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2OEH8eoCRo0yesterday at 6:12 PM1 replyview on HN

It's perplexing that strong female leads often end up just being more masculine.

Perfect Dark N64 commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAo7Vt4X_Ys


Replies

genthreeyesterday at 7:16 PM

My wife really disliked masculinization of the main character in the new She-Ra. The original was maybe her favorite cartoon as a kid, and what appealed was that She-Ra was a pretty, presenting-very-feminine princess who was also strong and kicked ass. She took the new representation (however it was intended, which, I think it's a safe bet it wasn't intended this way) as saying "being a strong woman means being more masculine and isn't compatible with the traditionally-feminine", which was very much not anything she was interested in.

In that specific case I think it was a result of the whole show bending almost every gender-presentation toward something less binary, on purpose, but the general tendency to make a woman character stronger simply by increasing her masculine presentation is pretty common and isn't well received by a lot of folks.