When a woman gets a romantic relationship onscreen, fandom criticizes her as 'just the girlfriend' in some pseudo-feminist rethoric, and the hypocrisy makes me so angry I want to scream, because it's used as yet another excuse to dismiss her.
Oh, don't get me started on this! Most of the time in these shows, the female character starts off somewhere else entirely. No romance on her mind. She's doing her job, whatever that might be, she's hanging with the guy in question and over time they start to be attracted to each other. Her goal isn't to attract a man, her goal is to keep surviving day to day, or to free her people, or to be the best she can be. And somewhere along the way - just like in life - love happens.
Apparently romantic relationships are not within the parameters of what's acceptable for strong female characters.
Apparently!
I agree that there are problems with female characters' main threads in stories often being limited to their relationships. Yet those female characters didn't start and finish with those relationships - they were people behind them, even before the male lead took an interest. And relationships are a story and a character arc, too - and not just the Harlequin kind.
Then, too, if male writers are limiting the female characters to romantic relationships, and fandom objects to this, why don't more fanficwriters do something about it and rewrite these female characters in action-oriented scenarios? Why erase or reduce the feminine presence from our narratives even further than they've been reduced in canon?
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Oh, don't get me started on this! Most of the time in these shows, the female character starts off somewhere else entirely. No romance on her mind. She's doing her job, whatever that might be, she's hanging with the guy in question and over time they start to be attracted to each other. Her goal isn't to attract a man, her goal is to keep surviving day to day, or to free her people, or to be the best she can be. And somewhere along the way - just like in life - love happens.
Apparently romantic relationships are not within the parameters of what's acceptable for strong female characters.
Apparently!
I agree that there are problems with female characters' main threads in stories often being limited to their relationships. Yet those female characters didn't start and finish with those relationships - they were people behind them, even before the male lead took an interest. And relationships are a story and a character arc, too - and not just the Harlequin kind.
Then, too, if male writers are limiting the female characters to romantic relationships, and fandom objects to this, why don't more fanficwriters do something about it and rewrite these female characters in action-oriented scenarios? Why erase or reduce the feminine presence from our narratives even further than they've been reduced in canon?