I've read the comics and watched the series and I've always thought that Kirkman was quite multifaceted in his writing of the female characters (as also in The Walking Dead) and apart from certain scenes that were a little too sexualised, I've always appreciated him and I'm also happy that a lot of the sexualisation has been removed with the TV series (which could easily surpass the comic for me)
My issues with Invincible aren't of the menwritingwomen variety, but it has its moments.
It was like, his third book and second big ongoing monthly. It was also the 00s, and Kirkman was good enough to become a reliable name.
I do remember the letters page for TWD being a site for Discourse around Kirkman's writing of sexual assault and, to his credit, for a sustained number of months, he published and engaged with the critique and appears to have been willing to take that criticism on board.
And. Op. I cannot tell you how frickin low the bar was in the 00s and 10s. Kirkman handled the Michonne/Governor/Negan discourse so much better than a lot of his peers would have, and i got to say, it was refreshing.
i think all the women in the comic are cardboard and a lot of the problems are fixed with the show. i wish more people fixed the problems with their older works when they get adapted like invincible did
I agree that several problems are solved, but I think that the comic also has its pros
As far as the show goes, it started out okay with some interesting female characters taking focus, then started to downgrade with new seasons imho.
Eve in particular was a stand out character in season 1 and her backstory special kind of made me wish she were the main character instead of Mark. However, as seasons went on, the interesting aspects of her character were sidelined and she mostly just become a love interest for Mark. I heard some people at the time say most of their scenes as a couple were her acting like a therapist to him and... Yeah. She did have standout moments later on, like going godmode in the season 3 finale, but right before that she was put in a coma (???) seemingly just so Mark could angst over her injuries. Pisses me off.
The writing for Dupli-Kate and Shrinking Rae is pitiful. All of Dupli-Kate's scenes seem to revolve around the men in her life and Shrinking Rae only seemed to get a larger role when she started dating Rex. There's almost nothing going on with either of them.
Other than that, Monster Girl is interesting, though we see very little of her. I think Debbie is a great character and I still have hope that she'll have interesting storylines explored in the future. Not much to say about Amber since she's basically gone, though I'll admit I was always confused about the way she was written.
God I hope they don't have her get back together with Omni-Man. I don't mind redemption arcs and forgiveness, but Omni-Man is still a mass murderer that almost beat her child to death. Some things you don't get to come back from. Also, I like Paul.
Yes, that's also what I'm worried about. He committed a massacre, wrote her off as a pet, rebounded with a bug alien- she can't take him back, it would just be horribly depressing no matter how the show tries to paint it.
I think the pet comment and the rebound are at least conceivably forgivable, with the right writing. The rest, not so much. I feel like I see that a lot in fiction, that severe crimes like that are not given the proper weight.
Yeah I can easily see the pet comment as being explained as in he loves her but knows she’ll die well before him. I can honestly see the inter-dimensional genocide being written off as her never hearing about it. The only real thing that can’t be written off is what he did to mark and the guardians.
I saw the pet comment as something he believed, but didn't actually feel. It's a conflict between his Viltrumite upbringing and how his time on Earth has changed him.
I would also include the people he killed while he was doing that to Mark.
Bad news about the comics
Debbie is a well written character and Sandra Oh basically outshines the entire cast in the animated series. She’s so good in that role. And it seems multifaceted and complex. Yes she’s a mom, but like, so are many women. I wouldn’t consider it pigeonholing necessarily.
I also agree with many of the other points. Duplikate is really poorly written and has low key fuck toy vibes which doesn’t do her justice.
Amber is more one dimensional than she could be.
I hated the whole Dupli Kat-Immortal relationship. It just felt super out of nowhere and awkward the whole time.
But in the same fight in which Mark also ended up one centimeter from death and the greatest damage was done by Eve herself.
Well, she's written for a real bitch and I like it, I mean... I like it when a person can be a hero who genuinely wants to help others, but still be a dickhead.
Well, Rae was also relevant in the comics (plus she was a man) and she had her good moments and the end of the relationship with Rex was quite touching for me... I also liked how her almost death while in the body of that goliath snake affected her so much that she wanted to give up the superhero life forever.
Ohhhh she's going to have an interesting arc with Robot and she's going to be crazy.
She's still the best female character, yeah.
I agree, season 1 and 2 have two completely different Ambers... And if we hadn't had that weird moment in the first season where she got pissed at Mark for running away, but still knew he was Invincible, it would definitely have been better
Debbie in the show is pretty great. Got some very strong writing. The rest are kinda meh. Lots of generic troupe stuff, nothing too egregious.
Don't know about the comic, haven't read it.
Debbie in the show is such an amazing character. Her trying to get past Omni-Man's betrayal, breaking down crying after the bar, reaching out to the costume maker. She has some really profound scenes and is such a badass character.
I don’t find the women in the show particularly captivating. I’m not sure the show would pass the Bechdel test. It seems most of the female characters are only highlighted when the conflict stems from their love interest, whereas male characters have their own separate plot going on.
Yeah, I've talked to others in real life about Invincible and we're pretty sure it doesn't pass the Bechdel test. I know people are quick to point out "the Bechdel test isn't that serious! It doesn't apply to everything!" I know, but it's still a useful tool, especially for an action series that centers around male characters.
It's very jarring when you realize basically none of the female characters talk to each other about anything other than the male characters. I think the longest conversation Amber and Eve had was about dating Mark- and come to think of it, I can't remember an exchange between female characters that lasted longer than that one, correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe Debbie and Olga (Red Rush's widow) in the beginning? But even then, they were talking about their husbands.
Sorry for the possibly stupid question, what is Bechedel test? I'm practically a baby to this sub and maybe it's something that gets brought up often
Lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel came up with a way of rating female representation in film that boils down to: Are there at least two named female characters? If so, do those female characters speak to each other? If they speak to each other, do they talk about anything other than a man?
It doesn't apply to everything and it isn't the be all end all of feminism in media. But when I first learned about, it was pretty eye opening realizing how many mainstream stories feature women whose only meaningful interactions are related to being love interests. It doesn't mean a piece of media is inherently bad, just that male writers have a tendency to write women from their own limited perspective rather than as a fully realized person.
There's a similar test for black characters too, which I also think about a lot.
Oh I haven’t heard about the one for black people, I’m going to look into
Ah ok, got it, thanks for the reply
To be clear: Bechdel's point wasn't that any given work failing this test is necessarily bad, or even necessarily bad at writing women. (Although in practice many are.) It's that it's a pretty strong indictment of our ability to represent women in storytelling as a whole that such a small percentage of movies passed it. The Bechdel test is an absolute bare minimum standard, far short of what we should be doing, and yet we generally don't even clear that low bar.
Even Monster girl suffers from this. Her power comes from a curse placed on her because she slept with a boy, and the boys mother cursing her for it.
Not the best start, but at least she has a novel problem. Except then Robotman gets involved and completely dominates her story from that point on, Once Robots story ends, Monster girl just fucks off from the plot.
I haven't seen the show but read alot of the comic. I actually stopped reading it because of Atom Eve. She was so flat and obviously just written as a love interest that it really irritated me.
Side characters like Monster Girl and Duplikate I thought were cool but barely got any focus narratively.
Haven't read comics. But I love Amber in the show.
Not sure if this is sarcasm lol. It’s still crazy how show Amber is way better than comic Amber when the former is still one of the worst parts of the 1st season (and not because of some dumb incel logic, I genuinely think the way the narrative framing it as if she has some form of moral leverage is confusing)
They over-corrected in S2 where I felt like she’s not given moments to herself and stuff outside of her relationship with Mark, then again, knowing how the fanbase feels about the character, I can understand the decision to not flesh out the character more
Best female character/protagonist Kirkman’s ever written is probably Clementine from the games (check them out please if you haven’t), and even then that wasn’t his direct creation, just a character he consulted in the creation of lol
I haven’t read Invincible, but some of the panels and stuff I’ve seen of Amber and Eve…..yeah I’m glad they’re rectifying their tone-deafness through the show.
As for TWD, I have issues with how Michonne is treated like (engaging in a sexual relationship with literally every black guy she meets). It feels racially insensitive but that might just be me. I like her better in the TV show but that’s probably because she adopted some of comic Andrea’s arcs
My issue is less with how it depicts women and more that its another in a long line of western animation that wants to claim it did Asian representation but you can tell zero effort went into it and they didn't like, actually consult anyone to make it speak to the Asian experience. Its not offensive per se, but the fact that it's a long standing trend for western animation (and games) to do this comes off very apathetic. And likely is connected to the same trend that Asians complain about in that a lot of western progressives when pushed will admit they don't really take racism against Asians seriously.
Are you talking about Debbie and Mark? I don't think Debbie is meant to be a recent immigrant, I don't really see what they should do differently? People with distant foreign ancestors often have no connection whatsoever to that culture anymore.
Yeah, as far as I remember, there are 3 Asian characters. Debby, Mark, and Duplicate-Kate. And none of them were supposed to be “Asian representation” so much as people who happened to be of Asian descent
She doesn't have distant foreign ancestors, she's a second generation immigrant who was born in the early eighties. She was already into legal adulthood before it even became normal for interracial friend groups to be common rather than the exception in the US. So it raises the question, what is her backstory supposed to be? Was she raised exclusively around white people? And if so, what is the purpose of that backstory? Because it goes back to my original point, that the purpose is usually that a white author wants to be seen as doing representation but not to do any actual work. So they go the opposite extreme from a stereotypical representation and write someone who comes off like they are actually completely divorced from any past leading to their present.
https://preview.redd.it/lti1puplh36g1.jpeg?width=1957&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7463e31447a49ec0a39365725f3ec83bb1feb5ad
Now I'll give an obvious example. The infamous scene where Mark is casually wearing shoes in bed. Now, I shouldn't have to point out just how implausible it is that someone who was recently living at home in the home of an asian woman who was born in the early eighties would wear shoes in bed so casually that they don't even seem aware they are doing it. Now sure it's not physically impossible, but does this scene give the impression that it's meant to be a deep commentary on being divorced from his family's culture despite this literally never coming up anywhere? Or does it give the impression that the people making the scene weren't actually thinking at any point about how his cultural backdrop might influence his actions?
It's not like there's any one thing that you have to do to make representation believable. Like I said, if you look at this show in a vacuum you might shrug and say whatever, maybe some implausible backstory justifies it. But its not in a vacuum. It's a fairly common thing.
Where is the backstory that she's a second generation immigrant from? I don't remember that at all and can't seem to find anything about it either?
Huh. I've seen people talk about it, but I guess it's not explicitly said anywhere. That aside, based on the US Korean population by year its not very plausible for her to be more than second generation. And it wouldn't make that much of a difference because non-white immigrant communities weren't exactly allowed to culturally integrate in the 1960s.
Where are you getting all of this backstory? Why does she have to act asian? It feels like you're just making all of this up.
Because of her current age relative to the year it takes place.
What an odd question. If from now on all black characters in western animation were written the exact same as white ones with no indication that there are different subcultures that exist that they might be more or less likely to be involved with people would find it odd and immediately noticeable. Do you not think people care whether their depictions are done with authenticity?
To go back to the original point, its not like any one example is inherently super bad. Its that it reflects an ongoing trend.
Oh so you did just make it up. Cool.
Huh, I always just assumed she was white. Because of things like wearing shoes in the house.
A well-written, distinctly Asian-American character would be better, but given that in the 00s the more common options were 1) No Asian characters, or 2) She wears a kimono all the time, secretly knows how to use a katana, and every other stereotype, I'll take 3) A white person palette swapped into an Asian-American. It's not great but it could easily be worse.
Oh! And I have an AA friend, when I was invited to her wedding I was with another friend and said "Oh shit, her parents are Asian? I always assumed she was adopted by white people!" And he said "Why would you even... no, that actually makes sense. Huh. But she wasn't." So IRL I know at least one person like Deborah.
In the comics she wasn't Asian. That was an addition for the show, which came out much more recently. But they didn't actually change anything when doing this. They just said it and called it a day.
Yeah, but white writers are convinced this is every Asian under 60. Its not impossible, but people can tell it's not done for authenticity.
Life is strange true colors did it with an offhand blowoff excuse that they were adopted despite them being adopted at an age and in a time where they still remembered their parents because they weren't weren't young.
Bojack horseman... no one has any clue what that was doing. It gave her a backstory so implausible that it came off like a joke, but then they admitted that they didn't actually realize how nonsensical a fifth generation full blood vietnamese family that acts like poor white people would be. It wasn't until several seasons in they actually hired someone for pointers.
At least when Futurama did it it was an intentional joke. Though that is old enough its a mix of questionable stereotypes and deliberate subversions.
This is just a lie, she's Asian in the comics.
No she isnt. They didn't have a canon ethnicity in the comics. Some readers assumed she was Asian, which influenced decisions for the show.
I don’t like him. Just in general , he’s very much torture porn. He likes to make his audience feel horrible just because.
I think that's more to be attributed to Garth Ennis, not Kirkman for sure.
Idk how certain characters are killed in invincible, the walking dead are definitely very trauma porn. I’m keeping it spoiler free for people not saying which characters
It's shit.