This is such an interesting dissection of a very common trope in writing female characters that I never really thought about before, but it’s so prevalent and so obvious and so fucking disgusting.
it’s called infantilization and i hate it but “born sexy yesterday” is such a good way to put it
Yeah, though I think there’s another thing going on here too that the vid mentions but could focus more on, which is the male fantasy of “making” a woman precisely as they wish her to be, including her ideas about what is acceptable treatment and romantic/sexual behavior.
One of the HUGE inaccuracies in this, which is to say one of the major fantasies it embodies, is that because these women are naive on a particular topic, they have no self-image or dignity/self-possession, nor instinct/intuition on the particular topic, or on how the world ought to work. Take Celeste(Kim Bassinger’s character) in that My Stepmother is an Alien scene. Who gives a damn whether you know about sandwiches or not, what frigging interstellar traveler is going to let some schmuck yell at her, browbeat her without explanation or even basic interpersonal respect, into doing anything? Why would a professional, an individual accomplished enough to be sent by her planet’s government to investigate a potential attack on their world, someone responsible and respected enough to be entrusted with reality-warping technology who has traveled across the cosmos to confront a potentially hostile alien world and put an end to any threat she finds there, acquiesce to that treatment? Why would she find being insulted and ordered around and treated like she can’t be trusted to make her own decisions acceptable? In reality she wouldn’t, and therein lies the fantasy.
In the movie, because she doesn’t know about Earth and Food she has no concept of the sort of treatment she, as a person, deserves. That’s fundamental to the fantasy in this trope: these women never know how they ought to be treated, because they don’t know some specific thing they apparently have no concept at all of the treatment they deserve, and because of that these men get away with bullying, manipulation, and taking advantage without being caught, and without having to feel guilty for their behavior since there is no chance to get caught(which, of course, also presents their behavior as normal: if only men didn’t have to worry about censure, it says, they’d all treat women this way, which is the sort of mendacious bullshit creeps tend to tell themselves).
But it doesn’t stop there of course; not only do they not get caught out and called on their dickery, which is presented by the movie as “proof” that the woman doesn’t mind it, their dickery is celebrated and admired as “helping” the woman learn her place in the world and become a full and “real” person. That last bit of the dynamic is particularly notable in Tron(where the guy literally brings Quorra into the real world and a flesh-and-blood body) and The Fifth Element(where the movie ends on Leelo and Dallas having sex, after the climax where Dallas teaches Leelo “the Fifth Element” of “Love” and saves the Earth, through kissing her, without her consent, while she’s having an emotional breakdown. A particularly strident stating of the trope’s core thesis).
in all honesty this is the most unreal, surreal, unimaginably magical thing i’ve ever seen in my life. they make sounds and i never knew. these things are gigantic. i’m so awed.
SERIOUSLY THOUGH SHE WAS MY FAVORITE BATMAN VILLAIN
Her physical condition didn’t allow her to age
No one took her seriously as an actress
And even when she was trying to get into a happy romantic relationship (albeit with another villain) he still couldn’t take her seriously as a consenting, sexually active and romantically interested adult
That’s a lot of blows to someone’s psyche
and Babydoll is both a sympathetic villain and a formidable one
I remember this episode fucked me up a a kid.
And man, do I wish we could see this Batman again: the Batman that consoles his villains, because the majority (if not all) of them are mentally ill people. And Batman knows this and wants them healthy again, not punished and GOD definitely not dead.
Baby Doll is so underrated as a Batman villain
but her episode was perfect
Batman: The Animated Series
The story of one fucked up, traumatized little boy, doing his best to help other fucked up traumatized people.
The Batman that cares about the inmates is my favorite. He doesn’t put up with their shit, but he does try to reach out here and there and he’s as human as he can be to them.
When Harley was re-institutionalized, he got her that dress she wanted.
In the comics based on B:tAS, there was a time during Christmas that there was snow and it was Mr. Freeze’s fault, and he was making it snow because Christmas was his anniversary with Nora and she LOVED it when it snowed on Christmas, so Batman let him finish mourning before calmly taking him back to Arkham.
He never, ever gives up on Harvey possibly recovering.
Sure, Batman is going to throw punches and do what it takes to take these guys down when they’re hurting or threatening people. And he’s not going be a complete bleeding heart; he has to protect the innocent. He’s going to take them down and take them back to Arkham, but it doesn’t mean he’s incapable of being a bit human to the ones who deserve it.
Batman needs become human again
Because it needs to be here:
Remember that time a young girl with near god-like psychic powers threatened to destroy reality and the only one that could stop her was Batman because he had a previous encounter with her and was tasked with killing her to restore reality.
But instead, Batman sat with her on a swing and kept her company as the girl’s psychic powers slowly killed her.
No?
Fuck you people making me emotional
The. Batman.
This is MY Batman, not the murderous fascist they’ve made him into.
The animated series Batman is the best Batman, and don’t let no boring ass fanboys tell you otherwise.
when i saw this i couldn’t believe it didn’t have music
one day the SMH dared Bitty to ride a mechanical bull. Bitty drowned a shot, yelled at the DJ to cue up some Beyoncé, and proceeded to wow the gallery like that.
just moving along like everyone else 