No matter how specific our little pass/fail tests are, they’ll never be able to take everything into account. She goes on to talk about regulating male characters with their own tests, but what I want to focus on is her discussion on regulation of characters in general. Taken to an extreme they can become a version of the dreaded Strong Female Character, or the equivalent to slapping the Mary Sue or Manic Pixie Dream Girl label on every fictional woman. More restrictions, more ways we can critique the perceived inadequacies of female characters. Though useful and well-meaning, tests like these always focus on female characters, essentially creating more and more rules for them. Over on geekalitarian blogger Joanna helpfully shines some light on the problem with these tests in general: chaila was actually responding above to another Tumblr user mentioning that there were women calling for others to boycott Pacific Rim on the basis that it fails the test. Probably one of the biggest flaws the Bechdel Test has is in those who consider it to be the (Many movies/shows would not pass it).Īnd really, I think this is a step in the right direction. It does not make a movie automatically feminist. It is a pretty basic test for the representation of women, as is the Bechdel test. I think this is about as indicative of “feminism” (that is, minimally indicative, a pretty low bar) as the Bechdel test. The Mako Mori test is passed if the movie has: a) at least one female character b) who gets her own narrative arc c) that is not about supporting a man’s story. Let’s propose the Mako Mori test, to live alongside the Bechdel test (not to supplant it! My point is not that we shouldn’t care about women interacting-I care about this A LOT-but that isn’t the pinnacle of feminism or the only thing we should care about). To come clean, most of the research done for this post was found by reading the follow-up article on the Vulture to the one above, “The Mako Mori Test: ‘Pacific Rim’ inspires a Bechdel Test alternative.” It turns out that there are many bloggers over on Tumblr who love the female protagonist, Mako Mori, unabashedly, and in one thread Tumblr user chaila offered a new way of rating films in light of her as a character: ” I don’t really feel the need to sum up what the author’s thoughts were, but suffice to say they made reference to the film failing the Bechdel Test. That’s cool, though, because Vulture took care of it with a review titled “There Isn’t Much Room for Women in the Future of Pacific Rim. I wrote about Pacific Rim and how much I appreciated the film not falling back on conventional Hollywood romance, but what I didn’t do was discuss how it treated women. Really great at staring intensely, really bad at talking to one another.
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