Female Agency

Today we're focusing on the portrayal of female characters in fiction and how there is a trend in how we write and portray women in stories, and how that portrayal is really f*cking unhealthy and hasn't changed enough. 

This episode was inspired by a particular TV show that was recently released and which I've previously spoken about on another episode in Season 3, Unlikeable Characters. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

So a few weeks ago, I was discussing well, I can't remember which episode title I gave it, but I was discussing the TV show Rivals, focusing mainly on season two and what a fucking disaster it was. Probably should have just made that as an episode title, that way I could have remembered it. Anyhow, finished the season, well, to the midpoint, because I did that stupid thing where they did like a mid-season finale. What the fuck even is that? Like someone explain it to me. Anyhow, they so I finished off the episode to what they've released, and then they've decided to do that stupid thing that they're gonna release the rest of the season later on in the year and whatever. But anyhow, I I wanted to go back to this series and kind of dissect it from another point of view and how they fucked up and what we can learn from that because how they fucked it up just is something that actually really aggravates me. So if you haven't seen this season two, perhaps don't keep listening because there will be spoilers about the mid-season finale. But at the same time, if I spoil it for you, I'm probably saving you like hours of watching the damn thing. And that you might actually thank me for because it really does become a shit show. Basically, what ends up happening is that the villain Tony Baddington, uh, he has a wife. I don't remember what her fucking name is. Let me quickly look it up. Monica. Her name's Monica. I almost said Victoria. It's kind of on the right sounding syllable thing. Anyhow, her name is Monica, and she has been for most of season one and season two, she's been quietly aware of Tony's infidelity behaviour and being a complete ass, but she's kind of stuck by his side. In the last episode of I don't even know how to call how to say phrases, it in the mid-season finale, well, just call it that. The episode really focuses on Monica and her relationship with Tony, who is the bad guy. And basically the episode kind of develops in the fact that Monica suddenly gets some agency in herself and the fact that she decides that actually Tony is an asshole, shh, it is not worth forgiving him, and that she should essentially divorce him. And she doesn't even have to pack up and leave, funnily enough, because it's her fucking house, which is brilliant. Anyhow, so she basically finds the gumption in her to be like, Tony, you're an asshole. This is we're no longer compatible, we're going to divorce, and I'm gonna lawyer up. It's really refreshing to see because, you know, as a viewer, we've kind of just been seeing Monica kind of being, I don't know, what's the word? Push over. Let's just call her a pushover. And she is. She's really just kind of allowed Tony to treat her really poorly, and she hasn't given him any kind of, I guess, stern stern repercussions, and she's just kind of allowed him to get back in her good books with like nice gifts and things like that. And it's been kind of, I guess, frustrating and annoying to watch because you can kind of just see her essentially being a pushover and just falling for his stupid antics again. So it was kind of refreshing in this episode where she suddenly decided, you know, what I'm this is enough. I'm not gonna put up with that anymore. Now, uh, this is the thing that kills me about this episode. It sounds like it should be a really good storyline, right? The wife leaving the villain and the wife actually getting to keep the house because it's hers, and you know, the villain then having to deal with the humiliation, I suppose, of being divorced by her and whatnot. Now, it's funny because in the books, from what I understand, she does go through the divorce, and by the sounds of it, she actually gets involved with a woman she used to know in high school, so there's a bit of a lesbian love story there. Which would have been phenomenal to see on screen, right? So, what does the TV show do? They fucking kill her off. Yep. No redemption arc for her, no sense of agency. All of it got lost because she decides to go out for a drive in a storm and she crashes the car. Now, where to even begin with this fuck up? Not only are we dealing with another TV show that isn't following the material, aka the novels, we are dealing with a TV show that is basically portraying the fact that as soon as a woman wants to stand up for herself and correct her life, that she ends up dead. I cannot tell you how much I have seen or witnessed this story arc in female characters. Now, this is assuming that the female character hasn't been sexually assaulted or killed off before all this. It's really quite funny that female characters do really have the most predictable storylines in any type of medium art where there is a storytelling element. It's just it's just baffling, really, how we write female characters and whatnot. But the the thing that kills me about killing off Monica, besides the fact that it steers off from the source material, is the fact that it would have been such it would have been so encouraging for, especially women, to see a female character like that to basically gain her own agency, go through with this divorce, deal with uh, I guess the humiliation or that because it is set in the 80s, and I don't know. I I get a sense that the 80s still wasn't very probably still don't really see so fondly on divorce. I mean, I can't imagine it would have been terrible, but these people are really high class, and I think people in high class generally would probably still look down at divorce even in the 80s. They probably still do, to be honest. I think that's why they're so fucking miserable, they just stay together. Anyhow, but it would have been really stellar if we had had and been able to see a female character actually go through that growth of leaving a man who she had obviously stood by, treating her like shit, and finding her agency to basically rebuild herself and move on. That would have been a fucking stellar storyline to see, and it would have been so encouraging and motivating for so many other women or even men who are in the same role or similar situation as Monica and really help, you know, um maybe not give them a blueprint of how it can be done, but just making them see that it can be done, you know, that's that's the power of fiction. It doesn't have to be totally real in how it unfolds, but it can just plant seeds, it can spark ideas. And the fact that the TV show writers, which are ironically mostly women, have decided to kill Monica off and basically not give her a happy ending with her lesbian friend and not give her the chance or not give viewers a chance to see a woman actually develop and grow, I think is just so, so disappointing. I just it really just baffles me how anyone in that writer's room thought that was a good idea. And what I'd really like to kind of get in your head about all this, despite beyond how shit this season was, is to really make you think about what you're doing with your characters and the social contracts you're making them follow. It is so, so easy to write characters that just follow the social contracts and just go through life and not do anything new or exciting. It is very easy just to do that. Like, you know, it's easy just to write a female character who just wants to meet a hot guy and get married and have lots of, I don't know, hot juicy sex and then live happily ever after. That that's fucking easy to write. But it's also not very inspiring because we've got so many versions of that story out there. And the reason why I go on about this is because if you can write a unique character in the sense that you give the character, especially female character, agency and you make them do something different, and you kind of show them stepping outside the social contracts and the normal expected life, it is going to have an impact on your readers more so than the juicy hot sex story and the happily ever after. It just will because it will be not only something different, but it'll be a more realistic and have a high chance of resonating with your readers. See, the best stories are the ones that resonate with your readers. I'm gonna say that again. The best stories are the ones that will resonate with your readers, and the way you resonate with your readers is by creating characters that are going through situations that are realistically possible, and you are showing them, going through those situations in a way that an average person will probably respond to. This is how you create resonance, and the reason I say it doesn't, it has to do with that and not like ability is because you can even have a reader resonate with an evil character. And that's actually what I think an actual a very good writer will do. It'll make readers actually sympathize and resonate with the evil characters, because if you do that, then it's sort of a bit more complex when eventually they get defeated and killed off, isn't it? Like it's so easy to hate the most common fantasy villains like Soran or Voldemort or who am I fucking missing? Anyone from the freaking Game of Thrones series, because they're all such dipshit assholes. Like it's easy to be like, thank God you're fucking dead, because they have been such assholes. But if you have an evil or not so nice character and you actually partially resonate with their experience, like the fucking Disney characters, oh my god, I there's this thing when as you get older, you actually start to resonate more with the villains and the Disney princess stories more than you do with the fucking princess. I have heard of this, and then it wasn't until recent that I actually started to realize it's true because yeah, I actually really do like the villains in most of the Disney stories now because they actually make much more sense than all the fucking princesses who just kind of show up with this Sing Song voice, make friends with all the animals, and then just expect, you know, life to fall into their lap. That's just so unrealistic and pathetic. But the villains, they generally, you know, they're clever and they've got usually wit about them, and they've got good reasons to want to basically do what they're trying to do. So you can create a villain that resonates and makes you kind of go, like, yeah, I can kind of see their point of view, and they can be totally unlikable because they're the villain. You can do that. So what I'm trying to say is that please have a think about what you are putting in your stories and what you are portraying to people and what sort of messaging it is leaving behind. Because unfortunately, a lot of creators do not really push themselves to question social contracts or anything like that, and so they end up just writing the same characters over and over again, and then we all end up reading the same characters over and over again, it just becomes very boring and uninspiring, and and ultimately you want your characters to leave an impression of being motivating and inspirational. I mean, I think that's where some of the biggest fictional characters are sober loved, because on some level they do inspire us and they do bring us, they do, I guess, give us a sense of looking at our lives and motivating us to do better. And but if you're gonna kill a character off before they get a chance to do that, then all you're basically saying is that the situation is hopeless, especially in Monica's case, in the sense that it's hopeless to try and leave, that it's better just to put up with it and stay. And this is what kind of kills me about her story arc and what the writers have done, because that's essentially the message these female writers have given their audience, that it is pointless to try and leave a man like Tony. And if you are going to try, then you'll likely end up dead. And I'm sure any woman would I'm sure any woman will agree with me when I say that women already receive that messaging quite a lot. Like there is so much risk, even in this day and age, to leaving your husband. So what is the point of adding to that narrative, of reviving that message to viewers and readers? I just don't get it, especially, especially in this case when the source material, the novels had this beautiful story arc where Monica actually grew and made peace with her sexuality. And it's just we haven't actually really, I haven't really been exposed to that storyline enough. A woman, you know, leaving her marriage and then, you know, identifying herself as queer and then being all a woman and then being with a woman. I mean, I think that would have been really refreshing to see. Great opportunity there to show something new and exciting, and the writers fucking blew it. They just blew it. And yeah, I don't really have much more to say than the fact that female characters in general are just not written to the same degree as men. They are just generally the pretty sidekicks, they're sexually assaulted, they're killed off way too easily. And it's just it's just sad. It's sad that in the year 2026 that this is still how we treat female characters in a day and age when women have more agency in society than what we've ever had before.