Thoughts and feelings towards “Femme Fatales”?

Discussion in 'Character Development' started by Oldmanofthemountain, Sep 20, 2020.

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  1. shiba0000

    shiba0000 Member

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    Femme fatale is a trope that's existed throughout history in cultures around the world. See the siren, succubus, and Eve of the Bible. Stories, especially back then, are sometimes exaggerated to communicate a concept or lesson useful for survival, and the femme fatale acts as a caution to keep up your defenses against being seduced to your own detriment.
     
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  2. jim onion

    jim onion New Member

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    In a word: "accurate".

    As a feeling: it's something like taking a transcendent Hans Zimmer-esque soundtrack, and playing it over a lioness chasing a gazelle in slow motion across the African savannah, bathed in orange dawn, and then uploading it to YouTube where the lioness receives very little public criticism, and the gazelle was asking for it.
     
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2020
  3. Fervidor

    Fervidor Senior Member

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    Come to think of it, I don't believe I've ever written one. My femmes tend to be pretty straightforward, even when they are cunning or engaged in subterfuge. I guess I just don't really write women as intentionally seductive. Or men, for that matter.
     
  4. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    ...what?
     
  5. Friedrich Kugelschreiber

    Friedrich Kugelschreiber marshmallow Contributor

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    that was my question as well.
     
  6. Fervidor

    Fervidor Senior Member

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    I think what he was saying was that his experiences with women has been akin to being devoured by a dangerous predator, and then garnering no sympathy for it.
     
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  7. Friedrich Kugelschreiber

    Friedrich Kugelschreiber marshmallow Contributor

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    Apparently, but it was odd in the context of a thread about femme fatales.

    Anyway, welcome back @Foxxx, haven't seen you around for a while.
     
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  8. Fervidor

    Fervidor Senior Member

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    I assume it was meant as a joke.
     
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  9. jim onion

    jim onion New Member

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    I appreciate people who don't assume the worst in one another. The perfect target for a femme fatale. ;)

    ---

    I've written a femme fatale before. I'm not going to plug my story here though.

    If you write it well, it remains an archetype. If you write it poorly, it becomes cliche. And I believe that goes for all archetypes, including "the fool" and "the Byronic hero".

    (For the record, my femme fatale was poorly written. Some might say worse.)

    What makes something cliche? That might be a rabbit hole... But in the briefest, I would say that it's uninspired and boring. If it's entertaining and even transformative while still being familiar, it's perhaps archetypal.

    Femme fatale, homme fatale; two sides of the same coin which was used to buy the cloth from which sirens and succubuses were cut.

    While no person is so simple as to be completely pigeon-holed into any one archetype, one ought pay attention to the moments when these archetypes manifest in your life—either when you yourself become the archetype, or when people around you become the archetype—and to notice how that makes you feel.

    That, I think, is a key to then writing them well. Because you know them inside (to be) and out (to observe).
     
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2020
  10. DK3654

    DK3654 Almost a Productive Member of Society Contributor

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    Going back awhile in the thread, but I wanted to address this.
    Male gaze is not a problem with writing a female or neutral POV like a male POV, it's a problem of writing from a misogynistic, objectifying point of view. There's no universal male or female or nonbinary POV. What makes male gaze male is not an inherently gendered perspective, but an inherently patriarchal perspective. And that's not so much biology as it is society.
    If we reduce male gaze down to simply being male perspective, we risk limiting what a female perspective can entail, what a male perspective must entail, and, most importantly, normalise harmful—and often misleading—perspectives as being natural.
    I mean, as a male(tm) myself, I find prominent male gaze in a story not just distasteful, but also kind of boring, and I'm sure that's not that rare of a position. Male gaze can make otherwise interesting, complex characters shallow and predictable: both male and female. A fixation on the superficial and a dismissal of the complex and varied reality of people's identities and experiences just makes for bad writing, but challenging common perspectives will always be a great way to make interesting writing.
     
  11. shiba0000

    shiba0000 Member

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    You just described writing complex characters in general. Good for some stories, not necessary for others. There's nothing inherently wrong with using exaggeration and caricatures in art, whether it be visual or written. Cartoons use this kind of minimalist simplification to emphasize elements of the art to be more easily digested. It's not an issue that not all art is completely accurate to reality, especially when the simplified elements are non-essential to the intended experience of the viewer. Like how it doesn't really matter that most depictions of war are completely inaccurate in media. It's all exaggerated based on what kind of story the writer wants to tell. It's not going to ruin my experience to see Hollywood actors run around with sci fi prop guns that don't make sense mechanically.
     
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  12. jim onion

    jim onion New Member

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    Well, if we're talking about "what the problem is" (to loosely paraphrase) regarding male gaze when it appears in literature, we're now talking about ascribing personal moral dogmas, or possibly even political ideology as seen in the cases of publishing houses during the Soviet Union, to the art and artist and insisting that all adhere to them, and that certain topics are only allowed to be written about in a specific way lest they be morally impure. Such discussion about the male gaze really seems very far removed from the more local discussion of the femme-fatale archetype, but alas—

    I'm taking a course right now on examining English literature at university, and in this course we operate under the belief that the author is "dead". That is to say, unless they've come out and explicitly stated intention and revealed the inner-workings of their designs in a space such as an interview, you cannot merely read a work of art and before so much as removing your ass from the armchair say "therefore you are corrupting the youth, Mr. Socrates". Even if such an author were to come out and say they've been caught red-handed, their intentions were to corrupt the youth, the measured results will likely differ from the intended results.

    So what has been revealed to me in this course I'm taking, is that we're really all in a great big game of projection when it comes to interpreting literature, in which the only person saying that "The Girl With Big Boobs written by Randy Macho is propaganda in support of the patriarchy" is, in fact, none other than the person making the statement... not the author. In the same way that me calling this fictional work-of-fiction the greatest satirical feat of all time would be nothing more than my subjective interpretation, which others may or may not agree with.

    You can only ever make the argument that something can be read in manner x, y, or z, and try to convince others that your interpretation is the most PLAUSIBLE. The same can be said of femme fatales. I have read femme fatales that are poorly written, and seem to be more of an insertion of private fantasies on behalf of the author, and I've come across femme fatales that were well written and seemed to reflect some degree of truth about reality. But to make a blanket statement about the societal impact and trickle-down effect of femme fatales in literature, is basically as accurate as making an assertion about how male gaze in literature contributes to the Voldemort-archy.

    tl;dr "The problem isn't that a character is racist. The problem is what the author says about racism." And the problem with that, is often times what the "author says about racism" is what the reader said the author said, not what the author said, because we don't know what the author said because the author usually doesn't break the fourth-wall to come out and tell us, and even when the author is abundantly clear about what they meant, some people still choose to hear what they want to hear.
     
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2020
  13. DK3654

    DK3654 Almost a Productive Member of Society Contributor

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    There's something wrong with using discriminatory, reductive stereotypes in art.
    And I would contend that many exaggerated and/or caricatured characters in fiction contain hidden depth, and many of the ones that don't aren't particularly well written. Children's cartoons often have superficially 1D characters, but a number of good ones actually have surprisingly interesting characters when you break it down. Yes, sometimes it can be good to have a character that is just a caricature, but it's the exception that proves the rule, and to circle back, harmful prejudicial caricatures are not part of that exception.

    The nature of fiction does not mean you just do whatever you want and nobody can criticize it.
    Inaccuracy is permitted, but there are standards around what most people are willing to accept. And there are multiple reasons why we might do so- because realism can help ground the story and develop immersion, because realism can sometimes make the story more interesting, or because realism can be necessary to inform—and avoid misinforming—people about important points.
    In that sense, there's little comparison between a misogynistic femme fatale character and an implausible sci-fi weapon. There are far more powerful reasons to avoid the former, and frankly, there's much more legitimate reason to ever want to do the latter in the first place. After all, if we are distorting reality "based on what kind of story (we) want to tell", as you say, what kind of story do we want to tell that is dependant on misogynistic depictions of women?
     
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  14. jim onion

    jim onion New Member

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    Harmful according to you, here, sure. "Harm" nowadays means a lot of things that it shouldn't, and requires absolutely zero evidence to prove.

    Correct. Whether that criticism has been brought down to us from the mountaintop in the form of some indisputable, objective moral code is another matter.

    An archetype is inaccurate. I'd argue it's harmful to treat real-life people as if they are cardboard cut-outs or "archetypes", but I don't see anything inherently harmful in a femme fatale archetype in a work of fiction, poorly written or otherwise. The only harm would necessarily be that which is imagined, unless of course you or I could point to evidence in which somebody committed a hurtful act and claimed the archetype as their motivation. "All women are femme fatales; she got what was coming to her," said the murderer on the stand.

    You get to tell whatever kind of story the reader says you told. Recent changes in the winds of our societies would seem to indicate as much. You just have to hope that your work was deemed so important that groups of scholars across the nation and perhaps the world unite to defend the righteousness of your work, like To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn.

    First they came for the femme fatales, and I said nothing. Then they came for the Mockingbirds and Huckleberries, and still I said nothing. Then when they came for draft three of my sub-par untitled WIP (speaking for myself here), there was nobody left to help me.
     
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2020
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  15. DK3654

    DK3654 Almost a Productive Member of Society Contributor

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    Avoiding sexism is a goal I have no shame about insisting adherence to, and I would think every decent person would be the same. There's nothing totalitarian about having and promoting moral views any more than if I were to complain about books being too long.

    Femme fatale characters are closely tied to the male gaze, as are a number of other archetypes for female characters of older media. In much the same way as black characters were subjected to a long history of being confined to limited, harmful stereotypes in media, so have been female characters. That does tend to happen when you had a society that is deeply prejudiced in such ways making these works.
    It's a more extreme comparison, but if this were a thread talking about writing with the 'mammy' archetype, it would very much be a pertinent point to discuss the connection to the history of anti-black racism and how you might avoid the problems inherent in that.

    There are degrees of interpretation required. Not everything said through a piece of media is equally ambiguous in its range of possible interpretations. What exactly Lord of the Flies has to say about nature vs nurture is something we can reasonably debate with some fairly different interpretations. But if we're talking about The Turner Diaries, I'm simply not willing to accept any interpretation of the text that does not make note of how horrifically white supremacist it is, because that much is beyond reasonable debate.
    And beyond this, even if something is reasonably debatable on whether it is 'actually' a harmful representation of a marginalised group, if that interpretation is clear enough, if that interpretation is harmful enough, it's probably best to just avoid such a depiction. There is room for truly grey areas, but you shouldn't push it. Don't play chicken with bigotry.
     
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  16. jim onion

    jim onion New Member

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    Right, but this isn't about what you do in your own personal, private time and space that make you such a morally righteous person who earns many a social-point. This is your beliefs that guide your own work encroaching on (struck for poor choice of words) interacting with others in the public square, albeit not in any fashion that carries consequences for disregarding your opinion.

    How is the femme fatale archetype harmful? Are we using the same definition of femme fatale? Are we interpreting it the same way?

    I'm very curious to see how you'll prove harm.

    Bigotry as defined by you? Or who?

    Would it be a legitimate stance to interpret every single thing Lovecraft ever wrote, all of his fiction and his non-fiction, through the lens of him holding some racist views that were common of his society at the time? Would it be legitimate to construe his entire oeuvre to be nothing but a propagation of white supremacy?

    I mean, you at least can't disprove it wasn't subconscious and implicit in every word of every sentence of every paragraph of every completed piece that Lovecraft composed. Do you apply Hitchens's razor here?

    The reason I'm asking, is because without hard evidence, any discussion of femme fatales is really no different in terms of the level of subjectivity. Two people look at a femme fatale and one says, "Unbridled sexuality in women will ruin them" (that's more or less straight from Wikipedia), while the other says "Untamed sexuality in men will ruin them."

    And this goes back to my point about projection. Sometimes the text only says what we say it says. Sometimes the harm is only that which we've imagined.

    For example, I never knew why I hated watching sit-coms until I realized that 90% (hyperbole) of the father figures, or really the male cast in general, were clowns and simps. Do I find it harmful? Maybe insofar as wasting my time and being of little interest to me, but if people are being "harmed" by that, I can't see how.

    Note: I can imagine how. I can concoct all sorts of ways in which that might be harmful, or any other similar stereotype. But I'm asking for proof as it relates to femme fatales.

    ---

    And I have so many more questions. Are all archetypes harmful? Are only some? How come? In what ways are archetypes and stereotypes different or the same?
     
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2020
  17. DK3654

    DK3654 Almost a Productive Member of Society Contributor

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    ?
    Hence my use of the words 'insisting' and 'promoting'.
    I am happy to, to some extent, pressure others about not being prejudiced. That is surely a good thing to advocate.

    Let's use a definition straight off the top of google.
    "A femme fatale, sometimes called a maneater or vamp, is a stock character of a mysterious, beautiful, and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, deadly traps"
    Immediately, this character is obviously defined prominently by their sexuality. That might be okay if done carefully, but it's very often going to mean, and very often has meant, objectifying the character.
    Then we can consider 'ensnaring' people into traps. The association between this and the prominent sexuality of the archetype creates a potential association of women's sexuality being dangerous. Especially when the femme fatale character is portrayed as fairly powerful and assertive, which leads us right into an important patriarchal idea, that women being powerful and assertive is dangerous and bad (while women being weak and submissive is of course not).
    Femme fatales have often been villains, and this has been used much in the way as gay characters were long pigeonholed as villains, in order to make sure that 'immoral' people were properly condemned by the story, and this was actually practically codified into the US film industry with the Hays Code.
    And of course, let's not forget the association with sex outside of marriage being a corrupting influence.

    So, to say the least, there are a number of pitfalls to avoid in making a character of this kind.

    Bigotry as defined by being bigoted.
    I'm not sure what else you expect me to say.

    It would be irresponsible not to consider the potential influence of racism on Lovecraft's work and recognise those places where a racist message does come through.
    Frankly, it's not all that hard to figure out this stuff.
     
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  18. jim onion

    jim onion New Member

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    So you're talking about theoretical harm. Not manifest harm.

    Let me play: I think the femme fatale is a figure to be hailed in the halls of archetypes, as the symbol that reminds men to not be overly objectifying or else suffer the consequences of their vice, and for women to not be she who takes advantage of one of men's vices. In the same way, a homme fatale (more a modern creation of the same idea) is a reminder for men to not take advantage of a woman, and for women to not be seduced by a man's appearances until she can be certain that they are more than just a facade, as neither sex is more or less likely to fall to seduction.

    Another way to look at it, might be that the femme fatale or homme fatale is just a stand in for that desire which possesses a person but is either unobtainable or destructive, although this is much more abstract than perhaps the archetype itself.

    Another way might by that it's saying if you don't want to be treated as an object, do not portray yourself as an object, whether you're male or female.

    Yet another way could be that treating a woman or man as an object of desire rather than as a person will lead to a bad outcome.

    "which leads us right into an important patriarchal idea" that you yourself projected onto it by way of making that connection, in the same way that my subjective interpretations above are all just that: subjective. In the grand scheme of things, this additional detail seems to be one that is only present on occasion, and a more recent modern invention than if you look at ancient examples of femme fatales, or examples of femme fatales from periods such as the Romantic.

    But I'm not about to assert that my interpretation is evidence in and of itself. Are you?

    One man's bigotry is another man's not-bigotry.

    Of course it's not difficult, if you shy away from the actual problem of literary analysis I'm highlighting by not fully thinking about it.

    If we all just apply the analysis as it suits us, or only as far as is convenient, then everything is hunky-dory.

    But for me, it really takes the wind out of the sails of many arguments when I realize the only wind in the sails was the hot-air coming out of the person's mouth.

    That is to say, there's no substance to them. It's just people practicing Wicca, thinking if they say something it'll just be true by virtue of being said. "I say it's harmful, therefore it is so." If that's the case, then the dumb-male trope that has so thoroughly infested western sit-coms that it's uncertain if there are any survivors aside from Rick Grimes, must be as big of an issue as femme fatales.

    Furthermore, it would appear that any work of art that leaves room for viewers/readers to "mis"interpret it should be labeled as harmful, as those viewers/readers may come to a conclusion on their own that will somehow produce a negative outcome in the real-world, even though we have no causal proof of said negative outcome.

    Suddenly though that would make Lord of the Flies just as harmful as The Turner Diaries, and I don't think we want to go there.
     
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2020
  19. Odile_Blud

    Odile_Blud Active Member

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    I just wish we had more male counterparts of this trope (homme fetales, I guess they call them).
     
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  20. DK3654

    DK3654 Almost a Productive Member of Society Contributor

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    I'm talking about harm. Harm to people. People being hurt. By the thing. The thing hurts people.
    Depictions of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and more all are inextricably tied to the very real consequences that these groups have and continue to face, in a whole multitude of ways.
    Just in and of itself, it's harmful to hear derogatory things about oneself. When you hurl slurs at someone in real life, it's harassment, it's abuse.

    That would work a lot better if the framing of these depictions emphasised the flaws of the men more, but the focus is usually squarely on the dangerousness of the woman and the flaws of the men they seduce is secondary at best. The women are usually the villains here and that says something. It's not reading into it if it's right there.
    And even if you did shift the focus and make the femme fatale not a villain, it would be an improvement, but the presentation of women's sexual agency as dangerous would still be there. Making women into a cautionary tale for bad men is still dehumanising. Women should not be limited to mere plot devices for the stories of men. It's essentially the same problem as with fridging. There are ways to give such characters a little more nuance and a little more agency within even much the same plot.

    Again, changing the focus doesn't change what's there.

    Ok, but that's victim blaming.
    Women allowing or encouraging somehow their own objectification is not the problem in society. That's not what we want to be portraying.

    Much the same here as the others.

    Something being subjective doesn't necessarily mean it's just personal taste and nobody can assert anything. Certainly not in this context. Not all interpretations are created equal.
    As I've already said, interpretation of a text is not always open to whatever interpretation; somethings are clear.
    And some things are just clear enough to warrant avoiding.

    Yes, and some people are wrong.
    Just because there are some greyer areas doesn't remove the black and white, especially not when there's so much obvious black and white.

    If all interpretation is without substance, what's the point of ever interpreting anything? Or for that matter, writing fiction with any kind of message in mind?
    Interepretations vary in substance. Calling Neo the protagonist of The Matrix is pretty damn substantial, but calling Neo's journey an allegory for trans experience is a little more debatable, and calling The Matrix a film primarily about cisheteronormativity is more debatable than that, and calling Neo a side character of The Matrix would just be wrong.

    Not in a patriarchal society. In an alternate matriachal society though, probably.
    There might be some issues to discuss with this example, but it could never compare.

    So, we think The Turner Diaries *is* more harmful than The Lord of The Flies I take it?
    Is that an 'interpretation'? Or do we think we can just call it the truth?
     
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  21. jim onion

    jim onion New Member

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    Okay, but let's keep this to le femme fatale. I don't see how the archetype of femme fatale is hurling slurs, harassing, or abusing anybody, nor do I see a tie to inspiring any person to do those things. Imagined, theoretical, invented harm is not the same as harm-harm.

    Says something to you, maybe, which says something to me about what your presumptions are. To me, they're just the inconsequential vehicle to prove a greater point.

    For bad men? What about just damaged men?

    And what if the story isn't even about their agency, for or against? This seems to imply that if a character lacks agency, then that must be a statement about an entire group of people who you've arbitrarily decided as a reader are now represented by that character. Lots of assumptions going on here.

    Sometimes a cigar, is just a cigar. Sometimes a femme fatale without agency is just that: a femme fatale without agency. Not some carefully calculated societal commentary about women, nor a proscription of their position in future society. The jump to such notions is so large as to be beyond any Olympian.

    Call it what you want, but there's undeniable practical truth to it.

    Unless you're the type of person who would go back in time to 1945 Berlin and encourage civilians to run out and party during an air-raid siren, because after all, they'd still just be victims.

    Or for less conflict of interest (if you're the type who thinks every German alive between 1938-1945 was a Nazi), how about we tell all the civilians during the Battle of Britain to just maintain a polite social distancing of 6-feet between one another and to go about their usual business. After all, if they die, Hitler did it.

    How stupid. While acknowledging that a secondary party shouldn't act a certain way in the first place, I actually find it reprehensible to not instruct somebody on how to act in the reality that we live in, not some la-la land where no cave-man do wrong thing.

    Okay, so we agree. I largely admit, as I should have done from the beginning if I were acting in as good of faith as I ought to have acted, that some of what I was doing was Devil's advocating. As you said elsewhere, not all interpretations are created equal, depending on evidence derived directly from the text, as well as measurable outcomes in the real-world.

    However, I still stand by the problem that I have again and again defended video games like Grand Theft Auto from obnoxious prude Catholics. You need to demonstrate the harm. Not just say "muh harm". You need a DIRECT CAUSAL LINK to prove that this is causing harm.

    I've never been one to say "My dad is bigger than yours", much less "Muh problems' bigger than yours."

    ---

    Could we agree, then, that while there are issues with femme fatales (as there are issues with stereotypes in general, for example), that the larger concern is HOW the author uses this archetype, and WHY and WHAT they intend in doing so?

    Albeit a very non-specific question, what are your thoughts on that?
     
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2020
  22. Lazaares

    Lazaares Contributor Contributor

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    Huge disagreement there. Unless the misrepresentation itself is an artistic tool, any movie or book would receive quite the criticism for inaccurate portrayal. War is conflict, and conflict creates audience expectations. If you subvert those expectations through inaccurate portrayal, there'll be dumpster fires. Opposed to this, accurate portrayals are almost always well-received and praised.

    The same argument can be made for seduction. Slapstick femme fatales are negatively received.
     
  23. jim onion

    jim onion New Member

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    I don't know man, I couldn't hear all the 3-and-half race-baiting, blue check-mark, Twitter-whiners screaming over the vast amount of people who thought 1917 was a fantastic film (or Saving Private Ryan / Band of Brothers for that matter). Because technically, they were probably right, it was an unrealistic misrepresentation to have a singular Indian dude in the entire film of 1917. Any reading of a history book could tell you that.

    Will it receive criticism from some dude on the internet or some annoying critic that nobody cares about?

    Of cooouuurrrrssseee!

    The point isn't if it's unrealistic. The point is to what degree. And there is actually a large margin of error that the general public, for better or for worse, are either ignorant of or are willing to overlook for the sake of being entertained.

    As you'd have it, millions would have angrily stormed from the theaters when Tiger tanks couldn't penetrate Sherman tank armor in the movie "Fury".

    Nobody cares man. And I say that as somebody who laughed out loud and said "This movie is such crap" when that happened in Fury.

    Millions would have left the theaters when they were hearing sounds in space during Star Wars battles and said "this movie blows", or millions would have asked for a refund when Legolas clearly could not have slid down that elefant trunk in LotR.

    Suddenly it dawns upon a person like myself that most people have a life, and aren't pointlessly obsessed with World War 2 facts, and that the FICTIONAL STORY might have a purpose other than to be a faithful retelling of the precise, exact historical events of 1941, or to abide perfectly by the laws described by humanity's greatest scientific minds.

    This is, of course, the fabled "artistic license" we hear spooky stories about.

    This all applies to femme fatales too. I find it hard to believe anybody in their right mind would walk out of a theater thinking anything remotely close to what some people like DK are concerned about.

    Similarly, when I watch literally any sit-com made in the past ten years, full of mumbling bumbling male *idiots*, am I annoyed? Sure. Do I wish we would do better?

    Of cooouuurrsseee!

    But I don't feel the need to launch a social crusade against the absolute state of dog-bleep Western sit-coms. They are so beneath me that I treat them as if I am a Lovecraftian Elder God. I am completely unaware of their existence.

    And suddenly with a Pikachu surprise face, you nearly have an enema in your pants at the fact that if everybody woke-up and felt this way, that there'd be no need to fear "dumb sit-com dads", or these unfalsifiable claims about femme fatales leading to some patriarchical Skynet that will tyrannize all life-forms without peens.

    Because, tl;dr, this is all just fiction. Seriously. As much as we like to get-off about its tremendous power and importance, at the end of the day this is the same stuff we get high out of our minds to watch instead of doing homework, the stuff we read while sitting on the toilet and forget about when we flush, the same stuff many of us listen to as meaningless ambiance while doing our daily chores or during our daily commute, and stuff we tell at the dinner table and around the campfire.

    The femme fatale archetype is never going to bring about The Handmaid's Tale in real-life. It's just not lol. The fact that there hasn't been so much as a cursory hint of proof otherwise is all I need to say that with confidence.

    In my opinion, fiction has always been a faithful reflection of society. A description, NOT prescription. If you want to to talk about actually effecting change in society, you should be in the advertising industry. Because unlike fiction, they pass all their garbage off as gospel.
     
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2020
    Odile_Blud likes this.
  24. Lazaares

    Lazaares Contributor Contributor

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    There's a difference between those statements.

    A Sherman shell not breaching a tiger's armour is unrealistic. Germans shooting /their/ Shermans at "Russian" Mark 4s in north Africa is completely inaccurate.

    Similarly, femme fatale characters easily fall into one of many annoying cliches. The "dumb horny male" depiction, the "evil slut" depiction which is so frequently opposed to a "shy and chaste heroine". Most of these are not only offensive, but make for terrible narrative.

    Yeah, write whatever, just write.
     
    DK3654, Oscar Leigh and jim onion like this.
  25. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    If you could knock off the offensive characterisation of people who disagree with your position that'd be dandy
     
    Oscar Leigh likes this.
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