Chris Fritz's Blog - Posts Tagged "marvel"
The ultimate guide to writing strong female characters
Like most of you guys out there I’m a big fan of the Marvel cinematic universe. They’ve given us so many different female characters with exciting backstories and personalities. Like Black Widow who was captured at a young age and forced to be a badass fighter, or Captain Marvel who was captured at a young age and forced to be a badass fighter, or Gamora who was captured at a young age and forced to be a badass fighter, or Scarlet Witch who was captured at a young age and forced to be a badass fighter. Wait a minute. Oh my god they just made the same character four different times! So with repetition like this I asked myself a truly deep question. How can someone create a strong female character and actually have it be a strong female character? More specifically can a strong female character be strong not in spite of being female but because she’s female? In my contemplation on this subject three characters came to mind. They are all from the same TV show and that show is Avatar: the Last Airbender.
As fans of the show know it is filled with really good female characters but right now I just want to focus on three. They are Toph, Katara, and Azula. Three character that got a lot of screen time and were flushed out the most. Let’s start out with talking about Toph. Toph is a twelve year old blind girl and her character is truly a unique departure in the evolution of female characters and comes at writing female characters from a completely new angle. For Tophs character the writers took masculine traits and mapped them on to her. This makes Toph relate to the boys more because she doesn’t play into feminine stereotypes. She rejects things like putting on makeup, doing her hair, and bathing regularly in favor of getting dirty, laughing at bodily functions, using rude language. She rejects the feminine activities and replaces them with masculine actives. Also rejecting traditionally feminine traits in favor of traditionally masculine ones. This is the way I generally see most of the stereotypical strong female characters and it can be an easy path to go down from a writing stand point. At a certain point I do think the strong female character with masculine traits becomes a parody of itself. I can probably think of dozens of strong female characters that fall into this category so if you want an easy way of writing strong female characters this is probably the way to go.
But some people demand more from their strong female characters so let’s move on and talk about Katara. Katara is a unique strong female character because her strength comes from a place that most people wouldn’t see as a place to draw strength from, your mom. Katara displays the strength of a mother. She acts like a den mother to everyone in the group. So much so that Sokka almost forgot the face of his real mother and whenever he tries to think of her he can just see Katara. At some of her most powerful moments she cries out like she is scolding her opponents. In the first episode the inciting incident for the entire series happens because she scolds Sokka. Sounding very much like a mother disciplining her child. At times when the group is mentally and physically exhausted Katara is the only one to hold them together. Like a mother guiding her children. Also in the last episode of season two there’s this one shot where she’s holding Aangs dead body and it invokes the image of Michelangelo’s pieta statue where Katara would be the Virgin Mary the mother of Jesus. Just as Mary was the mother of Jesus so is Katara the mother figure of this group. She is a good example of being strong not in spite of her femininity but because of her femininity. Being a mother is a feminine role and it’s where she draws her strength. I’ve seen very few characters like this so in Katara I find something very unique.
Now let’s take a trip over to the dark side and talk about Azula. Azulas character is an interesting development in strong female characters and it comes from a very dark place. You see in a general sense women have a high capacity for emotional intelligence than men. This means that generally women can recognize their emotions and even control them better than men. In the show we see Katara as a very emotionally conscious character for example. But what if that emotional consciousness turns into emotional manipulation. That is the strength of Azula. There is a time in the show when she gets into a fight with Zuko and doesn’t have to through a single punch. She just dodges and hurls emotionally scarring insults at him until he tires himself out. She repeats this strategy multiple times throughout the show when fighting. She manipulates the emotions of her opponents. Wasting their time, wasting their energy and throwing them out of whack without even touching them. She uses her higher emotional intelligence to manipulate her enemies and her allies. It’s a generally feminine trait that has devastating consequences in this instance. Once again she is not strong in spite of her femininity but because of her femininity.
So what’s the lesson here? I think it’s this. A female character doesn’t have to give up female traits in order to be strong. If you really want to step things up make a female character that’s strength and femininity intertwine with one another. Because women can be feminine and strong at the same time they don’t have to choose between the two. I’ll end this by saying call your mom, she misses you.
As fans of the show know it is filled with really good female characters but right now I just want to focus on three. They are Toph, Katara, and Azula. Three character that got a lot of screen time and were flushed out the most. Let’s start out with talking about Toph. Toph is a twelve year old blind girl and her character is truly a unique departure in the evolution of female characters and comes at writing female characters from a completely new angle. For Tophs character the writers took masculine traits and mapped them on to her. This makes Toph relate to the boys more because she doesn’t play into feminine stereotypes. She rejects things like putting on makeup, doing her hair, and bathing regularly in favor of getting dirty, laughing at bodily functions, using rude language. She rejects the feminine activities and replaces them with masculine actives. Also rejecting traditionally feminine traits in favor of traditionally masculine ones. This is the way I generally see most of the stereotypical strong female characters and it can be an easy path to go down from a writing stand point. At a certain point I do think the strong female character with masculine traits becomes a parody of itself. I can probably think of dozens of strong female characters that fall into this category so if you want an easy way of writing strong female characters this is probably the way to go.
But some people demand more from their strong female characters so let’s move on and talk about Katara. Katara is a unique strong female character because her strength comes from a place that most people wouldn’t see as a place to draw strength from, your mom. Katara displays the strength of a mother. She acts like a den mother to everyone in the group. So much so that Sokka almost forgot the face of his real mother and whenever he tries to think of her he can just see Katara. At some of her most powerful moments she cries out like she is scolding her opponents. In the first episode the inciting incident for the entire series happens because she scolds Sokka. Sounding very much like a mother disciplining her child. At times when the group is mentally and physically exhausted Katara is the only one to hold them together. Like a mother guiding her children. Also in the last episode of season two there’s this one shot where she’s holding Aangs dead body and it invokes the image of Michelangelo’s pieta statue where Katara would be the Virgin Mary the mother of Jesus. Just as Mary was the mother of Jesus so is Katara the mother figure of this group. She is a good example of being strong not in spite of her femininity but because of her femininity. Being a mother is a feminine role and it’s where she draws her strength. I’ve seen very few characters like this so in Katara I find something very unique.
Now let’s take a trip over to the dark side and talk about Azula. Azulas character is an interesting development in strong female characters and it comes from a very dark place. You see in a general sense women have a high capacity for emotional intelligence than men. This means that generally women can recognize their emotions and even control them better than men. In the show we see Katara as a very emotionally conscious character for example. But what if that emotional consciousness turns into emotional manipulation. That is the strength of Azula. There is a time in the show when she gets into a fight with Zuko and doesn’t have to through a single punch. She just dodges and hurls emotionally scarring insults at him until he tires himself out. She repeats this strategy multiple times throughout the show when fighting. She manipulates the emotions of her opponents. Wasting their time, wasting their energy and throwing them out of whack without even touching them. She uses her higher emotional intelligence to manipulate her enemies and her allies. It’s a generally feminine trait that has devastating consequences in this instance. Once again she is not strong in spite of her femininity but because of her femininity.
So what’s the lesson here? I think it’s this. A female character doesn’t have to give up female traits in order to be strong. If you really want to step things up make a female character that’s strength and femininity intertwine with one another. Because women can be feminine and strong at the same time they don’t have to choose between the two. I’ll end this by saying call your mom, she misses you.
The best and worst of 2021
Looking back at all the movies I saw in 2021 I made an extraordinary discovery that my notion of storytelling to its very core. To demonstrate this notion I’m going to have to write about my favorite movie that came out in 2021 and my least favorite movie that came out in 2021. So let’s follow along and see if we can learn something.
The worst movie I saw in 2021 was Marvel’s the Eternals. Going into the movie I knew it had a bad rotten tomatoes score but I still wanted to see it. Right now I’m going to have to agree with the critics and say this movie was a swing and a miss. It feels strange because I am deep into the marvel cult and I know very little about the Eternals. I hoped for the best but I was disappointed. Maybe studying this movie for a little bit can teach us an important lesson. Here’s what I really believe. The Eternals is the complete antithesis of everything that makes marvel movies good. It takes everything that gives marvel success and runs in the complete opposite direction. Let’s start at the beginning with the characters. One staple of the MCU is making movies with big casts of unique characters. Some of the best examples would be the first Avengers movie and Infinity War. One of the reasons those movies are so good is that they don’t introduce us to new characters. They take almost all the characters from previously established movies and focus on the characters just interacting with each other. In Eternals they introduce us to ten new main characters, and this is the first time the audience is seeing any of them. So, this movie has to spend a good chunk of its run time introducing all these characters. It just fails to keep all these characters unique and interesting. Now right now you might be saying to yourself that there’s an exception to this rule. Guardians of the galaxy introduces us to an ensemble of new characters and it’s one of marvels greatest movies. That’s because that movie has a very strong plot which is the next thing I want to talk about, the plot. Now the plot of guardians of the galaxy is pretty straight forward. Here’s a powerful McGuffin all these characters have to play keep away with it for two hours. The plot of Eternals has so much deep lore, mysteries, magic, and plot twists that it’s enough to make anybodies head spin. There’s so many layers to this plot that it all just gets lost in the sauce. My final point is the probably the most important criticism I can levy against the movie and that is this movie doesn’t have good themes. To understand the themes of this movie you just need to understand the bad guys plan. A celestial god wants to destroy the earth and give birth to a new celestial who will in tern create new worlds across the galaxy giving life to trillions of sentient beings. (Spoiler alert) They want to trade the lives of everyone on earth for the lives of all these potential beings. If that sounds familiar to you it’s because that’s the theme of Avengers infinity war. Thanos wanted to trade the lives of half the universe so the other half could flourish. The Eternals just recycled that theme and the characters spend a good chunk of the film debating weather or not they should even save humanity. I moral dilemma that has already been solved by the previous avengers movies. So Eternals is really a bitter tasting mess that does not belong in the MCU and would probably feel more at home in the DCEU.
Now to review a film that I thought was one of the best from 2021 and that is a movie called Don’t Look Up. For those of you who haven’t seen it it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of scientists who discover a meteor that will collide with earth and destroy all life on the planet and they have to convince people to do something about it. Now for several years I’ve debated with myself about whether or not satire is a dead art form. Is it possible to satirize society and make jokes about our culture? Ever since the election of Donald Trump I think it’s become harder to do that. Mostly because with him we’ve ushered in the post truth era I think a side effect of this is a fracturing of culture into several different sub cultures that hold different beliefs and recognize different truths. So with all these fractured sub cultures how can someone truly satirize culture? The answer is Don’t Look Up. Let me explain. In the film the giant meteor that is headed to earth is an obvious comparison to climate change. So the audience can spend the entire movie comparing the disaster in the real world to the disaster of the fake world. The only thing that is consistent between the two is how humanity responds to the disaster. One major lynch pin of this movie is the fact that it does criticize the responses towards the meteor. But it doesn’t criticize the actions of everyday individuals. Instead it criticizes systems of production and consumption that envelop those individuals. Systems that envelop entire cultures and sometimes entire communities. So how does all of this relate to satire? Earlier this year Dave Chappelle released a stand up special called the closer and was immediately criticized for transphobic jokes. Now some people might argue that the jokes he told weren’t transphobic but here’s why I think a lot of people thought they were. In Dave’s jokes about the LGBTQ community he probably thought he was commenting on society in some way. And in a way he was but in a much bigger way he’s criticizing one subculture from the perspective of a different subculture. Subconsciously putting the African American culture up against the LGBTQ subculture. He also acts like these are two completely different factions that don’t have any way to cross over to each other. So I guess that’s why I think Dave Chappelle was thrown into the grinder this year. The guy is the greatest comic but maybe that means we should hold him to high standards. So my question still stands. Is it possible to satirize society? After all of this time I have to say the answer is yes but satire is going to look a lot different from now on. Now I guess the biggest thesis of Don’t Look Up is stated in the beginning minutes of the movie. When it just displays the text of a joke that reads like this. When I die I want to die like my grandpa peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like his passengers. This movie criticizes a lot of real world events and people. From politicians like Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton to billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. So I guess in this framing this satire is trying to tell us that these billionaires are the grandpa that died in his sleep and the entire earth are the passengers. In the end I think this movie is a good example of a great story. It’s a fantasy that can tell us more about ourselves than real stories ever could. Now my one criticism of the movie is that comparing climate change to a giant earth shattering comet doesn’t line up completely. Climate change is of course slow and manmade while a comet is a sudden cosmic anomaly. But it’s still a decent movie if you want to watch excellent acting get a few chuckles and also have a slow anxiety attack.
Now there’s something very amazing that happens when you compare Eternals and Don’t Look Up and that is this. They are the exact same movie but they go in completely opposite directions. Both movies are about a small group of people trying to save the world from total destruction. They both contemplate humanity, society, and nature and they both encounter god like beings that want to wipe out humanity. Both of these narratives question if humanity is worth saving and they come up with different answers. In Eternals they save the world in Don’t Look Up they don’t save the world. So let’s go over the process by which each movie comes to their own conclusion. In Eternals it runs the gamut of all human history and focuses on all the deadly weapons mankind has created. All the death and destruction of entire cultures and civilizations. But it does ground itself in a romantic humanism that always wins out in superhero movies. While Don’t Look Up does a deep dive into contemporary culture and forces us to look at our everyday contradictions. Just little things that we think or believe that are ultimately harmful to us. Things we’ve normalized that might harm us down the road. It could be the way we communicate, the way we produce, the way we consume, or even the way we reproduce. We can find harmful contradictions in all of them. Just maybe all of those contradictions add up to a point where we can’t help ourselves anymore. That leads me to something that I have believed for most of my life and that is this. Inside of every bad movie there is a good movie just trying to get out. So think of this when you’re reading, writing or creating. Sometime the difference between something good and something bad is just a few decisions.
I did find it interesting that two movies can be released in the same year and be about the same thing even though they’re different genres and styles. I’m very interested about stories that are apocalyptic or even post-apocalyptic so I might write more about those in the future. But what do you guys think? Am I on to something here or am I completely out in left field. Let me know in the comments.
The worst movie I saw in 2021 was Marvel’s the Eternals. Going into the movie I knew it had a bad rotten tomatoes score but I still wanted to see it. Right now I’m going to have to agree with the critics and say this movie was a swing and a miss. It feels strange because I am deep into the marvel cult and I know very little about the Eternals. I hoped for the best but I was disappointed. Maybe studying this movie for a little bit can teach us an important lesson. Here’s what I really believe. The Eternals is the complete antithesis of everything that makes marvel movies good. It takes everything that gives marvel success and runs in the complete opposite direction. Let’s start at the beginning with the characters. One staple of the MCU is making movies with big casts of unique characters. Some of the best examples would be the first Avengers movie and Infinity War. One of the reasons those movies are so good is that they don’t introduce us to new characters. They take almost all the characters from previously established movies and focus on the characters just interacting with each other. In Eternals they introduce us to ten new main characters, and this is the first time the audience is seeing any of them. So, this movie has to spend a good chunk of its run time introducing all these characters. It just fails to keep all these characters unique and interesting. Now right now you might be saying to yourself that there’s an exception to this rule. Guardians of the galaxy introduces us to an ensemble of new characters and it’s one of marvels greatest movies. That’s because that movie has a very strong plot which is the next thing I want to talk about, the plot. Now the plot of guardians of the galaxy is pretty straight forward. Here’s a powerful McGuffin all these characters have to play keep away with it for two hours. The plot of Eternals has so much deep lore, mysteries, magic, and plot twists that it’s enough to make anybodies head spin. There’s so many layers to this plot that it all just gets lost in the sauce. My final point is the probably the most important criticism I can levy against the movie and that is this movie doesn’t have good themes. To understand the themes of this movie you just need to understand the bad guys plan. A celestial god wants to destroy the earth and give birth to a new celestial who will in tern create new worlds across the galaxy giving life to trillions of sentient beings. (Spoiler alert) They want to trade the lives of everyone on earth for the lives of all these potential beings. If that sounds familiar to you it’s because that’s the theme of Avengers infinity war. Thanos wanted to trade the lives of half the universe so the other half could flourish. The Eternals just recycled that theme and the characters spend a good chunk of the film debating weather or not they should even save humanity. I moral dilemma that has already been solved by the previous avengers movies. So Eternals is really a bitter tasting mess that does not belong in the MCU and would probably feel more at home in the DCEU.
Now to review a film that I thought was one of the best from 2021 and that is a movie called Don’t Look Up. For those of you who haven’t seen it it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of scientists who discover a meteor that will collide with earth and destroy all life on the planet and they have to convince people to do something about it. Now for several years I’ve debated with myself about whether or not satire is a dead art form. Is it possible to satirize society and make jokes about our culture? Ever since the election of Donald Trump I think it’s become harder to do that. Mostly because with him we’ve ushered in the post truth era I think a side effect of this is a fracturing of culture into several different sub cultures that hold different beliefs and recognize different truths. So with all these fractured sub cultures how can someone truly satirize culture? The answer is Don’t Look Up. Let me explain. In the film the giant meteor that is headed to earth is an obvious comparison to climate change. So the audience can spend the entire movie comparing the disaster in the real world to the disaster of the fake world. The only thing that is consistent between the two is how humanity responds to the disaster. One major lynch pin of this movie is the fact that it does criticize the responses towards the meteor. But it doesn’t criticize the actions of everyday individuals. Instead it criticizes systems of production and consumption that envelop those individuals. Systems that envelop entire cultures and sometimes entire communities. So how does all of this relate to satire? Earlier this year Dave Chappelle released a stand up special called the closer and was immediately criticized for transphobic jokes. Now some people might argue that the jokes he told weren’t transphobic but here’s why I think a lot of people thought they were. In Dave’s jokes about the LGBTQ community he probably thought he was commenting on society in some way. And in a way he was but in a much bigger way he’s criticizing one subculture from the perspective of a different subculture. Subconsciously putting the African American culture up against the LGBTQ subculture. He also acts like these are two completely different factions that don’t have any way to cross over to each other. So I guess that’s why I think Dave Chappelle was thrown into the grinder this year. The guy is the greatest comic but maybe that means we should hold him to high standards. So my question still stands. Is it possible to satirize society? After all of this time I have to say the answer is yes but satire is going to look a lot different from now on. Now I guess the biggest thesis of Don’t Look Up is stated in the beginning minutes of the movie. When it just displays the text of a joke that reads like this. When I die I want to die like my grandpa peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like his passengers. This movie criticizes a lot of real world events and people. From politicians like Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton to billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. So I guess in this framing this satire is trying to tell us that these billionaires are the grandpa that died in his sleep and the entire earth are the passengers. In the end I think this movie is a good example of a great story. It’s a fantasy that can tell us more about ourselves than real stories ever could. Now my one criticism of the movie is that comparing climate change to a giant earth shattering comet doesn’t line up completely. Climate change is of course slow and manmade while a comet is a sudden cosmic anomaly. But it’s still a decent movie if you want to watch excellent acting get a few chuckles and also have a slow anxiety attack.
Now there’s something very amazing that happens when you compare Eternals and Don’t Look Up and that is this. They are the exact same movie but they go in completely opposite directions. Both movies are about a small group of people trying to save the world from total destruction. They both contemplate humanity, society, and nature and they both encounter god like beings that want to wipe out humanity. Both of these narratives question if humanity is worth saving and they come up with different answers. In Eternals they save the world in Don’t Look Up they don’t save the world. So let’s go over the process by which each movie comes to their own conclusion. In Eternals it runs the gamut of all human history and focuses on all the deadly weapons mankind has created. All the death and destruction of entire cultures and civilizations. But it does ground itself in a romantic humanism that always wins out in superhero movies. While Don’t Look Up does a deep dive into contemporary culture and forces us to look at our everyday contradictions. Just little things that we think or believe that are ultimately harmful to us. Things we’ve normalized that might harm us down the road. It could be the way we communicate, the way we produce, the way we consume, or even the way we reproduce. We can find harmful contradictions in all of them. Just maybe all of those contradictions add up to a point where we can’t help ourselves anymore. That leads me to something that I have believed for most of my life and that is this. Inside of every bad movie there is a good movie just trying to get out. So think of this when you’re reading, writing or creating. Sometime the difference between something good and something bad is just a few decisions.
I did find it interesting that two movies can be released in the same year and be about the same thing even though they’re different genres and styles. I’m very interested about stories that are apocalyptic or even post-apocalyptic so I might write more about those in the future. But what do you guys think? Am I on to something here or am I completely out in left field. Let me know in the comments.
