BBC Radio recently did a special on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the 10th anniversary of the Joss Whedon series airing in Britain. Naomi Alderman spoke with several people including Whedon and Neil Gaiman about the long-running series and discussed the…dun, dun DUN…strong female character. 

Alderman asked Gaiman, who famously gave form to Doctor Who’s TARDIS, “How would one go about writing a daughter of Buffy?”

Gaiman: I always feel like the wrong person to be asked when I get asked that question because people say, ‘Well how do you write such good female characters?’ And I go, ‘Well I write people.’ Approximately half of the people I know are female and they’re cool, and they’re interesting, and so, why wouldn’t I? In the case of making the TARDIS a person, you make her the kind of person you’d like to meet.”

Alderman: This gives me nothing to help people with who cannot write good female characters, and they do exist.

Gaiman: I think the big thing to point out to people is, you know, possibly they should go and hang around with some women. And also, it’s worth pointing out that people, unfortunately, misunderstand the phrase ‘strong women.’ The glory of Buffy is it was filled with strong women. Only one of those strong women had supernatural strength and an awful lot of sharpened stakes. And people sort of go ‘Well yes, of course Buffy was a strong woman. She could kick her way through a door.’ And you go ‘No, well that’s not actually what makes her a strong woman! You’re missing the point.’”

Others have tried to drive this point home in the past - Thor’s Natalie Portman, Iron Man’s Rebecca Hall, and cartoonist Kate Beaton – to name a few. Strong female characters don’t necessarily have to have Hulk strength, they need to be strongly written. The difference is something Whedon has noted over the last few years as characters meant to be “strong” like Buffy, weren’t necessarily so.

“I think that the romance, and the supernatural and the lure of the vampire, which is, you know, timeless, that all seemed to go over pretty well. The self-actualized female who was in charge of things didn’t land quite as solidly. I think people are un-used to it. I grew up with it, it just makes sense to me. You know, we write the things we either want to see or always have. Buffy was both,” he told Alderman. “And I, too, have been somewhat disappointed. I mean, there’ve been great shows, great roles, but when you look at the shows somebody would lump in with Buffy the Vampire Slayer they’re, you know, very passive girls choosing between the cute boys. It feels almost like a backlash – we want to inoculate ourselves against this by giving you everything it had without the feminism. And, needless to say, slightly problematic for me.”

(via Blastr)

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There was a storm warning in Reykjavík the night I started playing The Banner Saga. As my computer booted and my tea steeped, I made the rounds in my apartment, securing the latches of my windows — double-paned, of course, to keep the cold out. Bare birch branches writhed eerily outside, and the sky, which had danced pink and green four nights prior, was coal gray. It was a good night for a Viking story.

I glanced at my watch as I launched the game. I had to start playing, but I was eager for my partner to come home. Most Icelanders I’ve met have a strong affinity for their heritage, but my partner is a cultural paladin. Our shelves are crammed with epic poetry, archaeological resources, and dictionaries of dead languages. When my mom came to visit last summer, my partner had a story (or a song) for every mountain and waterfall we drove past. There’s a single-handed battle axe resting against her bedside table. Y’know, just in case.

I didn’t want her to play the game with me. I wanted her to snark.

Loyal defender of her culture that she is, my partner’s feathers get easily ruffled by secondhand portrayals of Vikings or Norse mythology. She grumbles whenever we walk past tourist shops selling plastic horned helmets (the horns, in case you’re unaware, are not a Viking thing). Watching The Avengers involved a lot of skeptical looks directed my way. Though I know she’d love the gameplay, she’s never given Skyrim a fair shot, on account of being too busy laughing at the mispronunciation of Icelandic names. Whenever someone portrays Viking culture inaccurately, she appears, in a puff of ocean mist and blacksmith sparks, to set the record straight.

I knew nothing of The Banner Saga beyond the basics: A Viking-themed RPG made by a small team of former BioWare devs, with turn-based strategy, very pretty artwork, and a soundtrack by Austin Wintory, who has yet to compose game music that I don’t enjoy. Now, I’m fine with derivative uses of any and all folklore, but I also take great enjoyment in watching my partner go into incensed academic mode. The moment the game started, however, my hopes of snarky running commentary scattered. I leaned forward, pouring over the little details. The cursor was styled like a cloak clasp, the same kind I’ve seen in museums. The clothes looked right. The weapons looked right. The helms lacked horns. The words — I knew words like that.

“They’re speaking Icelandic in this game,” I said by way of greeting as my partner walked in the door.

“Are they,” she said dryly, brushing the freezing rain out of her hair.

“No, seriously, listen,” I said. “There was Icelandic in the beginning of the game, and it segued into English.”

“Uh huh,” she said. I knew what she was thinking. Skyrim.

“Real Icelandic, with real Icelanders,” I said. “Come on, I know what you guys sound like by now.” Not that I knew what had been said in the game. If it doesn’t involve grocery shopping, bus travel, or common topics of conversation at a family dinner, I’m lost. The presence of the language, though, intrigued me, as it indicated that the use of the word saga in the game’s title was more than just window dressing. The Icelandic Sagas are about as Viking-y as it gets. They’re a collection of prose histories, detailing the settlement of Iceland and the political drama that followed. They walk a muddy, bloody line between historical fact and folk legend, but basically, if you want to know what Nordic life was like a thousand years ago, the Sagas are your best bet.

“Do women fight in the Sagas?” I asked, as I directed my archers around the grid. In The Banner Saga, women carry bows, never axes.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Women in the Sagas don’t fight.” She thought for a moment, smirking with recollection. “But they are incredibly badass.”

I consulted her on that point the following evening, after I had completed the game on my own (she did watch for a while the night before, declaring the clothing to be, in her scholarly opinion, “totes legit”). I needed to know specifics. The women in The Banner Saga felt subtly different than what I’ve grown used to in fantasy games. I was hungry for context.

Let me back up: Historical accuracy has been a big point of discussion in gaming circles as of late. Between the MedievalPOC to-do and Cara Ellison’s excellent essay on female representation in noir fiction, historical accuracy — or rather, perceived historical accuracy — is something I’ve been chewing on a lot. It’s the go-to justification for excluding female or minority characters, or for portraying them as oppressed — which is fine if you’re describing an actual historical setting in which said things really happened, but doesn’t hold much water if you’re telling a fantasy story. On the surface, The Banner Saga seems guilty of this. It’s a world of horned giants and magic, but women are not warriors here. They cannot become clan leaders. In combat, they are always archers or casters. This sort of thing has irked me greatly elsewhere, but here, the approach felt different. They weren’t going for historical accuracy, they were going for — if you’ll allow a made-up term — folklorical accuracy. They were trying to mimic a particular type of story, using a very specific culture as a foundation. I had the sense that in this world, women and men existed in separate social spheres, with distinct but equally important roles. It wasn’t that women couldn’t do what men did. It was that they didn’t.

“That’s exactly right,” my partner said, referring to actual Vikings. “They had super strict roles, but women were highly respected in Norse culture. They weren’t equals — there were bride prices, and that kind of thing. But women weren’t property, not like you’d see elsewhere in Medieval Europe. In Iceland, you’d most likely be literate. You’d be able to inherit. You couldn’t inherit a title, but you could inherit everything else — land, money, power. Some women held a lot of power. I mean, who do you think was running everything while the men were off making war?”

Such a woman is present in The Banner Saga: Oddleif, a chieftain’s widow. She can’t take her husband’s title, but she gets stuff done. Everybody knows her and respects her. “The chieftain of Skogr was considered one of the luckier men in town when he wooed the beautiful daughter of a well-known fighter,” her character description says. “These days most people consider him a lucky man for marrying someone who knows how to run a town.”

“What about witches?” I asked. “There are a couple witches in the game, and they’re awesome. Everyone’s scared of them. The most powerful character in the game is a witch.”

My partner’s eyes lit up. “Oh yeah, witches,” she said with relish. “Witches are all over the Sagas, and you do not mess with them. Witches, and wise women. Men always seek the advice of wise women. Wisdom’s what women in the Sagas are most often praised for. Everybody knows that they know what’s up.”

“Yeah, in the game, women aren’t leading the charge, but they plan stuff. The way my game ended, the two characters who played the biggest part in saving the day were both women. The men kept the monsters back, but those two were crucial.”

She nodded approvingly. “Women are always making stuff happen in the Sagas.” She launched into the tale of Auðr djúpúðga — Aud the Deep-Minded, who controlled a ridiculous amount of land during the early days of Icelandic settlement. “Women in the Sagas — oh, queens, there are so many awesome queens — they’re the ones with the best schemes. They don’t fight, they just figure things out and throw dudes at each other. That’s the difference between Viking men and women. Men get in ships and go raiding. Women stay at home and plot.”

“I get the sense that things like honor and courage and strength weren’t masculine characteristics in Viking culture. Is that right?”

“Absolutely. Those are neutral traits. Men and women just achieved them in different ways.”

That notion is evident throughout The Banner Saga, and it has made me aware of how accustomed I am to having one standard fantasy world template. In the stories I grew up with, men are warriors. Warriors are best. Women are weak, so they can’t be warriors. They have to be healers, or casters, or not there at all. That idea is so deeply ingrained that when I push back against it, when I shout that women are strong, too, my gut reaction is not to demand an expanded redefinition of strength, but to want to be a warrior. I am delighted whenever I can play a female character in full, practical plate. After playing The Banner Saga and picking apart its cultural basis, I’ve found myself pondering why I am so drawn to that sort of thing. If I had grown up with stories and games that presented female characters as being as powerful and visually impressive as their male counterparts, would I still want to be a warrior? Would I still want it if I hadn’t grown up in a culture where honor and courage and strength are tied to one narrow set of coded imagery? If I hadn’t been explicitly told again and again that the only things worth doing are the things that men do, the things I’m not allowed to do? I don’t know. I might. I do have a penchant for big swords and tanking. I think that’s just who I am. But I liked the witches in that game. I liked the women who solved problems and made things work. I liked how accepted and admired they were. I liked that none of them were there to be romanced or ogled. I liked that they were people. I liked the idea of there being more paths to glory than melee combat alone. Me personally, I’d prefer to live in a world where I’m free to wield a mace or a magic wand or no weapon at all, without my gender playing into it (I’d like the same for men, too). And I also think that we could use a lot more stories where women do pick up swords and become leaders, not just because we’re capable of doing so, but because we have done so, all through history. But this story — this story showed women with a different sort of strength, and I think it’s good to explore that, too.

“You know me,” I said to my partner, “I usually get so annoyed in RPGs when the only women are archers or casters. But this I was cool with. I think they were trying to keep the archetypes and social structure intact, but wanted to include female characters in the gameplay anyway. Which is pretty cool. I mean, they could’ve chosen to keep them out of combat altogether, and blamed it on the folklore.” I frowned. “It’s weird, though. I hate being told that I can’t have an axe. It’s funny that it doesn’t bug me here.”

My partner smiled. “It’s because you know this stuff. You understand Viking culture.” She paused, and gave me a wry grin. “More than most Americans, at least.”

I took that as a compliment.

Becky Chambers writes essays, science fiction, and stuff about video games. Like most internet people, she has a website. She can also be found on Twitter.

When development studio QCF started their beta build of Desktop Dungeons, they knew that their female characters needed some rethinking. The team’s awareness about female representation in games had grown since they began the project, and they were eager to incorporate that into their work. However, the reality of avoiding common pitfalls proved more challenging than they’d expected. As they put it, “Thinking about stuff was one matter, doing it was another.”

In a recent blog post, QCF provided some fascinating insights into their attempts to create a more egalitarian look for their game. Through what sounds like a lot of soul-searching and cultural unpacking, these devs decided on an atypical approach: Blur the binary.

It wasn’t good enough for us to simply react with deliberate ugliness or typically masculine factors – the idea was for Desktop Dungeons to remove the gender binary entirely instead of just making everyone a man. In de-emphasizing sex as much as possible, we hoped that players would be able to enjoy a more gender agnostic environment in general.

Shorthands for the feminine kept crawling into our work when we weren’t paying attention – smooth skin, homogenized facial structures, evidence of makeup, you name it. Even characters who we thought would easily sidestep trouble (like the female wizard) simply looked like young, pretty women in grunge costume rather than hardboiled dungeoneers. Portraits for some species went through several drafts just to deprogram our subconscious idea of what felt normal and right.

The result, judging by their artwork, is pretty darn cool. I see a varied bunch of professions and personalities, all of whom would look right at home in a monster-filled dungeon. I’m intrigued by them. I want to know their stories.

Though there’s good stuff at work here, QCF was also upfront about the areas that still needed improvement.

In some of the more egregious cases, time and pressure still had us throwing up our hands and going with what was easiest for us with slightly disappointing results … like bringing in an entire cast of female goblins relying on secondary markers like eyelashes and lipstick. We also messed up pretty badly by whitewashing our cast (with the occasional blue-skinned Bloodmage, but that doesn’t really count). And for the most part, enemy rosters and main story characters still reflect a heavy male bias.

Next time, they say, inclusion and intersectionality will be on the table from the get-go.

So no, it ain’t perfect, but I think it’s refreshing nonetheless. A small step forward is still a step forward, and I admire QCF not only for their positive accomplishments, but for their self-reflection on what could be better. Kudos.

(via Boing Boing)

Previously in Female Representation In Games

• Gender-Bending Musical Adventure Game Dominique Pamplemousse
• Female Characters In The Banner Saga
• Review: The Last of Us: Left Behind

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Just a couple months ago, the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film released their report on the gender ratios of Hollywood’s workers, discovering that the ratio of women to men in various behind the scenes roles such as editors, writers, cinematographers, composers, and special effects supervisors has not changed more than three percentage points in sixteen years. That was pretty disheartening, but theoretically, men should be just as able to craft female characters that don’t play to stereotypical tropes as women are at creating relatable male characters. So how did that go?

Turns out it went 30%. 30% of the major characters and 30% of all speaking characters in the 100 highest grossing films of 2013 were female. The numbers were halved for main characters, with only 15% of “all clearly identifiable protagonists” being female characters. 15% is only a percentage point shy of the average representation of women (16%) across the most powerful jobs involved in the making of a Hollywood movie, director, executive producer, producer, writer, cinematographer, and editor.

The report also concerned itself with the general depiction of those characters, their occupations, and whether the narrative spent time establishing their lives and goals. For example, female characters were significantly more likely to have an identifiable marital status, married, single or otherwise. Overall, researchers found that 17% of the characters in 2013′s top grossing films were placed in leadership roles. That accounted for 21% of male characters, but a mere 8% of female ones. In a particularly interesting examination, the Center also found that while 61% of male characters were depicted actually performing their chosen occupation as established by the film, only 40% of female characters were.

You can download the entire study results by clicking here, but I’ll leave you with this tidbit. 73% of all female characters in the 100 highest grossing films of 2013 were Caucasian, 14% were African American, 5% were Latina, 3% were Asian, and another 3% were aliens or fantasy races. Yes. In 2013, American theater audiences were about as likely to see a woman of an animal species or completely made up race as they were to see an Asian woman.

As we’ve previously discussed, of the 100 highest-grossing films of 2013, a whopping 15 featured female protagonists. This figure became popular knowledge through a report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, which compares the percentage of women working behind the camera with those featured on screen. Unsurprisingly, the numbers correlate.

Vanity Fair’s Bruce Handy had some questions about those statistics. Given Hollywood’s focus on getting as many butts in seats as possible, surely they wouldn’t ignore the preferences of their audiences. Could it be that the lack of women on screen was actually reflective of a purchasing trend? If we treat blockbusters like Catching Fire as flukes, is there economic logic behind the comparative lack of female-led films?

Spoiler: No.

In order to puzzle things out, Handy went in search of numbers to crunch. He broke down the top 100 films by the lead character’s gender, admitting that some of his choices were subjective. Identity Thief, for example, co-starred Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman. However, Handy reasoned, given that McCarthy was “the one audiences were coming to see,” he put that movie in the female column. To be thorough, he went outside the top 100 as well.

…just to be sure that box office wasn’t skewing the study’s results, that there wasn’t a huge cache of women-centered flops clustered below the top 100, I took a look at the next 50 films on Box Office Mojo’s grosses list; at that point, you’ve pretty much covered all the big studio films and many indies and are drilling down into documentary, foreign film, and re-release territory. Of those 50 films, I tallied 10 headed by actresses—a slightly higher percentage than in the top 100, but not dispositive—and 4 gender neutral.

Going back to the top 100, Handy compiled the grosses, and did some division.

- Total gross of all the top 100 movies in 2013: $10.039 billion.
- Total gross of 15 actress-centered movies: $1.908 billion.
- Total gross of 79 actor-centered movies: $7.525 billion.
- Average gross of actress-centered movie: $127 million.
- Average gross of actor-centered movie: $95 million.

This should go without saying, but the takeaway here is not that women-led movies are better than male-led movies. Gender disparity in media is an issue of balance, not of competition. Catching Fire, Frozen, and Gravity killed it last year, not in spite of being woman-led, but because they were good. I think that’s all your average moviegoer cares about. And maybe having female protagonists didn’t hurt. I think I speak for a lot of us here when I say we’re hungry for female protagonists. Ravenous, even. Perhaps we’re a little more willing to turn out in droves for something that’s only offered to us a fraction of the time.

Read the full article here.

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Elementary is unique among the many recent retellings of A.C. Doyle’s famous detective, for better or worse depending on your tastes, because it takes familiar characters and story elements and places them in a completely new or reimagined context. While playing it fast and loose with what’s familiar might alienate some, one thing this freedom does allow Elementary to do—and do well—is give us more interesting, fun, and complex female characters to revel in.

Original A.C.D. Canon

That’s not to say there weren’t awesome ladies to like in the original canon. Despite only being in one adventure, everyone knows about The Woman, Irene Adler, who outsmarted Sherlock Holmes. And there were others: Helen Stoner from “The Speckled Band” and Violet Hunter from “The Copper Beeches,” and other women who appear throughout the many cases. The downside is that few women besides Mrs. Hudson and Mary Morstan appear with any regularity, usually only as a character in one case. In the world of adaptions, they’re forgotten pretty easily. The “recurring cast” of the original cases is almost completely male, and of course completely focused on the two male protagonists. Sadly this tends to carry over into adaptions, with a lucky few exceptions.

Joan Watson

Elementary subverts this pretty handily by simply taking two of the most important classic players in the Holmes stories—Watson and Moriarty—and daring to imagine them as women. Not only as women; both of them, in their own ways, are Sherlock’s equals. Joan is always Sherlock’s partner, never his assistant (a point made beautifully in “The One Percent Solution”) and her own intelligence, insight, and hard work are treated by both Sherlock and the NYPD as equally qualified. Watson is also a definer of interpersonal boundaries who can be emotionally supportive and empathetic without giving up her own needs or allowing others to push her around. Also she’s played by Lucy Liu so you know she’s going to be fierce as heck.

Jamie Moriarty/Irene Adler

Moriarty on the other hand is what she’s always been—Sherlock’s dark shadow, the Napoleon of crime and, as a composite character of both Moriarty and Adler, the one person capable of outsmarting Sherlock again and again. In the end it’s actually Joan that helps capture her due to Moriarty’s underestimation of her. Jamie is a compelling mix of capable and vulnerable, intelligent but isolated which helps her be a multifaceted and intriguing villain. It’s also nice that she uses the misassumptions people will make about her as a woman to her advantage.

Ms. Hudson

Though only appearing in one episode (Snow Angels), the “fascinating” Ms. Hudson is updated to a beautiful and intelligent trans woman who is a prominent Greek scholar and friend who assisted Sherlock on cases back when he worked for Scotland Yard. Appreciatively, she is always referred to with the correct pronouns. The show emphasizes her kindness, practicality and handiness, growing independence, and personhood. Hopefully she’ll return in later episodes.

Of course, the show is not entirely perfect; out of the four main regular characters, Joan is still the only woman. Jamie is a huge player in season one’s plot but shows up less frequently than Mycroft or Alfredo, Sherlock’s addiction recovery mentor, in season two. But it’s not just about numbers—the female characters in Elementary, usually even the ones who only show up in a single episode, have both diversity and agency. While they might not, like Watson or Moriarty, make the choices and hold the sense of self that drives the action of an entire season’s plot, they still can drive the story of their own episode. Sometimes they are the heroes, and sometimes they’re the villains. Sometimes they’re near-paragons and sometimes they’re incredibly flawed. Many of the female characters, from the mathematician trying to solve p=np in “Solve for X,” the prima ballerina in “Corpse de Ballet,” and the consulting geologist in”Dead Clade Walking” are authoritative experts in their fields.

In a way, the variety is also one of the show’s strengths. Elementary has both two main recurring female characters who are well developed and have equal control of their story but it also has a wide and varied field of representation on an episode-by-episode basis. It’s a great show that’s female-positive (towards women of all types) and is enjoyable from both a Holmsian and crime show perspective too. The season 2 finale premieres next month, so if you’re not watching this is the perfect moment to start binge-watching and enjoy yourself some awesome lady characters.

Alana Mancuso is a freelance writer and fiction editor with a passion for geeky things and good storytelling. You can find out more about her and her writing at alanamancuso.com or @AlanaMancuso on Twitter.

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Every year at CinemaCon the MPAA releases statistics (report here) on the previous year’s moviegoers: What percentage of them can be classified as “frequent moviegoers,” how 3D movies do across various markets, whether the average ticket price has changed. Stuff like that. And, of particular relevance to us, demographic breakdowns. You might have to sit down for this, because it’s shocking: Far more women and racial minorities see movies than there are women and racial minorities in movies. It’s almost like there’s not enough representation or something. I know. So weird.

For this post I’ll cross-reference you to our write-up on the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film’s 2013 study on Hollywood’s (lack of) gender balance. To tl;dr it up a bit, the study found that 30% of the speaking characters in 2013’s top 100 films were female, and only 15% of all main characters were. Taking the female characters as a whole, 73% were caucasian, 14% were African American, 5% were Latina, and 3% were Asian.

That’s not a heck of a lot. But what about people seeing the largely white male worlds depicted in the multiplexes? Turns out that a whopping 52% of the moviegoing public is women. In fact, “Females have comprised a larger share of moviegoers (people who went to a movie at the cinema at least once in the year) consistently since 2009.” That’s right. The majority of people who go to the movies are women, but we’re seeing stories that are about men 85% of the time.

Among the top five top-grossing films of the year—Iron Man 3, Catching Fire, Despicable Me 2, Man of Steel, and Monsters University—Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel were more dude-heavy in terms of their audience breakdown, while women had the majority on the other three. Still, even with of Man of Steel, which had the biggest percentage for any one gender with a 60% male audience, it’s not that much of a difference. There were still tons of women going to see Snyder’s Superman and tons of men going to see Katniss vs The Man 2. I’m going to step out on a limb and say that if studios made more female-starring studio blockbusters, men wouldn’t ruin their box office by staying home for a Michael Bay marathon because ewwww, cooties.

The study also found that Hispanics purchased 25% of the tickets sold in 2013, though they make up only 17% of the population. In addition, 2013 saw the first significant increase in ticket sales to African-Americans since 2009, a fact that MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd and NATO (National Association of Theater Owners, not the other one) chairman/president John Fithian attribute to films like 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, The Best Man Holiday, and Black Nativity. “More movies in 2013 featured more black actors in important roles that drove more patrons to the theaters,” says Fithian. “That’s why we saw substantial growth in moviegoing for African-Americans and other minorities.” Also relevant is the fact that 2013 saw the release of Instructions Not Included, the highest-grossing Spanish language film of all time.

It’s almost like people want to see stories that reflect their own cultures and lived experiences. And if Hollywood overwhelmingly tells the story of white men, they’re missing out on the opportunity to rake in more money. And they’re, y’know, contributing to institutional racism and sexism, which should be enough to get them to make a conscious effort to increase diversity. Should be. But we know what £anguage Hollywood $peaks.

(via Indiewire, The Hollywood Reporter, image via badahos/Shutterstock)

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From Nimona creator Noelle Stevenson, first-time comic author Grace Ellis, and artist Brooke Allen comes Lumberjanes! Produced by Boom! Studios, this first book is a delightful camp adventure in the weird-but-true style of Psychonauts and other such strange adventures.

Featuring (so far) an entirely female cast of characters, each delightfully quirky with more-than-meets-the-eye attitudes (and believe me, there’s already a lot to meet the eye thanks to interesting and unique character designs), the first book introduces us to our cadre of lumberjane troopers deep in the woods in the dark of night, mid-adventure. Things escalate quickly, and it soon become obvious this is no slice-of-life camp adventure, but that indeed some weeeeiiiiird stuff is going on, the kind of stuff that will have you going:

We leap into action mid-scene with our plucky protagonists, Jo, April, Mal, Molly and Ripley, who are up way past their bedtime and way far away from their beds, following clues and trailing mysteries and breaking rules to do so. Can you really blame them, though? I mean, they’re starting out fighting three-eyed dream-like foxes who vanish into smoke when…uh…sufficiently punched, I suppose. We don’t know much about what’s going on to start, but the book certainly doesn’t disappoint with it’s hilarious and engaging action.

Of course, nothing in life is without consequence, which is how we are introduced to our esteemed counselor, Jen, and camp director, Rosie. (Let me add that not only do I find the fact that every character so far is female to be delightful, but that they also all have names and not one is set dressing to be especially pleasing.) The exposition in the comic is done so well that it isn’t until reading it again that I start to recognize the narrative structure underneath what I enjoyed as a dorky but enthusiastic adventuring group. As the lumberjanes explain to Rosie exactly what possessed them to wander into the woods, and as Rosie responds with sincere interest and not dismissive anger at disobedient children, hints of the larger story begin to take shape. From witchy old bear women to high fights and action it’s stunningly clear that Lumberjanes is going to be worth picking up every issue as soon as it comes out.

While the story has me delighted in a way that I can only compare to Adventure Time in its whimsy-yet-surprising-depth, the art does an amazing job of selling you the story. Many first issues of a comic can get long-winded into exposition and talking heads as the characters attempt to explain what’s going on, but because of the great art and layout in this comic, Lumberjanes doesn’t hesitate to dump you into the action, and then tumble you into the suspense of getting caught, and then slip right into the cheerful-yet-serious development of who these people are and where they’re going. Frankly, largely because of the art, the book reminds me of great cartoons I’ve watched, enrapt, not only by the antics of the characters but the way their attitudes, ideas, and  character are so aptly expressed in the style.

It’s obvious that Lumberjanes is going to be especially great for kids, but I mean that in a way that there are things that are For Kids in a way no sane adult would ever touch, and then there are things that are “For Kids” that do a fantastic job of being all-ages and positively delightful, and Lumberjanes falls solidly into that second camp (ha ha, get it? Camp joke). Combining the heady feel of camp nostalgia with solid story-telling and wonderful art, Lumberjanes is a comic you’ll not regret picking up.

Lumberjanes is written by Noelle Stevenson and Grace Ellis, drawn by Brooke Allen, and is available from Boom! Studios.

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If you had told me back in 2011 that Tina Belcher would be my absolute favorite character on H. Jon Benjamin’s new show Bob’s Burgers, let alone that she’d be one of my favorite characters on television period, I would have been … skeptical at best. Mostly I just saw the character design and knew she was voiced by a male comedian and, man, does comedy have a bad history of mocking girl characters who have masculine features and don’t fit perfect feminine molds (cough cough Family Guy cough). But the show took what could have been a cheap running gag of “let’s laugh at the weird girl” and turned her into the best character on the whole damn show. And I’m still kind of amazed that she exists.

My love for Tina started in the second episode, “Crawl Space,” when she’s faced with sharing a room with her brother for the week. In what seems like a throwaway joke, Tina warns that not only has she dealt with zombie-themed night terrors for years, but thanks to her budding sexuality, the night terrors are melding into weird sex dreams where she gets the zombies to make out and touch each other’s butts. Bob, along with Tina’s brother and sister, are understandably unnerved by the admission and that’s where I thought it was going to end. A random joke that pokes fun at Tina’s intense awkwardness and then is never mentioned again, right?

Well, no. Instead of just dropping the zombie fetish joke, they made it part of her character. You see the dreams manifest themselves later in “Crawl Space.” Then you see euphoric visions of zombies in her head when she has her first kiss a few episodes later. They kept bringing it up. Sometimes it’s a sight gag, sometimes it’s a passing comment and sometimes it’s a whole plot line. There was even an anthology episode this season where she writes a story for school about the school basketball team becoming part of the walking dead and Tina (in full Walking Dead sheriff uniform) seduces them with her expert hair flip and feminine wiles — it ends with them all becoming her sexy zombie boyfriends.

But it doesn’t stop there. As the seasons have progressed, she’s been more and more unashamed about being physically attracted to boys. She flirts with them … it’s usually really awkward, but you’ve seen her level of confidence grow (props to her voice actor Dan Mintz for walking that line of awkward and confident perfectly). Along with zombies, she really, really likes sometimes-love-interest Jimmy Jr.’s butt. She really likes boy butts in general. Heck, she listens to the traffic reports because she likes the phrase “bumper to bumper.” We’ve also seen Tina’s volumes and volumes of erotic fiction — both fan fiction and stories based on her classmates and almost all of them involve butt touching as part of the sexy activities. And did I mention her short story about becoming the girlfriend queen of a horde of sexy athlete zombies who all have cute butts? The girl knows what she likes!

Sure, we only see hints of how filthy her erotic stories get (TV Standards and Practices, after all), but the parts we see are still unabashedly “Tina.” I can’t think of a show (especially a comedy) that has so expertly handled a teenage girl’s desires in all their awkward glory. If we do see a teenage girl having desires on other comedies, it’s either being mocked as something trivial and stupid or, even worse, shown behind the lens of what boys and men want from young women, catered to what the male gaze wants girls to be in that moment. And god forbid that girl doesn’t look exactly how the male audience wants her to look, whatever arbitrary traits those might be. That invasive scrutiny permeates through a good portion of our entertainment and is, quite frankly, really gross.

But in Bob’s Burgers, the writers (several of whom are women, surprise surprise) have allowed Tina to express her budding sexuality, weirdness and all, without putting it through the lens of what others would feel comfortable with. She has weird fetishes. She writes erotica. She enjoys expressing her feminine side in the form of unicorns and pretty horses while having a thing for zombies, too. She female gazes all over hot men. She also has some of the funniest, most random and weirdly sexual thoughts in the whole show, including “If boys had uteruses, they’d be called duderuses.” In short, Tina is the patron saint of Tumblr, a platform that brings in a multitude of weird, creative young women. I can think of no better representative.

There is also something to be said for how the writers surround Tina with a support system, no matter how flawed its members may be. After all, Tina’s great weirdness is written as a strength, but it would be put to waste if the characters around her were constantly putting her down (cough cough Family Guy again cough). While Bob might not want to know the details of his daughter’s sexual urges — pretty sure most dads just don’t want to hear that — he’s never told her how she feels is bad or that she needs to change. He’s often the first encouraging Tina not to listen to what others think. Mom Linda is mostly just happy when her kids are happy, so if Tina is happy writing undead erotica then all the better. And despite the occasional mocking from Louise and silly comment from Gene, Tina’s siblings have supported her in their own way, like with an army-style bootcamp to prepare her for her first kiss. Even with the hints of dark humor in the show, Tina is encouraged by her family more than she’s discouraged and that’s an important element to what the show is saying about how to treat teenage girls.

But at the end of the day, what makes Tina great is Tina herself. Tina Belcher’s sexual desires are weird. They’re weird and more than a little off-putting and not meant to be particularly palatable for the average straight male viewer. And it is glorious to watch. The show makes you recognize her desires as a young woman and the possibly that other girls feel the same way. Tina’s budding sexuality might be an exaggerated view of how a lot of teenage girls feel as they grow up, but there are girls out there that relate to Tina and it’s a point of view that rarely gets told. And when it is, it’s almost always bent to fit how men want girls to express their sexuality. But Tina’s sexual desires aren’t there to titillate the audience. They’re there because they’re a part of her. And they’re funny because sex is weird and funny and awkward.

After the Season 4 finale this past weekend and with season five coming in the fall, I can’t help but be grateful. I came to Bob’s Burgers for H. Jon Benjamin, I stayed for the quippy dialogue, but I fell in love with this show because Tina is a beautiful unicorn of awkward blooming sexuality. And television is better for it.

Katie Schenkel (@JustPlainTweets) is a copywriter by day, pop culture writer by night. Her loves include cartoons, superheroes, feminism and any combination of the three. Her reviews can be found atCliqueClack and her own website Just Plain Something, where she hosts the JPS podcast and her webseries Driving Home the Movie. She’s also a frequent Mary Sue commenter as JustPlainSomething.

To the surprise of no one, women are still majorly underrepresented in video games — especially in terms of protagonists. Thankfully, game studios seem to be recognizing this as a problem and taking steps in the right direction. Three of the biggest games from last year – BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, and The Last of Us — featured strong women as protagonists, and the indie sector continued to prove they were all about inclusivity.

2014 is already shaping up to be another good year in terms of women in games, and I wanted to highlight some upcoming lady-led titles that I think are worth getting excited about.

[View All on One Page]

Lauren Puga is a writer/designer hybrid. She writes for her own blog, GameSkinny, and now the Mary Sue. You can find her on Twitter @kittentarantino.

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I know I was looking for a new female superhero, and the idea of an intelligent Hulk-type grabbed me. …Never for an instant did I want her as a love interest for Hulk. Only a nut would even think of that. — Stan Lee, speaking to The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs.

Stan Lee’s reasons for creating She-Hulk (which we covered in our piece on David Goyer‘s comments yesterday) might not have been entirely as he says, but the problems with the screenwriter’s statements stand. For one, Goyer’s perfectly confident his words will be respected even if they reveal a broad ignorance of both the in-comics appearances of the character he’s talking about and the known industry stories of their creation. For another, he’s perfectly comfortable with at-a-glance assigning a female character to the “just there for the T&A” box, a trend we’ve seen over and over again with male movie reviewers and Black Widow. And further, his statements do nothing to shame these hypothetical sex-fantasy-crazed writers who created his hypothetical She-Hulk or hold them responsible for being a part of the problem of women’s representation in genre fiction.

It’s especially worrying Goyer thinks having an origin which might be related to male sexual desires allows one to dismiss the entire history of a character outright, given the relationship between the personal life of William Moulton Marston and the themes of early Wonder Woman comics, and Goyer’s own work creating the foundation for Wonder Woman’s first appearance in a live action feature film and his duties as writer for the first Justice League movie.

(via The Washington Post.)

Previously in She-Hulk

• Warner Bros. Scribe Calls She-Hulk “Giant Green Porn Star” who “Serves to Service” the Hulk
• The History of She-Hulk, Part 1
• Preview: She-Hulk #1

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I don’t like time travel. Excusing the excuse that it’s a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, most Hollywood time travel consists of altering linear timelines to forestall mistakes, death, and apocalyptic disaster. At its best, it comes across as the screenwriting equivalent of a neat parlor trick, at its worst it’s sloppy, plot-hole-filled writing that has to use sci-fi mumbo-jumbo to cover its own tracks. But the latest time-jumping saga to hit the silver screen – X-Men: Days of Future Past – made pretty good on its promises with one major wrinkle; the film itself is an alternative timeline to what happened in the comics, for a not-so-mysterious reason. That reason is Ms. Shadowcat herself, Kitty Pryde, who, instead of being the time-traveling agent of change, acts as the supercharged battery that sends Wolverine back.

Though we’ll get into the details below, a canon shift of this magnitude in book-to-film adaptation would normally inspire internet outrage, essays about the changes, and hot debate between fans. Instead, it seems that only a corner of the fan world—the one directly concerned with issues of female representation—has spoken up in opposition. Considering the canonical fanaticism that followed the introduction of a female character to The Hobbit films, you might think it strange to see such a dearth of dissent. Unless what we’re really looking at is the same thing in reverse, another classic case of – everyone say it with me now — Hollywood sexism.

To solve this mystery to our satisfaction, let’s do a touch of time traveling ourselves; to 1981, when the original Days of Future Past was published in the Uncanny X-Men series. Desperate to avert the dystopian future of 2013 where every last mutant was either placed in an internment camp or outright murdered, Kate, née Kitty, Pryde transferred her consciousness into her younger, 1983 self. There, she rallied the old X-Men to prevent the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly, an act that had led to mass anti-mutant hysteria. This arc is one of the most famous in X-Men history, and helped established the popularity of the series under writer Chris Claremont. Seems like a plum story for convergence to film, so why the character switch?

Before spinning off into conspiracy theory, we should address some of the more reasonable explanations for this change. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of them have to do with money and logistics. Kitty, thus far, had not been established as a main character in the X-franchise. In fact, her only other major appearance, where she was also portrayed by Ellen Page, was in the X-film we’ve all dedicated energy to pretending never happened. To that end, Ms. Page’s increased stardom in the interim means she would potentially be less available to take on a major role. Then there’s the sheer fact of Wolverine’s popularity as a character and fan expectation that the movie will center around him as a major player: these films have not been so much about the X-Men, after all, as they have been about Wolverine. Finally, there’s the funk caused by the timeline being between the not-so-distant-future from 2014, where Kitty is still a young woman, and the 1970s, when she wasn’t born yet.

Sounds about right. But I’m still calling a foul. Kitty’s lack of popularity is not a fault of her character, but a fault of the writers, who have focused their energies again and again on the walking trope of a tough guy that is our dear Logan. Falling back on Wolverine yet again is a mixture of kowtowing to audience familiarity and plain old writing laziness touched with sexism. Screenwriters are told to do the same thing, but different, and not to stray too far from the path, lest audiences get left behind, leaving their cash behind, too. It’s not that they couldn’t take the time to introduce a new main character; it’s that they didn’t want to, especially if it’s a woman, one they speculate will lose them ticketbuyers on that critical opening weekend.

Finally, there’s that timeline issue, one that wouldn’t be a problem if producers weren’t trying to link the two franchise casts together. I complain about sci-fi mumbo-jumbo, but it, of course, has its own advantages, namely that you can do pretty much whatever you want in a story, so long as there’s a reasonably plausible explanation attached with some fancy science-sounding phrases. Who’s to say that a traveler has to inhabit their younger body? In a similar vein, why does it have to strain the mind to the point of breaking, meaning that only a mutant who can self-heal, as Wolverine can, is capable of making the trip? These are not concrete facts, but changeable pieces of fiction, written in so that we don’t question why a woman is being virtually written out.

Kitty’s displacement is symptomatic of the lack of female representation in action films. There is very literally no reason why, with a bit of finagling, she could not have been the one to convince a younger Professor X of the terrible, imminent future. Wolverine does nothing physically that Kitty herself could not have found a way out of, or wouldn’t even have had to deal with given different writing. Who else would have loved to have seen Kitty, as a future student of Xavier’s, restore his hope in all the good he will one day accomplish? But in Bryan Singer’s estimation of the X-Men, characters are defined by their powers, and, consequentially how powerful they are in the physical realm, not who they are emotionally. Wolverine’s ill-suited manner for the task is played for laughs, when a character sincerely able to address the matter may have been just as, if not more, effective.

Absence of protest in the face of a woman’s part being diminished is, sadly, no surprise. But there’s also been no outcry at Kitty’s absence from the meat of the action because no one misses a character they hardly know. This didn’t have to be the case. Make us care about her, and she could have been the central focus of the film, with all the action necessary to carry it off as a summer blockbuster. The idea that audiences couldn’t have related to her is an excuse among many that prevents characters like her from being able to take the reins. That’s all they are, though; excuses based on fear. The fear of losing money, the fear that a film won’t be successful if a woman is the main character, the one with, in this case, the most agency. However, again and again at the box office, we see that women can not only carry films, but can do so to great effect. Just think of X2, a blockbuster mega hit where Jean Grey and Storm had more screen time than even Mystique, the most featured woman in the film, does here. There’s so much more to the X-Men than Wolverine and background characters with flashy powers and few lines. For a socially conscious cluster of heroes, letting women take the main lead is one battle they’ve yet to fight.

Zoe Chevat is a writer, animator, and illustrator who attended the CalArts MFA Program in Film and Animation. In addition to writing for The Mary Sue, she also contributes to Bitch Magazine Online. She comes from New Jersey and lives in Los Angeles, and, after many years, still finds that second part incredibly strange. Follow her on Twitter @zchevat, or on Tumblr at http://justchevat.tumblr.com

In Teen Wolf, a show full of alpha males and machismo, one of the most interesting characters is something else entirely – a woman. Lydia Martin begins her arc in episode one as a stereotypically ditzy, beautiful, popular girl, but that soon starts to unravel. Over the course of the first three seasons, it is slowly but resolutely revealed how intelligent and powerful Lydia actually is. From a feminist standpoint, Lydia is incredibly important because she starts her story attempting to adhere to the traditional dumb popular girl trope but slowly, through her relationships and character development, drops her pretense to reveal her true intelligence and power as a woman.

One of the most significant moments in Lydia’s story line is seen in episode five of season one. In this episode, titled, “The Tell,” the end revolves around a set of parent-teacher conferences involving the parents of all the teenage characters of the show. The conference between Lydia’s divorced parents begins with them assuming that Lydia is having problems at school and trying to blame one another for those imagined problems. They are cut off by the teacher, who states, “Academically, Lydia is one of the finest students I’ve ever had. Her AP classes push her GPA above a 5.0. I’d actually like to have her I.Q. tested. And socially, she displays outstanding leadership qualities. I mean, she’s a real leader.”

Even Lydia’s own parents assume that she is fully committed to the trope of the ditzy teenage girl character. However, Lydia’s abilities, academically and socially, demonstrate that she is capable of so much more. This scene is a lovely bit of foreshadowing for what is to come in her character arc. Throughout the course of the show, Lydia can be seen, time and again, figuring out problems before anyone else. Her only rival is the character Stiles, who is intelligent but not as focused or socially adept as Lydia. What the revelation of Lydia’s true nature says to the audience, which is comprised predominantly of teenage girls, is that they don’t have to be defined by their intelligence, their popularity, or their beauty. They can use and embrace all three of these concepts. In this respect, Lydia is an incredible example of feminist ideals.

Throughout the course of the show, Lydia is shown to be very sexual, but she is never morally judged for her sexual activity. In many other shows, teenagers, and especially women, are typically judged as being morally bad or corrupt in some way for having and enjoying sex. Unlike these other shows, Teen Wolf never makes any moral judgment on Lydia or any other characters for their sexual activity. Lydia is seen being sexual with multiple characters and is still perceived as someone worthy of desire and affection. This can be seen through Stiles’s unwavering devotion to her. He knows about her sexual history, but he is not bothered by it. He is still in love with her, not in spite of or because of her history, it’s simply a non-issue. She is not viewed as being damaged or brought down by her desires in any way.

In parallel to this, there is one very important moment in episode 11 of season one “Formality,” in which Stiles takes Lydia to Winter Formal. While outside the dance, they are approached by Lydia’s ex-boyfriend, Jackson. He says to Stiles, “it’s your go, boss,” implying that Lydia is someone who gets passed from one boy to another. Her response after he walks away is a breath-taking example of feminism in action. She says,

“I don’t care. I don’t want compliments. I will not fall prey to society’s desire to turn girls into emotional, insecure, neurotics who pull up their dresses at the first flattering remark.”

Just look at that line for a moment. At its core, that one line of dialogue defines Lydia as an intelligent woman who is completely aware of the constraints society wants to place on girls. The fact that this line is delivered by a beautiful, well-dressed woman makes it all the more powerful. It is saying that you can be a strong feminist and still be feminine. This scene is telling young girls that you don’t have to fit a certain mold. You don’t have to choose between wanting to be respected and wanting to be beautiful.

Perhaps the most important development in Lydia’s character is the revelation of her own supernatural powers. At the end of season 2, it is discovered that Lydia is a banshee, a mythical Irish spirit woman who wails when someone is close to death. In the show, the writers add to the mythology, allowing the scream to help Lydia hear the whispers of the dead. She can hear the universe speaking to her and she uses it to help save people. What is important about this is that it takes something that is traditionally seen a weakness for women, the tendency to scream in the face of danger, and turns it into something powerful that can be used to save and protect others. Lydia uses her scream to help her friends avoid danger and death. By doing this, the ‘wailing woman’ stereotype is being turned on its head. Instead of screaming being a weakness, it is a source of strength and power. It’s giving a Lydia a power that no one else has.

Lydia Martin has grown and changed over the course of Teen Wolf’s first three seasons. She has gone from a supposed brainless snob to one of the most respected and powerful characters on the show. It will be interesting to see what more she will accomplish in the fourth season this June.

Katie Garren is a nerdy feminist blogger from Washington State. She runs the blog Katie Reads the Classics , in which she reads and reviews literature mostly for her own amusement.

Previously in

• Teen Wolf Picks Up The Wolverine Actor
• Teen Wolf Finale Recap
• Teen Wolf Recap: Insatiable

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This past Wednesday, many of us chatted about Steven Moffat‘s remarks concerning casting a female in the titular role of Doctor Who. It seemed like a good idea to delve into the opinions of other people who have been involved in the program, as well as some of those who’ve played the Time Lord hero who makes a habit of transforming his body in order to avoid death.

The idea of a female Doctor has been explored in non-canon comedy stories. Joanna Lumley played a female Fourteenth Doctor in a Red Nose Special in 1999, “The Curse of Fatal Death,” written by Moffat. The 2003 audio play Exile featured an alternate universe where the Third Doctor was female, played by Arabella Weir. David Tennant appeared in the same audio play as another Time Lord.

Some have said that the debate about whether or not a woman can play the Doctor rose above the level of occasional fan musings due to Tom Baker, who played the Fourth Doctor. In 1981 it was announced that Baker would be leaving the title role of Doctor Who after playing it for seven years. When asked during an interview about what sort of man the Fifth Doctor might be, Baker remarked: “Well, you’re making an assumption that it’s going to be a man.”

Speculation began as to whether or not the remark should be taken seriously, and it’s been reported by different sources that then-producer John Nathan-Turner encouraged such speculation in order to help publicity. We know, of course, that the Fifth Doctor was indeed male. But since then, every announcement by the BBC that the Doctor would be recast has been quickly followed by news media asking if the next incarnation would be female. In recent years, the debate has shifted from “Is it possible?” to “Why hasn’t it happened yet?”

Before the casting of the Twelfth Doctor, actor Arthur Darvill (who played traveling companion Rory Williams) eagerly suggested Dame Helen Mirren for the role. Mirren herself said she would not be right for the part but said she believed it was time the Doctor’s gender was switched. While appearing on the show Daybreak, John Barrowman (who played Captain Jack Harkness on Doctor Who and Torchwood) also supported the gender swap, saying, ”Give it a whirl. If it doesn’t work… she can always regenerate back to a man.” All the way back in 2011 he asked “If Captain Jack can be an omni-sexual time agent and an assistant to the doctor, why can’t we have a female doctor?”

When I was writing my book Doctor Who: A History, I had the opportunity to talk to Lisa Bowerman. An actor, director, and photographer, she appeared in “Survival,” the last story of the classic Doctor Who program. After the show was cancelled, she became more well known to Whovians for playing the role of Prof. Bernice Surprise Summerfield. A hard-drinking, flirtatious archeologist who originally traveled with the Doctor in tie-in media, Benny thrilled readers so much that she got her own spin-off book series that included twenty-three novels. In 1999, Big Finish Productions started releasing new books featuring Benny, along with audio dramas starring Bowerman. She has now regularly played the part for fifteen years.

With that in mind, I was curious what the actor/director thought about casting a female as the Doctor. Bowerman said, “I don’t think there’s a good reason the Doctor can’t be a woman. I don’t think we should fixate on it, either. We shouldn’t cast someone just to have a woman Doctor or a black Doctor or an Asian Doctor. If it works well dramatically and it’s the right person, then, yes, why not cast that person? If it’s a woman that time, cast a woman. You’d probably lose half of fandom, as people can be very loyal to their ideas, but you have to have confidence in your conviction. If you have something appear on television, in the story, then that legitimizes it. The Doctor can be anything except—and I don’t mean this to be offensive—anything other than British in character, atmosphere and sensibility.”

Excellent points. But what do the Doctors of Doctor Who think?

Peter Davison played the Fifth Doctor on the classic program and decades later starred in a mini-episode alongside Tennant’s Tenth Doctor (who became Davison’s son-in-law a couple of years later). Davison’s daughter Georgia Moffett auditioned for the role of Rose Tyler and years later starred as Jenny in “The Doctor’s Daughter.” In a Q&A feature on the BBC America website, Peter Davison said, “I’ve never quite liked the idea of a female Doctor. I think they’ve found a perfect situation now [in the modern show] where they have the slightly faulted Doctor with all his mad genius, and you have the strong woman as the companion. I think that works very well. If you reversed it, it would be difficult because you’d have the woman as the mad genius, but is she vulnerable? And then you just have a strong man as the companion. And somehow that doesn’t work well to me.”

In July 2013 the website blastr interviewed Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor, and asked about the possibility of a female Doctor. The actor said, ”There’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be female.” He then added jokingly, “If the Doctor has twelve incarnations, surely he must be in touch with his feminine side to a certain extent.”

Baker was asked about the Doctor being played by a woman again at the Radio Times Covers Party on January 28, 2014.  This time he said, “There should [be a female Doctor.] It won’t happen because [the BBC] are too timid, but there should be.”

My research for Doctor Who: A History also involved an interview with Sylvester McCoy, who played the Seventh Doctor. I brought up my own opinion that I think we’re overdue to see a good and talented female taking on the Doctor’s role. McCoy responded, “I wonder sometimes if Doctor Who would lose some fans with a woman in the role. But we need more equality among the sexes because it isn’t there yet. We don’t give women enough credit. Women can be heroic in science fiction and can be intelligent, complex characters, of course. If the Doctor can change from looking like Colin Baker to looking like me and change yet again so he looks like the not-as-handsome Paul McGann, then turning into a woman doesn’t seem much stranger. It’d be interesting and they should try it.”

Eighth Doctor actor Paul McGann has said on multiple occasions that he would like to see a female Doctor and doesn’t think there’s any good reason to prevent such casting. When fans have brought up that they’re not sure Time Lords are able to swap gender, McGann has enthusiastically responded “It’s science fiction!” At the Armageddon Convention in New Zealand in 2010, he even had a suggestion for who could play the female Doctor: “Tilda Swinton as Doctor Who, can you imagine that? Tell me you wouldn’t watch that. You would. You know you would!”

Despite all this, I know that there are people who insist that it doesn’t matter what any actor, writer, director, producer or BBC Controller thinks. These folks believe that since the Doctor was created as a male then the character must stay male and that to do otherwise would go against the core of the story. But you know who didn’t think the Doctor had to be a male forever and always? Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman.

In the 1980s, BBC Controller Michael Grade attempted to cancel Doctor Who but then rescinded the decision after international fan outcry. Despite this, he was very public in saying he didn’t like the show and thought it was embarrassing. Although it had been decided (temporarily) that Doctor Who would have another chance, there was still the feeling that the show needed a serious shake-up to make it interesting and fresh again. In 1987, Grade reached out to Newman and asked for advice.

Newman wrote back with a few suggested changes, on the condition that he return as showrunner to implement them. Those suggestions included that the Doctor get two new companions who were siblings, a 12-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy. These siblings would travel with the Doctor for a few adventures and then, just as they were getting used to him, they would witness his regeneration into a female incarnation. As had been done with previous traveling companions who stayed after an incarnation, the story would feature characters adjusting to the fact that this was the same hero they had known before, even if the outward details were new.

Michael Grade didn’t care for these changes and dismissed Newman’s suggestions. But it doesn’t change a simple fact: The creator of Doctor Who was not only OK with the idea of the Doctor being played by a woman, he was ready to have it happen in 1987.

Seems like we’re overdue.

Alan Sizzler Kistler (@SizzlerKistler) is an actor and writer who moonlights as a geek consultant and comic book historian.He is the author of Doctor Who: A History. Paul McGann is his Doctor.

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Disney’s Maleficent made over $170 million worldwide in its first weekend (check out our review!) but it’s domestic take beat their animated powerhouse, Frozen by a few million. Though Maleficent has a way to go if it’s trying to beat Frozen’s current worldwide gross of just over $1 billion. Putting numbers aside, what most people are talking about in the wake of Maleficent’s release is the interesting female character stories Disney has been giving us lately. Find out what screenwriter Linda Woolverton thinks about that. 

[Spoilers for Maleficent to follow.]

Woolverton, whose writing credits include Disney animated staples like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, was tasked with making a fan-favorite villain into a protaganist. Something she said was very difficult. She told The Hollywood Reporter how it all fell into place:

We based this on the Disney movie, not the fairy tale. I was looking at that scene, and I had done some research, and the biggest surprise is that she’s a fairy, not a witch. I’ve always wanted to do a dark fairy story. Then I watched that scene where she curses the baby, and I’m thinking “well if she’s a fairy, where are her wings?” Suddenly it was “boom. Lightbulb. Oh! It’s the wings!” Then I worked backward from there to create the Stefan relationship.

They also spoke about the big scene toward the end where it’s Maleficent’s kiss which wakes Aurora from the curse, not Prince Phillip’s. She told THR that plot decision was made very early, “The whole movie was moving us toward that singular moment.”

She also noted it was one of the most emotional scenes she’s ever written. “You have to rewrite these things 100 times, and every single time I wrote it I could barely get through it. I did Homeward Bound, you know that dog movie? Every single time I wrote the moment over the hill when everyone comes back at the end, I would cry into my hand over the keyboard. The kiss scene was like that for me.”

And for those curious as to the timing of this particular message, considering Frozen’s curse-breaker came in the form of a sister’s love, rather than a romantic one, Woolverton told The Daily Beast:

Maleficent is the second movie in the past year where the big True Love’s Kiss at the end wasn’t between the guy and the girl. In Frozen it was between Anna and Elsa, sisters, and in Maleficent it’s Maleficent and Aurora. Two movies in the same year with that message seems to indicate that Disney is changing the ideas it’s telegraphing to young girls.

Yes. You know, we weren’t aware of that before doing this. But it’s in the zeitgeist, isn’t it, then? As a writer you must feel this, there are ideas in the universe whose time has come. In our movie, we really wanted to show that there are many aspects of love, not just romantic love. Obviously, that’s something then that we’re all embracing at this moment in time, since it’s in Frozen, too.

They also asked her how writing a family Disney movie differed from twenty years ago. “There’s more women in the room. I’ve seen that happen over the years, which is a wonderful thing,” Woolverton told The Daily Beast. “The sensibility about female characters is different than it was. I don’t have to fight as hard—in fact, I don’t have to fight at all—to make them strong and interesting. It’s a different group of people I’m working with. Disney has changed along with the world.”

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Saturday I attended a panel at Special Edition: NYC, and from what I gathered it was one of the only panels that day that was even nearing maximum capacity. The Carol Corps, various members of the Young Avengers team, and plenty more in addition to myself waited patiently in the ever-growing line for this event. It was pretty much the only reason I went to the convention that day. It seems that many others had the same idea.

The totally stellar line-up of creators for the talk included Gail Simone, Amy Reeder, Marguerite Bennett, Emanuela Lupacchino and Jenny Frison – moderated by Ben Saunders. Now, I just want to get out there how much I enjoyed this panel. I’ve attended too many that were nearly ruined by over-eager, over-opinionated moderators, slideshows that dragged on for far too long, merciless promotions and panelists that were understandably upset by these things and more. This panel and its participants were great in every respect, and it produced some great conversations.

The following is the entire discussion prior to Q&A, which I have chosen to omit for my sanity and the safety of my hands at this point in time. I will be doing a smaller post later in the week with the highlights of the audience portion, which had some wonderful questions from fans and thoughtful answers from the panelists. Enjoy!

Saunders began the discussion by asking the ladies what their experiences with comics and popular culture were like when they were growing up, specifically in relation to female protagonists and heroes. Were there any particular heroes they were drawn to?

“When I was a little kid my parents got me a Wonder Woman book with a tape, I think it was called “Cheetah on the Prowl,” said Frison. “I loved it, I was obsessed with it. I always thought Wonder Woman was really cool, even when I wasn’t reading comics. I really wasn’t into them until I got into high school,” she continued, “and that’s when I saw Adam Hughes’ first Wonder Woman cover. My jaw just hit the ground. I was just so excited that that was a thing people could do – that you could create women like that and put it out in a comic book.”

“My favorite superheroes are from the 80′s,” Lupacchino noted. “I knew them when I was a little girl and I couldn’t read the comics because I was too little. They are She-Ra from Masters of the Universe and the Incredible Hulk from the television series. It was the best. At that time there was nothing like that that you could watch on the television. I was totally addicted to the characters.”

Bennett was next in line, mentioning that her introduction to Batman was actually through the animated series, and added, “I guess my introduction wasn’t so much to female superheroes as it was to female super villains. And so Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn – that was my holy trinity. It was so wonderful to see these women who did not abide by your rules and were not going to take your consequences.”

“I was becoming very frustrated with a lot of the material that was out there at the time when I was first learning to read,” began Simone, “because it seemed to me that most of the female heroes and protagonists – if they had any kind of adventure at all – it was thrust upon them or it accidentally happened. It was never something they went out and chose.

I was at a garage sale,” she continued, “and I saw the cover of a Justice League comic, and Wonder Woman was on the cover and I was like ‘Oh, what’s this? Is this some kind of princess that looks really strong?’ So we got the comic and I just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t understand how comic stories went, I didn’t understand the numbering, I understood nothing, But I did understand that this was a really strong female character that made her own decisions, that chose to leave her homeland and go out and have adventures, and that was it for me. It was a done deal. It really stuck a huge chord for me when I was young and impressionable.”

Reeder mentioned that she was also a She-Ra fan, as well as being a fan of Jem. “I was mostly into things that had girl characters,” she said. “It was a great time being a kid in the 80′s because there was a lot of empowered female characters back then, and it’s sad that there are fewer now. It’s really weird. I got super-duper-duper hooked [on Sailor Moon] and that’s like pure, unadulterated super hero. There’s no reason not to group her into superheroes. And also, I believe the fandom is basically 50/50, men to women, and I think that’s great.”

Sailor Moon by iamacoyfish

Saunders used the statistic Reeder gave to segue into his next question. ” I teach these classes on comics,” he began, “and women consistently outnumber men in all of my classes. Girls just read more than boys. What I’ve discovered is – it turns out that girls like action adventure stories, like superhero stories, and always have liked them! But a lot of the female fans that I teach feel that they have to battle with publishers, with store owners, and with, let’s say, certain male-dominated enclaves of fandom, in order to even be taken seriously as members of this fandom. So I’m wondering if any of you have ever been given that message – that superhero comics were not for girls.”

“I will say a very easy thing,” Lupacchino responded, “we are women, not aliens. We like rock music, heavy metal, we have feelings, we like flowers, but we like adventures as well. It’s something mysterious because people think that girls can’t like man-centric stories or adventure because they’re not ‘girly’. In the end, it’s a matter of interests. It’s about stories. They think that superhero stories are something definitive for men, and that women cannot understand how to make them.”

Simone replied with a story about her beginnings with the industry. “When I first started,” she said, “since my name Gail could be male or female, most people in the industry just assumed I was a male. It was only when pictures were taken, or I talked on the phone, or I met some people that they would even admit that I was a girl and writing superhero stories. That was 12 years ago at the most, and I was telling them at the time that we are going to have a 50/50 male to female audience, we are going to have more female creators, and I am going to prove to you that these female characters have more value to your company than just being someone that can be de-powered, raped, chopped up, put in a refrigerator, and then the stories become all about the male heroes. So it’s come a long way, it’s been absolutely incredible to see.”

I think there is sort of an idea amongst some companies,” stated Frison, “that they’re not trying to make comics for boys. They’re just making comics and just a few people happen to be in charge and so a lot of their comics are very similar. And then when they hear that they’re pigeon-holing themselves and should be making more comics for women, then they’re trying to make comics for women, and not trying to make comics for everybody. And that’s what I think is so exciting about Image, is that there are so many people in charge. No one person makes the decision, everyone is creating their own story, and no one’s trying to hit a marketing niche that they’ve been missing.”

“There are some people that have it in their head that, in order to attract a female audience, it has to be a romance comic, but there’s more to the audience to that,” added Simone.

“When I broke in I was actually encouraged not to go by my name,” announced Bennett, “which is an old woman’s name. I actually started in prose – I graduated with my MFA last year, and I got in because I had written two prose novels. I’ve been shipping them around to agents, and what I’ve actually heard several times in response was ‘Well, female writers have a much harder time, especially with the work you want to do. Would you consider having a pen name, or abbreviating your name?’ And for 30 seconds, in a moment of weakness, I considered it. And then I decided THE HELL WITH THAT, they are going to learn that I’m a girl.”

Saunders then brought up a slide of the first appearance of Lois Lane. “This is her first panel,” he said, “and she’s being very cruel. Cruel and alluring. I love the economy of the character – that she’s really there in that first panel. But then for decades they reduce her to someone else – someone whose entire agency and goal in life is to marry Superman. Now she’s back from that, so I was wondering if we could talk a little about Lois or another character with a similar history in comics?”

“Lois is that great embodiment of the change, and just the great arc that female characters have taken, to me,” replied Bennet. “Starting out as just the love interest or comic relief, and becoming fully-formed, singular, compassionate heroines.”

“You know,” quipped Saunders, “we should really talk about Batgirl.”

“Well… whaddaya wanna know?” said Simone.

Saunders chuckled nervously as the crowd laughed. “Yeah, you try being up here with Gail Simone asking what you want to know about Batgirl! Tell me you won’t choke!” He continued, by asking what Simone what she thought was the essence of the character.

Batgirl by Jez Tuya

“For me, Barbara has always been the most intelligent character in Gotham,” she responded. “She’s very compassionate. So I see her as the hope in Gotham, and I think Gotham needs that sometimes. And also, no matter what her circumstances are, she wants to help people, to make Gotham better. Those are the things at the core of her character… She’s one of those DC characters that should inspire someone to do something.”

Saunders furthered the discussion by asking the artists on the panel if sexualizing female characters was an issue for them – if it was something they thought about while drawing.

“I’m not going to say this is the right answer,” started Frison. “I’m not a creator, necessarily. I’m not creating a character and a costume for her, I’m usually assigned a character that has a costume. So that being said, with Red Sonja wearing her chain mail bikini – which is ridiculous – it does not bother me. To me, the thing that makes her sexualized by other people is the way she presents herself. Not the costume. I probably wouldn’t draw her with, you know, her legs spread and sucking her thumb, because that’s not her. To me, it’s the strength that she has.

“Can I tell a funny story about Red Sonja covers?” interjected Simone. “So Jenny does the main covers for Red Sonja, and all the variants are done by female artists. And we were sitting at a convention just talking, myself and some female artists, and it was the best conversation ever. It was all about how to draw the boobs. And listening to these female artists talk about it was completely different from how a lot of male artists talk about it. They kept saying things like ‘the weight of the underboob,’ and the shape, and if she’s flipping up in the air where would those really be? And I was just sitting there thinking, ‘This is the best conversation that has ever existed.’ And I’m so proud of all the covers on that book. No one wanted to draw her NOT in the chain mail bikini, which totally cracks me up.”

Lupacchino spoke up next, wondering why everyone only seems to notice how set the women are in comics, and not the men. “I mean seriously guys, do you think Batman is not sexy for us?” she said. “When I went to the DC offices and I faced this big Batman 2 meters high, man, he’s sexy. It’s just cardboard and grey paint with black underpants.”

“I think what I really care about when I see a female character and how they’re done, is if they really have personhood,” Reeder remarked. “And that’s really what gets to me, is when they don’t really seem like a person anymore, that they’re an object. When they seem like they don’t have a personality, or like they’re soulless. So when I did a Red Sonja cover, I wanted something on her face, I wanted her to be fierce. I just want to know that they’re people.”

Simone was the last to speak before the Q & A, stating, “The best covers, the sexiest covers to me, always tell some kind of a story. And without that story, and with a porn pose, it just means nothing. I don’t even know how you’re trying to attract someone to read a story without creating some sort of sexiness with something behind it.”

This article originally appeared on Girls Gone Geek under the name Reimagining the Female Superhero and is reposted with permission.

Also on Girls Gone Geek

• Geek Girls Have “Nothing To Prove”
• On Marvel’s All-Girl X-Men
• DC Ruins Wonder Woman, Twice in One Day

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It’s 2014, and I keep asking myself: Why aren’t we farther than this? I don’t just mean the lack of space colonization, sarcastic robots, and hoverboards that films promised me would be here by now. I mean representation in pop culture and storytelling. Seems we should be better about that, especially when the explanations for why we’re not all sound pretty crap. “The public might not be ready for it.” “It would take more time and effort than we can afford.” “We need a good reason to do it.” Shut up. Those reasons were weak decades ago and they’re weak today.

There are also all the trolls who exist on the internet and/or speak their ridiculous beliefs in the real world. Two months ago in a comic shop I overheard a customer complain that casting Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask in X-Men: Days of Future Past altered the character because now he probably just hated mutants due to “a Napoleon complex” (never mind that Hugh Jackman, at 6’2″, plays Wolverine, who was created to be 5’3″ and to this day is usually drawn to be 5’8″ at most in the mainstream comics). When Thor was hitting theaters, some folks complained that Idris Elba could not play Heimdall, because apparently aliens who inspire myth cannot have dark skin. Yet they didn’t mind a guy with dirty blonde hair playing a thunder god who in mythology (if not Marvel Comics) is said to have red hair. A British actor played Superman, who is often considered an icon of American idealism, yet I did not see the same level of anger about it that I saw towards the fan campaign that wanted to see Donald Glover play Spider-Man.

But trying to convince certain fans and trolls that they’re wrong about not needing better representation gets a lot harder when companies that produce content wind up reinforcing the idea. Recently at E3, Ubisoft said it would not include playable female protagonists in the newest installment of Assassin’s Creed because the programming would take too much time and effort. Yet the Assassin’s Creed franchise has been very proud to point out the attention to detail put into the backgrounds of its games, making buildings and cities of the past historically accurate. Ubisoft developed new technology for the game just to make water work better! Basically, more thought and care went into scenery than into the consideration of female protagonists. A former Ubisoft animator then remarked that, in his experience, programming in female protagonists wouldn’t have been all that much trouble.

The film Noah came under fire for having a nearly all-white cast while also claiming to be a universal message for all people. Screenwriter Ari Handel defended the casting by saying that including people of various backgrounds would have called attention to the fact that there was a lot of diversity. Which I guess is a thing to be avoided? He basically called it a no-win situation, saying, “Either you end up with a Bennetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise. You either try to put everything in there, which just calls attention to it, or you just say, ‘Let’s make that not a factor, because we’re trying to deal with everyman.”

Why is “white” automatically symbolic of “everyman”? And what was wrong with the Starship Enterprise? I was a kid when I saw Star Trek and didn’t think “Wow! What sorcery is that that brought people of different backgrounds to the same spaceship?!” I saw a group of characters rocking out in space.

Along the same lines, Farhad Manjoo recently wrote a New York Times review for the third episode of Halt and Catch Fire. I won’t spoil who he’s talking about, but Majoo criticizes the show for revealing a male character is not strictly heterosexual by showing them engaging in sexual activity with a man. Majoo says, “Until now there’s been no sign than [the male character] might be interested in men.” I’m pretty sure Majoo meant “that” rather than “than” but the bigger issue is the insistence that a character is heterosexual unless we’re given sufficient evidence to the contrary upfront with their introduction. Heterosexuality is common. It is not default. You’ve known the character for less than three hours, so you should be prepared to learn things about them that weren’t immediately itemized and explained to you.

In the comics, Mystique’s greatest love was a woman named Irene Adler aka Destiny. She has now appeared in five movie adaptations and has fallen for or become romantically involved with many male characters, but Irene is nowhere to be seen (see my two-part guide to the history of LGBT representation in mainstream comics here and here). When the original cartoon adaptation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was being planned, the creators realized that the only black character they were adapting from the original comic was Baxter Stockman, a bad guy. They feared that making their only black character a villain would send a bad message to kids. The solution? Make Baxter white. Wait, what? Why not just introduce another black character who wasn’t evil? The cartoon created original characters to act as supporting cast—why couldn’t any of them be a person of color? You’d think we’ve evolved, but over twenty years later we have a Ninja Turtles live action movie coming out where the Japanese villain Oroku Saki is being played by a white guy. Yes, he’s a good actor and could give a good performance. That’s not the point.

Some folks have said, “Well, we shouldn’t be surprised anymore by these decisions.” Maybe not, but we should be angry. Adding better representation isn’t hard, and the attitude of resistance against it should have fallen by the wayside already. It makes little sense for a business to limit its market. But more than that, this is limiting fiction. I’m not just talking about Ubisoft. We all see examples of self-imposed limitations across the board, and they’re harmful. I know, I know. “Not all comics are like that.” “Not all video games.” “Not all movies.” “Not all TV.” That’s true. But enough of media and pop culture is still like that, with enough companies and creators telling us that they’re not interested in changing.

That affects us, especially when we dismiss it as inconsequential. Recently, Anita Sarkeesian released another insightful Feminist Frequency video discussing negative portrayals of women in video games. In it, she pointed out, “While it may be comforting to think that we all have a personal force field protecting us from outside influences, this is simply not the case.” She’s right. We surround ourselves with viewpoints that inspire ideas or reinforce old ones, and from that we build a story through which we see the world and ourselves. When you decide that female protagonists are not worth considering and that they might actually hold you back, what kind of story are you influencing your fans to build?

MTV Splashpage interviewed me about the possibility of Donald Glover portraying Peter Parker. I don’t think any and all characters can have their race changed. Some characters are very closely tied to their heritage. Beyond that, there should never be a hard and absolute rule for fiction and what you’re allowed to adapt. You look at things on a case by case basis. The Black Panther is said to belong to a long line of people who have lived in and ruled Wakanda, a fictional African nation never conquered by outside forces. If you had him played by a white man, you have altered a major part of his character. Peter Parker, on the other hand, is a scientifically gifted kid from Queens with a smart mouth who wrestles with doubt. So I don’t care about the color of the person who plays him, as long as he plays him funny and smart.

Ever see The Shawshank Redemption? Remember Morgan Freeman’s character, Red, who joked that he got the name because he was Irish? Guess what? In the original story by Stephen King, Red was indeed Irish. And white. Did this make the movie less interesting? I’m going to say no, the same way that the Spider-Man universe did not explode when Victor Cook and Greg Weisman developed the cartoon adaptation The Spectacular Spider-Man and decided to alter the backgrounds of several characters to better reflect today’s New York City. Liz Allen became Latina, Ned Leeds became the Asian Ned Lee. None of this magically made Spider-Man less heroic or his villains less evil.

I was lucky as a kid. I had positive influences in my life and encountered some good stories. One of the first movies I remember ever seeing was The Secret of NIMH, based on the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien. The movie features Mrs. Brisby, a widowed mother of four who embarks on a quest to protect her home and save the life of her deathly ill child Timothy. Mrs. Brisby faces dangers that terrify her, but she continues because her children (and later others) depend on her. Along with this courage, the story showcases that she is more educated than other mice. She can read, a skill that lets her learn secrets. A villain motivated by greed and envy endangers her family, but Mrs. Brisby overcomes the scheme due to love and willpower.

Child-Me did not see a widowed mother of four as an uncommon protagonist for an adventure movie. Child-Me had no reason to think that a female character wouldn’t or couldn’t be as heroic as any male character. I hadn’t been taught otherwise. Adult-Me also loves the fact that, while Mrs. Brisby’s deceased husband is a constant presence in the story, she is not held back by his memory.

There were other influences, as I grew older, from people I encountered, as well as from books, TV shows, plays, and movies. The 1990s X-Men cartoon showed me a diverse team of heroes from various backgrounds, working together to save the world. Storm wasn’t “the black character.” She led the team many times. Rogue wasn’t the “hot chick” character. She could shrug off tank fire. Xavier was in a wheelchair but was arguably the most powerful member on the team. They were all seen as different by others, and they fought back with the simple message that the world could be better than this.

In 1992, Legion of Super-Heroes #34 had a character learn that his girlfriend was actually a male using future-science to become female. His response was that he loved her not because she was female but in spite of it. Ten-year-old me read that and had his mind blown in the best way possible.

None of these stories were without flaws. They also weren’t the only ones I took in. Some of what I enjoyed as a kid I now look back on and see as lame, misguided, classist, or sexist. Growing up, I said things that later on I realized were ignorant. But I grew up and got over myself, partly because these early stories and others like them made me empathize with characters of different backgrounds and identities. I benefited from all this and continue to do so to this day. We all do. It is a benefit to understand that your experience is not the default experience of the human race.

Star Trek showed me a multicultural team that explored and protected the universe. Spider-Man 2099 showed me that in a possible future, Spider-Man’s legacy would continue with a Latin-Irish hero named Miguel O’Hara, which was especially exciting for me as a Latin-Irish kid. Yet we have people saying no, Peter Parker can’t be black because that’s not Spider-Man. So I guess racial diversity is only okay in the future? Wow, that’s depressing. Is “depressing” the right word? No. No, the word I want is “dumb.”

Diversity shouldn’t be seen as a hardship or a task that makes telling a story harder. Diversity leads to wider dramatic opportunities. The original Battlestar Galactica featured Starbuck, a charming jerk who womanized, smoked cigars, and was great at what he did. We’ve seen that type of character throughout action films and science fiction. But when the Battlestar Galactica reboot made Starbuck into a woman, that put a fresh spin on things. Did it change part of Starbuck’s character? Yes. We benefited from that change and got to explore new territory. Similarly, the TV show Hannibal swapped the genders of multiple characters from their counterparts in the novels by Thomas Harris. Guess what? The fact that Freddie Lounds is a man in the book Red Dragon but a woman in the show Hannibal did not magically cause Hannibal to become less evil or interesting. Perry White was not less of a newspaperman because he was played by Laurence Fishburne in Man of Steel.

Changes like this aren’t enough by themselves, of course. You still need to provide good stories and characters. Making Jimmy Olsen a woman is a neat idea, it gives you new area to explore with a familiar character whose background has been rebooted several times over the decades anyway. But if all you do then is have her stay in the background until she’s trapped and needs to be rescued by men, that’s disappointing to me. It seems as if you gender-swapped just so there could be an extra damsel in distress. But if you make Jimmy a woman, keep them as Superman’s pal who’s immature and reckless but can also provide valuable insight and assistance, and if you keep Lois Lane’s sister Lucy as a love interest… Well, now that’s a story I’m interested to see.

Another note about changing things for adaptation: It’s fine. Live-action entertainment involves different visuals and storytelling than comics, and changes are necessary when dealing with characters whose stories span decades of serialized sagas created by many different viewpoints, as opposed to characters who are formed by only one or two writers across a limited span of novels. A lot of us accept this. Weirdly, though, many superhero movie adaptations will change elements of hero’s origin, the villain’s origin, and how they met, but then the folks behind it will insist that a female character’s death cannot be altered. Bruce Wayne’s parents have to die for the story to begin, sure. But if you’re changing a lot of how Spider-Man and his world operate, if you’re changing the source of his powers and how he meets certain people, then I’m not convinced Gwen Stacy automatically needs to die just because she did in a story written decades ago. If we’re evolving, why can’t our stories? The 1990s X-Men cartoon found a way to end the famous Phoenix Saga without killing Jean Grey. Even as a kid, I knew their version of that story was different than the comic. But so was a lot of what the show presented.

We need better representation, especially to counter the steady stream of negative, stereotyped representation that benefits no one and is reinforced by certain new content. You didn’t realize you were excluding others and feeding the prejudices of internet trolls and bigots? OK. Now that you realize that’s what happened, what are you going to do about it? We need to stop acting as if it’s not insulting to keep coming up with reasons not to have better representation rather than using that same creativity to expand our stories. We need to stop acting as if just having one good female character (hero or villain) is a huge accomplishment worthy of praise, and that reproducing such a thing shouldn’t be expected because man, it is tough making a lady interesting, am I right? Well-written non-white, female, and/or LGBTQA characters are not rare gems that will lose value if surrounded by others.

“But if all this happens, then the stories and games I know will change!” Yes. That’s what happens when limitations are removed.

Limiting fiction limits imagination, and that has consequences across the board. Don’t say “Well, we shouldn’t be surprised.” Get angry. Get motivated. Follow the lessons that abound in countless cherished stories and stand up for changing things. Follow the basic moral that is behind so many adventure stories and tales of superheroes:

We should be better.

Alan Sizzler Kistler (@SizzlerKistler) is an actor and writer who moonlights as a comic book historian and geek consultant. He is the author of Doctor Who: A History.

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We may have been disappointed that speculation about a female protagonist/playable character in the next main-series Zelda game turned out to be wrong, but Hyrule Warriors is really picking up the slack in that department with more women than you can shake a deku stick at. The latest Japanese character trailer for the game once again begs the question, “Does she just let Link save her to give his self-esteem a boost?”

Not only that, but Hyrule Warriors has a ton of female playable characters. In addition to Link, of course, there’s Impa, Midna, and Zelda, and Famitsu just revealed that Agitha, the bug girl from Twilight Princess, and a brand new character named Lana. Right now, it sounds like Lana will be integral to the currently unkown plot of the game, as she’s Hyrule’s White Witch, and the antagonist is Cia, the Black Witch.

I was confused as to why Nintendo would throw one of their biggest franchises into a weird, seemingly dated Dynasty Warriors mashup, but they’re really winning me over with the playable women. So, here’s Zelda, showing why she is a legend:

During an E3 interview, Hyrule Warriors producer Yosuke Hayashi told Polygon that the game finally shows off the power that Zelda has always had. He told them:

Regarding the look of Zelda herself, she is a ruler. So we want to make sure she is seen as a strong character in that she needs to look like a ruler, she needs to feel like a ruler. So, [she has] what you might consider a stronger look for the character. She is also a playable character here, so she needs to be able to go out and take out tons of enemies on her own. She needs to seem like a character they can do battle with.

They’re winning me over on this one. Now just make the next main Zelda game about something other than “save the princess,” and we’ll be all set.

(via Polygon and The Escapist, image via Nintendo)

Previously in Legend of Zelda

• The Temple of Time remade in Unreal Engine 4 looks awesome
• Ocarina of Time speedrun world record is now even more stupidly fast
• A guy fought off a real intruder Zelda-style with Master Sword and smashing pots

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Thank you, LoadingReadyRun, for delving so deep into this hard-hitting story.

(via tipster ItsMyDeLorean)

Previously in Laaaaaadies

• Ubisoft Blames Lack of Female PCs in Assassin’s Creed on “Reality of Production”
• We All Benefit From Better Representation
• Tropes vs. Women in Video Games: Women as Background Decoration

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BRB, running around the room screaming.

Hey, SEGA, I was already going to play this game but thanks for sucking up. We’ve previously expressed our excitement for Alien: Isolation, the game in which you get to play as Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda, and fight xenomorphs just like dear old ma.

So are you ready for this? There are two, yes TWO, pre-order bonus content allowing you to play as Ripley herself complete with voice and likeness of the one and only Sigourney Weaver. But that’s not all, Bob! Tom Skerritt (Dallas), Veronica Cartwright (Lambert), Harry Dean Stanton (Brett), and Yaphet Kotto (Parker) will all be reprising their roles as well. Ian Holm’s likeness will be used but unfortunately will be voiced by a sound-alike. And here’s what that will look like…

“Working with the original cast has been an incredible experience,” said Alistair Hope, Creative Lead on Alien: Isolation. “It was important to us to have the key original cast members reprise their roles in order to perfectly capture the atmosphere of the movie. For some of the original cast, this is their first appearance in an Alien video game. Seeing them reprise those roles after 35 years was an unforgettable experience.”

And since I’m sure you’re wondering, here’s the pre-order details:

Anyone who pre-orders the game will get a free upgrade to the Nostromo Edition, which includes the bonus content “Crew Expendable”. Players can choose to play as one of three surviving crewmembers, only moments after Brett’s death at the jaws of the creature. As Ellen Ripley, Dallas or Parker, players can explore the Nostromo from habitation deck down through engineering, coordinating their efforts with Lambert and Ash to lure the Alien into the ship’s airlock.

In addition, consumers who pre-order at GameStop will exclusively also receive “Last Survivor” in which players pick up the story as Ripley tries to escape on the Narcissus. On hearing the screams of Lambert and Parker, players must navigate their way back down through the Nostromo in order to activate the self-destruct sequence, before retracing their steps back to the Narcissus shuttle and their escape.

GIVE ME ALL THE THINGS!!!

I leave you with a side-by-side of Amanda and Ripley.

Alien: Isolation will be available from October 7, 2014, for Xbox One the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, Windows PC, Xbox 360 games and entertainment system from Microsoft and PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system.

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