If no character is seen as having agency based on their personality then thanks to death of the author the judgement falls to the audience and as everyone's opinion is subjective then there is no universal true answer thus peoples objections are based on their subjective views.
Yes.
Is this news to you? Did you seriously think there was such a thing as an "objective" opinion in media analysis. Good thing we disabused you of that notion.
To any sane person, subjectivity is implied. It does not even need to be stated.
Thus the whole argument is pointless to have as people who hate sexy character will carry on hating them and people who are fine with them will keep being fine with them and unless people want to make this into a war for domination then people are going to have to learn to live with sexy characters and especially with them not getting changed.
Except, once again, this is not actually a discussion about the inherent worth or otherwise of "sexy characters". That discussion is fundamentally unworthy of adults. It's a discussion over
representation, which is different because representations, as the name suggests, represent real things. They contain meaning and information that concerns real things. The way you think about "sexy characters" will be indicative of the way you think about
sexiness both inside and outside of media. You'
yeh......... I'm still going with this sounds like fanfiction stuff. Lady D isn't the Rocky Horror Picture Show
Um, source? Because there's no mention of it on her wiki page.
Um, those "hags" are her daughters. And nowhere is it stated she is gay.
It's a joke.
However, look at this fucking character and tell me that's a heterosexual with a straight face.
Um, you DO realize that that I could replace Lady D with Dracula in this scenario and barely have to change a word of that sentence, right?
Yes. I actually do realise that.
Like, you do know Dracula is incredibly homoerotic right? Like, countless books have been written on the weird amount of queer subtext and coding in Dracula, on Bram Stoker's weird relationship to (and anxieties about) sexuality which he channelled into his work, and how this carries over into subsequent depictions of vampires in media.
Give it a few years and that'll probably be said by a girl in a film unironically lol. Hell some female fans push for that now.
I don't think they do.
Sure, straight women sometimes ship same-sex male characters, but that is actually very different from performative lesbianism, in that the former is typically about
relationship dynamics between men
, while the latter is about
visual spectacle. There is no normative assumption in that kind of same-sex shipping that the male couples are not actually attracted to each other independently of the male gaze, or are more interested in gaining the approval of women, whereas that
is an implicit assumption of performative lesbianism. If you wanted to criticise the way straight shipping culture handles same-sex male couples, it would be more similar to the way someone would criticise "lesbian porn", in that both are representations of same-sex intimacy that end up reflecting the attitudes and priorties of their heterosexual audience, and thus misrepresenting what same-sex intimacy is actually like in reality.
I didn't say the characters were 100% hetro.
Good, because that would be a terrible argument.
There is absolutely nothing subtle about the way those characters are framed as bisexual.
As far as if my view matters or not? Well not to you that's fairly clear but based on what you said about the way the film was marketed I guess my views mattered or was shared by a Hollywood executive or something marketing the film.
You misunderstand.
The reason your views don't matter is because you clearly missed very obvious things about that film. I think most straight adults today would have absolutely no problem picking up on the very unsubtle bisexuality of these characters. I realise that there's a certain bizarre unwillingness to acknowledge that female characters being obviously attracted to each other, kissing or having sex with each other in a film might imply something non-heterosexual about their sexuality (cough,
Black Swan) but I also want to give credit and say that I think straight people today are generally far more media-aware when it comes to queerness compared to a decade ago. The problem is, this film wasn't marketed to straight adults today, it was marketed to straight male teenagers in 2009.
And if your mentality hasn't moved on from that of a straight teenager in 2009, I do think your opinion doesn't matter, because I think there is a fairly clear-cut right and a wrong audience for certain films, and this film wasn't made for straight boys from 2009.
Heck, when Karen Kusama (the director) and Diablo Cody (the writer) wrote to the film's publicity team to complain about an advert for the film they felt was misleading, they apparently received a single like reply that read: "Jennifer sexy, she steal your boyfriend". If that's the executive you want to compare your views to, go right ahead, because that certainly sounds like someone who understood what they were doing. That sounds like someone whose opinions we should take very seriously indeed.
Does anyone remember Acclaim? And them filing for bankruptcy before disappearing forever?
