I agree that it was a sweet movie, and overall I enjoyed watching it. The above critique is a lot harsher than my overall impression. But when I heard that Pixar was making their first movie with a female lead, I expected a lot out of them and thought they were going to try for something really exceptional in both character and message, and it ended up undershooting my expectations on those counts.
I can sympathize with the extent to which simply having competent important female characters with relatable goals is a huge step forward for a lot of works. Ironically, I don’t think I really grasped how frustrating the lack of them must be until I started encountering works which are supposed to be some sort of wish fulfillment for guys. There are numerous anime and manga, particularly harem series, which are full of female characters graced with various flavors of awesomeness, without any significant male protagonists other than the lead who’s a total loser, and I find it infuriating when the closest thing I have to a proxy in the story is such a lousy and overshadowed character. It wasn’t until I started encountering works like those that it hit me how painful it must be to be hard pressed to find stories that aren’t like that on some level.
One thing that disappointed me about this whole story was that it was the one and only Pixar movie that was set in the past. Pixar has always been about sci fi, not fantasy, and its works have been set in contemporary America (with Magic Realism), alternate universes, or the future. Did “female protagonist” pattern-match so strongly with “rebellious medieval princess” that even Pixar didn’t do anything really unusual with it?
Even though I was happy Merida wasn’t rebelling because of love, it seems like they stuck with the standard old-fashioned feminist story of resisting an arranged marriage, when they could have avoided all of that in a work set in the present or the future, when a woman would have more scope to really be brave.
All in all, it seems like their father-son movie was a lot stronger than their mother-daughter movie.
I don’t think “This Loser Is You” is the right trope for that. Actually, I don’t think TV Tropes has the right trope for that; as best I can tell, harem protagonists are the way they are not because they’re supposed to stand for the audience in a representative sort of way but because they’re designed as a receptacle for the audience to pour their various insecurities into. They can display negative traits, because that’s assumed to make them more sympathetic to viewers that share them. But they can’t display negative traits strong enough to be grounds for actual condemnation, or to define their characters unambiguously; you’ll never see Homer Simpson as a harem lead. And they can’t show positive traits except for a vague agreeableness and whatever supernatural powers the plot requires, because that breaks the pathos. Yes, Tenchi Muyo, that’s you I’m looking at.
More succinctly, we’re all familiar with sex objects, right? Harem anime protagonists are sympathy objects.
I agree that This Loser Is You isn’t quite the right trope. There’s a more recent launch, Loser Protagonist, which doesn’t quite describe it either, but uses the same name as I did when I tried to put the trope which I thought accurately described it through the YKTTW ages ago.
If I understand what you mean by “sympathy objects,” I think we have the same idea in mind. I tend to think of them as Lowest Common Denominator Protagonists, because they lack any sort of virtue or achievement that would alienate them from the most insecure or insipid audience members.
I agree that it was a sweet movie, and overall I enjoyed watching it. The above critique is a lot harsher than my overall impression. But when I heard that Pixar was making their first movie with a female lead, I expected a lot out of them and thought they were going to try for something really exceptional in both character and message, and it ended up undershooting my expectations on those counts.
I can sympathize with the extent to which simply having competent important female characters with relatable goals is a huge step forward for a lot of works. Ironically, I don’t think I really grasped how frustrating the lack of them must be until I started encountering works which are supposed to be some sort of wish fulfillment for guys. There are numerous anime and manga, particularly harem series, which are full of female characters graced with various flavors of awesomeness, without any significant male protagonists other than the lead who’s a total loser, and I find it infuriating when the closest thing I have to a proxy in the story is such a lousy and overshadowed character. It wasn’t until I started encountering works like those that it hit me how painful it must be to be hard pressed to find stories that aren’t like that on some level.
One thing that disappointed me about this whole story was that it was the one and only Pixar movie that was set in the past. Pixar has always been about sci fi, not fantasy, and its works have been set in contemporary America (with Magic Realism), alternate universes, or the future. Did “female protagonist” pattern-match so strongly with “rebellious medieval princess” that even Pixar didn’t do anything really unusual with it?
Even though I was happy Merida wasn’t rebelling because of love, it seems like they stuck with the standard old-fashioned feminist story of resisting an arranged marriage, when they could have avoided all of that in a work set in the present or the future, when a woman would have more scope to really be brave.
All in all, it seems like their father-son movie was a lot stronger than their mother-daughter movie.
I don’t think “This Loser Is You” is the right trope for that. Actually, I don’t think TV Tropes has the right trope for that; as best I can tell, harem protagonists are the way they are not because they’re supposed to stand for the audience in a representative sort of way but because they’re designed as a receptacle for the audience to pour their various insecurities into. They can display negative traits, because that’s assumed to make them more sympathetic to viewers that share them. But they can’t display negative traits strong enough to be grounds for actual condemnation, or to define their characters unambiguously; you’ll never see Homer Simpson as a harem lead. And they can’t show positive traits except for a vague agreeableness and whatever supernatural powers the plot requires, because that breaks the pathos. Yes, Tenchi Muyo, that’s you I’m looking at.
More succinctly, we’re all familiar with sex objects, right? Harem anime protagonists are sympathy objects.
I agree that This Loser Is You isn’t quite the right trope. There’s a more recent launch, Loser Protagonist, which doesn’t quite describe it either, but uses the same name as I did when I tried to put the trope which I thought accurately described it through the YKTTW ages ago.
If I understand what you mean by “sympathy objects,” I think we have the same idea in mind. I tend to think of them as Lowest Common Denominator Protagonists, because they lack any sort of virtue or achievement that would alienate them from the most insecure or insipid audience members.