âThe 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 heâs the most boring average person in the world. Itâs impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if sheâs female sheâs already SOMEthing, because sheâs not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but itâs weirdly prevalent in childrenâs entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, whoâs 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 charactersâ is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?â
â 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)
