For those who aren't familiar with it, FX recently announced a new direct-to-streaming series on Hulu, titled "Y: The Last Man". It's based on the 2000s-era Brian K. Vaughan-written Vertigo comic book of the same name, where an incident occurs that kills every mammal with a Y-chromosome on the planet - except for one dude named Yorick Brown, and his pet male capuchin monkey. With half the population instantly dead, you can imagine that chaos ensues, especially when you factor in that a good majority of infrastructure support jobs are handled by - you guessed it - men. (And that's not even taking into account the death of uncountable species across the world as they will no longer be able to procreate, the destruction of food supply, etc).
You can see the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEQ5Lj-cXM
Obviously this series was written back before the huge push for inclusivity started, so its comic book iteration is not as horribly woke as it could be, but I'm just waiting for the shoe to drop on the TV version. Obviously, nature and genetics don't give two shits about your fee-fees and what you identify as, so that means if they go the full nine yards on this they're either going to have to:
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Ignore the existence of trans people entirely,
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Break the narrative and have it do something stupid like leave M-to-F trans alive but sterilize them,
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Downplay the whole event by claiming it killed "trans-women" as well, or
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Accept that M-to-F transgendered people genetically aren't women and lean into it and just show them as dead as well.
Somehow I think it's probably going to be option 2 or 3, but if it catches traction then the amount of salt this show is going to generate could season the world's popcorn for decades to come.
I saw the trailer for this and I'd never heard of it before. I just assumed that since it actually got funding for a series that it must have been cucked in some way, but the premise is interesting.
Has anyone here read the comics this is derived from? And if so what are your thoughts?
I've read the books, but it's been since 2008-ish when I last picked them up. The first part of the story arc kinda glosses over the fallout of the deaths and what would happen when not only infrastructure starts breaking down, but also the ramifications of needing to find a way to safely dispose of the corpses of half the world. After the initial "OHSHI- PEOPLE DED" reaction it jumps straight to the post-apocalyptic side of things, where women have carved up the countryside into their own enclaves. Yorick is discovered, and protection from the remnants of the US government is forced upon him and a geneticist who is charged with figuring out why he isn't dead and what they can do to use his genetics to try and kickstart the repopulation of the planet. I remember the books being a good read, although there were more than a few points where I rolled my eyes at the impossibility of the situation where women effectively "manned up" and tried to rebuild into their own version of a perfect society.
If you have an Amazon Prime account, the first volume of the series is available for free for a limited time under their Prime Reading feature. It's worth a look, even if only to get an overview of the content.
Alrighty, that is a hard pass then. There's a saying that if all the women on the planet disappeared, the men would die out in about twenty years. But that if all the men on the planet disappeared, the women would die out in about twenty days.
I usually point at the TV show Survivor for an example of that. I forget which country's edition of it did a "men vs women" breakdown on the initial separate islands, but it basically proved that the guys would have survived and the women were screwed. The men built shelter, set up a rotation for chore duties (hunting, gathering, fire tending, cooking, etc) based on their skills, and were generally thriving as best they could. The women basically spent their first few days burning through their supplies and lounging around doing jack shit, treating it like they were on some sort of beach vacation. The producers had to pull the "tribe member swap" bit early to get some men over onto the women's team, so they wouldn't starve to death or get killed from exposure.
There was something similar in the American show too. They didn't separate by gender (I don't remember the gimmick for that season) but there was an older lady on one of the teams who was busting her hump doing stuff around camp and during challenge. She was voted off, with the other women of the camp basically having the reasoning of "she makes us look bad" wrapped up in the idea of her being a dangerous foe during the late game. They hadn't even merged into one tribe yet. Hilariously their camp life took a hit too since she had been doing so much.
The ending was fucking horrible and felt rushed as hell. I think they told Vaughn to wrap it up, and he said "fuck it".