The Mythcreant Podcast 507 – Unfair Character Double Standards
Don’t you just hate it when characters stubbornly refuse to change their views when encountering new evidence? Unless it’s a character we like, then they’re bravely sticking to their guns in the face of adversity. That’s clearly a double standard, but it’s a fairly mild one when looking at all the ways we inconsistently judge characters. Our topic this week is figuring out how and why this happens, plus what we can do about it.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…
Oren: Oren
Chris: And
Bunny: Bunny
Chris: Now we all know that everybody likes Bunny’s evil laugh since Bunny is the villain
Bunny: [laughs evilly]
Chris: But somehow people find it weird when Oren and I as protagonists laugh. Isn’t that a little unfair? Shouldn’t all the characters get to do an evil laugh.
Oren: It’s only because my evil laugh sounds like a screaming goat. People are not into it.
Bunny: Maybe my laugh is just inherently better.
Oren: It seems like it.
Chris: It’s entirely justified, yeah. OK.
Bunny: You’re not villains, so you don’t get to.
Oren: I’ve also been told my normal laugh sounds like an evil laugh, so when I try to do an evil one, it’s just kind of forced.
Bunny: Maybe you should just lean into it. Maybe you’re destined to become a villain.
Oren: Maybe. Yeah. I’m just gonna join the bad side.
Chris: Gosh. That would be so awkward if there was a villain who just had a very forced laugh all time. Gosh, it just would set off my embarrassment fear.
Bunny: Cringing on behalf of the villain.
Chris: Yeah, probably. So more seriously, we’re gonna talk about unfair or character double standards that generally reflect unfairness in the real world.
Oren: What do you mean unfairness, Chris? I have been told by a number of very reliable internet commentators that discrimination doesn’t exist anymore–if it ever did. I think we’re probably fine. I don’t see what’s the problem.
Bunny: We did it. We solved it. Haven’t you heard about Obama?
Oren: I read an entire book by Stephen Pinker about how discrimination doesn’t exist anymore. [laughs]
Bunny: Oh, that was Pinker. I didn’t realize that.
Oren: Well, he’s a person who has said that. I don’t know if he still believes it, but that was one of the premises of The Blank Slate. It’s a very unfortunate book.
Bunny: Oh, I say that because that is a name I know from If Books Could Kill.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But any case, we have run into a number of people who just weren’t aware of some of these dynamics, and I think it is really important when we’re talking about stories and criticizing stories especially, that we understand the double standards that are out there, so that we don’t inadvertently reinforce them when we’re talking about stories.
There are a number of stories where, unfortunately, we criticize everything.
Bunny: [laughs] Unfortunately.
Chris: But some stories we have to tiptoe around a little bit. Not because we are afraid to criticize them, but because other people are applying a really unfair lens to them. And if we just criticize them normally as we would any other story, we can seem like we’re feeding into that or make that worse because that’s how a lot of this stuff works.
People just reflexively pile onto something and it’s not necessarily that people are intending to be unfair. Unfortunately, it doesn’t require intent.
Oren: Although, to be fair, there is a lot of intent. There is a whole ecosystem of people who do an outrage grift based on this sort of thing. They’ll look at a fight scene from Echo, the more recent Marvel show, and be like, “this fight scene is so bad. It’s so much worse than Daredevil. Why are they making the fight scenes woke?”
Bunny: The punching is too feminist.
Oren: Right. So what they do is they’ll slow the fight scene down or play an early version of it that doesn’t have all of the smooth editing or all of the effects they put in to make it look more real. Or they’ll zoom in really close and be like, “Aha! If you zoom in at fifty times zoom, you’ll see that they didn’t actually make contact.”
Now, of course, if you apply any of these standards to Daredevil, the show that they claim is so much better before everything was woke, Daredevil’s fights would also be bad because this is an impossible standard we’re suddenly holding echoes fights to. And it’s not like Echo is a perfect show, but these people are either extremely uninterested or very bad at actual critique, so they come up with this nonsense instead.
Bunny: I take it you’ve been steeped in the sewage of this discourse recently.
Oren: I try to keep abreast of what they’re saying ’cause it’s gonna come up in comments and I need to know if someone is repeating a narrative they heard deep in right wing YouTube.
You can also just tell if you look at public comments on some new trailer that has a visibly marginalized character in it, and all the comments are saying the same thing. They all got that from somewhere.
Chris: At this point, any popular speculative fiction show whose main character is a woman of color, right? You can just guarantee. It’s not hard to identify which shows are gonna be the target of this.
Oren: Right. And the way that it typically works is that these grifters will pick a show that has a woman or a person of color, or a woman of color as its protagonist or a main character, and they’ll hate on it for a couple months from the early trailers.
Then it’ll come out, and if it is well received, they move on and pretend that they never talked about it. And if it’s poorly or mixed reception, they’ll keep hammering on it for the next year. And they do this with almost perfect prediction. This is what happened with Prey where when the Prey trailer first came out, they were like, “Ah! Indian woman in the movie! Blah, blah, blah.” But then everyone loved Prey, so they all immediately stopped talking about it. Whereas with something like The Acolyte, which people didn’t really like, they were like, “Aha! The wokeness.” And that’ll power their algorithm for the next year.
Bunny: And it sucks for us because stories featuring marginalized characters can also just be bad independent of that. But now there’s this whole gross ecosystem of obfuscation.
Chris: On one hand, when we do criticize a story…yeah, it can possibly make it look like it’s worse, but at the other hand, we are also creating discourse about that story and can actually benefit a story too. Having that extra discourse, even if it’s critical.
So, all stories should have some level of criticism if they’re big budget, or bestselling or really popular stories.
Oren: Right.
Chris: We don’t need to do that with somebody’s unknown novel that’s languishing on Amazon. But generally, all stories are worth discussing, including stories that star marginalized characters. And of course they’re gonna have flaws in them too, like everything else.
Oren: There’s definitely a line you wanna walk there where you don’t want to just pile on, and you don’t wanna only critique stories by, or about, marginalized people. But you also don’t wanna ever do that ’cause then that suggests you don’t take them seriously.
For a long time, I avoided talking about The Broken Earth in my various oppressed mages discussions just because it didn’t seem fair to go after a black author for doing something that white authors have been doing for decades. But, like, eventually I did have to talk about it ’cause it was getting weird that I wasn’t mentioning it. ‘Cause it’s a very influential book, and if I never talked about it it would be like I don’t take it seriously. But it’s important. It matters.
Chris: Yeah. It’s important and influential and worth talking about.
Bunny: And I feel like these reactionary lines of reasoning go a couple of paths. One of them is that the character is only marginalized to get favor with annoying feminists, or it’s been infiltrated and bent to the whims of these feminists. The second one is representation as being forced down our throat, because you have to look at someone I guess who might have a different skin color?
Oren: Yeah. Well, their eyes actually live in the bottom of their throat, so they kind of have to unhinge their jaw to look at the screen. It’s not pleasant. It’s not a fun site.
Bunny: Oh yeah. Maybe in that case it is better if we withdraw from the forcing, and then after the thing comes out, usually say something like, how you can’t criticize things anymore because we’re all too politically correct. And then they’ll appeal to the idea that things used to be good. But no, they aren’t anymore.
Oren: Yeah, that’s my favorite. The, “I don’t hate this type of character. See, I like these ones from 30, 40 years ago. I just don’t like these new ones.”
And this is usually with white female characters, because there were more of them in the eighties, or at least in science fiction, than other options. But I do see it with people sometimes saying, “I don’t have a problem with black guys in movies. I liked Blade back in the 90’s. I just don’t like Finn ’cause he’s a beta cuck,” or whatever.
Bunny: “My best friend is gay.”
Oren: Yeah, that sort of thing. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is their favorite. Everyone constantly loves Ripley, but hates every character who is like Ripley that was made recently.
Bunny: And look. Ripley is objectively good, but so are many characters these days.
Oren: A Starbuck was a really funny one that came up recently in one of these videos. “Ah, why can’t they make them like they used to with Starbuck, the character who everyone was furious about at the time because it was a gender swap.
Chris: Yeah. So let’s move on from–
Bunny: You’re stopping us from complaining! Come on.
Chris: I just think it’s worth–we know that there are jerks out there. They probably don’t listen to our podcast. So let’s talk about the things that happened that are a little less intentional than that.
Oren: Okay. If we must.
Bunny: Fine.
Chris: Taking this whole, “oh, I’m not sexist, but…,” “I’m not racist, but…” And then making complaints. One that I have seen from somebody I knew was looking at, for instance, the romance in good omens and being like, “well, aren’t men allowed to be friends on TV anymore?”
Somebody’s experiencing a little privilege loss. Their basis, what they’re used to, is always having nobody be gay on television. And then we get like one gay couple and they’re like, “oh my gosh! There’s so many gay people.”
Bunny: When the paradigm shifts, even a tiny bit, you got these people popping outta the woodwork to be like, “oh my gosh. Now you’re not even allowed to have friends,” or something.
Oren: There is no shortage of media where guys are friends. [Scoffs] That is not an endangered species. Don’t worry. It’s fine.
Bunny: Have you seen the entire genre of buddy cop movies?
Chris: Yeah. That’s one of those things where you have to make people aware of the fact that whatever they’re used to becomes normal, and when they see a change that seems unfair, even if it’s not.
If a straight guy is used to all of the men in TV shows being straight, two gay guys suddenly feels like there’s too many gay people, because that person’s definition of normal is all straight people. Not because that person thinks that there shouldn’t be any gay people on television if they reasoned it out. It’s a reflexive reaction to having two guys who don’t represent you [laughs] when you’re used to every male character being your stand-in character.
Oren: That’s 200% more than there used to be, if you think about it. So that’s actually quite a lot.
Bunny: I wish I knew more specifics, but I feel like there was a study where people would think that a room was half men and half women, simply because there were more than just a couple women in it, even when the ratio was ten men and five women.
Chris: One thing that I love is–so Orin’s novel, the Abess Rebellion. A very frequent beta reader feedback to that one would be like, “Oh my gosh. There’s so many women in this book.” And then Oren would just point out that that novel has more men than most novels have women in that.
Bunny: Yes. That is so good.
Oren: I promise I was not going to bring this up. The point of this episode was not to be like, “yeah, look how feminist I am.”
Bunny: That is such a good retort though. Just such a clap back.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Oren did not plan this. I just decided to bring it up because it was such a good example of how unused to people were of having women in their books.
Oren: Yeah. And to be clear, most of them were saying it as a good thing. I wasn’t trying to do a ‘gotcha’ on them. Most of them were excited to be like, “there’s so many women!” with a couple of minor exceptions. But it was still just an obvious example of they have been taught to expect so much less.
Bunny: I think a similar point, at least, was made with Black Panther. Obviously that one was dealing with race in an extremely explicit way and the Abis Rebellion was not dealing with gender in that sort of sense. But it was pointed out that even as this was a movie full of black people, and that was the whole point, there are still more white characters in Black Panther than there are black people in most other superhero movies.
Oren: Yeah. And we get to call them the token white guys. Come on. That’s so beautiful. I love it.
Chris: Okay, so beyond just the pure number of people, there’s also the inherent judgments that people make that are different depending on a character’s demographics…
Oren: Oh yeah. This is hard.
Bunny: Yeah…
Chris: …that we have to talk about. Right? And we’ve talked about candy and spinach a lot. I think this one is so big and so important for double standards, and the reason is because in the way that candy and spinach work with characters, identification is just a really important component of that.
Probably most of our listeners have heard us talk about candy and spinach before, but let me just break it down a little bit. So candy is like wish fulfillment regarding how cool a character is. It’s basically things that the storyteller puts in the story to make a character cool. And if you identify with that character, then that feels good. It’s empowering and validating. It’s great wish fulfillment and people love it. But if you don’t identify with a character, it makes ’em absolutely insufferable and you won’t be able to stand that character. Whereas spinach is like candy’s opposite, where we’re making a character more relatable, but it means they’re less cool. They’re more average or unattractive, and they don’t have as many skills, and they fail when they try things. As opposed to the candy character that has all the skills and wins all of the fights, and stuff like that.
Bunny: The spinach is the character wearing frumpy clothes and glasses, and candy is when they let their hair down and take their glasses off.
Chris: Yeah, I love that analogy.
So, the fact is that plus spinach makes a character relatable, which also can be something that people respond differently to, whether they’re likely to relate to a character because they have similar demographics. And candy–it feels good if you identify with a character, and the people who are most likely to identify with a character are people who are similar to that character. And that’s a natural thing that happens. But power dynamics makes it so that we have very different standards where white, male characters are definitely allowed to get away with a lot more, either being on one end of the spectrum or the other. And more marginalized characters have to do the tightrope walk between these two things in order to be not…hated, shall we say.
And that’s just because, again, a lot of our stories have been because men have been more powerful and white people have been more powerful, have just a long legacy of catering to white men in the way that they’re constructed, because white men usually have the power somewhere in the company, there’s probably an executive who’s doing the budget or a committee who’s approving a bestselling book that has men in control, and that matters.
Bunny: Wow, Chris. You did such a good job explaining this, that I think you’re turning into a bit of a Mary Sue.
Chris: Oh, no! No…
Bunny: I don’t know if I can believe this anymore.
Oren: From, like, an editing perspective, this is a challenge. It’s possible for an author to make a woman, or a character of color or some other marginalized character still have too much candy. But do they really? You gotta look closely. You gotta take a second. You gotta use your second thoughts to really examine what you’re doing.
Bunny: You have to make the comparison, right? That’s the whole double part is you have to look at the other half of that. What judgments are we making here that haven’t been made in other places?
Chris: Oren did an article on Fallout, which is just a great example because in Fallout, Cooper is a white guy and he has tons of candy, but people love him. And Maximus is a black guy, and he has too much spinach and people hate him.
Oren: Yeah. And not like everybody, right? The show is pretty popular. But I definitely noticed as I was looking through comments on the show, a really strong bias against Maximus.
Chris: Mm-hmm. And people like Lucy, but that’s because she’s doing the tightrope walk. She’s got that balance just right, and that’s why she’s popular. When we’re looking at characters, the fact is that if you look at really big budget media, it is far more likely that there will be a super candied male character, not a woman. But yet, Mary Sue is the big insult that we have, and it’s targeting women specifically. So, it really shows the male lens that has been applied to our characters and that people just jump on board without thinking about it.
Oren: If you switched up Cooper and Lucy, if a woman was playing the ghoul, you would not be able to look at the comments of the show for shouts of Mary Sue. It would be unlivable.
Bunny: It also reminds me of the existence of the term ‘chick lit’ denoting something that’s a deviation from the norm. The fact that we have a term for it and the norm is that media is not produced for women, or by women, which is usually what that term denotes. And it’s usually applied to romance too, which is predominantly written by and read by women. It’s a term that we have that signals that that is something out of the ordinary. We don’t really have ‘dick lit.’
Chris: One thing that is sad is that the majority of readers are women, and somebody did some number crunching and found that publishers tended to underrate the sellability of books by marginalized people, including women. So, they tended to underestimate how well those books will sell in comparison to books read by men and written by men. It’s just a wildly bad business decision considering that women are the majority of the customers for a publisher.
Oren: But it is heartening that it shows that the buying public is less biased than the people at the top think they are. ‘Cause that’s always a question whenever these things come up is, is the general public actually going to reject this movie or book, or whatever, because it has too many marginalized characters in it? And it’s not impossible that they might, I mean, people can be really racist. But there also might just be that that’s not the problem at all, and the issue is that either the thing is being under advertised or starved of money, or maybe this particular one’s just not very good.
Bunny: Or just the people who like it aren’t being that noisy.
Oren: If anything, I feel a little heartened by the fact that those books overperform expectations, because that shows that the problem is with the decision makers and not with the general population.
Chris: Yeah. There’s also numbers for Hollywood too. And I read the book, Burn It Down, which gave some numbers. But basically it showed that there is an untapped market with an audience of color.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So Hollywood is losing money because they are not catering to this market that’s ready to buy films or shows, or what have you. You normally think that all companies are great at figuring out how to make money, but this is an area where they’re apparently not as good as you would think.
So yeah, back to candy and spinach; we can directly compare a lot of characters like Janeway versus Sheridan. Those are both candied characters.
Oren: I do love making that comparison ’cause they are so similar.
Chris: They’re very similar.
Oren: In weirdly specific ways. They both have the fake funeral, so that other characters can say how cool they are, and they both have episodes where the way that we show that someone else has been mind controlled is the fact that they are questioning the Janeway slash Sheridan’s decisions. Because why else would you possibly do that?
All: [laughter]
Chris: Yeah, but only Janeway, who was derided for being a Mary Sue. Sheridan doesn’t get criticized for being candied. Unless you’re on Mythcreants, right?
Bunny: Unless you’re hanging out with the cool kids.
Chris: Hanging out with the cool kids? Anyway, we could just take lots of those comparisons. It’s just something to be aware of.
I think general likability outside of candy and spinach also is a thing to just be very aware of, especially when it comes to who is allowed to be a jerk, or abrasive or aggressive. Galadriel, to me, is the one of the latest big examples.
The Rings of Power is not by any means a perfect show, but one of the big criticisms when it came out was that Galadriel was unlikable. And she is just the gruff warrior type. There have been so many male characters that are just like that, and they are not criticized in the same way. There’s nothing about her that’s exceptional for the main character of a TV show, but there’s a whole thing where if women don’t smile, people think they’re, like, angry or aggressive. If you look at any newscast that has a woman newscasting and a man newscasting, and just look at their facial expressions, you’ll see that the woman is smiling a large percentage of the time and the man isn’t, because that’s what people are used to. The smiling woman is like a baseline, and so if she’s not smiling, she must be angry, for instance.
Oren: Yeah. That was the same problem that Maximus had actually. And Maximus and Cooper, beyond just the candy, there’s what kind of bad behavior are they allowed to do before the audience will turn on them? And with Cooper, he’s allowed to randomly shoot people because he feels like it. That’s not a problem. But, Maximus got some payback on a bully of his, and people were like, “whoa, wow. What a bad thing for him to do. He’s such a bad person.” [laughs]
Chris: That was so weird. Those guys were jerks. I won’t feel bad that Maximus–that was just poetic justice.
Oren: People are always lecturing me about how important flawed characters are, and it’s like, Hey, look. Here, we’ve got Maximus. He’s actually a flawed character. The one you guys are always saying you want, and everyone didn’t like him. And by everyone, I mean some people; lots of people did like him.
Chris: Right. Whereas Cooper deliberately baits a young man by telling him he killed his brother. And when that guy attacks him, ’cause he was just baited, Cooper just kills him. That kid was like maybe sixteen. What the hell?
Oren: And this is where we get into some difficult discourse because my take on all this is that in most cases what we should be doing is not letting any characters get away with things that we let privileged white characters get away with. There are exceptions, but I don’t want anybody doing what Cooper does. I immediately turned on Cooper the moment he did that, and I think in a potential future where we have less prejudice, more people would. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to be like, “well, I want my marginalized character to be able to shoot innocent people and still be liked.” I think that’s not the way forward. I think we need to stop Cooper, not create other Coopers.
Bunny: #StopCooper.
Oren: #StopCooper!
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s very clear just looking at some TV shows that people are very used to very toxic behaviors, and a lot of people don’t realize how bad those behaviors are. Because as a culture, our awareness of those kinds of things is just low.
We were watching Resident Alien recently, and the sheriff met with his dad in the diner. And then his dad rips into him. And just says really mean things about, “oh, you’re a failure and so maybe you should go back to New York” or something. And I’m like, okay, so we’re saying his dad is abusive. This guy has an abusive dad. And then later, no. That person is not supposed to be–What kind of parent deliberately attacks their kid’s self-worth that way? Targeted psychological attack.
Oren: Yeah, he’s fine. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: But he’s fine. Don’t worry about it. And that kind of thing happens so often in shows. And that’s just one of those things that hopefully people will become more aware of–and they are, certainly. It’s getting better in many places.
Oren: Oh, another thing that is interesting–this is a little bit outside the candy and spinach, but I wanted to mention it since we’re nearing the end of our time–is when you have a marginalized character–and this tends to come up most often with women, but I’m sure it affects other characters too–suddenly people become real sticklers for the kind of character arc they’re allowed to have.
Oh, with Captain Marvel, it’s suddenly a huge problem that she didn’t start off without powers. ‘Cause that’s not a proper arc.
Bunny: I had never heard of this discourse.
Oren: This is very common. Even somewhat progressive people will sometimes make this criticism of Captain Marvel, which is this idea that because she started out with all of her powers, she didn’t have a proper arc.
A), there are obviously lots of male characters who start the superhero story with their powers, and that’s just silly. But B), y’all have been poisoned by too many origin stories. Not every superhero story has to start that way. She has an obvious arc about learning to not let other people control her. You can argue whether it’s good or not, but it’s clearly there. So, the idea that she needed to go from not powered to powered is just a weird bit of brain rot that people suddenly think that she has to have this very specific arc. I don’t see anyone doing that with male characters.
Bunny: Yeah. Just because it’s a common arc doesn’t mean it’s the only arc. And it’s telling that this is where you’ve decided to draw the line.
Chris: Yep. And suddenly we get really nitpicking about all of their small failings, supposedly. That one’s just very made up.
Oren: That one’s just fake, ’cause people have seen too many origin stories.
Okay, well now that we have solved double standards forever, I think we can call this episode to a close.
Bunny: And you two are never allowed to laugh again.
Oren: [laughs]
Bunny: Stop it.
Chris: If you would like to help us continue talking about double standards, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, ‘The Princess who Saved Herself’ by Jonathan Colton.