Whosoever Gets A Movie, If He Be Worthy

Today The Mary Sue posted the following article about an NPR interview discussing the lack of female protagonists in films. Not only are there not many to go around, but the industry stubbornly insists that female protagonists do not sell tickets, dismissing every success as a fluke and taking every failure as proof of what they already believed.

Sure, Katniss can hold her own with Harry and Batman and Merida wasn’t exactly a flop, but why listen to consumers? Admittedly, a bad female lead can get you some unflattering press, but I would love to see them stop blaming every failure on women not being viable leads and start blaming it on writers and filmmakers not writing good female leads.

Cover Me

Since Maureen Johnson’s coverflip book challenge thrust the gendered nature of book covers (particularly YA covers, but no genre is without sin) into the spotlight, there has been a great deal of discussion on the matter. Marketing books to women as though 51% of the global population were some niche market is bad enough, but, as I’ve said on this blog before, “girl covers” for books by women or featuring female protagonists tend to be both condescending and wholly unrelated to the book’s content.