Actually, I agree that this appears to be much more obvious in American media (Although it could simply be that those of us in the States tend to have much more exposure to Hollywood and network television) , not least because of the degree to which these preconceptions are entrenched in the entertainment industry. Off the top of my head I can think of several anime and manga series which easily pass the Bechdel Test (MSL Nanoha [admittedly, it fails the reverse test hard, seeing as there are never more than 2-3 significant male characters in any given season, and most of them are put on a bus after their first season.], Claymore [well, duh], Black Lagoon, etc.). For that matter, I tend to get the impression that SF/Fantasy works tend to pass the test more often as well, although I could be mistaken. The Wheel of Time springs to mind, although Jordan complicates things with his whole fixation on the "the genders can't understand each other at all" thing. Terry Pratchett, OTOH, passes it with every volume centered on Granny Weatherwax & Co.
On another note, I think that it is true that the test can be somewhat inaccurate in terms of films which have strong female characters who are in environments or situations where, historically speaking, the population is largely male, or in films with small casts. E.G.: in a film about frontline U.S. troops in the Korean War, it probably wouldn't be reasonable to have large numbers of female characters. This is where I see SF/fantasy as able to break this trend of casting predominantly white het male characters, as the central aspect of both genres is the telling of a story in a world which is inherently different from our own, freeing the writer to set up sociopolitical structures, etc., however they desire. The problem with this is that people do tend to write what they know, even in strange settings, so quite a few authors still tend to superimpose contemporary gender, political, social and economic issues onto their universe, which I believe is part of the reason why Golden Age SF writers mostly wrote white het male leads, despite the freedom offered by the genre.
In short, it isn't just a matter of convincing authors and film/series writers to write more central characters that don't fall into the default type, it is a matter of drastically altering the way in which they perceive the "natural" structure of things, as well as overturning the fear in Hollywood of films that don't fit the formula and yet still succeed, which poses a threat to the people who make a living by bullshitting statistics to 'prove' that the most successful films are ones tailored to the supposedly monolithic audience bloc that will only spend money on films with white, het male leads that spend most of their time centered on the actions and character of the lead, even when they are offscreen (or dead).
(late at night after a long workday, anything that sounds too moronic was probably my brain skipping a beat)
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Topic: Chill and Relaxed Progressive Irritation and Annoyance Thread (Read 883127 times)