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Soooo I was on YouTube 8 seconds ago and discovered the hidden gold of the comment section
This doesn’t even include the Star Trek series with all of their lead females. Or battle star Galactica. Or firefly.
Dont the first 12 doctors alone outdo this dumb post?
But muh equality. I guess you ought to be out in a coal mine right now, since we’ve had so long with 99.9% male coal miners.
So representation in science fiction is the same as mining coal to you? Doesn’t change the fact that you can barely scrape up 8 female leads in sci-fi films where i can name 12 in just one series.
Equal pay for equal work, sweetheart. Do you want equality in all areas or not? Sure let’s go to half women leads in all movies. But go to half women in anything important and you will watch the world burn.
… My god are the original post and attempts to defend it stupid.
First, I’ll jump on the low-hanging fruit to point out that six of these representations (four if we don’t count comic book characters due to source material rather than medium of specific depiction) didn’t exist before 2000. Under the most generous terms, half of these examples only came around in the last 17 years.
The next most obvious thing to do would be to cite a litany of male leads in scifi all the way back to at least the 50s if not earlier. I’m not going to do that. I’m lazy and everyone here knows it already even if they pretend they don’t.
Instead, I’m going to highlight something else: differences in how women are treated in scifi. I’m going to use a recent example: the TV show Haven.
The show stars a woman. Cool, right? Surprise! All her consistent costars are men, including (obviously) the two male leads. Four if you stick to who’s there from start to finish, five if you include Dwight who joins in season 2.
The show does add other female characters as stars. But you know what? They all die. Only one of them gets to stay on the show for slightly longer than one season. The show sucks so hard at women that in some cases, their deaths just happen and don’t make a lick of sense. The second to last female character to get killed off literally died of nothing. No cause of death. No symptoms. Nothing. She just up and died because she was a tool for the story and the writers decided she should stop existing after she served that purpose.
This is Haven, a show that ran from 2010 to 2015.
If you go back to Star Trek, the 90s shows had their own problems with treatment of female characters and their actresses too. Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar), Gates McFadden (Beverly Crusher), Jennifer Lien (Kes), the Dax women, there was a strong tendency to treat female characters as expendable and easily replaceable. Crusher’s the only case where trying to remove and replace her didn’t stick. By contrast, Wesley Crusher was the only male character treated that way. Worf even got shifted over to Deep Space Nine after Next Generation ended.
Even when you have female characters in scifi, their existence isn’t enough. How they’re depicted matters even more. A hundred female characters that get treated poorly and quickly killed off don’t come anywhere close to equaling a single prominent, well-treated male lead.
Favorite X-Moments (4/A lot) – Amanda Sefton’s magic is awkwardly corrupted by the Shadow King
Aaaand I’m not surprised by the outfit on Lorna given Claremont’s goal of stripping everything away from her and turning her into a different character based on super strength. That’s typical “avoid sexual objectification with masculine women, emphasize their being more like men” stereotype stuff right there.
Reply from @whatiwastedmymoneyon:
This is interesting! I actually think the literal reason Lorna doesn’t transform here is because Amanda sefton wasn’t targeting her (she’s already wearing the costume that sefton is trying to conjure for the rest) but Claremont took Polaris to some interesting places via her magnetism absorbing emotions or whatever
Disclaimer: none of what I’m about to say is meant to be an “attack” toward you in any way. I just got really carried away with my thoughts.
Honest answer: I wasn’t aware Lorna was already wearing that costume before the spell, as I hadn’t read the issue it comes from.
With that, though, I think this is still an example of Claremont’s attitude at that exact moment in time. He could’ve easily had Sefton’s magic overreach to change Lorna’s costume alongside the rest of the team. He made the decision that it shouldn’t happen.
I have a lot of problems with how Claremont treated Lorna any time he wrote her. His stories involving Lorna can be aptly summed up as “Anything that makes her look awful is her fault, and credit for anything that makes her look cool or badass in any way goes to a different character.”
Pre-Malice, Lorna acted weak and terrified by Sabretooth, crying for Havok to save her. Once possessed, Malice, in Lorna’s body, had threatening moments that were attributed to Malice. Yet moments where she was weaker, particularly with Storm, got this sort of treatment.
Then you get to the 80s with Zaladane and you get this sort of thing.
Basically, we go from Lorna being repeatedly dominated and humiliated by Storm, to Lorna being repeatedly dominated and humiliated by Zaladane. Only with Storm, she had the convenient excuse of “she was possessed by Malice so that makes it okay while she’s a hero” going on. The Zaladane storyline gave him a chance to strip away her whole identity as Polaris and take away her powers (unique, shared only with Magneto) to make her a generic, forgettable bruiser type of character.
Then Claremont made the attitude he’d been harboring and building up toward Lorna extremely literal by making her inspire hatred in people, especially toward her, as a nexus for the Shadow King. You can’t really go much further into “Lorna should be downright hated” territory than actually having characters in the franchise hate her just for existing and being around them.
Through it all, when she wasn’t being dominated, humiliated and diminished as a character, she served to prop Havok up higher and serve as his “piece.”
It might seem like I’m making a lot out of something old, but it’s really not old at all.
For one, every time Claremont’s written her again, it’s followed this same pattern. On Genosha, Claremont had Lorna beaten in combat, but then when she managed to stop one of Magneto’s plans, she gave credit to Havok as a “I thought about what Alex would do and I did that” sort of thing. On X-Men Forever, Perfect Storm easily trounced Lorna alone, then later was “beaten” by Lorna… because Perfect Storm was distracted by a second Storm, and Lorna got really mad about Havok getting hurt. These storylines happened in the 00s and 10s, and they’re a small taste of what Claremont did to her in the 70s and 80s. He sticks by that treatment of her.
For another, what Claremont did to Lorna killed her potential for decades, and it’s still doing so to this day.
If not for Claremont, maybe Lorna would’ve been in tons of video games and cartoons over the years. Maybe she would’ve had a major role in the X-Men films before Gifted. Maybe she would’ve had a solo book by now. Maybe her origin story would’ve been told in the 70s, instead of not getting told until 2012, a good 44 years after she was created. Maybe she would’ve been allowed to lead a team in her own right before All-New X-Factor in 2014. Maybe she’d get to take part in major Marvel and X-Men events, and maybe Marvel wouldn’t have shoved her into forced limbo for the past 2 years.
Every missed opportunity and bit of lost, wasted potential for the character goes back to Claremont. People praise him for having a long tenure and making other characters popular, but he utterly destroyed Lorna in that same time span, and he’s shown no effort or interest in fixing that. He’s shown the opposite desire, one of “putting her back in her place.”
I think I’m atypical from other Lorna fans that have a huge problem with the Claremont era. The ones I talk to that have a huge problem with it, never want it revisited in any way. I’d actually like Malice, Zaladane, Shadow King, etc all revisited for Lorna – so they can be done right. I see potential in those parts of Lorna’s past if they’re worked on by someone that actually likes and respects Lorna in all the ways Claremont did not and apparently never could.
But even with that, I don’t think any credit should go to Claremont for anything good that comes out of it. If someone did a horrid job of building a staircase, and someone else came along and made an absolute masterpiece out of the mess left by the first guy, you wouldn’t say the first guy deserves most of the credit just cause he laid the foundation. Credit goes to the guy that actually did it right.
Anyway, that ends my massive post. Apologies. Like I said in the disclaimer, I got carried away.
Favorite X-Moments (4/A lot) – Amanda Sefton’s magic is awkwardly corrupted by the Shadow King
Aaaand I’m not surprised by the outfit on Lorna given Claremont’s goal of stripping everything away from her and turning her into a different character based on super strength. That’s typical “avoid sexual objectification with masculine women, emphasize their being more like men” stereotype stuff right there.
‘The Gifted’ actress @EmmaDumont shares a seemingly updated look, for Polaris. Featuring more Green Hair. (July 16, 2017)
I have a feeling some people will keep complaining until all her hair is green, even though it’s incredibly obvious the hair is developing across several episodes.
lol that was…not so secretly the reason I posted it. >.>
salarta 