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Peach 00

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Hi guys! Long time no see. I'm a non-existent ghost, lurking around, and I came across this topic. Nostalgia hit me like a 200 ton bag of bricks. So, I'm just dropping in to say hi.And yes, I do not enjoy hot-headed females with a lack of common sense.

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Yes, apparently... Even the word filter hates him.@Tekulo- That's the thing about most of the female characters in Avatar- they transcend "feisty". They're competent fighters and interesting characters, not just loud-mouthed ankle-biters. I'm not saying I dislike hotheadedness in a female character full stop, it's just that it's common to see it abused in a very lazy manner with little thought put in.

I have to agree with you.Hi peoples, I'm a 13-year old male dropping in on this conversation. But I am a feminist, supporting equality and free will with females and all that. I hope you peoples don't mind me if I drop in and share my opinion and stuff like that.

Haven't seen one of these in a long time...

 

 

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JC, to comment, I think it's at least partly a matter of Author Appeal; writers tend to write what they like, and a hot-headed girl is very appealing in a lot of ways. Also, showing a feisty action girl is a good way to add in some gender balance to a mostly male cast while still having her be realistic in a more dangerous situation.Do hot headed girls show up way less in less dangerous literature? Not sure...

That being said, thag thag thaggity thag thagness.

-Rover

 

"A memo was sent to Astaria asking if it would at all be possible to make a flying goat."

"The Astarians responded that making a goat fly would be trivial; making it land safely would be another matter entirely."

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Most try to portray tough females to cater to other women, but usually that heroine-type have a high chance to fall on her face.In my personal opinion, a fine example of a strong female would be Katniss from the Hunger Games. At times, she shows her weakness along with her strengths. Seeing the two ends, somewhat helps her develop fully as a character.

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Yeah, having "I can do it go out and get 'em" as the extent of a female character's personality is... not good.Another good female character that occurred to me just now is Mia Fey from Ace Attorney, particularly her younger self. For most of the series she serves as a pretty traditional cool-headed mentor (albeit one with a few tricks up her sleeves, and despite getting offed about an hour into the first game - the joys of spirit channeling), but the third game focuses quite a lot on her days as a rookie attorney. There she gets flustered, belittled by the prosecution, and generally kicked around like all the series protagonists - but she also displays incredible belief in her clients, even willing to push and pressure them for their own good if need be, and when she does home in on a suspect, she simply does not let up. And when something truly horrible does happen in one of her cases, she displays a fairly realistic reaction rather than just being 'too tough to get upset because I'm a strong female protagonist'.

Hey: I'm not very active around BZP right now.  However, you can always contact me through PM (I have email notifications set up) and I will reply as soon as I can.


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On that note, GSR, how great is Maya's character too? She's practically a giant kid; she likes kids shows at the age of 19, she generally doesn't take life too seriously and her imagination likes to run wild (Xin Eohp XD). Still, she's also been through a fair share of troubles such as being accused for the murder of her sister, Mia, being kidnapped by an assassin and that near death experience later on (they need to put a tracker on her XD). Despite all of that, she puts on a smile and does her best to support the people that she cares about instead of sobbing, playing the damsel in distress (actually, she's pretty resourceful when push comes to shove. Using spirit channeling and trying to find an escape). She shows a different kind of inner-strength. She's not head-strong, "I'mma tackle the world" feisty type, she's more of a silly, spacey goof ball with more to her character.

Executive Vice President of Tomato Throwing

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... well I have to give mad props to BZP that a topic like this can exist peacefully. Nice!Anyway yeah, I think female characters with bad attitudes are common mainly for laziness, author tastes, or just fear of being sexist. The latter really gets you in trouble more often than not. Fear of being seen as sexist is itself a sort of sexism, being afraid to give a female character certain traits just because of that.Also if you lack characters of a certain gender, never add one just for the sake of adding one. Affirmative Action should not apply to storytelling unless you really have good roles for them to fill and good personalities for them to have. If you just make them one-note stereotypes that's going to look worse than not having any at all. Characters should exist to be characters, not to satisfy a demographic that your effort is not going to satisfy anyway.I can give an example here. Take Leila, a character I was going to introduce in SK Inn. She's not so much affirmative action as transferring a character from another story of mine into a different setting. Regardless, once transplanted I had no idea what I would really do with her. I just hoped I would figure something out. Del, on the other hand, was designed right alongside Burns and I had a very well-defined role for her from the get go.(If you could even tell she was female. I tried showing that any way I could without giving her the most obvious trait that Matoran shouldn't even have, but apparently some people still couldn't tell. :P)

Edited by Superkid11
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Fun fact everyone; after talking to Peach, I've decided to make a change and turn my short story of a gender bending Toa into an epic, so we may have even more of Great Being sexism, awkward Toa interactions, and general insanity. Always works.In the mean time, since I now need to fill somewhere between 30k and 50k words of story, anyone got ideas for subplots that could go on with my gender bent Toa?

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"In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after." -Isaac Asimov, responding to a letter he had received saying that scientific certainty was false, The Relativity of Wrong

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Long story short, the Great Beings hold a trial regarding the guilt of a team of AI programmers for making female Mata Nui inhabitants passive or crazy. AI team says it'd happen anyways. Great Beings take some random fire Toa and turn him into a female fire Toa to test claims. Insanity ensues.

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"In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after." -Isaac Asimov, responding to a letter he had received saying that scientific certainty was false, The Relativity of Wrong

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It's what happens when you ask Greg too much about these things.

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"In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after." -Isaac Asimov, responding to a letter he had received saying that scientific certainty was false, The Relativity of Wrong

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Does "Marcus" (genderbent Toa) run into any of the canon characters? Meeting Orde or Helryx might be interesting.I'd also be interested to see what the gender change actually involves, since the GBs' experiment implies that they completely reprogrammed his mind, leaving only his memories and possibly a few basic personality traits intact. So, there's the whole issue as to whether there are any personality changes involved. If there are, it would be more incentive for him to want to change back, (as opposed to relatively benign changes to voice and body shape) but you'd have to be careful how you handled that...

3DS Friend Code: 0018-0767-4231

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Yeah, handle with care. Could be great, could be... disasterous.So is this a comedy or are you taking a more serious approach to it? My approach to a genderbending story would be the character enjoying it at first due to petty reasons but after an extended period of time begins to not only see how the grass only looked greener, but feel as though they're in the wrong body, like a transexual. (or it could get so bad they actually develop a split personality...) I -think- that would work with Bionicle if the GBs actually didn't reprogram his mind and just gave him a new body, but then again the entire concept of gender as far as Matoran go isn't quite what it is for humans. Might have to take some liberties there.

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Alyska~I'm trying to avoid cannon characters as much as possible; I'm not too well versed in Bionicle cannon (sue me), so a lot of this story is basically what I do know, what I need to know, and making my own stuff for whatever else. Not so much alt. reality as much as it is... slightly different. I might have to make an exception for Orde though; he's simply too crucial in these talks.As for the change, basically I'm striking a middle ground. The point of the change is so that the Great Beings can see if Marcus goes with the change and his/her mental gender changes with it. Basically, to prove or disprove The Mind Is The Plaything Of The Body. If it was purely AI, well, that wouldn't work. But since it's already been said that Toa have a much greater level of programming than Matoran, it's a blend between computer-like programming and actual organic thought. The Great Beings did do some reprogramming of the mind, on the computer aspect, but the point of the experiment and change is to see if the organic process, which has been changed on a physical level, would fall in line with the stereotypical behavior.Basically, the trial is based around the idea that the AI team purposely wrote stereotypical behavior into the computer portion of thought, overruling any organic thought that might of been otherwise. When confronted with this, the AI team says that the organic thought would comply with it anyways, so they aren't at fault. So Marcus is selected, a fiery, impulsive example of a fire Toa, to see if s/he would become passive or crazy.Hopefully that makes sense.Superkid~I most certainly will be handling with care; a great writing opportunity, but at the same time, could result in many problems if done incorrectly.From what I have of the story so far, Marcus definitely doesn't enjoy it for petty reasons, and immediately gets annoyed. Marcus' behavior could be drawn as a comparison to transsexuality, and indeed it's the classic sort of case, but I'm not sure how well it'd apply on a larger scale, seeing as this was against his will and all. The computer portion of his mind being reprogrammed to assist in the change will definitely cause some mental problems, though not so far as split personality, so basically... yeah, it's going be tricky. I should be able to manage, though.

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"In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after." -Isaac Asimov, responding to a letter he had received saying that scientific certainty was false, The Relativity of Wrong

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No; the short story was in the works, but Peach convinced me to try to extend it and make it into a 5 to 10 chapter epic.

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"In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after." -Isaac Asimov, responding to a letter he had received saying that scientific certainty was false, The Relativity of Wrong

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Any hints as to what the mental issues involved would be?As for the transgender thing, it's probably fair to compare him to a trans-man (male mind, female body), rather than a transsexual, since transsexual implies willingness to change from one to the other, while transgender is really just being in the wrong body.

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Well, I'd recommend relations with Marcus' home tribe (Ta-Matoran/Turaga) and also relation with others' (Ko/Ga/Onu/etc) reactions to the change. Maybe even have a cold war start because of it between some of the female and male elements? (Oh sweet Makuta, the females are outnumbered! WHY?!?!) As said, gender differences aren't really anywhere near as complicated with Bionicle as it is with real humans. You're probably bound to get some who think it's wrong, others who might like the idea and others who think it's not that big of a deal and get tired of hearing the protesters rally. Sounds like a real in-world political story, which could be pretty interesting.

Executive Vice President of Tomato Throwing

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@ JC- Generally speaking, transgender is being the opposite gender to your body, transsexual is getting your body changed to match your psychological gender.@Alex Humva- What about another female character in there somewhere- someone who outright contradicts the Great Beings' hypothesis? (Although, for the love of Mata Nui, please don't just make her "feisty". :P) She could be another old friend of Marcus, but he might be more reluctant to reveal his identity to her for various reasons (He might not be as close to her as he was to Brutus, Marcus might have secretly admired her, or he might just think she'd laugh at him and never let him hear the end of it. ) . Although, if she saw a female Toa of fire walking down the street, she'd probably be curious enough to go and say hello, leaving Marcus with the options of either bluffing his way out or running away. (If he chooses the latter option, he might take it as one of the first signs that his mind has been altered.)

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Alyska~Just like to point out, the different between transgender and transsexual is a purely academic one. Transsexual applies before and after the transition. As for mental issues... think of a conflict between two portions of the mind. But don't think of it as split personality; take a computer for instance. You install a program which changes a system coding to A instead of B. Another program already there relied on B to do some stuff; now it has to cope with A. In a regular computer you'd just get an error, but in a Toa's brain, things can more easily adjust. So because of this, it... gets weird. Could even result in insanity.As for the 'breaking the standards' Toa... could work, could work.Tekula~Erm, it's a nice idea, but not quite what I'm going for. Marcus isn't going be running about telling everyone that'll listen. A very select group would be in the know.

Edited by Programmer Alex Humva

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"In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after." -Isaac Asimov, responding to a letter he had received saying that scientific certainty was false, The Relativity of Wrong

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And there it is again, the infamous Tekula. If the a and o keys were right next to each other, I'd probably understand. The fact that they're on opposite sides of the keyboard just leaves me dubious to such a mistake. XP (Hah, that'll be my toa counterpart's nemesis. The evil Tekula; a female villain that can never be tracked and never leaves any sign of her existence aside from a calling card at the scenes of her crimes. XP)Anyway, it sounds like the story will be interesting. ^^ Marcus sounds fun already.

Executive Vice President of Tomato Throwing

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Hey all. I notice that the 'Art' section in the topic has nothing under it, so if anyone's interested, I've got a bit to contribute there. I'm actually just starting a small project, the aim of which is to create a Toa Team primarily comprising of female characters, the gender-element rules completely disregarded. The first character is done, and I'm working on the next.

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I'll add it in a second. My computer logs out whenever I view direct links, but I'll add it ASAP. Thanks for the contribution! :)

On the day the wall came down / They threw the locks onto the ground

And with glasses high / We raised a cry / For freedom had arrived

 

On the day the wall came down / The ship of fools had finally run aground

Promises lit up the night / Like paper doves in flight

 

I dreamed you had left my side / No warmth, not even pride remained

And even though you needed me / It was clear that I could not do a thing for you

 

Now life devalues day by day / As friends and neighbors turn away

And there's a change that even with regret / Cannot be undone

 

Now frontiers shift like desert sands / While nations wash their bloodied hands

Of loyalty, of history / In shades of grey

 

I woke to the sound of drums / The music played, the morning sun streamed in

I turned and I looked at you / And all but the bitter residues slipped away

 

slipped away...

 

 

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And there it is again, the infamous Tekula. If the a and o keys were right next to each other, I'd probably understand. The fact that they're on opposite sides of the keyboard just leaves me dubious to such a mistake. XP (Hah, that'll be my toa counterpart's nemesis. The evil Tekula; a female villain that can never be tracked and never leaves any sign of her existence aside from a calling card at the scenes of her crimes. XP)Anyway, it sounds like the story will be interesting. ^^ Marcus sounds fun already.

She's evil? Huh, I just thought you were getting Rule 63'd as a result of spending too much time in the Girl's Corner...Speaking of gender bender stories, I've been tossing around the idea of writing something about a literal gender bender. As in, instead of characters getting their biological sexes swapped, they get their gender identities changed by some sort of reality-warping device (So, the female character, Brooke, is now convinced that she's meant to be Brock, and her friend Chris is insisting that his name is Christine) At first, wacky hijinks ensue and all that, but then their friends realise that these people are not just Chris and Brooke having been brainwashed, but two completely new people- the original Brooke and Chris are gone (And a few of Brock's antics go from funny to creepy when you realise that he's a complete stranger in Brooke's body, not just Brooke acting loopy). So, now they're faced with the dilemma of whether to use the device again, which may or may not get them back, knowing that doing so would possibly destroy "Brock" and "Christine" in the process.Not going to spoil the ending, but what do you people think of the premise?

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In my defense, I read the o as an a xDAnywhos, the story does seem pretty interesting Alyska; worth a shot at writing. I know I'd read it.

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"In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after." -Isaac Asimov, responding to a letter he had received saying that scientific certainty was false, The Relativity of Wrong

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I'm sorry! Please don't cry...I was thinking about the content of the proposed story, and whether it would be okay to post on BZP, when I got to thinking about characters in their underwear... Hear me out.See, a male character being caught in his underwear (or completely naked, for that matter), for whatever reason, is generally treated as relatively harmless and funny. But if it's a female character, even if they're in the exact same situation, there's all those inherent sexual connotations of the female body, and I'm guessing that such a thing would be considered inappropriate for kids (when you think about it, in family shows, male characters winding up naked is is not uncommon, while the same thing happening to female characters is extremely rare). I guess it's all that male gaze stuff again- the viewer is assumed to be male; most men don't see other men in a sexual manner; men are expected to always see women in a sexual context; yada yada yada. Also, if some of the female audience IS seeing the undressed male character as a sex object, this is considered an anomaly and either a) not common enough to be worth worrying about, or http://www.bzpower.com/board/public/style_emoticons/default/cool.png a ridiculous thing to do that should be frowned upon. I think this can be used to explain why the later Twilight films were so unsettling to the male audience- seeing naked male torsos objectified, and being expected as an audience member to see them in a sexual light, is something that was relatively uncommon in mainstream film until then. Now, I'm not going to comment on whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, but the effect it's had is certainly... interesting, to say the least.

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Wasn't there a stir about a year ago about Orde and it's gender?

We did but the discussion carried over to the Yesterday Quest topic and Greg silenced all discussion. It's best to not talk about Orde (poor Zaria he had nothing controversial happen to him).Question for everyone, how do you feel when a movie or any other media passes the Betchell test? @Alex Humva How will it be shown that a gender change has occurred?

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Didn't really think about the specifics; despite being the source of problems, it's not a major plot point. The GBs kidnap Marcus, reassign him via GB magic, and dump him back. So A Wizard Did It.

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"In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after." -Isaac Asimov, responding to a letter he had received saying that scientific certainty was false, The Relativity of Wrong

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