Category Archives: Fantastic Fictional Females
TEi talks about his favorite female protagonists in gaming, anime, TV and movies, and why they have been so incredible.
Fantastic Fictional Females: Princess Peach
I hate Princess Peach. She’s a moron, she’s an archetypal damsel in distress – hell, she’s almost as outright insulting as Zelda. It’s kind of disheartening to know that Nintendo is still reliant on such an archaic cliche in a game series that doesn’t really boast much plot to begin with.
But…is it possible that she’s not all that bad? Perhaps. The answers lie in this week’s edition of Fantastic Fictional Females!
Fantastic Fictional Females: Toph Bei Fong [A:tLA Month part 2]
Let’s play a little game I like to call Find The Baddest Badass. I’m going to show you a bunch of characters from Avatar: the Last Airbender, and I want you to identify who the most badass of the lot is.
He has the look and attitude down, but something's missing.
As partial as I am to the Freedom Fighters, I don't think he's got this one (even if he can lift huge boulders over his head through brute strength alone).
Normally I wouldn't dare argue, buuut...
Hmm...he could be, except he's got self-control issues.
Oh man, if this had been more than a one-off gag...
*swoon*
The epitome of a badass, but still...
Okay, yeah, this is more like it.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Toph Bei Fong, the fourth human member of Team Avatar.
Fantastic Fictional Females: Katara [A:tLA Month part 1]
Sexism
[sek-siz-uh
m]–
noun
1.
attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles.
2.
discrimination or devaluation based on a person’s sex, as in restricted job opportunities; esp., such discrimination directed against women.
Sexism is sort of a weird thing to me. On the one hand, I love the word itself – very blunt and to the point, no beating around the bush, no wanton prefixes or suffixes. As an author, the concept is crucial; of the multiple characters I have conceived for both fanfiction and original fiction, over half of them are female, and I’ve known for many years now how to avoid devolving into sexism just because gender stereotypes have been so thoroughly ingrained into our culture. Yet, as a casual feminist, I love nothing more than seeing that word being refuted, and I’m thrilled to see that programming aimed at younger audiences is starting to take steps to show that women are more than capable of evolving beyond gender roles. Hell, my second Fantastic Fictional Female articles covered Sam Puckett from Nickelodeon’s still-running tween sitcom, iCarly, which speaks volumes for the show’s writers – not to mention Nickelodeon’s capacity for having shows featuring characters like Sam.
Still, as defiant as some female characters get in the face of sexism, I have yet to encounter one who battles the concept so directly as Katara*, one of the main protagonists from Avatar: the Last Airbender.
As I mentioned in my preface for Avatar Month, Katara and her brother Sokka are members of the Southern Water Tribe, a culture of Inuits that live in the south pole. Decimated by the Fire Nation early on in the war, the once-great city has been reduced to a meager village of senior citizens and children. All of the men in the Southern Water Tribe left to fight in the war two years prior to the show’s start; Hakoda, the de facto chieftain of the Southern Water Tribe and father to Katara and Sokka, left Sokka in charge of defending the village, while Katara was relegated to the usual duties of the tribe’s women: cooking meals, caring for the children, and washing and mending clothes.
Ouch.
"Whatchoo say about my hair loopies?"
Now, to be fair, Sokka and Katara’s duties, though segregated by gender, are portrayed as equally important; being the two oldest, non-infirm members of the tribe grants both enormous responsibility. Yes, the gender stereotypes do suck, but it’s established very early on – in the first scene of the show – that it’s made up for Katara’s eagerness to learn Waterbending and never say die attitude, and Sokka being kind of a putz. Right in this first scene, Katara faces her first challenge against sexism and spends literally the entire first season combating it, from sources as grand as a master Waterbender, to as close to home as Sokka himself. That last part in particular is the source of a unique dynamic that results in both characters outgrowing traditional thinking when it comes to gender roles, but it’s here you first learn that Katara does not like being forced into those roles. Take this early piece of dialog for example, following the two becoming stranded on the ice floes:
Sokka: I knew I should have left you home! Leave it to a girl to screw things up.
Katara: …You are the most sexist, immature, nut-brained – I’m embarrassed to be related to you! Ever since Mom died, I’ve been doing all the work around camp while you’ve been off playing soldier!
Sokka: Uh…Katara?
[As Katara tears Sokka a new one, the water behind her begins to heave every time she throws her arms back or down in anger.]
Katara: I even wash all the clothes! Have you ever smelled your dirty socks? Let me tell you: NOT PLEASANT!
[The water thrashes around even more, and part of an iceberg behind her splits. Katara is none the wiser, but Sokka can see just what his ignorance has wrought.]
Sokka: Katara! Settle down!
Katara: No! That’s it! I’m done helping you! From now on, you’re on your OWN!
Following immediately after Katara’s outburst, a large spray of water erupts from behind her; the iceberg splits and shatters, chunks of ice falling into the ocean, the resulting waves sending both her and Sokka careening away on their ice floe. As Katara marvels at her unintentional Waterbending, a bright, glowing light springs to life beneath the two Water Tribe siblings, eventually yielding a strange, spherical iceberg – the iceberg, containing the young Airbender, Aang, and his pet Sky Bison, Appa.
"I'm Katara. This is Sokka, my sexist, immature, nut-brained brother."
Throughout the remainder of the two-parter series premier, Katara expresses a desire to learn how to fight via Waterbending to the young Air Nomad, allowing the viewer to gain a solid grasp on the character, her abilities as they stand, and what she wants to do with those abilities. Though just a novice, what with no other Waterbenders remaining in the South Pole, let alone a master who could take her under his or her wing, Katara remains resolute; when the exiled Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation abducts Aang, Katara intends to chase after him in order to rescue her newfound friend regardless of combative skill. While this doesn’t necessarily seem like a smart idea…okay, it isn’t a smart idea, as Katara can barely Waterbend, Sokka has proven himself to be an incompetent warrior, and their only secret weapon – Appa – was just introduced to them earlier that day, but the point is that it speaks volumes about both Katara’s loyalty, and her feelings of personal responsibility. Two fast-paced action sequences later, Aang has been rescued and he, Katara and Sokka fly away on Appa’s back, making towards the North Pole, their adventure finally, truly begun.
(An interesting note to make is the parallel between Katara and Sokka’s development when it comes to sexism and gender roles, particularly in an early episode of the season. The two and Aang visit Kyoshi Island, where they’re captured by the aptly-named Kyoshi Warriors, a group of young women who were trained to fight and defend their home, which has stayed neutral in the war with the Fire Nation. While Sokka gives Katara grief about the duty of a girl (sewing, preparing food, et cetera – to which Katara refuses to finish stitching up a hole in Sokka’s pants by throwing them in his face) in the opening scene of the episode, the rest focuses its sexist tension on Sokka. The episode makes very poignant the fact that gender roles can be redefined, that the Kyoshi Warriors are both warriors and girls, even at the sacrifice of Sokka’s pride as a male warrior. Sokka spends most of the episode learning to deprogram himself from his perception of gender roles thanks to Suki, the leader of the Kyoshi Warriors, and the entire thing comes to a head at the end of the episode. The pair defend Kyoshi Island when it comes under attack from the Fire Nation, Zuko having learned that Aang has spent a prolonged amount of time there; when Aang, Katara and Sokka are forced to abandon the island mid-battle, Sokka laments treating Suki like a girl, when he should have treated her like a warrior; in turn, Suki responds that she’s both before giving Sokka a peck on the cheek. While this episode does little in regards to Katara directly, this counter-sexism supports her as the character continues to outgrow the stereotypes she’s been raised under.)
Although Sokka’s contribution to the problem is brief, rarely coming up following the above episode, Katara still takes grief from the people she comes across, particularly members of the Fire Nation’s military branches. Zuko at one point even attempts to hold Katara hostage, collaborating with some pirates from whom Katara had stolen a Waterbending scroll. He…actually succeeds, and uses her as leverage against Aang and Sokka, but she gives him lip the entire time and actually brings him down a peg in front the pirates. There are other fleeting instances, and for the most part, her growth in this aspect is subtle; we’ve seen as she goes from barely being able to Waterbend to becoming very proficient and more than able to defend herself in a fight, but it really all comes to a head in the episode The Waterbending Master, as Katara faces her greatest challenge yet: the entire culture of the Northern Water Tribe.
When the moon hits your eye like a big freakin' koi, that's amore...
She, Aang and Sokka, after foiling the Fire Nation and saving whatever villages they can along the way, successfully make it to the North Pole. A greater bastion against the Fire Nation than their southern cousins, the Northern Water Tribe is a full, balls-to-the-wall city, including fantastic, swirling architecture carved from ice and whale bone, and Venice-styled canals, complete with gondolas and everything. However, because they’re from a fellow Water Tribe, and because they’re a unique traveling company (what with Aang being the Avatar and all that), the three friends are greeted with honor, a feast and a ceremony. While Katara and Sokka are off mingling, Aang is introduced to his Waterbending instructor, the greatest master in the North Pole: a surly, traditionalist old man named Pakku. Aang makes passing mention about bringing a friend to his Waterbending classes, to which Pakku begrudgingly concedes…but things go sour when Aang arrives the next day with Katara in tow.
Pakku is quick to tell Katara to leave; it turns out that the same gender roles assigned by the Southern Water Tribe are enforced tenfold up north, and that female Waterbenders are forbidden to learn how to fight. Katara, though initially defiant, backs off when she realizes that Aang learning how to Waterbend was more important than her pride, and the two conspire for Aang to teach her what he’d learned later that night. Instead, she’s sent to learn the healing arts from a female teacher; exhibited earlier in the series, we learned that Waterbenders have the ability to heal by applying water to injured parts of the body and repairing the damage, and Katara is taught how to take advantage of that ability.
That night, Aang and Katara meet to follow through with their earlier plans; it’s spoiled, however, when Pakku catches them and subsequently expels Aang for insulting his teachings and culture. The following day, the two and Sokka attempt to appeal to Pakku and Arnook, the chieftain; Arnook claims he can’t force Pakku to take Aang back, to which Pakku responds he will if Katara will apologize for her behavior. Katara looks about ready to swallow her pride once more, but decides that enough is enough; she calls Pakku out knowing that she’s far outmatched, challenging him to a fight – even going so far as saying she’ll “be outside if you’re man enough to face me.”
"My balls are too big for me to rap in that voice."
Now – it’s here that I would go into detail, squeeing about how awesome Katara is in her defiance and the balls it takes to stand up to an entire culture’s tradition like this, but honestly, I couldn’t do it any justice. As a firm believer in the show-not-tell rule of storywriting (even though this is article doesn’t constitute as a story), I’ll post the clip straight out of the show. This way you can experience both the spine-tingling chill of Katara’s epicness, as well as one of the best fight scenes in the entire show. Now, Viacom has all sorts of issues when it comes to people posting things from Nickelodeon on YouTube; I figured it’s worth a shot, but if the video gets removed, please leave me a comment so I can find somewhere else to upload it. Also, pardon the movie’s title and description. >_> [Apparently the video won't work here, since I've set it to "only people with the URL can see this" mode to further avoid the video being removed. So instead I've just posted the URL itself, and it ought to work now. If not, let me know. <3 ]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPEkIHO3OK8
Dayumn.
That battle marks the end of Katara’s long battle against sexism as Pakku decides, “to hell with tradition,” and accepts Katara as his student. Within a few episodes, her already great skill as a Waterbender improves to the point where, when they depart at the beginning of the following season, Pakku declares that Katara is officially a Waterbending master.
Katara spends most of the series being the upbeat optimist of the group. She’s the middle ground between Aang’s childishness and Sokka’s realism and sarcasm, but she has her limits despite her drive and attitude. She’ll act as the spokesperson of the group, often convincing the people they’re trying to save that the Avatar has returned from his century-long absence and that not all is bleak. One defining moment for the character is in the episode Imprisoned, where she has herself arrested by the Fire Nation so she can find an Earthbender boy who had likewise been arrested because of Katara’s actions. The prison is an oil rig stationed in the ocean far from the coast, as to keep Earthbenders from being able to manipulate their element; several dozen Earthbenders are kept there, despondent and broken by the fact that their hands are tied. It’s here that Katara delivers her infamous Hope Speech in an attempt to rally the Earthbenders:
“Earthbenders! You don’t know me, but I know of you. Every child in my Water Tribe village was rocked to sleep with stories of the brave Earth Kingdom, and the courageous Earthbenders who guard its borders. Some of you may think that the Fire Nation has made you powerless. Yes, they have taken away your ability to Bend, but they can’t take away your courage, and it is your courage they should truly fear, because it runs deeper than any mine you’ve been forced to dig, any ocean that keeps you far from home. It is the strength of your hearts that make you who you are. Hearts that will remain unbroken when all rock and stone has eroded away. The time to fight back is now! I can tell you that the Avatar has returned! So remember your courage, Earthbenders! Let us fight for our freedom!”
"Give me liberty...or a bran muffin!"
Although Katara’s speech doesn’t work at first – the Earthbenders have given up all hope of escape and are doing what they can to survive – you can see the impact it left with them right away, and it comes to fruition later in the episode. Aang and Sokka help Katara provide the Earthbenders with coal, which they could use to Bend with; while the Earthbenders are once more reluctant, they finally rally and fight against their jailers, stealing Fire Nation boats to return to the mainland. (This episode, by the way, features the voice talents of George Takei and Blu Mankuma. Oh man, I would turn straight just to turn gay again for these guys. Sulu could steer my Enterprise any day of the week.)
Another noteworthy episode focuses on Katara as she tends to a Fire Nation village stationed on top of a polluted river; Sokka, who is doing his best to keep the team on a tight schedule, insists that they need to move on even though the people of the village are infirm and starving at the hands of their own military. Though not the overall smartest thing to do, Katara’s pure-heartedness wins out as she disguises herself as a local legend, the Painted Lady, and literally moonlights to the village so she can use her Waterbending to heal them, and to provide them with better food than the mutated, grunge-choked river life they’re currently sustained on. She and Aang conspire to destroy the Fire Nation factory polluting the river, but upon their return, Sokka has wised up to their good-natured antics, and insists they leave, which Katara concedes too hesitantly. Before they can take off, though, the men and women stationed in the factory attack the riverbound village under the assumption that they’re responsible for the damage; it’s here that Katara and the others launch a defensive, sinking the Fire Nation and actually staying long enough to clean up the river for the sake of the village. This isn’t necessarily the best idea in the world, but we had already learned from the second episode that Katara is willing to set aside common sense in order to make a more morally-correct choice.
Throughout the remainder of the series, Katara continues to grow; now fully confident in herself and her abilities as a Bender, she develops a more maternal side for those in her traveling party, even if she’s prone to butting heads with them. She’s got a sharp tongue, a strong will, and isn’t afraid to speak her mind (as already exemplified), and becomes a progressively stronger Bender as time progresses. She’s actually pretty inventive; she comes up with the idea to use sweat as a source for Waterbending when stripped of her waterskin (which is excessively incredibly disgusting, but points for cleverness), and is quick to adapt to new, hidden techniques of Waterbending, including pulling water from plants or the air itself, and the ability to Bloodbend, which is…well, it is what it sounds like, and it’s just as gruesome.
All the while, Katara’s not some one-track-minded badass; much like Suki, she’s both a warrior and a girl, so she’s prone to feeling all the things you could expect from a teenager. She feels enraged at being brushed off by Pakku and joyful for becoming his student after their hard-fought battle; she feels indignant when other members of the party call her out for being overbearing (because she can get overbearing); she crushes on a few notable young men the show throws her way; she feels mistrustful when Zuko attempts to join the group after spending the entire first season trying to hunt them down and capture Aang; she feels vengeful and furious when hunting down the man that murdered her mother in cold blood. Katara makes it well known that you don’t fuck with her, especially psychologically. She’s only very rarely broken, and only when she’s forced to go into the darkest recesses of her mind, to do what she knows is wrong.
She can dish it out just as well as she can take it.
That said, she isn’t without her weak points. Katara’s largest flaw is her self-righteousness; she holds the most phenomenal grudges, and while few of them aren’t completely unfounded, she’ll sometimes let her emotions get in the way of the goal she and the rest of the team are trying to accomplish. She spends most of the last half of the third season being completely unreasonable to Zuko following his reform, to the point of being overzealous; granted, she does have a valid reason to be mistrustful of him (again, see the whole “spending a season chasing you down” thing), but there’s a difference between being cautious and going out of your way to take potshots at the only person who could teach Aang Firebending.
The same thing happens between her and Jet, the leader of a band of guerrilla-styled war orphans called the Freedom Fighters; Jet, who has a pathological hatred for the Fire Nation (as they murdered his parents when he was eight), manipulated Katara with his natural charisma and good looks, charming her into helping him wipe out a town full of civilians that happened to support the Fire Nation. When Jet returns in the second season, Katara is still bitter about her involvement in his plans, and refuses to believe he was capable of reform (I’m sensing a pattern here); the pair, alongside the rest of Team Avatar and two of Jet’s Freedom Fighters, become entangled with a dystopian conspiracy in which Appa had been kidnapped earlier in the season. Jet dies saving Appa, and we learn in the last leg of the series that his sacrifice meant very little to her (and Aang, which is kind of disappointing).
She and Toph are prone to going at each other too; Katara’s nurturing, ‘positive reinforcement’ attitude when it comes to everybody in the traveling party clashes with Toph’s headstrong, oftentimes reckless attitude. This has on one occasion proved to be outright detrimental to the group; shortly after Toph joins the group, she and Katara begin to butt heads about sharing the duties necessary in a traveling party versus only carrying one’s own weight. Sleep-deprived due to being pursued by the Fire Nation, the tension peaks when Toph (correctly) blames Appa for leaving a trail of shed fur. The result is Aang of all people snapping and driving Toph away, and though Katara immediately identifies that they’ve made a mistake, she acknowledges the fact that she was the source of the tension to begin with, despite being indignant beforehand. The two would get along pretty well for most of the season, but they would occasionally lapse into confrontation for one reason or another. (Granted, this is very much a bipartisan effort…)
The most shocking, though, is when Katara plays the self-righteous card on her own father, Hakoda – you know, one of the men from the Southern Water Tribe that went out to fight in the war. Katara, feeling abandoned by Hakoda, blames her father for most of the terrible things that have happened to her ever since he’d left. Even though I’ve never had any direct or indirect involvement with themilitary, I can tell you that this is a selfish, bratty thing to do, and it’s one of the few moments of Katara exhibiting a negative character flaw that feels forced.
I COULD make a joke about this, but they're both minors and I wouldn't be able to walk away feeling like a decent human being.
If I had to sum up Katara in one word, it would be “change.” She goes from a well-meaning but underpowered girl to a strong-willed young woman who is both an expert Bender and influential to those she meets, changing their lives for better or worse. She helps Jet and Zuko redeem themselves (for what both redemptions wind up meaning to her); she helps Aang realize his destiny as the Avatar, even if it means making hard decisions; she makes one grumpy old Waterbender change his perspective on gender roles so deeply ingrained in a sexist society that she could even revolutionize the way those people live, spurning female Waterbenders to become warriors and male Waterbenders to become healers. While she isn’t my favorite character in the show, she leaves a lasting impact as both a role-model and a fantastic example of a strong female character in a show full of strong female characters.
- – -
* Okay, yeah, you could argue that it’s been done before, and you’d likely be right. Disney’s Mulan is a great example of a girl confronting sexism head-on (even if the movie itself was otherwise unremarkable…well, this song was pretty awesome (and no the irony is not lost on me)), and it was set in no more perfect an age than ancient China, where male dominance raged at its most rampant.
- – -
All images in this post were captured and are hosted on Avatar Spirit. They’re a pretty good website with a decent amount of A:tLA resources and a thorough screenshot database. Just…don’t go to the forums. They have overbearing censorship issues. >_>
- – -
Super-extra special thanks to the LiveJournal user keithmex17 for providing the video clip of Katara vs. Pakku! Love ya, broseph. <3
- – -
After writing all of this, I would once more like to express my hatred for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. As I mentioned in my post-movie rant, TLA‘s Katara served as the movie’s narrator and nothing more; we’re told that she grows and changes, but we never actually see it, so we only have the narrative’s word to go by. That defeats the point of a visual medium; it’s even more imperative to follow the show-don’t-tell rule because you can actually visually show these things, and just telling us they happened makes the viewer think the screenwriters are just making shit up. TLA‘s Katara is never confronted with sexism – hell, Pakku is portrayed as nice, if not vague and vapid. M. Night even saw fit to give Katara’s Hope Speech to Aang, all the while delivering a back-handed slap to the Earthbenders the Fire Nation was holding prison in a canyon. You know, made of rock. And stone. And while normally I’d avoid this, I want everybody to see just how bad M. Night is at writing character, dialog and action. Ladies and mentlegen, run for your life as you witness The Last Airbender‘s version of the Katara vs. Pakku fight.
Are your eyes and ears done bleeding? Okay. Cool. Sorry to have done that to you.
- – -
Look for part 2 of Avatar Month next weekish, when we take a look at the next main female protagonist, Toph Bei Fong…time permitting, at least.
Avatar: The Last Airbender Month Prologue
Let’s face it: Nickelodeon was as deeply ingrained in our childhoods as Transformers and Ninja Turtles.
Oh, don’t bother denying it, either; there wasn’t any Kids WB or Cartoon Network at the time (well, at least when I was but a wee TEi), and while we could occasionally find kid shows on a random channel, only Nickelodeon promised us 100% kid shows all the goddamn time. Everybody watched Nickelodeon, even if you didn’t have cable TV; you’d go over to a friend’s house, even spend the night, just to catch the latest episode of Fire Drill or Nick Arcade. Maybe this is just me dating myself, but that was the shit you did.
And Nickelodeon covered it all, too. Game shows for kids (Double Dare, Wild & Crazy Kids), sports shows for kids (GUTS, Legends of the Hidden Temple), sitcoms for kids (Clarissa Explains it All, Salute Your Shorts), hell, even Saturday Night Live-styled comedy shows for kids (You Can’t Do That On Television, All That). And yeah, those were all well and good – hell, some of them are still fondly remembered even to this day (All That, last I checked, was still on the air, albeit whitewashed and not funny), prolific in their own ways. Some were even coveted – if you had SNICK (Nickelodeon’s Saturday night block), you were the envy of your entire class. The real draw, though, was the cartoons.
In the Dark Ages (or the mid-late 1980′s, before Transformers and Ninja Turtles hit the scene), Nickelodeon would fill its animated line-up with licensed cartoons outsourced from Europe, such as Danger Mouse and Count Duckula. Now, I’m not going to talk smack about either of these (because they were fucking awesome), but the point is that Nickelodeon’s cartoons just weren’t prolific, as they tend to be nowadays. In the early 90′s, though, Nickelodeon finally took the hint; they realized that if they wanted to rake in the big bucks, it was time to start giving kids the one thing they wanted most, while securing all of the copyrights to make sure nobody else made any money off them. The idea was to keep these cartoons in-house (though a few would eventually be picked up by other companies and channels).
You could say "this was all we had," but really, we didn't care. It was awesome!
Thus, the concept of NickToons was born. Nickelodeon promoted the shit out of the block as it neared completion, and all us kids were quivering in our seats, waiting for the channel aimed specifically at kids to deliver. The day those first three NickToons hit the air – Sunday, August 11th, 1991 – was like bliss for us (and would undoubtedly make our parents pull their hair out)…but, we were also very stupid kids at the time (well, at least I was), so in retrospect those three NickToons were actually kind of poopy.
I’ll be honest: as much as the idea of Nickelodeon making cartoons made us fidget with anticipation, they really didn’t take a whole lot of risks with their first three NickToons…okay, well, two of the first three. The first of the line-up was Doug, a stylized show with a completely a capella soundtrack; while the art team seemed hell-bent on utilizing their full color palette in character design (what with characters having skin color ranging from “real-world white guy” to green and blue and purple and every other color on the color wheel), the show suffers from being ungodfully boring. Starring the titular character, Doug Funnie, the entire show’s premise was the typical Dreamer Outcast In School as he dealt with all sorts of socially crippling misadventures, including dealing with a greaser-styled bully and trying to find the courage to express his love to The Most Perfect Girl in School. It’s a shame that the show was so trite, because I really did enjoy the visuals and music. The second was Rugrats, a kid-friendly version of Look Who’s Talking…and that’s about as interesting as you’d figure it would be. Lastly is The Ren & Stimpy Show, which was…well, it was The Ren & Stimpy Show. Again starring titular characters Ren Höek and Stimpson J. Cat, Ren & Stimpy was like drinking Four Loko laced with acid (as if the stuff wasn’t deadly enough). This is the one that “dared to dream,” so to speak, thanks to the animation studio, Spumco; while Rugrats and Doug would be sly on occasion and slip in more adult-oriented humor (the last names of the vice principal and never-seen principal of Doug’s school, for example, were Bone and Butsavitch respectively), they were pretty harmless. Ren & Stimpy was nothing but adult humor, thinly veiled by the fact that it was animated; while I’m not a fan of the cartoon myself, and indeed most of Spumco’s other works (and animation inspired by Spumco), Ren & Stimpy gave us unforgettable schticks such as the Slinky parody, LOG, and the board game Don’t Whiz On The Electric Fence. For that, I give them credit.
I don't think anybody can forget this bit, either.
Nickelodeon wasn’t content to sit on its ass, though; following on the success of the first three NickToons, a fourth would soon join the line-up called Aah!! Real Monsters. My favorite of the early NickToons, Aah!! Real Monsters was sort of like Doug if it were good and funny; the premise was similar – the Dreamer Outcast in School, dealing with socially awkward situations, only starring three young monsters named Ickis, Krumm and Oblina. The three attended a monster academy, where they were taught lessons in how to best scare the shit out of humankind using their natural talents. Ickis, a smallish red monster with rabbit-like ears, could loom, grow huge, and change his eye color from yellow to blood-red, but had the misfortune of being the son of one of the world’s scariest monsters, leaving him with huge boots to fill; Krumm was sort of like your smelly friend who had trouble finding practical use to personal hygiene, hairy and tremendously stinky, with eyeballs he held in his hands; Oblina, a Tim Burton-esque inverted candy cane, served as the Hermione of the group, and often came up with the cleverest ways to scare people. To be honest, it was easier to relate to these characters than any on the original three NickToons since – ironically – they were more human, bearing both realistic yet different problems. The writing and art were brilliant, and though it wasn’t without its flaws, it was still a joy from start to end. Plus, it had Tim Curry in a few episodes! You can never go wrong with Tim Curry.
(An odd parallel to draw, though: the teacher in Aah!! Real Monsters, the Gromble, is a male monster with a gender-ambiguous personality and a love for red high-heeled shoes. Knowing that Tim Curry was involved with a show where one of the main characters could easily substitute Doctor Frank N. Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show is pretty trippy.)
We're just two sweet transvestites, from Transexual Transelvania, a-ha-hah
That wasn’t enough, though; before long, Nickelodeon beefed up the NickToons line-up even further with cartoons such as The Angry Beavers, CatDog, Hey Arnold, and more. It’s around here that I “outgrew” cartoons (I.E., liking cartoons was considered kiddy and nerdy, and as an introverted geek I already had enough on my plate to be made fun of), though that would hardly stop the influx of animation, for good or ill. I remember the next NickToon I really liked being Invader Zim, created and directed by Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Squee!! artist/author, Jhonen Vazquez. At the time, Zim was the funniest thing on the damn planet, and due to its nature, it had become really popular amongst the Hot Topic crowd. In hindsight, I can’t tolerate the damn show – too off-the wall for my tastes, and the show’s writers were prone to condescending to the audience (a personal vexation of mine), but the appeal was still great enough to draw my attention back to my once-revered television network.
Unique visual style; run-of-the-mill douchebaggery.
Unfortunately, the pattern of mostly suckish shows intermixed with the rare gem persisted, and I wound up ignoring other NickToons in favor of Zim and, sometime in the middle of its second season, Danny Phantom. Danny Phantom, created, written and directed by Butch Hartman (who made another NickToon that shall remain unnamed, lest my head explode upon acknowledging it) was a change of pace from the NickToons I knew; rather than the episode being split into two, unrelated mini-stories, Danny Phantom was plot-driven, featuring realistic characters in unusual-but-believable situation. The titular character, Danny Fenton…okay, I’ll come clean, he used the exact same Dreamer Schoolkid trope as Doug and Aah!! Real Monsters, except he was born to a pair of eccentric mad scientist ghost hunters. The “straight man” of the family (and a foil to his overbearing older sister, Jazz, who spent a lot of time studying and worrying about getting into college), Danny is caught in his parents’ experimental ghost portal, granting him a small, but growing range of ghostly powers including flight, invisibility and intangibility. The story followed Danny and his best friends, Sam Manson (a Jewish goth tree-hugger – take a second to let that one sink in) and Tucker Foley (a tech-savvy meat-lover) as they combated the evils of ghosts seeping into the human world. The writers went out of their way to avoid drawing Ghostbusters parallels too – at least, in my opinion – though they would have homages on occasion.
And then, in 2005, Avatar: the Last Airbender aired.
My hands can touch everything but themselves.
Like everything else, I got into Avatar relatively late, introduced to it by an ex-girlfriend near when the second season began. The show took place in a world comprised of a mish-mash of Asian mythologies – largely Chinese, but Japanese and Indian mythology seeped in there as well. That wasn’t all, though: to spice it up, the world was divided into four separate nations, including the Fire Nation, an industrial-age, nigh-steampunk archipelago; the Earth Kingdom, taking up most of the continental space in the world; the Water Tribes, located primarily at the north and south poles; and the Air Nomads, scattered around four isolated points amongst the other nations. The world has been sundered by a century-long war instigated by the Fire Nation; already the Air Nomads had been murdered and the Southern Water Tribe largely decimated. The Earth Kingdom is on the verge of collapsing, and the only safe-havens left in the world are the Earth Kingdom capital of Ba Sing Se, and the Northern Water Tribe.
Many people in the world had control over one of the four elements tied to the nations; these people, called “benders,” could manipulate either air, fire, earth or water via martial arts based on various forms of kung fu. While not everybody in the world is a bender, there is only one person who is capable of bending all four: the Avatar, a human born to serve as the link between the material world, where all humans live, and the Spirit World, where the Spirits of the planet reside when they aren’t wreaking havoc upon the material one for one reason or another. The last great hope in ending the war, we learn through clever exposition and fantastic visuals that the Avatar has been missing for over 100 years as of the first episode of the show.
Four nations, fouuuuur loooooooves...
As the series begin, we see two of the series’ main protagonists, Katara and Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe, become marooned in the arctic ice floes during a fishing expedition. Katara, a novice Waterbender, discovers a strange, spherical iceberg with what appears to be a person frozen inside and manages to crack it open. What follows is a long, harrowing journey chronicling the adventures of Katara, Sokka and the boy in the iceberg, the lost Avatar, the last Airbender, a twelve-year-old monk named Aang, as they travel to the north pole to find a Waterbending master. From evading the Fire Nation, to saving small villages from rampant, vengeful Spirits, to battles against gender stereotypes and sexism, Avatar: the Last Airbender is definitely one of the finest pieces of animation I’ve ever had the pleasure of taking part in.
Now, let Avatar Month commence!
And then, in 2005, Avatar: the Last Airbender aired.
Like everything else, I got into Avatar relatively late, becoming interested in it near when the second season began. The show took place in a world comprised of a mish-mash of Asian mythologies – largely Chinese, but Japanese and Indian mythology seeped in there as well. The world was divided into four separate nations; the Fire Nation, an industrial-age, nigh-steampunk archipeligo; the Earth Kingdom, taking up most of the continental space in the world; the Water Tribes, located primarily at the north and south poles; and the Air Nomads, scattered around four isolated points amongst the other nations. The world has been sundered by a century-long war instigated by the Fire Nation; already the Air Nomads had been murdered and the Southern Water Tribe largely decimated. The Earth Kingdom was on the verge of collapsing, and the only safe-havens left in the world are the Earth Kingdom capital of Ba Sing Se, and the Northern Water Tribe.
Fantastic Fictional Females: Princess Zelda
“Whoa – wait – what?! TEi, what the simmering smegma are doing? WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE REAL, SEXY BEAST OF A MAN THAT I KNOW AND LOVE?! ;_____;”
This is likely what you’re thinking right now, and honestly, I can’t fault you for it. I am a sexy beast-man, so it’s only natural that you would miss me in the event an impostor reared its ugly head. Besides, knowing the standard set for evil doppelgänger in contemporary media, Evil!TEi would look only marginally like me. He’d be white, and a guy (or maybe an excessively hairy woman), and would likely have bad knees, yet even a blind man would be able to tell us apart…except for the media and the authorities, who would get us confused and result in me being landed in sing-sing for my unruly counterpart’s dastardly shenanigans. (I call this the Shadow the Hedgehog complex, as the events in Sonic Adventure 2 made popular this rampant stupidity amongst video games for a few years. Mario and even Metroid adopt this schtick…sadface.)
Okay, no, the part you’re really floored about is that this FFF features an incarnation of Zelda, a character whom I have vehemently expressed undying loathing for. My hatred for Zeldas throughout the ages (with the exception of their alter-egos, Sheik and Tetra) is no secret; I have strong issues with the Damsel in Distress, an archaic stereotype wherein a female character is depicted as helpless, useless, easily kidnapped, and needs to be rescued. So why the hell is a Zelda in this article? The short answer is, it’s because she’s not from a game. No, I’m here to pull a Spanish Inquisition on you about this Zelda here:
Princess Zelda, from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show
A brief history lesson: in 1989, Super Mario Bros. was picking up steam. While not at the height of its popularity, the hit Nintendo franchise was growing to the point where it warranted tons of pieces of merchandise, including and not limited to Super Mario Bros. cereal, Super Mario Bros. comics, Super Mario Bros. PVC figures (or whatever the late 80′s equivalent of PVC was), Super Mario Bros. coloring books, and the bit we all remember most (if for no other reason than its overt stupidity), the Super Mario Bros. cartoon, entitled the Super Mario Bros. Super Show.
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show consisted of live action segments sandwiching the actual cartoon, which itself ran for about fifteen minutes. The live action bits were probably the most obnoxious thing about the show; it featured Mario and Luigi as plumbers in Brooklyn before “being sucked down a warp zone while working on a drain,” starring famous professional wrestler, the late Captain Lou Albano as Mario and Danny Wells as Luigi. Often featuring “celebrities” such as Doctor Frankenstein and his monster, Dracula, Young MacDonald (the grandson of Old MacDonald, natch), and professional wrestler Sgt. Slaughter, the live action followed the Mario Bros. hilaaarious hijinks as they dealt with their guests and their problems in a parody-of-a-parody sitcom sort of way. If it sounds bad…well, it’s because it is. I don’t think even kids found it entertaining.
IT'S DA SUPA MARIO BRUDDAS SUPA SHOW
What’s weird, though, is that as abhorrent as the live action was, the cartoon was just as bad, if not worse, once again featuring Albano and Wells as the Mario Bros. They, alongside Princess Toadstool and Toad, combated the evil King Koopa in an attempt to foil his plans for world domination. I don’t really know where to begin with this, because there was so much wrong about the cartoon; the Mario Bros. were depicted as incompetent, bungling gluttons, and Koopa managed to become the Villain of the Week all by himself, filling a different role depending on the episode’s theme, such as a giant robot, or a hip-hop MC. Seriously, this guy makes Doctor Robotnik in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog look like freaking Darth Vader. Oddly enough, Toad and Princess Toadstool are painted as the only competent characters in the entire show, and I may do an article about Toadstool on a later occasion.
To spice up the pot, every Friday the Mario Bros. cartoon would be swapped out for a Legend of Zelda cartoon based on the game of the same name. Mario wasn’t the only Nintendo franchise that had started to gain notoriety, which warranted a Zelda slot in the SMBSS block. You’d figure it would be hard to screw up something as epic as the original Legend of Zelda, right? It’s a pretty basic formula. You go around the world of Hyrule, collect items and weapons, fight through dungeons and monsters and eventually save the Princess. Well, whoever wrote and directed the show sure managed it somehow…then again, if they can botch the premise of the Mario games (which was just “run right and jump on shit, then save the Princess”), I shouldn’t be too surprised.
By the power of Greyskull...I HAVE THE POWERRRR
The short version is this: Link has been tasked to remain in the equivalent of Hyrule Castle Town to protect it and the Triforce of Wisdom (which can talk, and in rhyme no less) from the evil machinations of Ganon. Link, portrayed as an insufferable womanizer, spends most of his downtime bitching about how boring life has gotten since taking the job of bodyguard and chasing after Zelda in vain attempts to get in her pants – much different from the silent altruist the games depict, da?
Ganon, a pig monster with a teleportation fetish, sends hordes of monsters after the Triforce of Wisdom, in order to unify it with his own Triforce of Power so he may rule Hyrule for all time (the Triforce of Courage is never even so much as hinted at). Ganon does make an adequate villain, even if his plans go tits up by the end of the episode; many of his attempts are fairly creative given that this was the weekday version of a saturday morning cartoon – but that doesn’t say much in his favor. Hell, once he actually did manage to get his hands on the Triforce of Wisdom…only for Zelda and Link to have stolen the Triforce of Power in his absence. Uh, whoops.
Alright, so we already know that Link and Ganon have been boned. So much of the show’s lore just doesn’t match up with the Legend of Zelda mythos; the only way you know this show was based on the game is because all of the characters are named. Take those away, and you’re stuck with a very generic “hero protects magic MacGuffin from villain” story. So again, why am I even bothering with Zelda? To be honest…it’s because she’s not a bad character. In fact, she’s probably the best character in both this and the Mario Bros. cartoon.
Wait, something seems off here....
This Zelda defies everything a Zelda has been in the video games. She’s rarely ever kidnapped by Ganon’s forces, and when she is, she manages to either outwit her captors or fight her way to freedom. When thrust into a combat situation, she takes the initiative and stands her ground just as effectively as Link can. She doesn’t buy Link’s “I’m a hero, gimme a smooch” schtick – even if he occasionally does deserve a kiss (at the very least), in which case she’s just stone-cold cock-blocking him. There are even multiple times when Link is indisposed, leaving it to Zelda to save the day! Furthermore, Zelda is always the one planning attacks/counterattacks against Ganon, and is willing to push her loved ones aside in order to meet those ends. She also dressed practically, given her tendency to slip into adventure: no high-heel shoes, no skirts, and the only skin you saw was her face and her hands.
(Oh, and she’s also actually a princess, as her father, the King of Hyrule, is a tertiary character. She’s not just sporting the title because it sounds pretty, unlike, well, every princess ever.)
Okay, that's more like it.
That said, she’s not without her bad points. She and Link bicker like an old married couple, which not only gets tedious, but feels forced at times – sometimes even detracting from the mission at hand, and despite her strong nature, she will sometimes lapse into the role of damsel in distress. In one particular episode, where Link’s soul and body are separated from each other, Zelda takes Link’s place as the hero, and is painted as inexperienced in combat, necessitating Link’s soul (which only Zelda can see) to provide guidance, despite the fact that she’s already proven herself to be combat-ready in previous episodes. She also indulges in some frivolities you’d expect from a member of the royal family, such as – and I’m not kidding – building a water park in Hyrule Castle Town. And as you would expect, she’s victim to the trappings of the show overall, which we’ve already established is crappy: bad writing, questionable direction, and lackluster animation all play a hand in adding to the character’s detriment. Plus, because she’s a girl in a cartoon in the eighties (back when gender stereotypes in animation were still going strong), she would be subject to the surprisingly rare dose of sexism. In one instance, Link is told by King Hyrule himself that the way to a girl’s heart is flowers – after Link pointedly told him that he was going to swing into Zelda’s room via grappling hook and hope that would charm her into kissing him. Of course, Link takes the king’s advice and brings some flowers with him on this Jackass-styled stunt, and they wind up working – because again, girls are nuts about flowers. Durr. Facts of life, people!
The biggest problem – the one that I’m most annoyed at – is the fact that there’s actually not much more to say about her. Cartoons from the eighties were mostly good for “entertaining” children (very few actually managed to do that right); there wasn’t any complex character or story development, as we would see starting in the early nineties, with cartoons like Batman: the Animated Series, Darkwing Duck, Sonic the Hedgehog (the “SatAM” version) and The Bots Master.
Still, I suppose I should take what I could get. Nintendo isn’t showing signs of changing the Zelda character; yes, I did say back in my original Zelda rant that Spirit Tracks was a step in the right direction, but it was also a baby step. I hate to say it, but this is one time Nintendo ought to have taken a cue from this awful cartoon. Alas…maybe one day, there will be an official non-alter-ego Zelda I’ll like.
Maybe.
Fantastic Fictional Females: The Women of Tales of Symphonia
Heyo! Sorry for the absence – I don’t really have an excuse, but I figure I’ll ring in my triumphant return with another installment of Fantastic Fictional Females. 
(I’m going to go on record now and warn you that this article contains spoilers from the game…but since it’s almost seven years old now, if you haven’t played it, for shame. >=( I encourage every gamer with a remote interest in gaming to play this masterpiece, so if you plan on it and don’t want yourself spoiled rotten, don’t read this!)
It’s no secret to people who know me: I’m not a big fan of your traditional RPG. It takes a lot for one of those to win me over, so it speaks volumes when I say that Namco’s first Tales of Symphonia is one of my favorite games of all time, despite its genre. It’s one of many examples of how video games can be an art form, and it was one of the best titles on the GameCube, which sorely lacked strong third-party support. ToS first premiered in Japan in 2003 and came to eastern shores a year later, and has since become popular enough to spawn an anime, a manga, several forms of awesome merch, and a sequel of questionable quality.
For a seven-year-old game, ToS has aged reasonably well. Graphically, it’s still very bright and colorful, and the environments are lush, but the character models suffer from lackluster cel-shading, a sad result of being caught up in the tail end of the Cel-Shading Madness Era spurned by my Favorite Game Of All Time, Jet Grind Radio. The musical score is phenomenal, and the voice acting is second to none. Although the game itself has some design flaws that have since been addressed in further Tales games (using a more realistic graphical style that’s more becoming of the game’s atmospheres, applying voice work more frequently throughout, amongst other things), as it stands, ToS is a fantastic game that is a must-have for any GameCube owner.
But that’s just scratching the surface, really.
My favorite part about ToS is its characters. The main cast is so wonderfully developed, each one believable and robust. They’re so charismatic that the situations they’re thrust in, for good or ill, can’t help but draw you in. Their strengths, their weaknesses, their joy, their sorrow – it’s an immersive experience, and the fact that so many of them are women and girls is incredible.
Colette Brunel, from Tales of Symphonia
First, you have Colette Brunel; you could call her the main female protagonist of the game, I suppose. She’s a victim of the system; in the world of Sylvarant, Colette is the Chosen, meant to sacrifice herself in order to regenerate the world and bring it into a flourishing age. Sylvarant, as it stands, is in pretty bad shape: mana has grown thin, resulting in drought and food shortages, and humans are persecuted by the Desians, a group of half-elves that abduct and imprison their victims regardless of age or gender, forcing them to do hard, meaningless labor. As the Chosen, Colette is expected to reverse all this; she goes through several trials throughout Sylvarant with the rest of her party (Lloyd Irving, Genis Sage, Raine Sage, Kratos Aurion, and later, Sheena Fujibayashi), releasing seals keeping mana from flowing in the world and destroying Desian strongholds known as Human Ranches. With each seal released, Colette loses part of her humanity, but because reaching the end of the Journey of Regeneration means saving the people of Sylvarant, she hides her pain and sadness from even the closest of her friends. Although frequently kidnapped (one of my big no-nos for a great female character, and she actually misses out on a decent chunk of the game in bits and pieces, making her one of the lowest-leveled characters in the game by the time you get to the end), Colette will not hesitate to fight back for her own safety and those of her friends, and the amount of suffering she endures without burdening others makes her a magnificently strong character. The Journey of Regeneration, in order to be complete, requires Colette to die in order to become the new vessel for the Goddess Martel, and to be able to face that head-on takes incredible, remarkable courage.
Raine Sage, from Tales of Symphonia
Next is Raine Sage, a supposedly-Elven scholar (although it is later revealed that she and her brother Genis are half-elves) who had no formal teaching, but has remarkable intelligence nonetheless. The oldest female party member at 23 years old (and the oldest party member overall throughout a hefty chunk of the game), Raine is the realist of the group, oftentimes cautious of the people they encounter (initially mistrusting Kratos, Sheena, and later, Zelos Wilder and Regal Bryant, amongst several other NPCs). She admits that taking that position is a burden, but a necessary one, as Lloyd, Genis and Colette are far too trusting and soft-hearted. She has a fascination with ancient, obscure histories, and the ruins tied to them, becoming ecstatic and mostly ignoring the world around her as she studies whatever they find, providing a stark contrast to her wise, leery personality. Raine is also very protective of Genis, having acted like a mother figure to him, their real mother having abandoned them when Genis was a toddler and Raine was a child.
Still, Raine is not without her insecurities, especially when it comes to her mother, Virginia; when Raine, Genis and Lloyd find Virginia on the floating island of Exire, they find that Virginia has lost her mind to the grief suffered when abandoning her children, believing a ragdoll she carries around to be a young Raine, and to still be pregnant with Genis. Raine, overwrought with anger and sorrow, breaks down and yells at the mother who doesn’t recognize her children before storming away from her.
Sheena Fujibayashi, from Tales of Symphonia
Sheena Fujibayashi is initially an antagonist to Lloyd and the others; they first cross paths early on in the game, and Sheena makes it clear that she has to assassinate the Chosen of Regeneration, Colette. Despite coming after Colette multiple times in failed assassination attempts, Colette, Lloyd and Genis take a liking to Sheena, especially when they discover her compassionate side. Although Sheena is from Tethe’alla, a world just out of sync with Sylvarant and threatening to fall into the same poverty Sylvarant is currently in if Colette completes her Journey of Regeneration (it’s sort of a long story), she isn’t a monster; she can be seen playing with children when not chasing Colette down, and defends the city of Luin from a Desian attack by herself, becoming gravely wounded in the process. When Colette and Genis ask Raine to heal Sheena, she expresses her gratitude and decides to join the party in order to kill the local Desian leader. Although she refuses to abandon Tethe’alla in its time of need and admits that, if it comes down to saving her world, she’ll still kill Colette, she is open-minded enough to try to find another solution.
Sheena is the only summoner in the party, and is at first hesitant to form pacts with the Summon Spirits of Sylvarant, although becoming more confident as time goes on; when she was younger, Sheena and the people of her village, Mizuho, appealed to Volt, the Summon Spirit of electricity in Tethe’alla. Due to Volt’s supposed silence, the people of Mizuho were unprepared to deal with him, and Sheena’s failure to make a pact led Volt to kill most of those who had come with her, affecting everybody in her home and alienating her from her village. And despite having regained confidence in her summoning abilities, when it becomes necessary for her to attempt to form a pact with Volt again, she becomes distraught, her previous failure still raw in her mind. Through Lloyd’s tenacity, and at the self-sacrifice of Sheena’s friend, the man-made Summon Spirit, Corrine, Sheena finds the courage to take Volt on, and successfully forms the pact with him. Having stared her past in the face and conquered it, Sheena walks away that much stronger from it.
Presea Combatir, from Tales of Symphonia
Finally, Presea Combatir is just as much a victim as Colette, at first a “lifeless being” whose emotional responses have been incredibly subdued due to the Cruxis Crystal growing inside her like a parasite. This crystal was planted in her as part of an experiment that nobody bothered to keep in check, turning a young girl into a blank, numb doll. The party goes through incredible lengths to restore Presea to her true self, and once they do, she’s still a mystery and not very in tune with her emotions. Left behind by time, Presea appears to be twelve years old, but in reality hasn’t aged a day in sixteen years; chronologically twenty-eight, she’s forced to live in a new world where everything she’d known has continued to go forward without her. She does her best to adapt, but despite her best efforts, feels cheated out of a life she could have lived.
Presea is one of the most physically strong party members in the game – a deceptive, slippery thing as she looks like an average twelve-year-old. This is one of the few perks of the Cruxis Crystal’s parasitism, but one she takes advantage of, serving as the party’s “tank” character in battle. While this means nothing to Presea, who views it as a lackluster attempt at making up for her lost time, from a meta perspective it adds a lot to her character. Although the quest Lloyd and the rest of the party is initially not her problem, she becomes swept up in the chaotic events surrounding them; she decides that, minimal involvement or not, the worlds of Tethe’alla and Sylvarant are sick and in need of curing, dedicating herself full-bore to Lloyd’s cause.
Fantastic Fictional Females: Sam Puckett
As I work around an ailing laptop and various creative projects, I’m attempting to get a regular schedule for the F3 editorial. I guess I’ll start worrying about it when I post more than every couple of weeks. 
This entry in Fantastic Fictional Females addresses a surprising character, given the nature of her origin, but I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Straight from the live-action Nickelodeon-original series iCarly, I present to you the second Fantastic Fictional Female, Sam Puckett.
Fantastic Fictional Female #2: Sam Puckett
- Sam Puckett as portrayed by Jennette McCurdy, from iCarly
Sam Puckett, played by teen actress Jennette McCurdy, is the best friend of Carly Shay and co-star of their webshow, iCarly (from which the series’ title was drawn), and fits in with the rest of the characters who have been cast as eccentrics with a pinch of normality to provide scope. In this aspect, Sam stands out above the others because, despite being a girl, there are almost no girly aspects to her; she’s lazy, greedy, loves to eat (she has a special affinity for meat and in particular cold, left-over chili), crude, intimidating to the entire male populace of her school, unafraid to express her opinions to anybody, and ferociously independent.
At this point I ought to put a disclaimer: there’s a difference between a character with admirable traits, and an admirable character. Sam as a character is fantastic, and every trait and flaw seems to have been designed strictly to dispel gender stereotypes, but she is by no means a good role model. I wouldn’t want my daughter to be caught eating breakfast in class (and then subsequently dump said breakfast, milk-in-cereal and all, into another student’s backpack), and as a student she leaves much to be desired. She can also get physically violent with anybody at any given time (particularly with Freddie, iCarly’s technical producer), and she’s prone to weaseling out of personal responsibility.
But again, all those flaws point to a powerfully developed character, especially as you usually see said flaws applied to males and never ever ever to females. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that a character like Sam came around, as Nickelodeon has proven itself capable when it comes to awesome female characters in the past with Avatar: the Last Airbender and Danny Phantom. Nickelodeon taking the next step and applying the same concept to their live-action series is absolutely fantastic on their part. There is nothing about Sam that’s girly (though that doesn’t keep her from trying on occasion), and for a teenage girl, that’s an impressive trait. (She has also expressed that a person’s first kiss is an overhyped and underwhelming concept, both before and after the experience; she shared hers with Freddie despite their immense friendly-dislike towards each other as he hadn’t either, mostly to get it over with, rather than save it for a special occasion). And of course, Jennette McCurdy’s acting skills are second to none, lending itself to Sam’s personality expertly, and it is in no small part thanks to her that Sam has come to life.
Sorta like in Aladdin with the whole diamond in the rough thing, Sam (and iCarly) stands out as one of the first, most original Fantastic Fictional Females on a live Nickelodeon-and-other-similar-channels televised series. Good on you, iCarly staff and Jennette McCurdy!
Fantastic Fictional Females: Lina Inverse
Hello out there, people in the blogosphere! (Augh, I never thought I’d actually say that…)
I’ve been taking some time to pull this new feature together, and I hope to stick with it on a fairly regular basis, but with a few creative projects going on that take higher priority, we’ll see how well I fare. I’m sure many of you reading this now are aware of my passionate feelings on a certain video game princess (and if you’re new to the blog, haven’t read the aforementioned post, and feel like wasting an hour of your life reading the opinion of a frustrated feminist and phylogynist, I recommend reading it), and some feedback has spurned me to create a feature of fictional girls and women for whom I have an incredible amount of respect/adoration.
I’m still sorting everything out, but I’ve already got a decent backlog of characters built up from all sorts of origins (video games, novels, anime, cartoons, comic books, movies – hell, even a few from live-action television shows), and hopefully by exploring these characters I’ll be able to both share what I believe are positive traits for a female character to possess, get readers of the blog to check out the media from which these characters originate from, and if nothing else, enlighten those who simply don’t know any better. =)
While I plan to do these posts either in bulk, or one character daily and thematically, I’m going to test the waters with just a single character right now, and hopefully things work out from here. In order to launch this article, I figured I would go with one of my utmost favorite fictional female characters – a character that many people know, but is still just obscure enough to maybe raise a few eyebrows.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the first of TEi’s Fantastic Fictional Females, Lina Inverse.
Lina Inverse
The anime Slayers first ran in Japan starting in 1995, and starred the above red-headed individual, Lina Inverse. Since then, Slayers has picked up enough steam to produce several prequel OVAs, movies, and spin-off/sequel series, and rests on the cusp of mainstream popularity. Most anime fans who look beyond the icky, slimy-coated surface left by the likes of Dragonball Z or Neon Genesis Evangelion have more likely than not heard of Slayers, being that it’s one of the longest-running anime series to date, still going strong fourteen years after its inception.
At the start of the original Slayers anime series, Lina was fifteen years old and looked every bit the part of it, but looks are deceiving with this woman; despite her childlike appearance and an incredible front of adorability, Lina is a prodigy sorceress, already educated in several dark magic spells, including the devastating Fire Ball and Dragon Slave, and is versed in the use of swords in the event her magic skills were not up to par.
Lina travels the world in search for great treasures of all sorts, oftentimes looting from bandits to secure whatever item currently has her eye, taking out even the strongest and most feared of men; those close enough to her see past her charming facade (and oftentimes pull faces when she resorts to using it, for one reason or another) recognize her greedy nature, and are forced to endure her bickering with traveling partner/sort-of love interest Gourry Gabriev. Lina is a glutton, sporting an appetite that several grown men have been visibly envious of/stupefied about, and above all, is a shrewd, if not somewhat manipulative, businessman, and recognizes the appropriate time to bail on personal responsibility (which is almost always at the sake of somebody else, but she doesn’t seem to mind).
Don’t let all of this fool you, though! Beneath her flaws and her immense magical skill, Lina does have a heart and shows sympathy even for antagonists and rivals; late in the original Slayers, Lina and her friends are antagonized by a loyal follower of a villain they had killed earlier on, and said follower created a copy of the villain in a desperate bid to bring him back to life out of misguided, but unyielding love; this backfires on the follower as, after executing her plan too well, the copied villain realizes his own will and identity and proceeds to kill the follower. Lina, sorrowful, remarks how cold the action was, and that even though the follower had been an enemy, she didn’t deserve to die like that. And though Lina does act very boyish, she does have a feminine side and has been developing a budding romance with Gourry.
In a pinch, Lina will put the safety of innocents above her own and frequently finds herself caught up in some greater scheme that would result in the destruction of the world unless she were to intervene. For all of her strength, Lina is a clever girl and is capable of weighing out the best possible solution to their problems (from the trivial to the world-threatening) , and has more than once ended a battle that would indeed mean the end of all mankind. This selflessness in such a selfish, greedy, gluttonous character is unprecedented, and with her strengths and weaknesses, comes together to create an awesome female character. Rock on, girl. Rock on.
Wildcat-Lvl
Nester-Lvl
TEi
grace
Jason X
camabyte
