My Observations of Strong Women in Media

I have a bone to pick with Disney. No, I assure you, you are not in the Twilight Zone. For years, Disney has made girls all googly and giddy over princesses. I have no qualms against it. There are plenty of great role models in each Disney princess that each girl can take from. But it’s this latest Pixar movie that has me irritated. I’ve been super excited to run out and see Brave the moment I found out about it (maybe two years ago, now?). The premise was great and I’m interested to see what Pixar, most known for their amazing boy-geared movies with emotional content, is going to do with their first girl as the main character.

And then the commercials started coming in…

Most of the commercials I’ve been seeing in my area have been more or less like the one above. It’s filled with every single slapstick and one-liner that the movie might have, all perfectly condensed in this little time frame. It tells me nothing about the movie. Absolutely nothing. Based on the above commercial, if I had no previous knowledge of the movie beforehand, I would assume the movie was a light-hearted comedy and not some sort of epic adventure.

Let’s compare how the U.S. is marketing the movie and compare it with the Japan’s marketing, shall we?

Better? Gives you more of an idea what’s going on, doesn’t it? And it would appear that Merida is very much like another red-haired Disney princess — Ariel. I have some things about Ariel that irk me, but I’ll save that for another day.

It irks me that Hollywood believes that in order to make a huge blockbuster hit out of a movie featuring a strong lady as the leading role, they need to surround her with able-bodied men and a plethora of humor or over-sexualize her. And I should correct myself. It’s not just Hollywood. It’s everyone. There’s a really good article on the comic book industry over-sexualizing women that goes on about how the artists take random scenes and kill the story because they feel the need to make the women super sexy and put them in ridiculous costumes. Hey, comic book artists. Tell me how ridiculous it would look if Green Lantern was wearing an outfit like Star Sapphire? Exactly. So don’t do it.

As for Disney, I can’t just deny the existence of animal sidekicks. I accept that they are the thing to give to princesses, but if they’re not going to be actual characters in the story and are more or less there for gags, take them out. Let’s ask ourselves: How much better would Pocahontas have been if the animals were out of the picture? Maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg’s dream of seeing the film reach the same level of esteem as Beauty and the Beast would have been reached without the animals. Speaking of the success of Beauty and the Beast, guess what? THERE WERE NO ANIMAL SIDEKICKS. Sure, Belle had her horse, but Phillipe was kinda there in the shadow. It was the humans–er, enchanted objects–that were actual characters and nobody was merely there for simply gags (except maybe Lefou, but it wasn’t overbearing).

Thankfully, The Hunger Games was such a huge success. The men around Katniss aren’t exactly able-bodied. Haymitch is constantly drunk and Peeta is more like a damsel in distress; they both contrast wonderfully to Katniss. And the best part? She’s not into that romancey stuff. So here we see proof that a strong woman will drive people to the box office. Because guess what? If the story is great, people will pay to see the movie or read the books. And men aren’t bored or embarrassed to see an action movie with a leading female character who isn’t wearing some skin-tight suit and strutting around like a ditz. They’re just as excited as the female audience and going out and buying the books and aren’t afraid to read the series in public.

With the huge success of The Hunger Games I’m really hoping that if the movie industry decides to make another action-adventure movie with a female lead, they won’t feel the need to over-sexualize her or put in unnecessary gags. Because as Katniss has proven, a strong woman can make movie-goers go to theaters. And please, Pixar, if you ever decide to make another movie with a female lead, don’t follow Disney’s example and put in a bunch of gags and animal sidekicks into your film. Especially your trailers. Okay?

Scarlet Wizard!

Can you believe I still haven’t seen The Avengers? I still can’t believe it either. But I don’t have to watch Thor or The Avengers to see Loki because I see him every day. And just the other day, my brother and I gave him a scarlet cape and dubbed him Scarlet Wizard (he’s a boy, so he can’t be Scarlet Witch). We’re thinking about making Loki a proper headpiece/helmet thing, but maybe it’s best we don’t.

What struck us as funny was the fact that Loki was so nonchalant about having a cape. He was all, “Yeah, I wear capes all the time.” Every other dog would have been spazzing out. Maybe he really was a cape-wearing Loki in his past life. He did pick out his name after all.

A-Z Reflection 2012

O, A-Z Challenge, may I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Shakespeare aside, the A-Z Challenge was pretty insightful. I didn’t think I was capable of maintaining my blog for a month straight. And despite coming up with topics the day before the challenge started, I veered off course of my chart several times when something more interesting (to me) sprang into my head. For example: I was planning on talking about verbs for ‘V’ but ended up with a blog post verisimilitude. I had nothing planned for U or X, but still managed to talk about Up and X-Men. So the Challenge definitely got me to use my thinking cap and managed to help me find my little blogging voice. (Part sarcasm, part… goodie-two-shoes? with a dash of nerd?)

And my little blog garnered some crazy hits during the challenge. My average number of views was about 7.5-10 views a day. Last month alone, I averaged about 40 views a day. Small numbers to some, big numbers to me.

More importantly than stats, I got to meet some amazing bloggers out there. Some of my favorite blogs I “discovered” were Jocelyn Risch (Film Friday will forever be my favorite feature) and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the Blogger Basics series from Like a Bump on a Blog. And of course the lovely, Becky from Braveheart provided me with the recipe to butterbeer. It’s become my new obsessive drink and I seriously need to make more. How have I gone this long without it and dared to call myself a Potter fan?! (We’ll blame this reasoning on me being a Hufflepuff, OK?)

Do I enjoy blogging every single day? Well, there were times when it was easy to imagine I could do this every single day (I’m pretty sure this was during letters A-C), but for me, blogging 2-3 times a week seems to be my sweet spot. It’s easier for me to handle and now that I know I’m capable of writing something every day, I’m going to stop telling myself that I don’t have time to work on those short stories. Because obviously, I’m capable of working on them if I’m capable of writing 500 word blog posts, right? And no matter how busy I am doing press stuff, I still found time to write these, so I can just use my time to blog for my time to write! Look at that, time management skills, for the win!

And I’d also like to thank the A-Z Challenge for me figuring out how to use Google Reader. I never subscribed to blogs before because I had no idea how to use a RSS Feeder properly, but in order to keep up with all the new, amazing blogs out there, I had to subscribe to them to keep up! So it forced me to learn Google Reader. Now I can’t live without it.

Will I be doing this again next year? You, betcha! Despite wanting to pull all my hair out at times, this was an amazing experience. Coming up with topics, meeting people, actually seeing comments on the blog (who doesn’t love comments?), just everything about it was fun. Well, except for coming up with topics for Q, U, and X… But I think everyone had a problem with X and pretty much agrees that X needs to be taken out of the alphabet.

And quick note! I have some fun stuff going on right now. Help me name my short story anthology and you could win a special edition copy! More details over here. And lastly, the blog tour for my novel, The Number, is under way! Follow along for 6 chances to win a copy of your own!

In My Mailbox: Comic Book Edition!

In My Mailbox is hosted by Kristi at The Story Siren and inspired by Alea of Pop Culture Junkie. This meme allows bloggers to showcase the books they’ve received, bought or borrowed from the library.

I actually filmed this late last night and just got around to editing it and putting it together. So here’s my in my mailbox, comic book edition! Haven’t done one in so long… I had to cut quite a bit because I kept rambling on and on.

Actual books mentioned:
The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Time Slip (The Zubot Masters #1) by J. Bryden Lloyd (you can read my review here)

Keep Calm and…

I love these “Keep Calm and…” memes. They’re just great. This one might be my favorite simply because taking a nap when one is super stressed just seems to be the perfect thing to do. Sleep on the problem and then come back to it with a fresh pair of eyes. Someone sent me a “Keep Calm and Watch Sailor Moon” picture before. I love the idea, but I’d end up using that as an excuse to procrastinate all the time.

Now that the A-Z Challenge is over, we’ll be going back to our regularly scheduled blogging program. That means a picture/blog post every Thursday (Snapshot Thursdays FTW!) and a random blog post sometime during the week. If I have any exciting reading related thing, vlogs will commence on Sundays. And actually, I just finished reading a middle grade book, so I might muster up the energy to do a vlog this weekend. I’m sure you all miss my awkward vlogs in which I stutter and stammer for a few minutes while I try to think of a way to tell you how great the book was. And now that we have new followers, they too, can witness the awkwardness of those vlogs! Huzzah!

I’ll be writing a proper reflection on the A-Z Challenge on Monday when I’m required to according to the A-Z Challenge website. That’s about the proper time it’ll take me to muster up the strength to write a proper blog post again.