Sorry everyone but I'm going to have to ignore a lot of stuff I'm afraid. Just not got the time for everything here and writing these posts isn't exactly fun for me. If anyone actually thinks a statement I didn't address needs a response feel free to ask for one. I'm going to start with the simple parts first.
Something that isn't reviled for its unreasonable portrayal of relationships would be good. Something like that would actually show that people buy into these narratives. Which Twilight really doesn't. Twilight does the opposite of that. Twilight is an example of people NOT accepting a narrative. Except the teenage girls, of course, but I think they're excused, being teenage.
For starters, a $5 billion dollar franchise is obviously not universally reviled. It has become one of the most widely successful and recognised romance stories of the last decade at least.
Next, the main reasons it is reviled rarely have to do with the relationship depicted, at least not outside certain (largely feminist) circles.
Ana has a post about this topic. A lot of the attacks on Twilight are more about it being a book for women and girls. The language used to criticise it is often openly misogynistic and sexist. You see the same thing with
Fifty Shades of Gray, complaining it is just porn for women or glorified fan-fic (both kinda true) but ignoring the horrible misrepresentation of BDSM/kink and the regressive elements (including, again, abusive ones).
Finally, the idea that it doesn't matter because it's only popular with teenage girls is so much bullshit. Teenage girls are among those most at risk from abusive relationships
and those most open to relationship narratives in this sense. Their models of what a romantic relationship should or does look like are still forming. They are the absolute last audience you want to paint abuse as romance for.
And for context, I want to refer again to Anita's own reference link,
"The normalization of violence in heterosexual romantic relationships: Women's narratives of love and violence". I think that reading that should help greatly with understanding what is meant by abusive narratives and their effects on women in this context.
Read the name of that article you linked. What does it say? "Why does the gay character always have to die", now that sounds a little different to what you are saying, that the gay character isn't allowed to die. Once again, when there is a mandate that the gay guy must die, it is offensive, when it just happens because that is how it happened then so be it. A homosexual character has the same rights to an interesting story as any other character, including a death.
I know I linked to the second of three pages there by accident, but please try
reading and understanding the entire article that I linked to with the words
understand the context.
Notably on page 3;
But to all those writers who justify the deaths of their gay characters with the argument that “it’s all about character and story”: you yourself are not seeing the whole story.
Sure, in the particular storyline of any given show, the gay guy might have to die. But that show exists in a larger cultural context, one that includes this longstanding writers’ trope of the Dead Gay Guy, and one that includes almost no leading gay characters. Indeed, of the many various "crime" franchises, only a single show, Law & Order: SVU, has a regular gay character – a minor one who didn’t come out until eight years into the show’s run
The argument is often made that, “If gay viewers want gay characters to be treated equally on television, they have to accept that sometimes bad things will happen to them.”
But that’s precisely the point: as long as there are no leading gay characters, gay characters aren’t being treated equally. We’re getting all of the trauma and tragedy of the gay death (and the vitriol directed at the gay villain), but almost none of the pleasure of the gay leading man.
And just as with racial minorities, it’s making all gay people seem less powerful, more likely to be a “victim,” than straight people. We never get to be Spartacus, the guy who makes it to the end of the story, the guy who ends up changing the world.
There used to be a similar cliché in horror movies where it seemed like the black supporting character always had to die – for exactly the same reasons that gay characters now so often die. That’s changed somewhat – in part, because the cliché was so widely mocked.
Also please try responding to what I write and you quote. You say it's about the gay characters being "allowed to die" when I said, and you quoted,
"As such if you are trying to write a story that is accessible to gay people you probably want to think twice before shoving your only gay character into a fridge. At least if you are going to do it understand the context and why it is very likely to piss a lot of people off." Thinking twice and understanding what you are doing is different from not being "allowed" to do something.
I think this is about as clear a summary of the whole debate as exists so far.
Also, Max, I can't really engage with what you are claiming that Anita claims simply because I don't understand where your assumptions are coming from. You are making wild leaps of logic about what she claims that simply don't follow from the video (or text). You are flat out ignoring a lot of what she says and coming from a completely different understanding of her goals to mine. If you could explain what you think she is trying to achieve that would be a helpful starting point so we could start talking about the same things again.
And on that note;
I'm disputing the way Anita couches her arguments, by painting only a lopsided picture of reality, and then giving a just-so explanation of why it occurs, she's not helping with solutions. Which is why things like the domestic violence abuse rate being pretty much exactly the same amongst lesbians as straight couples is a telling point. She's peddling a simplistic "patriarchy created every problem" model, which is way too simplistic. Since it doesn't address why things actually happen in real life, it's not going to solve those the problems.
The problem here is you are assuming she is doing something she isn't really doing. At no point is she saying "patriarchy created every problem" or domestic violence is solely about men beating women. She is saying that men beating women is a problem and that this particular set of narratives contribute to that problem.
Remember that her focus here is on tropes about women in video games. It's not about domestic violence in general or anything along those lines. Explaining the negative narratives expressed with regards to domestic violence is well within the scope of the video. Talking about the wide causes and issues with regards to domestic violence isn't.
I have to agree with Soadreqm here. The night shift team where I work is all men currently and if the topic of male on female domestic violence comes up a number of them like to say that if they knew a guy who was beating their partner they'd go around and break his legs. I can only think of one instance where a colleague excused domestic violence and that wasn't really domestic violence in the sense that there was a clear victim and aggressor; Their marriage was falling apart and near the end snide comments would lead to one slapping the other.
Honestly, this doesn't sound far off what I was thinking of. People are opposed to domestic violence in the abstract, because we have mental models of domestic violence which is bad and easy to condemn and our abstract discussions don't usually go outside those models.
But specific cases? Unless they do fit into one of those models we are less likely to criticise them. The examples that crop up in the real world are messy and so harder to condemn. And we are usually happy to let them be messy, especially if they involve people we know, like and/or respect being painted in a bad way.
In fact, going back to Soadrqm;
Are they really? Because the stock domestic violence story I know is that the man is always the offending party, and he is abusing the woman because he is evil and she is too weak and powerless to stop him.
This in itself offers a social reluctance to recognise abuse when it is conducted by men we don't think of as evil, or to women we don't see as weak and powerless. So we try to fit those abusers and victims into other narratives, often involving victim blaming or making excuses.
Recognising that abuse happens in different forms and ways and not just the narrow narratives that are easy to accept is an important part of this. But discouraging harmful narratives that make abuse easier to ignore or go any distance at all in excusing it is also important.
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Topic: Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games' (Read 312302 times)