GenderfreeEscapader

Pokemon Colosseum Protagonist:

and then they did the Greek Thing and painted naked men fighting the monster 

or, well, a deeply flawed representation of what they imagined the fossil had looked like while alive, an early form of paleoart. 

but sometimes they also just. drew the skull and slapped a black blob monster onto it? anyway i love the greeks.

About a month ago I met with a (young straight white male) professor about a script I was working on. The protagonist is an LGBT female struggling with a depression severe enough to have ended her last relationship. She is medicated for her depression and the medication itself plays a role in the script. This isn’t the plot of the film, just an aspect of the protagonist’s character.

The entire duration of the meeting with this professor was marked by his extreme disinterest in my script. Which, fine- you can’t please everyone, and honestly there were some major problems with the script that I’ll have to tackle during the rewrite. But the real highlight of the meeting was when, after being asked what he felt the biggest issue with my protagonist was, my professor responded: “Well nobody’s that sad. It’s just unrealistic.”

Three other scripts in my class feature protagonists struggling severely with depression. Two of those three are written by men. When I checked in with them afterwards, I was told by the other female writer that she’d received a similar comment from our professor. Both male writers, however, had been praised for their “sensitive and thoroughly human characters.”

Of the faculty in my program, only two professors (of close to 20) are female. The majority of the program is taught, run and managed by white, straight, cis males.

My point is this;; it’s not just Hollywood. As far down the career step totem pole in Screenwriting as formal education, men genuinely don’t believe that women are allowed to be emotive, expressive beings. If you say too little, you’re a bitch- if you say too much, you’re melodramatic and pathetic to boot.

In his notes, the source said, Chau wrote that some members of the tribe were good to him while others were very aggressive.

“I have been so nice to them, why are they so angry and so aggressive?” the source quoted Chau as saying.

Critics: wHAT DO YOU MEAN he’s a hungry, stressed, bisexual, monster-fucking, unemployed, auditory-overstimulated, disillusioned, anti-capitalist in a shitty apartment with a drinking problem!!!

Elsa had been taught to hide who she was because her parents feared the outcome should the citizens find out she was a witch. She never learned control beyond snow and ice sculptures. So when it came down to it, she couldnt forsee nor prevent what happened. Not until the end of the movie.

Why is this a good visual metaphor? Too often, autistics are the ones who have to adapt to neurotypical behavior, instead of the other way around. This leads to a lack of appropriate coping skills. Often, we will reach a peak tolerance and just burn out. This leads to more meltdowns, loss of abilities, and other stuff. Why? We were never taught to cope with and work around our disability. We instead had to hide who we are out of fear. That is never a good idea. When we are taught to hide instead of cope, we cannot control what happens when the pressure becomes too much. We never learned how.

During this conversation, she asks me if I’m in school, and I say yes. I tell her about how exams went, as they were near that period, and told her I had a Biology exam that was over genetics. And she looks me straight in the eyes, with seriousness of a heart attack being read in every wrinkle of her white soccer mom face, and says: “Oh, I’m a Christian, I don’t believe in genetics.”

Flabbergasted. My eyes do that spinny rainbow thing that Apple computers do when theyre buffering. A second goes by. I’ve gone through all stages of grief at this point, but haven’t reached acceptance. I have to say something, I have to say SOMETHING. If I just stare at her through this, she’ll know I think she’s fucking dumb and she might get angry, and I don’t need that. Two seconds have gone by. I have stopped scanning groceries at this point, and am just being violently shot back and forth between two sections of the galaxy. I can feel my body taking leave of my soul. Three seconds. I have to say something.