June 4, 2012 - Agg! I owe certain redesigns to the site, but I can't focus on that now.
Today marks the first time in the comic I have two male characters speaking to each other, though it's debateable if this passes the reverse Bechdel test as they still spend most of the conversation talking about female characters.
For those of you who may not know, the Bechdel test is designed to show the lack of gender equality in entertainment. Basically if a project features two significant female characters who talk to each other about something other than a male character it passes, if it doesn't it doesn't. The test is no indication of quality of a work (plenty good works fail, and several awful works don't) but it does highlight a lack of representation of female voices. For example can you name a film without any significant female characters? You can probably name several like most war films, some of which don't have any female characters at all. How about a narrative with no male characters? The ONLY one I can think of is the video game Portal and they shot themselves in the foot by introducing two male characters in the underwhelming sequel (sigh). But as I said, passing and failing doesn't really denote film quality as a film like Saving Private Ryan which I think can be pretty universally be considered good while my favorite awful movie of all time, Tommy Wiseau's The Room (which everyone can totally agree is hillariously awful) totally passes by virtue of the touching scene when Claudette tells Lisa she "definitely has breast cancer" (though to be fair most other conversations revolve around Johnny, and I may be stretching to count the dramatic breast cancer reveal).
-D
Today marks the first time in the comic I have two male characters speaking to each other, though it's debateable if this passes the reverse Bechdel test as they still spend most of the conversation talking about female characters.
For those of you who may not know, the Bechdel test is designed to show the lack of gender equality in entertainment. Basically if a project features two significant female characters who talk to each other about something other than a male character it passes, if it doesn't it doesn't. The test is no indication of quality of a work (plenty good works fail, and several awful works don't) but it does highlight a lack of representation of female voices. For example can you name a film without any significant female characters? You can probably name several like most war films, some of which don't have any female characters at all. How about a narrative with no male characters? The ONLY one I can think of is the video game Portal and they shot themselves in the foot by introducing two male characters in the underwhelming sequel (sigh). But as I said, passing and failing doesn't really denote film quality as a film like Saving Private Ryan which I think can be pretty universally be considered good while my favorite awful movie of all time, Tommy Wiseau's The Room (which everyone can totally agree is hillariously awful) totally passes by virtue of the touching scene when Claudette tells Lisa she "definitely has breast cancer" (though to be fair most other conversations revolve around Johnny, and I may be stretching to count the dramatic breast cancer reveal).
-D
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