“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post. (via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
#Shit I say this stuff all the time#Default is not male#Women are not a different species from men#It’s a toaster it’s make believe it can be whatever you fucking want it to be#Also voice actors get cast in the ‘wrong’ gender roles all the time#Do you know how many little boy characters are played by women#Do you know how many little boy characters are played by *Tara Strong*???#I did not watch an anime in which an adult man is played by a woman VA for 90 fucking episodes in the 90s#To have to suffer the stringent gender opinions of men who feel too threatened by the idea that a woman could be their equal
