The Girl with Many Faces

I really like watching TV. Like a lot. Which means I watch a lot of shows that aren’t very good. *cough* Once Upon a Time *cough*. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the ways that these shows are bad *cough* writing and character development *cough*. It just means I accept their flaws and move forward accepting that is how it is going to be. However, a few tropes have started to bother me because they have shown up in multiple shows that are good and that I like. While not necessarily bad tropes, I find the repetition of a plot device between shows rather fascinating. The two main ones that have continued to bother me are a) lesbians who only talk about men b) the girl with many faces. In this post, I’m going to talk about the latter as I need to remember my other example for a) before I write about it.

The girl with many faces is a trope I noticed specifically in iZombie (a show that I adore) and Dollhouse (a show that I liked a lot). It also appears to varying degrees in other shows such as Agent Carter (which I adore) and probably Alias (a show I haven’t seen) but to varying degrees. What is the girl with many faces? Well, she’s essentially whatever you want her to be. In the case, of iZombie and Dollhouse she is the main character but in almost every episode she takes on either all or part of an entirely different persona.

What’s cool about this? Well, audience members of different personality types can identify with the character depending on who they are in the episode. She can be anyone’s Mary Sue or fanfiction character, taking on the traits you want including butt-kicking, seduction, and intelligence. She can be confident or meek having tech skills or be handy with sewing. The world is her personality.

What isn’t so cool? Well, sometimes the development of female character as an individual is lost. This point often becomes part of character building. In iZombie, Liv is constantly battling with who she is on and off particular individual brains. However, characterizing Liv is still sort of difficult and comes into a sort of stark contrast with Gwen, the character in the comic that iZombie is based off of, who gets memory flashbacks but does not take on the personalities of those individuals. In Dollhouse, this comes with Echo’s increasing self-awareness but still Echo is essentially a tabula rasa for whatever the writers decide who she’s going to be. In both cases, there is a need to write at least two parallel personalities and sometimes the life of either the “true” main character or their “personality of the week” falls a bit short.

Beyond how well this is executed, it was an interesting trope to identify because it perpetuates an odd facet of gender in America. To a certain degree, women are taught to be what they are told to be. Meaning women are taught that whatever someone tells you to be you sort of should be. Women’s behaviors and personalities are encouraged to be more adaptable than men’s. This isn’t always true but I don’t think it’s accidental that both Dollhouse and iZombie focus on females who changes personalities as opposed to males. It is true that both do have male characters who take on different personalities but most cases these examples don’t highlight the extreme differences between one personality and the next, with much more detail given to the female personalities than the males. Or there are a larger number of female-centric episodes as opposed to male centric episodes. The one exception that I can recall is in season 1 of iZombie where Lowell mentions he’s on “gay brain.” However, almost every other male zombie appears to be unaffected, or only minimally affected, by the personalities of those they eat. Dollhouse also had Victor, a male doll, but it’s difficult for me to recall more than a few episodes that had his new persona as a main focus.

This isn’t necessarily a bad device. I really like(d) both of these shows. They have (had) good action, story, and writing with awesome female leads (and we need more of them). But why do cool women have to also be something like 30 other women. Yes, as a young girl I wanted to be all things awesome but at the same time it would be nice to have cool female characters that didn’t have to change all the time to fit the situation. And there are good examples of this, but at the same time why does it appear so often? Is it really so difficult to write one, stable although reflective and evolving, female personality?

The Rule

Note: This blog was initially written as part of an application for the comic website Panels on 25 Feb 2016. - Paulina

I didn’t start buying floppies until I was 22, just before I finished my first year of graduate school. It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy reading comics, I did, it was that as a kid my parents encouraged the use of the library. Also we were middle class and at the rate that I read manga buying them really made no sense.

Anyways, soon after I started collecting I became interested in the diversity of the comics industry. While not something I had actively cared about before I started collecting, the more I learned about it the more I realized that lack of diversity had kept me from pursuing my interest in American comics as a child. As a 9-year-old girl of mixed-race (Filipino-Polish if that matters to you) it was much easier to pick up manga like Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, or Inu-Yasha and relate to those characters than it was to start reading Batman where 1) there was no clear place to begin 2) it was hard to imagine myself as a stupidly wealthy middle aged white man.

So this got me thinking and after a year of collecting and going religiously to my local shop and grabbing up whatever sounded cool I realized I was adding too many books to my list and I needed a way to pare down the possibilities. (Not that you necessarily should, I just didn’t have the income to support my growing habit). And after some thought I came up with one rule:

No diversity within the comic or its creation, no way its getting my money as a full-priced floppy.

What does this mean?

It means that I don’t buy comics for full price that are made by white males about white males.

What doesn’t this mean?

-It doesn’t mean that those stories are bad.

-It doesn’t mean that the stories I’m left with are good.

-It doesn’t mean I would buy any story that met that criteria.

-It doesn’t mean I won’t ever read those stories.

-It doesn’t mean that I won’t eventually purchase those stories.

It was a way to merge my passions and meet my economic need. I could promote diversity in comics by putting my money where my mouth was and pre-ordering books with main characters who were women and/or people of color and/or stories that women and/or people of color made. To boot, it’s a pretty easy rule to remember and follow.

After I started filtering books by this rule, I realized how many new titles, creator owned and those promoted by the big two, didn’t meet my qualifications. It was a comics Bechdel test and there were months that would go by where no new titles followed my rule AND sounded interesting enough to purchase. Also like the Bechdel test, I knew it isn’t/wasn’t a perfect rule. Furthering the parallel though, it made me think seriously about all those stories that didn’t have women or people of color as main characters or as key creators.

Most of us know that what keeps women and people of color from entering the industry is an intersectional problem that involves the conception and a perpetuation of the idea that those industries “are” middle-class and white and male. This is a problem in almost all nerdy industries. More striking to me was the lack of women and people of color as main characters. What was it about a story that involved a “young boy discovering his destiny as X” that required him to be a) a boy (or male or gendered at all) b) illustrated as Caucasian. Was there some sort of special penis requirement for this destiny that also required the palest of complexions with European features? No, there wasn’t. Instead, these stories revealed a level of contentedness with “industry” standards and a lack of questioning of the ideology of the “typical” comic-book character. The industry assumed a white male audience and so they continued to give that audience stories that they could easily identify with. It wasn’t that white-male audiences couldn’t identify with diversity, we all know they can, it’s just that the industry didn’t think to make them try.

Thankfully, this is changing and every week more titles are coming out from DC and Marvel and Image that mimic the reality of comic book reading audiences. Where the characters and creators are increasingly diverse in age, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class background. But I keep my rule anyways. Partially because my comics are piling up in another state and I’m not adding any books at the moment but also because it’s still a good rule to have. If a comic can’t find a woman and/or a person of color to be a part of its creation, in any capacity, and they don’t have them incorporated into the story in a significant way is it an artistic choice or just laziness?

A long time ago

I started this blog almost 4 years ago after my graduate interview. At one point on the interview someone mentioned how important it was to write and that writing everyday can help improve your writing. (write write write, oh did I mention write?) So I did. For the last year (quarter?) of my undergraduate degree, I wrote something like 250 words everyday. It wasn't very organized, or good, and expressed opinions that I'm not sure I'd agree with today but I was younger and less aware and I'm not going to remove them because it's important to know where you came from.

Anyways, I'm going to start this blog up again because I've been finding myself attracted to small-blog writing jobs related to my hobbies and academic interests and, therefore, I need more updated writing samples if I'm going to apply to them. Additionally, (which is my current favorite transition word) there are a lot of things circulating my head that are not academic (aka related to my thesis) or explicitly creative that I've been wanting to write about. So this will be where I'm going to put those poorly constructed thoughts. I have also been bugging people about starting a blog but clearly not fully committed to the idea. So we'll start here, see what happens, and then maybe invest in something more substantial later on.

The current eventual plan is to have 2-3 blogs related on a central site. Those blogs will be 1) About my current research 2) A side project that I refer to as my "back-up" thesis 3) hobby/review material. These may intersect and cross over etc but those would be the three main topics of discussion. My next post will be a short blog I wrote for an application to Panels.