Will we ever get tired of hearing Gwyneth Paltrow talk about suiting up for Iron Man 3? Probably at least not until we get to see the movie this weekend.

Anita Sarkeesian runs a blog called Feminist Frequency and a long running, fascinating webseries of the same name where she examines the ways in which media and most often modern popular culture subtly and not-so-subtly support and perpetuate misogynistic ideas. I love her videos not because I necessarily agree with everything she’s ever said ever (you know, because we are not a single consciousness) but because when I do disagree with her, her detailed approach prompts me to calmly, privately examine why. This is not the case for 100% of human beings, however, and when she began a Kickstarter campaign to gain the means to expand her series to cover video games, it became the go-to example of overblown, vicious, flailing hate directed at a woman by self-identified members of the video game community. The net result of the harassment campaign (in numbers anyway, which is not to discount important qualitative things like personal peace of mind, or the outside perception of the video gamer community) was to encourage others to fund her campaign more than twenty-six times over what she’d initially asked for.

Naturally, the first video in her series is great: slickly edited, reaching back to Greek myths and forward to modern remakes of classic games, and she opens it with an idea that we here at The Mary Sue are all to familiar with: “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.”

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

In which Battlestar Galactica finally makes good on the plague promise of all space operas: making its characters navigate a room full of giant, deadly, moving pistons.

(more…)

We’ve all read enough books and watched enough movies to know that the surest way to make sure that a certain person is in your presence is to start saying things out loud that you would never want them to hear. And from the tone of voice of all these characters when they realize it and say “They’re standing right behind me, aren’t thety?” one can only assume that they’re familiar with the trope, too. So why hasn’t anyone turned this particular, apparently magical, phenomenon to their own purposes?

The next time the Joker escapes from Arkaham Asylum, maybe Batman should try smack talking him a bit in front of Robin and see what happens.

Magic Mike is not a movie that’s been pinging very loudly on my radar, and so it wasn’t really until today that I figured out what it’s all about: Channing Tatum as a veteran male stripper tutoring a younger guy (while dating said young guy’s sister) and deciding that though the work certainly gives him an ego boost he no longer finds it very fulfilling to be appreciated for his physical qualities: it hard to find his own self worth off the stage.

And that’s pretty interesting, as we don’t get a lot of serious depictions in our media of male characters who have made careers out of their looks alone, much less time spent on the personal struggles such a character might have with being in that position, like having to be encouraged by a female significant other (often it’s the other way around) to remember that they have other qualities that they could build a life on. (In the titular Mike’s case, he makes custom furniture). The loose woman who’s shown to be incomplete emotionally because she encourages men to objectify her and must be rescued by a loving man is a practically ancient story. According to director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin, that sort of gender flip was what interested them in making the movie in the first place, and between them and Matthew McConaughey, Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Joe Manganiello and Matt Bomer, who play the movie’s male stripper characters, that process has been kind of revelatory.

Up until a week ago, TV Tropes had a very handy trope index called Rape Tropes. (Note: all TVT rape trope pages in this article link, ironically, to Google caches.) This page also linked to other iterations of rape tropes in popular culture such as Rape as Backstory, Rape and Switch, Rape as Drama, Rape as Redemption, and other rape tropes common in the pop culture idiom.

Today when you access any of these pages, you’re informed, “We do not want a page on this topic. It does not meet our content policy.”

Recently on the discussion thread for combining the “Victim falls for Rapist” trope with the “Rape as Stockholm Syndrome” trope under the standard Rape Is Love cliche, Wiki owner and admin Fast Eddie explained that all tropes related to rape had been wiped off the site because it was getting the site “in trouble with Google.”

Apparently that meant any trope containing the word “rape” had to go.

Let me say this right up front: Diablo III is a pretty great game. It’s a satisfying, decently balanced helping of hack-and-slash, and it will scratch your every dungeon crawling itch. Diablo III is one of those games that just makes you feel cool. My Barbarian hits like a truck, and she is constantly surrounded by the pyrotechnic displays of my friends’ magical abilities. It is not the best game I’ve ever played, nor did it capture me as its predecessor did, but I am looking forward to my continued adventures in Sanctuary throughout the weeks ahead.

The whole point of the Diablo franchise is much less about telling a good story than it is about killing monsters and getting loot, but with the sort of time commitment that a game like this requires (especially to justify the $60 price tag), ideally you want the setting to be a place that captures your imagination, a place that you want to hang out in. So while I had a blast cleaving demons in twain over the weekend, I was nonetheless underwhelmed by a narrative full of uninspired tropes, as well as an otherwise impressive world clinging to some of the most tired cliches concerning women in fantasy. For a game that took twelve years to make, it was disappointing to see how little has changed on those fronts.

Fair warning: Massive spoilers ahead.

Way back in the dawn of blog, we included Dorothy on a short list of examples of published, famous Mary Sues, and I noticed some confusion about that. Allow me to explain: as soon as Dorothy appears in Oz, any character who does not immediately fall in love with her and overturn the order of the setting to help her plotline along is not just a bad guy, but the evilest thing to ever evil, and ugly. I’m not saying Dorothy’s character doesn’t work within her genre (because it does), I’m just saying: trope.

Man, now I want to watch The Wizard of Oz.

(via Neatorama.)

Here’s something to look at that will keep you occupied for a while. DeviantART user ComputerSherpa came up with this unbelievably informative “periodic table of storytelling” using TMS favorite TV Tropes to break down the chemical compounds of our most beloved (or reviled) geek stories. After the jump, click to enlarge for the full size. We’ll see you in a few hours.

How do we love thee, Feminist Frequency? Not only is your two year old video still the definitive word on the Bechdel Test, now you’re covering an entire series of female-oriented tropes? /sigh

Oh, and if you’re curious about some of the feeble ways that people have tried to subvert the Smurfette Principle, check out our launch Power Grid.

(via Sociological Images.)