I don't buy the brainy kid/guy/gal who has no understanding of popular culture.  It's one thing to not understand how to date; it's another to be caught completely off-guard by stuff everyone sees all the time.  Sure it can happen, but...not that often.

The way that the brilliant socially inept nerd who ends up dating the hottie is always male, and the hottie is always female. It's seen as 'normal', where the other way around- female genius nerd with the stunning supermodel lad- is basically non existant. Oh, the female nerd is around, but you're talking about a handful examples as opposed to entire shows being devoted to smart ugly men and vapid social climbing bimbos determined to prove that they have more than three brain cells to rub together. Moral of the story? Smart girls are never attractive and never sexually desirable regardless of how brilliant and talented they are, and all men are Shallow Hals. 

What a wank.

The Jungle Princess always puzzled me. A feral child who learns to speak perfect English with a super pretty leopard skin dress? In real life she would live on the edges of society if she had lived at all.

crystalwren wrote:

The way that the brilliant socially inept nerd who ends up dating the hottie is always male, and the hottie is always female. It's seen as 'normal', where the other way around- female genius nerd with the stunning supermodel lad- is basically non existant. Oh, the female nerd is around, but you're talking about a handful examples as opposed to entire shows being devoted to smart ugly men and vapid social climbing bimbos determined to prove that they have more than three brain cells to rub together. Moral of the story? Smart girls are never attractive and never sexually desirable regardless of how brilliant and talented they are, and all men are Shallow Hals. 

What a wank.

You're so right about that. It's even worse when the plot for these kind of shows has Nice Guy TM undertones. You know, the nerdy brilliant guy is such a nice person and totally deserves a relationship with an attractive women because women are vending machines and if you put a certain amount of so-called "niceness" into them, then that means they owe you sex and/or a relationship. Oh, and if the woman doesn't get into a relationship with the nerdy man, then that just means she's a shallow bimbo who will only date attractive, asshole men and end up getting her heart broken only to be saved by the nice nerd guy's penis.

There are definitely a lot of beauty-shamming myths associated with this trope.

Beautiful Women=Stupid bimbos who need to be saved from their stupidity by a Nice Guy TM nerd
Beautiful Men=Assholes that the beautiful woman only dates because she's stupid.

Social outcast really just wants to be popular and in the limelight.

I also disagree that there aren't that many nerdy girl, attractive guy tropes.  Things like She's All That flooded the 90's, but it's generally along the lines of "well, first we have to make her over," which might be the truly objectionable part.  Not sure.  Do they makeover the nerdy guys?  I don't watch enough of these.

Overlord Morgus wrote:

That's the ideal corporate citizen, someone who's both lustful and obedient.

Talk about a gender role "coffin".

oddity wrote:

The Rainman. Just ugh. No.

Eh...I'm sort of tolerant with the whole savant thing. My father's family has strong tendencies towards both autism/borderline autism and savants. To the point where I've been called a liar rather a lot if I make the mistake of talking about them. I didn't understand for a long time that people 'could only do those things on television'. Considering that of my father's four children, two are savants (albeit not as extreme as the commonly depicted media trope) and one is terrifyingly brilliant but with a severe PD, Rainman is not impossible for me to believe.




A trope that pisses me off: rape storylines about women always show the assault as a terrible crime, but rape storylines with men as the victim are always funny. There's a long running storyline in the Sexy Losers online comic with a teenage guy and his sexually predatory mother. It's immensely popular, extremely funny and it's one of my favourites; I'll confess. But when the writer decided to run a series of strips where the genders were flipped around- a horny man and his horrified daughter- the author wrote himself into the strip as getting the shit beaten out of him for it. And you know what? He's absolutely right.

I haven't read American comics in a long time and I'm starting to move back into them now. In the time since I quit Marvel in disgust, my favourite character (X-Men's Gambit) has had another ongoing series. And while I haven't read it I've read quite a few summeries and one storyline strikes me as pretty awful. Apparently, an former one nightstand drags Gambit in, strips him and basically coerces him into sex. And this two go one nightstand tapes the whole thing and sends copies out to his exes. Again, I haven't read the story in question but what I've read suggests that Gambit's main concern was getting those tapes before the exes got them- as opposed to being horrifically violated by the whole saga, and desperately needing a bath. I'll chase it up and read it eventually, but I'm not holding any great hopes for the story arc...

dlaire wrote:

And they lived happily ever after archetype. I hate when movies/fairytales/etc. show only the perfect beginning of the relationship but don't show that relationship is a hard work. I'm pretty sure that every long-term relationship has its ups and downs.

Some people seem to think that a couple must went until the end of a story before they can get together, and I can't help but think that they forget this. Granted, maybe a long-term relationship isn't as exciting as a will-they-ever-get-together story, but I think a good writer can make it work.

oddity wrote:

Only a small portion of those with savant syndrome are prodigious savants (which is the type usually present in television and film), and only half of those with savant syndrome have autism. The problem is that many either expect autists to be savants or hope for a day when autistic people no longer exist (ex. anyone who's ever donated to Autism Speaks). Neither are healthy views in my opinion (as an autist), and they are usually the only views I see in media. I don't feel like Rainman is unbelievable, but I feel it is a stereotype.

There's a point there, although I do think that there needs to be some sort of treatment for the people with the most extreme forms of autism, the ones that are completely incapable of functioning. I don't mean a cure, because I agree with you that we don't need one; but there needs to be a way of unlocking the ones trapped in their own heads.

There are two common stereotypes regarding autism that make me foam at the mouth and chew at my keyboard: one is that the only form of savantism is mathematics/musically based (BULL. SHIT.), and the other is that the very mildest form of autism/Asperger's is what's portrayed in books like 'House Rules' and 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime'. There are many levels of functioning below and above that, so when people go around saying that they're the most accurate fictional portrayal of autism evah I want to haul them around by their hair and introduce them to the real animal. They're great books but they've a bad habit of encouraging inaccurate views and spreading misinformation, to say the least.

Given that half of autistics do indeed have some form of savantisim, I do think that automatically assuming that the autistic in front of you is a savant is not all that of a bad assumption. 50% is pretty damn good odds. It's annoying for the autistic but I do think it has a good influence on how people regard your levels of intelligence.

I still want to slap the shit out of Jody Picolt though. She has NOT helped the acceptance movement.

This speech from Warren Ellis - http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314 got me thinking about how we're still going to see the entirely retro unreasonable science fictiony portrayals of technology in TV and movies, in the same way that cellphones always still lose service during an emergency, even in a major metropolitan area in the middle of the street or on fucking rooftops.

Because, without false drama and learned-shortcomings (that aren't real), there'd have to be actual effort, thought, and rewrites. And who wants that?

Stepmothers can be pretty nasty though.

I lot of my issues have more to do with the framing of certain archetypes rather than the archetypes themselves.


For example, the common tv plotline that involves a businesslike, over working parent, one non-working parent and children. The kids and the non-working parent will give the working parent grief and guilt for working too much and not spending time with the family.  Which is totally understandable, and makes for an interesting and relate-able family dilemma.  The problem is, the moral of the story or the resolution will always involve the parent getting a new job or working less. 

BULL.

BULL.

AND CRAP.

The ending is never that the family comes to learn to appreciate how much the working parent loves them -that the whole reason they work is to provide for them, and the working parent learns how to communicate this to his/her family better (say, instead of bottling up the stress and then lashing out when their kid makes a comment about their absence).  And more importantly, that unless the other parent gets a job, they win the lottery or decide to move into a cheaper home, the workload is absolutely necessary.  Jobs are not easy to switch, and many jobs do not offer flexible schedules and workloads -that is the real world.  Working parents already feel guilt over not spending enough time with their family, they don't need movies written by rich people guilt-tripping them further.


Did I mention that I adore Daria?  Both parents work, but the mom undoubtedly works a more demanding and stressful job.  What makes Daria's mother such a compelling, well-rounded character and Daria so likable is because the mother does worry (a lot) about whether or not she can be a "proper" mother to her daughters, and what that even means, while still taking pride in her work, and Daria, while (deep down) upset by her mother's inability to understand her at times, is mature enough to understand and respect the dual roles her mother must juggle.