If the first half of a movie was about Gordon or Lucius and in the third act they introduce Batman to reveal that they were just doing what Batman told them to do, it would kinda deflate the trajectory of the movie. The fundamental problem is that Bane was interesting (even if in hindsight he wasn't anywhere close to Joker or Ra's), but Talia wasn't, and it's hard to see the twist as anything other than sacrificing the development of a good character to try and salvage a bad one. Maybe if Catwoman wasn't in the movie and it focused more heavily on the Bruce/Talia relationship it would've had more weight.
In any case, I don't think continuing the discussion of Batman movies in the Arrow thread is a good idea.
The actual relationship between Talia and Bruce is immaterial, since the point of interest in their connection is more how Talia is a dark version of Bruce in his most complete state. And the best parts of Bane, his badassery and his accomplishments, are still intact. He has lost nothing in terms of formidable in the story. Your comment on Gordon or Lucius doesn't mesh because they DO just do what Batman tells them. They're not any less good characters for it. Perhaps I can agree it throws the pacing off a bit, since we'd essentially switch protagonists, but they'd as badass as they would be otherwise, since they're doing the same actions for the same reasons.
We clearly fundamentally disagree, but yeah, I'll stop the batman discussion there and we should get back to Arrow Batman.
....you know, I just thought of something. If Arrow is cribbing all the villains from Batman, does this mean Flash is going to go up against Lex Luthor, Brainiac and Darkseid?
Bullfucking shit.
Female characters are held to a double standard.
A bad male character is just "bad" and we accept that.
A bad female character is nearly always considered worse, whether it's subconscious or conscious.
Right, okay, look to clarify what I mean, when I say this show has bad female characters, what I mean is more that it has sexist gender roles, and I use female characters to demonstrate those gender roles that are bad. But that's a mouthful. Even shortening it to "This show writes it's female characters badly" is clunky.
When people say 'bad female characters', it's almost always in reference to how personally distasteful they find them. God, how many posts I read about people calling Skylar a bad female character just because she's 'annoying' to them, but ignoring the similar things other male characters do, or what her character adds to the narrative. "She's annoying" is reductionist arguments that rarely ever add anything to the discussion. Annoyance is not something you shouldn't feel, obviously. I mean, I am annoyed by various characters in arrow, but I try not to center my criticisms at my personal displeasure at them and more at how they harm the narrative they are within.
And what your talking about, it does have merit. I took a rhetoric's class that examined how sexism operates in language. What your talking about is how, in the language, Men are the default. Male is the root word, while FEmale is an alteration to indicate gender. Similarly, Man is the root, WOman has to have a prefix. Mankind is a word that makes perfect sense to describe all people, but Womankind describes only women. So yes, there are a lot of subconcious factors working whenever we talk about sexism because it's so inherent that we cannot even speak it without making arbitrary distinctions that put women in a secondary position, including this very sentence.
But I try to make it a point to avoid that, and talk about gender issues in all shows I deem worth talking about at all, because it's something I want to help fix. Superhero shows like this are particularly important to discuss because they were built on the male power fantasy, which is built on males saving females to win their affection through their power. But I don't want superheroes to be a male power fantasy but a power fantasy for everyone, so placing extra emphasis on writing female characters in an empowering way is important to me. Because you're right. People see a bad male character, but they don't have him be representative of anyhting but himself. But people see a bad female character, and they are a bad FEMALE character, representative of women as a whole. And the ways in which they are bad are often because tropes that are prominantly used for female characters, like the damsel in distress, are disempowering. So, the solution as I see it is to level the playing field, empower female characters and avoid things like DID or atleast have it happen in the same frequency to men as it does to women. If they are disliked, then atleast they won't be disliked on the basis of gender. That is the key to having people think of female characters as just characters, and that's what I want to have happen.
