When the original Star Wars trilogy came out, you can see footage from that time of people entering and exiting the cinemas. Men and women alike. It wasn't just men, there were plenty of women. Star Wars was a phenomenon with both sexes. In fact all cultural big hits were. You wouldn't encounter a female fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jaws and go "a WoMaN likes this?!?"
Big movies didn't really need to cater. Now Star Wars is the most feminine bullcrap ever. The biggest thing movies do is play on two things with women. Cutesy and their love of animals. Baby Yoda as an example and also what porgs and the little sphere R2D2 was meant to trigger in them. There's nothing really "cute" about R2D2 in his design. That little sphere droid in Force Awakens was meant to trigger that feeling in women though, the cutesy feeling. LIkewise Chrewbacca looked really off and the reason for that is he was cutefied. In the OT Chrewbacca had a menacing look to him. In the Disney trilogy every element of his face was softened so that he looks no more threatening than whinnie the pooh.
Likewise with the animal thing. The reason John Wick has his dog get killed is that is the quickest way to get women on board. In reality it's stupid.
I love animals, but I don't give a crap if they die. That doesn't make me heartless, that makes me a man who, like most men, has the ability to compartmentalize and understands the value of animals as compared to human life. I've never seen a woman who isn't really manipulated by their love and protective feelings towards animals. Watch a woman react to John Wick and see how much it impacts them, the dog aspect, compared to men. There's a reason in the old days revenge centered on killing someone you were related to in stories. Because that was universally understood. And don't give me any crap about "the dog represented the wife symbollically". It's just cope to get away from the fact that it's meant to be a lazy shortcut to get women invested in the plot when they otherwise wouldn't.
There's many ways that movies soften the action hero in ways more appealing to women but this wasn't always the case. Women enjoyed men who were rough in movies. Plenty of women enjoyed Bond films and Bond would often be cold, and harsh with women. Which they of course, as we know, women like. They like Bond being charming and wooing women, but they also like that he doesn't put up with women's crap either.
Today men are emasculated in films and despite women naturally hating this in men instinctively, they seemingly let this slide or don't see it happening on some level when they go to the theaters. Like how is it that I can see that Daniel Craig is emasculated compared to 1960s - 80s Bond and this bothers me, yet women who are repulsed by emasculated men flock to the softer action heroes today like John Wick or Daniel Craig bond whereas in the past they might have gone and seen the Dirty Dozen with their husband. Are women becoming lesbians, is that the conclusion?
About women liking effeminate men in movies, birth control causes women to like more feminine men. Screwing with your hormones will damage you significantly.
This. Birth control, plus the various other drugs women are on nowadays greatly affect them. They are not the women of a century plus ago.
When was entertainment first presented to a woman?
Makes me think of the outroar about kill shelters and putting down nuisance animals, etc. Yeah, they don't necessarily deserve it, but also it's a problem that needs to be dealt with, and they are animals. They aren't freaking furbabies.
They don't actually care. They just support feelgood causes.
One of the many reasons why is because men play video games and woman stream TV shows.
100%
It's more insidious. Movies cannot allow women to be the incentive or impetus for a man's actions if the plot requires her to be harmed at the expense of motivating the hero.
Feminists came up with this ridiculous term called "fridging" after a Green Lantern comic featured his gilrfriend being crushed and stuffed into a refrigerator.
After the 2010s, you'll note that women either cannot be killed to motivate the hero nor be a damsel in distress for the hero to rescue (a good example of this is Peach not being captured in the Mario movie, but Luigi being the dude in distress instead; and even when Peach agrees to marry Bowser, she ends up saving herself, which makes the whole rescue attempt by Mario and Donkey Kong look weak and half-hearted).
Ironically, they do see it happening, but most wenches are femoids. They just go along with it because the zeitgeist tells them to.
There are a few female content creators who point out that men in movies act effeminate and weak and don't act masculine at all. But they've been fed so much feminist bullcrap they don't actually know how to reconcile the cognitive dissonance fed to them by the zeitgeist that disrupts their built-in biological drive to be drawn toward characters like classic Bond/Indiana Jones.
I think it's obvious that there are several "white board" constraints guiding modern writing. Stuff like "no damsels in distress" and "there must be a strong independent female character" and "no negative depictions of protected groups". These function like quotas in screenplays to the point where they will reliably warp stories much like the gravity well of a black hole. You can't "see"' these rules, but you know they are there because of the resultant content.
The damsel in distress is one of the oldest and simplest stories our species knows how to tell, and the fact that it's not allowed to happen anymore shows the left successfully killed off a type of story that is as old as our species.
We get it, you have cats.
I hate cats, and no our family have always had dogs, and we have one dog now, as the last one died about a month ago.
Like I said, I love animals including dogs, and while I say I hate cats, I don't really hate cats, I just think they're so much worse than dogs. But really there's no animal I dislike. I just don't get weapy about animals dying. There's things that make me tear up, like certain Twilight Zone episodes due to their poignancy, but I don't have a Pavlovian reaction to animals dying.
Now Futurama did it right with the episode about the dog. That episode is devestating and it has nothing to do with an animal dying. It's one of the saddest dang episodes I've ever seen from any TV show.
Women are inherent narcissists. That's probably why that sort of propaganda always works on them.
Same with the entire romance genre of "boring, mediocre, unattractive woman with zero personality is magically rewarded by the universe with supernaturally hot boyfriend"
I'm going to push back on you a little. There's a trope called save the cat. And it's basically a quick way to show the hero is nice because he'll rescue an animal. It's just economical use of time. I don't think it's feminine to rescue animals. We've all seen videos of firefighters rescuing pets, I'm thinking most people don't think look at that wuss rescuing a dog.
As far as Disney creating scenes and characters to sell toys, I mean that is pretty standard. Lucas made warrior teddy bears.
How is John Wick soft or emasculated? He's not some ennui-filled emo arranging pieces on a board. He is a silent and violent killer who will take two bullets to deliver one. Daniel Craig's Bond is pretty ruthless as well. Have you seen these movies?
Still you aren't wrong that Star Wars and most other movies pander to women.
John Wick is, like all modern action heroes "a nice man". He's polite, he's never politically incorrect. I have an article I'm going to write contrasting John Wick to someone like the Transporter played by Jason Statham.
The Transporter isn't nice, knows about a sex trafficking ring and doesn't care. He only gets involved when it becomes too intertwined with his life that he has too. He actually takes a sex trafficked woman, puts her on the street for her to be picked up again. As he's driving away he reluctantly picks her back up and takes her to his home where he still treats her like crap because she's an inconvenience to him. And after all that, he still refuses to help her rescue her other family because it's not his problem. Only after more time in the story and other personal stakes does he finally become a hero. Action heroes are not good people who do things out of altruism, they are selfish people who via proper scripting are compelled towards making a good turn with well written justification. It's not meant to make you go "something should be done about this" as an audience. It's meant to make you believe a hardened criminal would be compelled to become a hero based on all the events that transpire.
The weak guy who gets browbeaten by his ex wife and scolded for not getting enough of a good gift in Taken, is not the same guy who goes Rambo in a foreign country in that same movie later. Modern movies want their cake and eat it too. Men must be killers with a past, but also nice and politically correct.
In the first Transporter, the first 4 or so action scenes are not motivated by altruism. The first one is motivated by pay (transport criminals for pay), the second for survival (fight cops or go to jail), the third by revenge (guy blows up his car, he comes to beat some faces in) and the fourth by survival again as the guys come to kill him in his home. Once he gets to safety Frank Martin is done with the whole ordeal, and tells the Asian woman who's trafficked, it's not his problem. Eventually he does agree to help her when she keeps persisting to eat away at his conscious.
That's the script getting you to believe the man who is capable of action that puts their life in danger and the man willing to do it can be one in the same and it takes heavy script lifting to get you to suspend that disbelief, as it rarely plays out in that way in real life. There's a difference between in real life when a guy intervenes in a fight to help someone, compared to action movies where they're facing off against a crime syndicate single handedly. The latter essentially never happens in real life, but they expect you to believe it happens by average "nice men" such as Liam Neeson in Taken. And rather than justifying it, the screenwriting trick is to say "he looks nice, but he has a past". This is telling, not showing.
In the Equalizer, another nice guy action hero, Denzel gets involved because sex trafficking is wrong and he sees a woman he likes getting sex trafficked. That's not an action hero motivation. Action heroes don't get involved because they see something the audience also doesn't like. They get involved when the script justifies that this is the logical point they'd get involved, typically reluctantly. JCVD in Hard Target knows about the killing games going on at a certain point, but he doesn't choose to put an end to them. He is forced to because his investigation catches their interest and they start chasing him, so the whole movie is him fighting for survival. He didn't even want to help the woman find her dad, but only did when the job he was going for was all filled up. That's the difference in how things are written now. Actions are taken based on if the audience would want to see it compared to logically written actual action heroes where actions are taken in proportion to how the script has carried them at this point in the movie in line with their characterization.
Almost every action hero from the 80s or 90s and earlier can be seen to have logical script writing justification for their actions, whereas the modern action heroes are "nice" who just are waved away as "they have a past and that's why they can do all this", which doesn't carry explanatory power as to why they would do all this. In reality, a retired hitman like John Wick would not come out of retirement for a dead dog, no matter how much he loved his wife. It's poor script writing and it's a case of having your cake and eating it too.
If you want an example of what I mean by John Wick is a nice man, watch the movie Warriors from 1979. The Warriors gang are the protagonists. They're still criminals, one of them is an attempted rapist, and the main leader, Swan pretended like he was going to rape the female love interest. They're not "good" people, they're just merely the people you root for because of their circumstance. If the Warriors were made today, Swan would never get "rape-y" with that hispanic broad. They'd have to be a politically correct "nice guy gang" who can kill people, but would never say the word faggot for instance.
And that's my point about John Wick. John Wick would never demean a minority or demean a woman, neither would Liam Neeson in Taken. Frank Martin from the Transporter does. He's disrespectful to an Asian woman throughout the movie, treating her like a nuisance.
So my point is the characterization of action heroes is at odds with what they're expecting you to believe they'd choose to do.
When superheroes do altruistically good, we understand that the risk to their life is proportionally small, which is why the early parts of the heroes helping out citizens is just portrayed as power fantasy, and not as supernaturally altruistic. The dilemmas for the superheroes have to be introduced by super villains that up the stakes where the choice to be altruistic actually has consequences in proportion to their superhero abilities.
Good comment.
John Wick is literally a paid assassin. He's not just "not nice". He's necessarily pure evil. If the audience saw all of the horrible things he has invariably done, they wouldn't cheer for him.
This is such a well written observation of the changing times.
Your point applied to so many "heroes" prior to 1997.
It was basically every action role for Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson.
Even with popular characters like John McClane -- he did not want to get involved with the heist during the original Die Hard. He was trying to get the attention of the police -- in fact, that's one of the very first things he does.
John Matrix has zero interest in going back to work in special forces; he was forced to do what he did to save his daughter. He didn't give two craps about the villain's plot to kill the president.
Rambo is basically the epitome of your comment all wrapped up in a nice bow. He was ALWAYS reluctant to get involved because he knew he cost and toll of combat. The entire series is him basically telling people, "I told you so" about not wanting to escalate things. He only ever got involved to save people he personally cared about or save himself.
Heck, even in Rambo, he led those missionaries practically to their death (even after giving them fair warning), and then had to lead the mercenaries in to rescue the missionaries, and he never took charge of the mission, just kind of followed along until at the end.
Good comment
Not entirely relevant but women have some sort of deranged mental attachment to cats. Entire colonies of stray cats exist because the population of stray females feed them.
I won't go too much into these movies because Staticnoise wrote an essay but even Craig's bond got really feminized near the end and of course he has a daughter. That trope of sidelining the masculine hero to replace him with a daughter was started with (((The Last of Us))).
Daughters are the best of both worlds in media. It triggers the simping girldad instinct in men, and it gives women someone to self-insert onto (even if she's a 40yo roastie).
This was the last memory of his wife. It kinda makes sense he snaps.
I thought John Wick killed those people because they stole his car...
Because they're narcissistic pieces of shit. It's not that complicated.
But they're objectively worse today than they were in the 70s.
I've been thinking about this since seeing the study posted about how women act when dosed with testosterone. We know there's a population wide drop in testosterone in men leading to more effeminate behaviour (my money's on hormonal birth control in the water supply, but we'll see). But what if we're also seeing a drop in women's testosterone?
While not near the levels of men, women do produce testosterone naturally. If the study is correct, women with more testosterone behave more reasonably and considerate of other parties. If their natural levels have dropped, doesn't it follow that they would be unreasonable and less considerate of others?
And what do we observe in reality? A correlation, at the very least.
Need to find that study about how if you give boys a Batman figurine they pretend to be Batman, and if you give girls one they pretend Batman's a girl.
I'd argue it's just as much about stealing something away from boys/men than it is to catering to women. You know those scifi movies you liked as a kid, maybe even your dad showed you? Those heroes that may have inspired you in one way or another? Well now it's about a grrlboss and your old heroes are losers!
I would argue it is in fact more about that then it is about catering to women. You can tell by the fact that they very rarely come up with their own stories and characters that cater to women and just tell those instead. 9 times out of 10, they are replacing something from the past.
Nerds have always been an enemy of the left. Nearly all White men, unapologetically heterosexual even past the point of 'good taste' with all the comic book women drawn with massive tits in skin tight costumes, the bikini armor tropes, etc. Most have at least some degree of what might be called autism, though I think that is a modern reinterpretation of what is actually just a personality type that likes details, systems, intricacy, etc. The sort that doesn't really pick up on or care about 'normie' social cues and worry about who's fucking who or if Tiffany cheater on Brad. They'd rather spend 4 hours figuring out the backstory of a fictional character to determine if their psychic powers can work on a ghost. Nerds have always just been apart. They see things differently, care about different things, don't respond to the same attempts at browbeating and corralling them into political groups, don't respond to the same kinds of social stigmas, and so on. Nerds have been a bulwark against leftism for a long time, quietly sitting in the corner drawing fictional hot women and saying you're gay if you like a particular run of a comic over another.
And the left has been trying to destroy them for ages, and finally more or less succeeded. Not by destroying them in the end, but by infiltrating them, taking their stuff and making it normal, and then making it gay and womanly. It was always about taking away what those nerds liked, because the themes present in nearly all nerd hobbies are things the left hates. Heroism, clear right defeating clear wrong, rules that matter because they are the reason things are the way they are, whether it's in Tolkien's universe, Superman's weakness to Kryptonite, or the real world. Most nerd hobbies have at their core, something that is noble, good, and encouraging. This is why each one has been taken over and replaced. Catering to women is just a side benefit.
I would recommend instead of going on a long rant on the internet about Star Wars, start a business and try to become financially independent
I would recommend instead of derailing a discussion for absolutely no reason, start a business and try to become financially independent
you first
Fellas, fellas, let's all keep up the same griping and endless shitposting while the world goes to hell.
Just today - my girlfriend says she’s stopped using ChatGPT.
The reason? It used to say ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ before giving answers…
Now she feels its suddenly cold.
Jesus…
Goddamn Sophie.
When Jews realized womens neuroses were an effective bioweapon against white men.
Because they're overmedicated BPD wrecks who demand their egos stroked all the time.
It's why they get all gooey for the first felon to crack them one in the mouth and tell them to sit down and shut up.