? It must be because black people aren't smart. He got divorced? It must be because black people can't do committed relationships. And so on. This tradition is far from dead, and I'd argue that we see it with T'Challa today. (I do like him as a character, but he's pretty perfect.)
Similarly, I think the uber-perfection of the current Mary Sue female hero is not a consequence of feminist domination but, on the contrary, a consequence of continuing (white supremacist) patriarchy. She can't slip up because any slip could be interpreted as evidence that either (a) the writers are (racist) misogynists or (b) (brown) women just can't hack it.
I think we see this pressure on the writers as early as episode 1 of Discovery. Here, Burnham disobeys her captain to take an unauthorized swipe at the Klingons, and the script cannot decide what to say about it. On the one hand, it tells us that her insubordination is a mistake for which she must go through a plot arc of soul searching and redemption. On the other hand, it tells us her actions were right and her knowledge of the Klingons saved the Federation from far worse damage. It can't be both. Sure, actions can have positive and negative inflections, and if the narrative were, for example, that her action was right but the insubordination broke her friendship with Georgiou, that would be coherent. But that's not what the storyline does. At least as I experienced it, it just bops back and forth between telling us she's wrong and telling us she's right. I put that down to the GWCTD Effect. I would posit that the writers wanted Burnham to have a nice, compelling arc of overcoming a big error—and they were desperately afraid that any sniff of imperfection would create backlash against either black women or themselves as writers. And so they tried to have it both ways—she's grappling with her errors and tortured by guilt and also perfect and has nothing to feel guilty for. From the very first episode, this damaged the coherence of the character.
Rey suffers similarly. As a case in point, the other day, my partner and I were engaged in that popular pastime of modern Star Wars fans: having a dinner discussion about how to fix Rey's story. And every plotline we came up with, some stereotype of female disempowerment prohibited it. We couldn't do this because it would mean a man defeats her, and her couldn't do that because it means a man saves her. We could possibly make the dynamics all about Rey and Leia, but then structurally, we'd have to kill Leia off pretty early (like Obi Wan), and then we'd lose Leia! And also, what about all the other characters? Now, one can imagine ways around these problems, but their very existence points to the GWCTD Effect: there's a massive pull to make Rey perfect, not because women have (or should have) more power than men but because we have less, and we are constantly having to fight against those old specters of disempowerment.
This is a shame because, at the end of the day, I do believe the answer is to write women as complex, interesting heroes (or villains or others), to just find the courage and do it. We've seen it before (though I fear all my examples are going to be white). In addition to the handful I mention above, we've seen it with Buffy, Xena, Scully, Battlestar Galactica's Starbuck, DS9's Kira, and others. We've had villains like Blake's 7's Servalan and Game of Thrones' Cersei. And, indeed, the relentless whiteness of all these examples probably points to some protection from the GWCTD Effect, because white women have had fairly reasonable representation by now. The Reys of the world notwithstanding, there is at least some critical mass of white female characters that allows for diversity and complexity. Likewise, a silver lining to the increasing numbers of brown female heroes is undoubtedly that they are moving toward that critical mass, and I hope it will begin to enable more and more nuanced, creative on-screen presences.
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Date: 2022-04-23 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-24 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-23 11:20 pm (UTC)Off topic, but that whole Star Wars trilogy suffers from speshulness. I liked that Rey didn't have parents, and the second film redeemed the overblown casino world sequence by having a slave (servant?) boy summon his broom with the force. But the third film? Forget all that about the Force being anyone's: Rey was Force royalty. I really hate that trope: the kitchen boy who turns out to be a prince and that's why he was so awesome all along (and yes, it's usually a male). I don't mind that being Luke's story because it's done well, but I'm glad Finn was just a stormtrooper who was awesome in his own right.
[Edit] And re John Sheridan and his replacement Jeffrey Sinclair, they were definitely JMS's Marty Sues, both very obviously having his initials. :-)
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Date: 2022-04-24 08:26 pm (UTC)One thing I admire about JMS is his unabashedness in naming characters after himself--or after each other. like "Markus Alexander" in Jeremiah having a doubled-up Babylon 5 name. :)