As for the age of the trope, I think there's another sub-thread that gets into that... hrm, I think in the comments with Ravenbell. There was a trend growing in Hollywood in the 90s to show more truly strong female characters -- from the Alien trilogy to T2 to Buffy, and so on -- and then suddenly we hit the aughts and there's freaking nothing. Japanese anime seems to have taken a parallel route, and my theory (purely speculation and of no scientific basis at all) is that this is tied to the economic hits both countries took in the early part of the new millennium: when things get tough, financially, companies get conservative, and that means scaling back on the transgressive stories and falling back on the old stand-bys of sexism and racism and all that jazz. There are outliers -- there always are -- but in general, the mid to late 90s were positively bastions of feminist storytelling compared to what's out there today.
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Date: 27 Sep 2010 08:21 pm (UTC)As for the age of the trope, I think there's another sub-thread that gets into that... hrm, I think in the comments with Ravenbell. There was a trend growing in Hollywood in the 90s to show more truly strong female characters -- from the Alien trilogy to T2 to Buffy, and so on -- and then suddenly we hit the aughts and there's freaking nothing. Japanese anime seems to have taken a parallel route, and my theory (purely speculation and of no scientific basis at all) is that this is tied to the economic hits both countries took in the early part of the new millennium: when things get tough, financially, companies get conservative, and that means scaling back on the transgressive stories and falling back on the old stand-bys of sexism and racism and all that jazz. There are outliers -- there always are -- but in general, the mid to late 90s were positively bastions of feminist storytelling compared to what's out there today.