In our media there’s so many love stories about average (or even socially below-average) men winning the affection of fantastical women. There’s unfathomably beautiful, pristine elven women of LOTR (Arwen, Tauriel) falling for unwashed human/dwarven dudes (Aragorn, Kili), and yet consider the fact that girls have crushed on Legolas for over a decade, and the not-romance he got in Hobbit was centered on an incredible elven woman who had no interest in him. We had a gorgeous elf king - clearly designed with women audiences in mind - tormented over his beautiful lost elven queen, a woman who’s not even on screen and is thus completely beyond the female audience’s ability to identify with.
We have movies out right now like HER where nerdy, socially awkward dudes win the love of female A.I.
Starlord and Gammora.
What’s his name and Wonder Woman.
We have movies where women learn to love beasts; to look past a monstrous visage to love the men underneath.
And I’m not disparaging some of those stories. I love a good gothic romance where a heroine falls for a monster man. I can appreciate men wanting to enjoy the fantasy of an incredible woman falling for someone like them.
But what we don’t have much of are stories where average women win the love of fantastical men. We don’t have stories about elf kings or princes or lords falling head over heels for freckle-faced, awkward human women, who decide to risk that unbearable pain of loss to love their mortals. We don’t have handsome robots falling in desperately in love with an average lady. We don’t have magical warlocks or sorcerers or genies deciding to live the life of a house-husband for some hardworking human woman.
The only exception to that rule (outside of video games) seems to be the movies Thor and freaking George Of The Jungle (and I’m not sure how much that one counts?). And Thor was mostly from the perspective of Thor himself, even if the Jane plotline was geared towards women. We’d also have to count the more questionable examples of Twilight and 50 Shades. Despite their serious issues, when considered in this light, it’s not surprising that they took female audiences by storm.
The Bioware video games are really the only mainstream pop culturally significant piece of media putting out stories like what I mean, tbh.
Ultimately though, outside of those few exceptions, the message that this sends is that incredibly desirable, interesting women can often fall desperately in love with men who almost any man can identify with, but a regular woman is not worth the same depth of passion, cannot even imagine herself in that kind of fantasy outside of romance novels that have been labeled unrealistic trash by nature. This is multiplied tenfold when it comes to women of color.
Even when it does happen, there’s often some element that renders it invalid. The heroine is being manipulated by a fantastical man with bad intentions, he’s hiding some dark secret, he has some irredeemable quality that renders him unappealing, he never really loved her in the first place/he’s a womanizer, or she decides she loves her “”“beta””” male friend more. The list goes on.
I feel like the unfortunate ones like Twilight and 50 Shades will start to fade from pop cultural consciousness when much more of this type of media starts to become more prominent.
There’s also the trope of the woman who insists (sometimes ad nauseum) that she’s average, and is told/reader is told repeatedly by the hot guy that she’s ACTUALLY GORGEOUS and she just doesn’t know it. I call it the One Direction trope. Like any woman on Gd’s green earth hasn’t analysed her physical features down to the molecular level since puberty hit. WE KNOW, DICKS.
(via dontyoudarestiles)
