Asklemmy

I have no idea, but I think this video is on to something.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CGL7_CO3YDg

I don't really talk to anybody

Because they are assholes.

Because they are so privileged they REALLY believe that they should see themselves in all stories.

Because they were taught from a young age that empathy is not manly.

Because, at the end of the day they were failed by their parents and society as a whole.

I believe the answer can be broken into three parts:

1. valid criticism, when a movie is genuinely bad and has a female lead, the valid criticisms of the film are overdhadowed by slop online articles criticizing fans for not supporting women and hating a female lead. Captain Marvel is a good example of this. The movie has genuine issues, and is not considered a good Marvel movie, but the overall online discussion focused around Marvel fans not supporting a female lead superhero movie, when Wonder Woman found success and Captain America: The Winter Soldier is arguably colead by Scarlett Johanson.

2. Pre box office reactions. Any movie which can be summed up as “X but with women” lands here. Same with any movie which intentionally admonishes the male audience and advertises itself as for women and only, then get mad men didn’t see the movie. Charlie’s Angels, Ghostbusters, and Captain Marvel fall into this category.

3. Genuine oddities and sexism. I believe this applies to the gaming industry more than the film indistry, but it can blead over. I believe the initial outrage over _The Marvels _ was this, but the movie ended up having major issues and went to category 1.

Inherent sexism in society to control people into doing what the dominant majority of society wants (which got there by force and enslaving and manipulation of the "lesser" people)

I've never heard anyone complain about it unless it was a remake or different from the original story.

Being a woman is "marked" while being a man is just the default, so anything that strays from the "default" sticks out and it seems reasonable that it requires justification. This goes in reverse in some cases, like the need to refer to someone as a "male nurse" - why do we feel we need to say this? Because the default nurse is assumed to be female.

Insecurity.

I complain about popularity of fantasy romance vis a vis non-fantasy romance, and that now most published (or advertised) fantasy books are fantasy romance.

That genre is typically written for women, with female lead and is heavy in certain tropes.

That genre isn't for me.

Am I a person that you're ranting about OP? If not, could you point me to an article or opinion piece that you're talking about, so I can read it and come back here?

Your comic book examples with one woman on a team of mostly men are probably due to the audience for conic books having been almost exclusively boys. I suspect the one woman was indicative of the market share going to girls

I wonder if umbrella academy's gender balance was due to the power archetypes being perceived as gendered

Most of those superhero teams were originally created by comic book companies staffed almost entirely by men. The heroes created are therefore how they visualize heroes being, which mostly takes inspiration from their own experiences, and therefore creates mostly men.

Some people see themselves as the default, and any change is abnormal or pandering. Same thing happens in video games. Anything that brings attention to the idea that they aren't the default audience is seen as a an offense. They assume these stories are an attack, an expensive way for people to say their way of doing things is wrong and therefore they are wrong, so they get defensive. In reality, it just someone else telling a story for another audience.

To them, the argument is, "why add more poc/genders if we're all the same? Are you saying something is wrong with people like me so they have to be gotten rid of? How come it's always me that's getting removed? Why am I under attack!" They see the addition as the erasure of some, like, Schrodinger's self-insert that would have been there if they didn't have to force a" woke" choice.

I don't know. I live a good female lead. Ripley, Furiosa, Marge Gunderson. There's so many, that's just the first three that come to mind. Half the time when I'm playing Fallout, it's female characters.

There are definitely bad female leads in things, too. Just like there are bad male leads. Like, Borderlands 3, basically unplayable. I never finished it. And I really want to be clear, the characters aren't bad because they are women, they are bad due to poor writing. That game had such potential, but it felt like the script was written entirely by highschoolers.

One of the ways i select a movie or series is by watching the poster. That tells me enough about whether it will be about male heroes and (maybe) female sidekicks or mothers in the kitchen. Particularly american ones have a lot of those movies. So, these i will not even try to watch anymore.

I’ve never met anyone who acted like this, nor even seen someone on the internet complaining about it, besides reviews in movie sections. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, it’s just I believe that you’re probably seeing a vanishingly small portion of society do this.

I'll preface with I'll agree that for the most part, it's men being whiny about "woke" and other nonsense. They're assholes. I really don't have anything to add to that front.

So I'll add a perspective of the small other crowd in situations friends of mine and I have found ourselves in, that having criticisms of women led stories gets us lumped in with the above group when the same criticism of a male led roles/stories are fine and dandy. And we're not exactly a group that hates women led stories despite our love of scifi action. Sarah Conner, Ripley, Jesse Faden if anyone has played the game Control.

Some of it I get as a female led cast movie/show will get hate before the first previews even launch so legitimate discussions can happen. However, I can go on absolute rants about how terrible movies can be: Tom Cruise remaking The Mummy was, attempting to do Hellboy without Ron Perlman and Guillermo Del Toro, whatever the Conan the Barbarian attempt Jason Mamoa had, and no one bats an eye. (Lets be honest, those were all terrible movies) However I've been called a misogynist when I talk about in the list with those above ones how absolutely terrible the all women cast remake of Ghostbusters was. Again, I knew there was a lot of undue hate, but if I ever discuss it, I've had to outright asterisk it every time that none of my complaints were to the actresses themselves but the movie from worldbuilding to some of the concept of it being made itself (As in: It's Ghostbusters, an IP that's been around for decades, did we need to dedicate screentime to remaking it from scratch? A complaint I'll have at every reboot of a popular IP.)

And there's legitimacy to the why. As you point out, there's very few women led movies/stories which (I assume) means that with some representation there's the want to nicer to it, especially as there are people who are outright assholes about it. Vs Another White Guy Does Things is easy to deride a movie because... speaking as a white guy, I'm going to be there mocking that movie too. But that's why I put the "(I assume)" earlier, because it's not like I'm lacking in some form of representation, so it's easy to mock it.

I will wrap up this though with again, it's a small extra outside perspective for a different viewpoint. If people just complain "There are too many women in x", no, they've stopped having legitimate complaints and are just being jackasses.