so I just watched Brave

[surrealistdreamer]

And I've gotta say I see why people like it so much. At least for the most part.

The start of the flick is...flawed. Very flawed. It kinda bugs me that Merida's oppression is implied to be solely upheld by her mother with no pressure from her father to fall into the role of her own princesshood. I can't help imagining that the reason they fired the woman who had been originally put in charge of this project was fired for not wanting to make the father more likable. Or that wasn't the reason at all. I don't really know.

Over all I did enjoy the flick a lot. It really picked up after the big confrontation between Merida and her mother.

Comments

[gryphonsegg]

It has become increasingly popular in the last few years to say that girls/women are no longer pressured(and perhaps never were pressured all that much!) by boys/men to conform to traditional gender roles, and most or all of the pressure comes from Mean Girls, pink-clad Girly-Girls, prudish Church Ladies, and the other female social villains we're all supposed to love to hate, especially mothers, since our society can't enough of blaming mothers. It's now sort of the in thing on tumblr to "call out" women for their internalized misogyny, whereas calling out men for actually being misogynist in ways that do not hurt them too is still controversial. Plus, Brave uses a lot of tropes that were popular in the fantasy genre 10-20 years ago, when every other female protagonist was a feisty red-haired tomboy who was much closer to her father than to her mother and emphatically Not Like Other Girls. The fact that the movie focuses on making the main character's relationship with her mother better is itself a subversion of that type of story, but it sounds like someone decided that letting men actually be part of the problem was going to far.

[surrealistdreamer]

-sigh- Yeah. And even the Not Like Other Girls thing doesn't really work in this movie because there are literally no other female characters that are Merida's age. That's also something that kinda bugs me. All the other women in this movie are adult servants or commoners who are seen for maybe a few minutes at a time. Yeah I know the main focus is Merida and her mother, but that doesn't mean they should be the only named female characters.

[gryphonsegg]

That's symptomatic of another one of contemporary Western media's many problems with female representation: the "male as default" thing is really strong. If a character doesn't HAV to be female in order for their part in the story to work at all, the powers that be just make the character male. Also, crowd scenes where more than 1/4 to 1/3 of the figures are coded as female are widely perceived to be more than 1/2 female! So writers, comic artists, animators, etc. usually end up with settings where men and boys make up much more than half the population, and it appears perfectly normal to most of the audience (after I took the red pill and gave it some time to get digested, though, I started perceiving more and more superficially innocent entertainments as creepy and unsettling because WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE WOMEN AND GIRLS?!).

[surrealistdreamer]

Yeah. It's aggravating, but so normalized that when there are more female characters (even if it is just in crowd scenes) then people FLIP THE FUCK OUT!