Totallibertarianism wrote: ↑Sat Dec 31, 2022 12:32 am
You are saying the men characters outnumber the females characters in those movies, I don't agree with you... If you watch all the casting for example in Oblivion, independence day, Star Trek Beyond, the numbers of both seems equal, at least 40 % - 60 %, 55 - 45 %.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1483013/fullcredits
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1628841/fullcredits
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2660888/fullcredits
If you want to calculate the proportion of male and female deaths in a movie, you have to take all the casting, all the actresses and actors playing in it not just the main casting, even someone who is playing a civilian bystander or a passerby in the street who will be killed in the movie has to be counted in this case, these scenes happen often in many movies by the way.
And calculating the proportion of deaths between women and men instead of the numbers is a completely wrong approach to define who between men characters and women characters are favored.
=> If tomorrow CNN would report the death of 50 US soldiers killed in a firefight with a dozen of russians troops near the syrian-iraqi border where thousands of US troops are present (50/7000 killed = 0.7 % of losses), then 7 russians soldiers were killed in the process among the few dozens of russians soldiers present in Syria (7/100 killed = 7 % of losses), would you say that US are more favoured than Russia in this event because of the proportion in the total losses ? LOL
You see ? You can not use the proportion for the death and losses of humans, to define morally which ones are more favored than others. Morally our ethic would say us a death is a death, death = death, the number of deaths are the most important than proportion !
How many of those cast members are actually treated as characters and how many are just standing around in the background?
How many have their deaths emphasized and how many would you not realize died if it wasn't pointed out?
How many would you even realize were male or female in their death scenes? In Star Trek Into Darkness, it looked like both male and female crew members were getting sucked into space when the Vengeance was firing on the Enterprise, but the scene is going so quickly, it's hard to focus on the genders of the dead crew members and how many of each are meeting their doom.
On the flip side, there's only about three female characters with speaking lines in Black Death, but there is a focus on them. Two of them die and their deaths actually matter. You actually know they died and remember they died.
When entries are usually added to the Men Are the Expendable Gender page on TV Tropes, the focus is on major character deaths - the deaths you're supposed to care about. Yeah, a lot of male extras survive Train to Busan, but doesn't change the fact that every actual male character gets killed and that's why it's included on the page. The proportions can be broken down simply by focusing on who actually matters and which deaths actually matter (which is what generates accusations of inequality in the first place). It's even easier to do so in the films with minimal to no background characters, which is also present in many films.
But even if you want to account for the background characters, you'll find indiscriminate male and female bystander / passerby / whoever deaths in those scenarios, whether it be the aforementioned Enterprise being fired on by the Vengeance in Star Trek Into Darkness, the dining room flooding in The Poseidon Adventure, the Terminator firing on the club crowd in the first film, or the exploding heads in the first Kingsman. These typically aren't factored into gender death equality vs. inequality because most people don't care about these deaths because the focus is on the situation, not the deaths. Unless they're trying to do a kill count, it's not relevant. It's seeing the actual male characters die that, again, prompted this very discussion.
And calculating the proportion of deaths between women and men instead of the numbers is the completely right approach because if there are less female characters than male characters, it is literally impossible for there to be more female deaths. Like I mentioned before, if all the female characters die and the only survivors are male, it doesn't matter if there were more male deaths. That's favoritism towards the men because men actually survived.
Comparing real life deaths to fictional deaths is false equivalence because in real life, those are actual people who died. In the movies, these are not real people dying and in the fictional narrative, certain deaths are going to matter more than background characters. It's also not a competition between male and female characters, unless that's what the story is about. It's absurd to claim favoritism towards women in a movie that has a higher male body count when all the women died. It's not favoritism if they're not making it to the end, while male counterparts are.
We're not talking about the death and losses of humans, we're talking about the death and losses of fictional characters. You can use proportion for the death and losses of fictional characters because they are not real and there is no moral or ethical issues in recognizing major character death =/= minor character death because that's specifically the point. In real life, the numbers are more important, but in a fictional world where no one actually died, the proportion is more important.
