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Post by Harkovast on May 15, 2015 22:20:39 GMT
So there is a new Mad Max film coming out, but even before seeing it, the heroic men's rights movement have identified it's evil agenda. Mad Max films, they explain, are the most manly of manly man films. Horrifyingly, this new film will have a WOMAN in it! Chalize Theron plays a one armed warrior called Furiosa who angers the MRA's on many levels. First of all, she is a woman doing stuff and being a character (urgh!) It gets worse though! She is a tough warrior who fights bad guys! The Men's Rights Activists found this idea absurd and ridiculous. I mean, a man fighting hordes of bad guys single handedly? That's completely realistic (seriously bro's, which of us HASN'T done that?), but a chick doing it? Get outta here! She also has short hair, which Men's Rights Activists really hate for some odd reason.
Anyway, the point is, the most macho American action franchise is being over taken by the evil feminists!
A few slight flaws in this otherwise cast iron argument... Their defence of American films seemed to miss the fact the Mad Max Movies are Austrailian (yes they really got this wrong.) They also seemed to forget that there have been loads of tough warrior women in Mad Max before. For example, in the second film there was a character called...Warrior Woman. Yes, really. She had bows and crossbows and at one point cuts a bad guys throat from behind with a knife. She is potrayed as being one of the most competent good guys asside from Max.
So the interesting reveal here is that the Men's Rights Activists (who love to claim feminists are always playing the victim and inventing controversy) are getting upset about people ruining a franchise they know nothing about. It's quite possible the people complaining haven't even seen a Mad Max film based on their shocking ignorance.
Their sexism and hate I've come to expect, but pretending to be Mad Max fans when you don't know anything about the films? They've actually mananged to disappoint me. That's almost impressive in a pathetic, sad kind of way.
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Post by Horsie on May 15, 2015 22:48:31 GMT
Fuck sake... really?
I only saw Road Warrior once, and one of the character I remember most clearly is that woman, because she was a badass.
Did you know that they dubbed the American releases of the films? True story.
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Post by Harkovast on May 15, 2015 23:58:01 GMT
Holy shit, seriously? Can you get the original version in America these days? More to the point...I should go see the dubbed version, that sounds hillarious.
Americans, Hollywood keeps calling you morons! Stop tolerating this!
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Post by Horsie on May 16, 2015 0:10:49 GMT
I looked it up, supposedly it was because the US distributor received a poorly-mixed copy of the audio for the film which left much of the dialogue drowned out by the music.
Why they couldn't ask for a better copy is beyond me, and considering that I've seen a lot of television shows in the US subtitle foreigners (even when they're easily understood), I'm kind of sceptical of that story.
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Post by wordweaver3 on May 16, 2015 4:01:39 GMT
Sometimes they even subtitle Americans. If they have a deep south accent or something.
Aside from the first movie I'm pretty sure there were bad ass women in all the Mad Max films. I mean, if she were still alive in that kind of a future she'd have to be a bad ass.
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Post by Canuovea on May 16, 2015 4:09:26 GMT
Tiberia saw it. Said it was amazing. I'll have to see it too.
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Post by Horsie on May 16, 2015 9:58:38 GMT
That's good, I was kind of worried it would be crap.
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Post by Canuovea on May 16, 2015 17:38:14 GMT
The reviews have been saying that this shows we've been holding other action movies to low standards. It seems kind of like it is to action flicks what Guardians of the Galaxy is to comic book movies.
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Post by StyxD on May 16, 2015 20:27:53 GMT
You know, this is one thing in popular culture that is positively infuriating for me. Hence the rant.
I remember a time, not so long ago, if fact it might have been less than five years, when having a woman in a work was normal. Behdel test might not have been passed most of the time, but hey, it was an option, put a woman in one of the lead roles. It could happen, I mean.
Nowadays, every time you do that, it's a fucking STATEMENT OF FEMINIST DOMINATION. Every woman outside of the kitchen is communist propaganda aiming to turn boys into BETA MANGINA WHITE KNIGHTS (I love that blurb, somehow).
Can you imagine how big of a scandal it would be on the Internet, if Buffy was made today? Or, hell, Terminator? ("What? A puny woman standing up to a futuristic killer robot, how fucking unrealistic is that!")
Case in point, I've already seen MRAs loosing their shit (in correlation with Fury Road) that there's going to be a new Terminator film / series / whatever (I'm not really a Terminator fan, so I didn't pay attention), which, they're sure, will comply with the wishes of the Global Feminist Overladies and make Sarah Connor the hero instead of her son who, by all that is righteous, is supposed to be the real saviour of mankind. Because, remember how in the original movies he burst out of Sarah's womb toting a shotgun and defended her from all killer robots? Me neither.
It's even worse in video games, I feel. I mean, fuck, what if Metroid was done today? Havens forbid, after the reveal at the end some people might have rolled over to the side, quivering and crying out "Mom, call an ambulance! I've been tricked into playing the whole game as a woman, I feel my balls crawling up my stomach!"
Heh, I'm also picturing the beginning sequence of Final Fantasy VI (the series has had male protagonists up until that point). "What is this? Why does that chick have better equipped mecha then those two (clearly NPC) men that are with her? Men are the expandable gender again! Misandry! See, I told you, they fricking died right in the prelude! And what's that? The guys died, but the weak woman was able to get up and walk? HOW UNREALISTIC!"
But it works the other way, too. Near the beginning of this year, I've read an article praising several games from 2014 for their female protagonists. Among them was Transistor, which I played and loved.
But the thing is, the writers did many interesting things with that character, but her gender never really factored into much. There were never any statements about female perspective or struggles or rights within the game. If they made the protagonist male, the story could have played out pretty much the same with minor adjustments.
Before Gamergate, Transistor would have been just a game that happens to have a female protagonist, like, I don't know, Beyond Good and Evil for example. Nowadays it's an egalitarian statement. It's like we have regressed so far.
Although I guess MRAs could have valid reasons to hate that game, I mean, the strongest non-boss enemy type is named "Man". Misandry much?
By the way, I'm pretty sure that Transistor is actually heteronormative propaganda. The protagonist is a straight woman wielding a giant phallic sword that is actually her lover (and some of the poses she makes when she attacks with it...) and the villains are, in order, a lesbian, a gay couple, and an asexual. Do you happen to know how I can report that to the Feminist Overladies, so that they can pressure the developers to at least change the protagonist into a queerromantic pansexual transgender woman of color? No?
Anyway, this type of thinking has also gotten into my head. The last time I was watching anime (Katanagatari), I found myself clicking my tongue at certain scenes and thinking "MRAs would not like that".
Has the world changed? Maybe I'm bitter, because after two decades of struggling with social ostracism I look at the state of my dear nerddom and see a bunch of idiots who somehow managed to grow down instead of up since they have been kids.
(I was thinking about starting a thread "What the fuck happened to the nerds", or something like that, in Random Nonsense, consider this rant tangential.)
Or maybe I'm just paying too much attention to the MRAs? Maybe it's not so bad? Maybe if I just stop looking at WHTM, it'll all disappear?
Sometimes I wish I could rewind my mind to the time before I read Elliot Rodger's manifesto.
Still, I feel intrigued enough that I might even go see the movie. I have no sentiment for Mad Max films, but it's just so unusual for people to heap praise on an action movie like this. Feminist propaganda?
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Post by Canuovea on May 16, 2015 21:01:36 GMT
You're right. It does seem worse now.
But you might also be right in the sense that we might just be more aware of it now.
Either way... sad.
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Post by Harkovast on May 16, 2015 21:11:33 GMT
Gamergate has indeed poisoned all discourse on gender in the media. As Lord Humongous would say to the Gamergaters "Just walk away."
In other news....I need to see the new Mad Max film so badly.
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Post by Horsie on May 16, 2015 22:33:55 GMT
I don't get it at all, that's why I kind of ignore the MRAs, they just can't be reasoned with without them declaring you a stooge of the feminist/fascist agenda.
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Post by Canuovea on May 17, 2015 0:19:30 GMT
There is only one argument I believe they will not make.
"Women are so incompetent and terrible, they can't actually manage to antagonize men!"
Seriously. I don't think anyone in their movement would be that dumb.
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Post by RED_NED on May 17, 2015 0:37:35 GMT
Completely off-topic but Transistor, which StyxD mentioned, has one of the best soundtracks of all time. You should check it out.
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Post by zaealix on May 17, 2015 2:23:23 GMT
It's not gamergate, if you ask me. Or rather, Gamergate's just a symptom. I feel like society has gotten a bad case of 'Social Justicism' or something over the recent years... I personally can only guess at WHY this is, though I feel like the trouble, ironically, is the whole 'attempting to be better' deal. Like... People started raising the issues of ' why aren't females more prominent?' or perhaps 'why does the black guy always die?' and somewhere later on there's the LGBT crowd arguing for their own rights, and well... We know it wasn't right but one thing I tend to notice, amongst feminism stuff, if less so with MRAs, is that we're grumbling that this isn't acceptable...But we don't know what we're moving towards, what WOULD be acceptable. And without a goal to move towards, it just turns into amusingly enough, something more akin to an angry wife from a sitcom situation, where you know you did wrong but darned if you know what it was that actually got you in the doghouse.
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