A Largely Incoherent Rant about Gender in Fantasy Parodies

(A.K.A. Me ranting about Your Highness, based on a couple of commercials.)

I was just watching television (shock, I know!) and I caught one of the trailers for "Your Highness" and it reminds me of something that really irritates me about high fantasy parodies.

Invariably, you have male lead characters who are doofuses or dicks, largely incompetent, and so on. And then you have the girl, who is the most competent/kickass of the bunch.

And that irrationally bothers me.

I get that this might seem strange to some people, as I am a feminist and I prefer my female characters competent in general. This is a special situation though. What bothers me here, about scenes like when the macho guys posture about how they can protect Natalie Portman and she promptly beats them up, is what I like to call Lysistrata humor.

See, Lysistrata's an old greek comedy where a woman convinces all of the women of Greece to withhold sex in an attempt to force the men to find a peaceful solution to the Peloponnesian War. This leads of course to a battle of the sexist. The key element though, the core joke, doesn't really come across to modern Americans though, unless you realize that in Ancient Greece, women were considered the baser sex. For modern Americans, the joke goes the opposite way. (Would the 40-Year Old Virgin have been as funny if said virgin had been a woman? Or any movie where the guy makes a bet to forgo sex for any specific period of time.)

So when I reference Lysistrata, I'm basically referring to the sort of parody where the joke involves a set-up that's considered really unlikely by modern wisdom/stereotype. We get the opposite of what we're expecting. (Also, it's me being incredibly pretentious, of course, but I think that's kind of expected by now. :-))

And that's the inherent joke in these sorts of parody movies (or tv shows: see Krod Mandoon as a recent example.) You expect heroes on serious or important quests to appreciate the gravity of the situation. You expect them to be good at what they do, reasonably clever, and of a fairly altruistic bent. So, naturally, in these parodies, you have heroes that are clumsy, inadequate, stupid, think only with their penises, self-absorbed, sociopathic, oblivious and so on and so forth.

But what do we have for the heroine? She's competent. Is the fact that the woman is actually competent supposed to be the joke?

(I'll spare a moment to acknowledge that Krod Mandoon also played up Annika's "promiscuous pagan" thing. But even then, the show made more of the joke about Krod's insecurity and inability to deal with this trait. Meanwhile, Annika continued to be regularly the most intelligent/competent person on the team)

Oh, they do get to be bitchy at least. But even then, that's not so much a flaw as it is pretty understandable when you're dealing with a group of idiots. And it never gets in the way of the heroes following her around like drooling lust-buckets.

I don't know if I even really have a point to this rant. Maybe I just want to see something where the token girl gets to be as stupid, lazy, incompetent and reckless as the men around her. Like in Hot Fuzz, where no one was really incompetent, but Doris was pretty much the same level of complacent, inappropriate, and y'know FUNNY as the two Andys. Or, say, it's Always Funny in Philadelphia. It's not really to my taste, but it got a lot more fun when they finally decided to write Dee as being as stupid, self-absorbed and sociopathic as the rest of the gang. (I realize those two examples aren't from fantasy, but that's honestly because off the top of my head, I can't think of a fantasy comedic female character that fits! Except maybe in anime, and you know how much it crushes my soul to admit that. :-P)

Or even better than letting the token female be involved what if there were TWO girls in the group? Or even three? Notice how that never tends to happen? Then even if one had to be the token competent person (which, okay, I can see the need for to keep the other idiots from getting killed), we'd have another girl character who'd get to be part of the joke?

Then it'd seem less like the idea of a competent female character in fantasy IS the joke.

Now, as a disclaimer, this rant is sparked by a couple of trailers. It is possible that my conclusions are erroneous. Maybe the movie is not the sort of "look! Incompetent Heroes!" fantasy parody I think it'll be. Maybe the chick will actually be not nearly as awesome/competent/smart as she thinks she is and therefore be part of the joke. (I would be very amused by a Zapp Brannigan style female character, actually. Or even a Hal Jordan one.) But the commercials at least fit a trend that's annoyed me for a long time.