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Extra Credit: Write a 500 word essay on what exactly is going on with Frank Miller’s female characters. Is he misogynistic, really misogynistic, or just sort of mysoginistic?

Is “none of the above” an option?

Yeah! Can’t a guy hate women WITHOUT being labeled?

Please don’t rip off yahtzee. He doesn’t like it.

Please, T. Frank Miller doesn’t just have issues with women; he has the Absolute Edition.

I think he loves women, personally. He just doesn’t overly romanticize them.

I’m opposed to this list for having River on it. 16-year-old girls with uncontrollable psychic powers who have endured years of torture should be more independent?

Firefly also had Zoey, who they don’t count because she never got an episode central to her in the show’s brief run. Plus an assortment of superprostitutes. That should count one way or another.

As for Frank Miller, does his creating Elektra not count because he killed her shortly afterwards? Even if he brings her back shortly after that? With the fact of Elektra in mind, I’d say “just sort of mysoginistic.”

Then again, at the same time as the Elektra stuff Frank was portraying Heather Glenn as being unable to cope in the man’s world of business, and missing out on her true calling as a housewife.. So “mysoginistic” might fit better.

If Foggy Nelson counts as a woman, then he’s really mysoginistic.

Ugh, merely being inspired by something in neo-Cracked taints this idea. A few years ago I joked with a friend about how bad National Lampoon would be if it had survived into the era of the douchebag-pandering lad mag.
Soon after, the new Cracked debuted to provide an example of just exactly such a magazine would look like.
The very notion of these people bringing in a token female writer to provide a supposed “feminist” rationale for that site’s standard lame snark reeks of hypocrisy when you consider much of the other stuff to be found there.
Plus, quoting that “alecto” maniac’s rant about Whedon without mentioning how insane the majority of her post was (and that it was regarded as insane by the vast majority of those who read it, feminist or Whedon fan or not) seems really dishonest.

any character written by greg rucka.

Also, each of the items in the list contain at least one mistake about its subject that could be leaped upon by even the mildest geek of its fandom. I’d see it as funny if I thought that this was on purpose, but I suspect it’s not.

If a character in fiction is a role model, then that’s a badly written character. The first rule of good writing is: Don’t provide role models. Good for all the women listed for not being role models. In my world, Han shot first.

(This doesn’t mean that all fiction should be immoral or amoral. Moral meaning should arise from the interactions of the characters, but not be embodied by any one character.)

Please don’t think that I don’t consider the core idea a worthy one; I just think that the piece itself is very poor and poor in a way typical of the site it appears on.
And, yes, some bloggers I otherwise enjoy have done work for that site, but that hasn’t saved it, at least not for me.

I would have if you hadn’t asked for MLA format.

“I think he loves women, personally. He just doesn’t overly romanticize them.”

Then what the hell was all that “Valkyrie” bullshit in “The Big Fat Kill?”

Frank Miller may or may not have issues with women, but he presents any character with traditionally feminine character traits (especially men who are “soft”) in a negative light. Elektra, the prostitutes in Big Fat Kill, and Martha Washington are all “tough,” and therefore get to be effective and heroic.

I don’t think Miller is misogynistic so much as that he has a tendency to (consciously or unconsciously) to assign traditionally masculine attributes to his strong female characters. Elektra, Gail and Daisy from Sin City, Martha Washington, Casey McKenna, his Catwoman from Batman: Year One… they’re all all practically masculinized females. I’m not familiar enough with the man or his work to intelligently speculate on whether there’s some sort of homoerotic subtext at play here, but I think it’s fair to consider the possibility if one is willing to entertain the notion that he might be misogynistic.

Maybe he doesn’t hate women or feminine attributes in his character leads… maybe he just loves men (or traditionally “male” qualities) just that much more.

the list has to include wonder woman and the wasp otherwise it is an incomplete list

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“I think he loves women, personally. He just doesn’t overly romanticize them.”

You reveal a lot about yourself on this blog, T. I guess we all have our own forms of therapy.