The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.
Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.
Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.
How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?
What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.
No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.
Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch
Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet
Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes
Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew!
Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.
This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.
You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.
This is why I believe more roles should go not just to asian female bodybuilders, but to tall female MMA fighters of all races.