To see Part 2 of excerpts/my discussion of this article by Jaclyn Friedman, click here.

“The tragedy of Brave, however, is that while it’s clear that our new Snow White is an actioned-up old-school princess, Merida is a princessed-out action hero.  Brave producer Katherine Sarafian made no bones about this in a recent interview on NPR, saying:

“We tried making her the blacksmith’s daughter and the milkmaid in various things … There’s no stakes in the story for us that way. We wanted to show real stakes in the story where, you know, the peace of the kingdom and the traditions are all at stake.”

Let’s take that in for a minute: the studio whose most iconic heroes include a toy cowboy, a rat, a fish, a boy scout, and a lonely trash compactor (all male-identified, of course), couldn’t figure out how to tell a story about a human girl without making her a princess. That’s the problem in a nutshell: if the sparkling minds at Pixar can’t imagine their way out of the princess paradigm, how can we expect girls to?

The past decade may have seen a welcome increase in on-screen female action heroes, but we’re still far from gender parity in the genre, and even when they’re not princesses, they’re nearly all trained assassins or Chosen Ones. Joseph Campbell wrote indelibly about the power of The Hero with a Thousand Faces – an ur-hero who’s living a mundane life when he’s faced with a challenge through which he can discover his greatness. It’s easy to see why this matters: everyman hero stories teach every boy that he can make himself great through his own actions, regardless of how dull or difficult the lot in life he’s been handed.

Princess stories – even Action Princess stories – inherently fail the Campbell test. That’s why, until we’ve got as many Mulans and (un-whitewashed) Katniss Everdeens as we do Frodos, Batmans, Kung Fu Pandas, Rangos, Shreks, Woodys – I could go on here … to infinity and beyond – even the most liberated of princesses will always be failing girls.”

I’ve covered the above NPR quote earlier and it still makes me sad to re-read it.I think a lot of the points made here are essentially right- the princess genre will always be a problem so long as it continues to define the majority of female lead characters/how we interpret the dreams and desires and futures of girl children/what identities society sees as legitimate. It is too bad that Pixar, of all companies, still has trouble envisioning girl leads as anything other than a princess.   The idea that other stories have “no stake” in them says so much about the way we as a culture interpret narratives of the female experience; the experiences of an ordinary girl cannot be universal in the way a boys’ experiences can be… that the life of an ordinary girl cannot be made appealing unless she is princess-ified… etc.

This is also why I continue to have issues with the often used theme of making a movie “empowering” for women by continuing to “challenge” concepts that have been pretty duh in our culture for centuries- yes, you shouldn’t be forced into marriage or relationships if you don’t want them, yes, no one should be able to force you to wear restrictive garments in order to look more appealing.  

Constantly identifying these problems as the “major ones against women” undermines current struggles by making it appear that a “feminist friendly” character is “anti-forced marriage”, which leads people to wrongly assume that feminism is about outdated concepts and problems society has already moved past for the most part.  It also reinforces what the director stated here: “We wanted to show real stakes in the story where, you know, the peace of the kingdom and the traditions are all at stake.”   Nothing is seen as “being at stake” if the main woman in a story is not constantly battling traditions that do not have a whole lot of current relevance.     She is not seen as interesting if she is not engaging in this- her own stories removed from these cultural pressures are not seen as interesting enough.

“I think the main problem here that most of the girls who watch princess movies are middle class or poor. To say the stakes aren’t high in a story without a princess is very insulting to the human dignity of the real girls in the audience.”

Yes, definitely.   And if you go to the full article, it references how the princesses inherently live a life most girls can’t: you’re born into it or you marry into it, either way it’s the 1% type thing.

crown-of-weeds:

likeacrime asked: If you could tell all TV writers (or movie writers or book writers) five things about writing autistic characters, so as to to make them explicitly autistic, not offensive, and actually empowering for autistic viewers, what would those things be?

This is a really good question that I hope my other A/autistic (are we all capital-A at this point?) who are much smarter than me will answer too, because I’m sure our answers will differ. 

So, my five.

1: Say their diagnosis.

Don’t dance around it. Say it. Maybe not in the first 30 seconds, but give the audience the correct vocabulary. Don’t make a huge deal out of it, don’t make it sad, don’t make it change anything. Just have the character (and yeah, Outing is wrong, no matter what it’s about, so, let your characters come out as Autistic on their own unless you’re going to do a plot about Outing,) disclose in a relevant context, and move on. Don’t give your audience a chance to squirm out of it if they feel like being assholes. 

2: Autism is not a character trait.

You know that post that’s been going around on tumblr, about how being female is treated like a character trait, and that’s fucked up? And it’s true for just about any minority group, because our culture is stupid. You have characters who are smart and funny and strong, or charming and a little douchey and secretly depressed, or A+ bullshitters with hearts of gold….and then you have a female character, a black character, a gay character. And now, apparently, an autistic character. You know they’re autistic because they rock, and flap, and they have a Special Interest that they talk about all the time, and they are so adorably terrible at people, and they cover their ears for loud noises and do bizarre things and they’ll even ask to count your toothpicks. They do everything you’ll find in the DSM, and they don’t do anything else. 

This is lazy writing!

Autism is a really basic, fundamental part of who someone is, and it colors everything else. But! So is their gender, their age, their height, where they’re from, what kind of education they’ve had, where they work, who they live with, who their friends are, etc. No person is just one thing. Please don’t forget that you’re writing about a person.

3: Autism is not a social disability.

If you don’t know that, you probably shouldn’t be writing autistic characters. You should probably be doing research and learning about sensory differences and motor issues and executive function and language processing and joint attention and the rates for anxiety and abuse and how every interaction takes two people.

Everyone knows that autism is a failure to connect, that autistic people are robots, that we don’t have feelings or theories of mind or any desire for companionship. This is all flat-out wrong, but it’s a familiar story. Tell a different one. Tell me a story about an autistic person who isn’t a robot, a burden, an innocent, or an emotional vampire. 

Tell me a story where the autistic character has friends. Tell me a story where they fight, where they negotiate, where things are imperfect and messy and human. Tell me a story where they have value. Tell me a story where the autistic character has different relationships to and with different characters. Tell me a story with joy and jealousy and empathy and intimacy and affection. Tell me a story where the neurotypical friend hands the autistic character headphones when its needed—and also one where the autistic character remembers a birthday and throws a party. Tell me a story where the friendship maybe looks a little different, and that’s okay—but tell me a story where the friendship is real and mutual and complicated.

Oh, and if you really want to blow me away?

Tell me a story where the autistic character fucks.

4: Autism is not a metaphor.

Every. Possible. Metaphorical. Use. Of. Autism. Has. Been. Explored. Already.

Write something else.

5: Let us do things.

I mean, it’s what this whole screed boils down to. Give us stories, give us choices and personal power and relationships, let us affect and be affected by others, and let us do things. Have what we do be colored, quietly and subtly, by autism when it’s appropriate—have us covering our ears in a crowd, or hanging a visual schedule on our bedroom wall, or fiddling with a stim toy while we wait, yes, please. But give us things to do.

also, don’t focus on the parents. I’m not autistic but I HATE whenever any program focuses on the parents whenever a child has a disability. I’ve seen this a lot with autism, “oh I can’t communicate with my kid why can’t they be NORMAL.” As a disabled young person I know my disability can put strain on parents. I know it’s difficult but if that’s all you get from “this character is autistic” that’s REALLY not cool.