Worn out by webcomics.

[Mon Ami]

Oh, you'll be terrified of Buster if you get to know him better.

What is a Buster?

Edit: Sorry about that.

[McDuffies]

It was to:

Many kudos in particular to bustertheclown for posts I'm going to have to quote wholecloth to various friends. And to think, usually I'm terrified of clowns.

[Bustertheclown]

Oh, you'll be terrified of Buster if you get to know him better.

What is a Buster?

Edit: Sorry about that.

That's okay. You're not the first one to wonder.

Thanks, spgrblues, for the compliment. I aim to challenge!

Come to think of it, hiatuses are always a pretty morale lowering affair, both as a reader who has to endure it from his favorite comic, and as a creator who has to take one in order to get his broken dreams repaired. Add that to my list of peeves!

[Turnsky]

i actually can't stand being on hiatus, even though i may look like i'm taking, say a two week hiatus, it's more like a couple days off, then coming back to my comic to further solidify ideas and story for it.

[Glambourine]

There's been a lot of talk of girl characters... I hate when people make a story about guys, and then just throw in one girl to sort of represent ALL girls. Either the girl is given traits that a teenage boy would like (big boobs, big lips, tight clothes, and no personality that gets in the way of the audience's fantasies), or she is given typical "female" traits that makes her nothing but a dumb cliché (passiveness, a tendency to fall in love with the main character for no reason). I can't for the life of me understand the appeal. Aren't people more interesting than an empty shell with boobs?

Even big Hollywood movies have these problems. Honestly, what's so hard about writing women characters?

Alison Bechdel, of <a href="http://www.dykestowatchoutfor.com/index.php">Dykes To Watch Out For</a> and Fun Home (and if you haven't read Fun Home yet, you must! You must! It is worth every penny you will spend on it!), invented something called the Bechdel Test/Mo's Movie Measure. Basically, a movie or work of anything passes the test if it features a scene with two or more women who talk with one another about something other than a man. When I first heard it, I laughed, thought "Oh it can't be all that bad", and then realized that yes, it is that bad.

I'm trying to pass the Bechdel Test right now in my comic, starting as of today's strip, going on for a while. It's surprisingly hard--I mean it's not hard to have women talking about non-man-related things, but it's hard for me to make it really funny and interesting (um, as today's strip shows, I fear.) I think it's a good thing for everyone to try and do in order to beat stereotyping and just learn more about the goddamned world--and to prevent random, scantily-clad girls being shoved into webcomics because hey, they need a *girl*--but I can't deny that it's not in any way a natural reflex to write nuanced female characters talking to one another. A writing teacher of mind (the ineffable Eloise Klein Healy) once said that getting to know one another is one of the most difficult, suffering-inducing things in the world--I believe it, I believe it.

Weird note: Jane Austen never, ever in her life wrote a scene without a woman in it. She wrote men talking together pretty well (Michaelangelo is a pretty good painter; Beethoven isn't bad as far as composing goes and all), but there's always a woman present, listening. She said that she didn't write men alone because she had no idea what they said to one another when women weren't around. I think a similar problem applies.

[Spqrblues]

I can't deny that it's not in any way a natural reflex to write nuanced female characters talking to one another. ... Weird note: Jane Austen never, ever in her life wrote a scene without a woman in it. ... She said that she didn't write men alone because she had no idea what they said to one another when women weren't around. I think a similar problem applies.

I'd once read some lit crit theory that claimed that the Great Authors (fill in whoever you think applies) created more Great Characters (ditto) of the opposite sex because Great Writers (okay, whatever) spent more time examining the "other" sex and had, not a more objective perspective, but a male writer would have more study of women than other men, since he already "knew" about men from being one himself. Not sure how I feel about that theory now, but I'm fascinated by the information about Austen. I know that most of the examples around "us" (in the general sense) are men conversing with men--TV shows, movies, many popular books, etc.--so that may be what one tends to learn and model on.

Right now I'm winding down to the end of a "chapter" in the webcomic that's been dominated by guy characters and guy stuff, with the only main female character very peripheral; actually, all the other females have been, well, party entertainment. Chapter 3 will be entirely from female characters' perspectives, and I can't wait to have at it. I think my current readers will stick around. But will I just not gather any new ones?

Honestly, there are days when I think one of the only ways to guarantee readership is to show big boobies in tight tshirts. Maybe I should set all the woman-to-woman conversations at a bath house with ladies wrapped in wet towels....

[Hallonpress]

Alison Bechdel, of <a href="http://www.dykestowatchoutfor.com/index.php">Dykes To Watch Out For</a> and Fun Home (and if you haven't read Fun Home yet, you must! You must! It is worth every penny you will spend on it!), invented something called the Bechdel Test/Mo's Movie Measure. Basically, a movie or work of anything passes the test if it features a scene with two or more women who talk with one another about something other than a man. When I first heard it, I laughed, thought "Oh it can't be all that bad", and then realized that yes, it is that bad.

God. Shows excactly what I mean. Why is it that way?

Are there even movies with women characters that are not in any way connected to love (or sex)? The standard formula seems to be that a woman is thrown in as a love interest.

Of course there must be lots of movies that stray from that formula, but my mind is blank right now.

I'm trying to pass the Bechdel Test right now in my comic, starting as of today's strip, going on for a while. It's surprisingly hard--I mean it's not hard to have women talking about non-man-related things, but it's hard for me to make it really funny and interesting (um, as today's strip shows, I fear.) I think it's a good thing for everyone to try and do in order to beat stereotyping and just learn more about the goddamned world--and to prevent random, scantily-clad girls being shoved into webcomics because hey, they need a *girl*--but I can't deny that it's not in any way a natural reflex to write nuanced female characters talking to one another. A writing teacher of mind (the ineffable Eloise Klein Healy) once said that getting to know one another is one of the most difficult, suffering-inducing things in the world--I believe it, I believe it.

Do you think it's hard to write female characters? Why? Why is it harder than writing a male?

Weird note: Jane Austen never, ever in her life wrote a scene without a woman in it. She wrote men talking together pretty well (Michaelangelo is a pretty good painter; Beethoven isn't bad as far as composing goes and all), but there's always a woman present, listening. She said that she didn't write men alone because she had no idea what they said to one another when women weren't around. I think a similar problem applies.

I think that we're just afraid to write anything unrealistic, but when it comes down to it, people are people, and we all talk about much the same things, basically. Of course, you could argue that men talk about, I don't know... football and women talk about shopping, but that would be to generalize. It's just social constructs, not something wired into our brains. And remember, we're writing fiction, so the sky's the limit, regardless the gender of the character we're writing about.

[Sortelli]

I was really happy the first time someone told me that Megan was a great female character, but that person did a comic about Lesbians... In Space! and I began to have doubts.

Actually, I think most of the difficulty men have in writing female characters is that they DO assume women talk and think the same way that they do, which is why girls in comics have a tendency to end up as little more than boys with boobs. The ultra violent gamer girl who can outgame all the guys is just an Alpha Male written into a tight t-shirt.

Male and female brains actually are wired differently. We have different sex drives and different priorities.

[Sorcery101]

Do you think it's hard to write female characters? Why? Why is it harder than writing a male?

For most people writing the opposite gender is harder than writing someone the same gender. Because if you're a guy then you already know how guy's think because you know how you think. And if you're a girl you know how girls think. But as you said people get need to realize that people are people and both sexes talk about the same topics pretty much.

And on a fun note, one time someone complimented me on how well written Ally was then added most guys have no clue how to write girls. To which I responed telling him I'm a girl and his compliment than changed to I write all my guy characters very well.

[Escushion]

Though not prevalent in my comic, outside of that I am prone to writing female characters.

But then, my closest friends are women and they tell me I'm not very masculine... err... I mean FOOTBALL RRRRRRGGGG!!!!

[Rkolter]

Alison Bechdel, of <a href="http://www.dykestowatchoutfor.com/index.php">Dykes To Watch Out For</a> and Fun Home (and if you haven't read Fun Home yet, you must! You must! It is worth every penny you will spend on it!), invented something called the Bechdel Test/Mo's Movie Measure. Basically, a movie or work of anything passes the test if it features a scene with two or more women who talk with one another about something other than a man. When I first heard it, I laughed, thought "Oh it can't be all that bad", and then realized that yes, it is that bad.

God. Shows excactly what I mean. Why is it that way?

Are there even movies with women characters that are not in any way connected to love (or sex)? The standard formula seems to be that a woman is thrown in as a love interest.

Alien. Alien II, Alien III, Alien IV...

Predator III - Aliens vs. Predator

Basically, it's all aliens.

[The Neko]

I don't think I've necessarily had trouble writing female characters, I tend to think of the personality first and gender after.

[Bekka]

Alison Bechdel, of <a href="http://www.dykestowatchoutfor.com/index.php">Dykes To Watch Out For</a> and Fun Home (and if you haven't read Fun Home yet, you must! You must! It is worth every penny you will spend on it!), invented something called the Bechdel Test/Mo's Movie Measure. Basically, a movie or work of anything passes the test if it features a scene with two or more women who talk with one another about something other than a man. When I first heard it, I laughed, thought "Oh it can't be all that bad", and then realized that yes, it is that bad.

God. Shows excactly what I mean. Why is it that way?

Are there even movies with women characters that are not in any way connected to love (or sex)? The standard formula seems to be that a woman is thrown in as a love interest.

Alien. Alien II, Alien III, Alien IV...

Predator III - Aliens vs. Predator

Basically, it's all aliens.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY

Awesome movie with awesome female lead not connected to love or sex.

[Glambourine]

Do you think it's hard to write female characters? Why? Why is it harder than writing a male?

I think that we're just afraid to write anything unrealistic, but when it comes down to it, people are people, and we all talk about much the same things, basically. Of course, you could argue that men talk about, I don't know... football and women talk about shopping, but that would be to generalize. It's just social constructs, not something wired into our brains. And remember, we're writing fiction, so the sky's the limit, regardless the gender of the character we're writing about.

I think it's harder because of different responses to stereotypically gendered statements. If you buy queer theory (which I usually do), everyone's performing gender all the time: men perform masculinity, women perform femininity. In my experience as a man listening to men talk amongst themselves, it always seems like there's this weird pressure on the part of everyone when something stereotypically "male" is at stake: not sports or crap like that, but things like responding to/giving advice about women, issues of honor in a fight, taste in movies, etc. It's like everyone goes around the table assuring everyone else that yes, they are masculine: everyone feels not just an interest, but a *need* to weigh in on whatever issue is at hand. It's this very weird social identity issue, and it works off of a very defined code of sensitivities.

I don't know if women do that, or what they respond to if they do, which makes them harder to write. Whenever I want to write a female character, I usually think in terms of body issues, being made into a sex object, or about feeling like the "token woman" in a social grouping. It's stereotypical, yeah, and I don't know that all women feel like that. But I think a lot of women--or at least the women I write about, for the most part--feel that they *should* feel like that, or face problems based on issues like that pretty frequently, so it makes sense to imagine that I'm sensitive to those issues when I'm trying to get into a female character's head. And it reads right to me when I do that--it reads like a female character to me--so it works decently enough.

I used to have a hard time with drawing women because I'd try not to make them all breasty, hippy, stereotypically bimboish, whatever--but then they didn't "read" like women when I'd look at the drawing. You can see it a lot in my early strips: the non-bimbo characters just look kind of warped, or like men in drag. So I started emphasizing breasts and hips more, and the characters started to look more like women immediately. It's this weirdly necessary exaggeration that I think is analogous to writing women characters for me: I can't just *write* them; I have to think in terms of sensitivities in order to get the reactions and subtleties right--or what I think is right, anyway; I have no idea.

I agree with what you're saying about social constructs, but social constructs, however arbitrary, play a big role in how we perceive gender, and in how we act it out to ourselves and to each other. And if we perceive gender through a lens of social constructs, than making female (or male) characters read right is a matter of manipulating the presentation of those constructs, just as you wouldn't draw a female character's shoulders the same size as a man's in order to manipulate perception. If I'm just writing about something innocuous--a conversation about bus tickets or video games or something--then I think any differences between men and women in terms of writing are going to depend mostly on the individual characters. But if I'm writing about characters under stress, characters who feel part of their identity at stake, then it's crucial to me to get those sensitivities right, or it just feels neutral or "off".

The biggest clue to characters isn't the subject matter of their conversation, but the conversational strategies they use to approach sensitive topics, and those are more gendered as a rule than a lot of people realize. I certainly didn't until I started talking to women about it, anyway.

Does that make sense?

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

Alien and Aliens are fantastic movies. They're mostly dialogue and both manage to be interesting. The second one is even better if you see the uncut version because you can see why Ellen Ripley takes such a liking to the little girl.

The last two Alien movies weren't very good in my opinion.

[Noise Monkey]

MILLION DOLLAR BABY

Awesome movie with awesome female lead not connected to love or sex.

It even has the "Lifetime Channel" ending.

Actually, I enjoyed the first 3/4 of the movie.

[Nanda]

Silence of the Lambs is a good example, too. And Kill Bill, for the most part - any "love" is all backstory.

[Spqrblues]

The thing I do like about Aliens, aside from having more memorable female characters than male characters, is that the main protagonist is allowed to be more than a chick running around in a man-suit killing things and being tough-macho to show that she's a valid character. She can have motivations and compassion that might be considered "feminine," "maternal," or even "bitchy," and even "lusty," and that's a-ok. And she didn't have to discuss objectification in the middle of it

Since my main comic is historical fiction (a hard sell to readers, I'm sure, and unless I start throwing in more orgies at Caesar's palace I doubt the comic will ever be very popular), I'll have a chance to show that there was more going on in history and human progress than who fought whom and which guy stabbed another guy to take over his kingdom. Once I'm done with the fighting and stabbing part, that is.

[Mercury Hat]

Silence of the Lambs is a good example, too.

But then there was Hannibal .

...

I've taken to calling the "female thrown into story just as love interest for main character" the Adam Sandler phenomenon. Because no matter what, even if she hates him at first, she will end up wanting to jump his bones.

[Spqrblues]

Silence of the Lambs is a good example, too.

But then there was Hannibal .

...

I've taken to calling the "female thrown into story just as love interest for main character" the Adam Sandler phenomenon. Because no matter what, even if she hates him at first, she will end up wanting to jump his bones.

Wait--did that happen in Hannibal? Because... yuck.

Is showing that a hero has physical appeal/sexual attractiveness to many of the women he meets always problematic? Can it be a way of showing that the hero actually does have some sort of appealing quality, inviting the reader to see it too and hopefully agree? (Or maybe stand aside and shake their head and think, "I don't know what women see in him, but I can believe some women go for that...") Or is it maybe a problem only when it's one of these "I hate you! Oh, but you've won me over by pestering me incessantly so now I love you!" stories?