Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
QC and the Bechdel test
ReindeerFlotilla:
--- Quote from: jwhouk on 10 Mar 2015, 04:14 ---Y'know, RF, you could start a separate thread on this - "QC and the Bechdel Test".
--- End quote ---
I will if the results are interesting.
--- Quote from: rfrank dodelijk on 10 Mar 2015, 06:13 ---the behaviour displayed by the character tai is motivated by selfishness and a lack of any regard for marten's experiences with dora.
--- End quote ---
Describe a human behavior not motivated by selfishness.
Okay, trick challenge. No such behavior exists.
--- Quote from: TRVA123 on 10 Mar 2015, 08:41 ---
--- Quote from: Tub on 10 Mar 2015, 07:47 ---In other words: a low passing rate of the strict interpretation of the Bechdel test implies nothing interesting. Certainly not any of the things the Bechdel test was designed to imply.
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I don't really think the bechdel test is a good one to apply to a daily comic.
...snipped, length...
The bechdel test asks for multiple female characters who aren't centered wholly around men. As a whole QC passes this easily.
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Sure, but you may have missed the point of this exercise. The test isn't about earning your feminist approval badge. It's about showing how easy it is to write women as marginally autonomous beings and how rarely this happens.
One can assume that QC does treat women as such, but does it? Consider the source of the test. It derives from an observation by Virginia Woolf (iirc) on how women in written fiction tended to exist only in relation to men. That is (until Jane Austen, in Woolf's account), women existed to service, relate to, or discuss men when they appeared in fiction.
Like I said, you can assume this is not true of QC, but you can also test it. And I believe it is a fair test. Tub points out the way. In a simple off hand, he says there's only a 25% opportunity for any fiction to even have two women talk to each other (there are, on average, twice as many male characters in movies than female, so Tub's number is wrong, but the idea is sound... Also, in the real world there should be a roughtly 27.04% chance that two women talk to each other, assuming a gender binary and equal odds that any pairing will occur. Women out number men). But with QC, and the wiki, it is possible to not simply count the ratio of genders, but the number of times they appear. This is amenable to scientific investigation. You can set a baseline and then compare QC's performance. And you can do so in a manner that allows concrete examination of your logic. Such level of detail is definitely fodder for another thread.
Any way, tl;dr--I'm not trying to prove anything about QC or the Bechdel test. I realized, shortly after making a joke about it, that I assume the test is valid at all and that I assume QC passes. I don't have to assume either of those things. QC has nigh 3000 samples and there is a lot of data on films with respect to the test. The assumptions can be tested by counting.
--- Quote from: osaka on 10 Mar 2015, 00:37 ---Why not keep cliff's notes on the phone? A 200GB microSD has been announced not too long ago, surely that's enough to keep track of everything xD
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Sir, there are still terabytes of calculations required before an actual flight is attempted.
Zebediah:
Let me point out a weakness of the Bechdel test, using a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode as an example. TNG passes the test less often than I'd like, but there's one episode that technically fails the test in a situation where I think it should succeed: the episode "Ethics".
For those of you who aren't hard-core Trek geeks who know every episode by title, it's the one where Worf gets paralyzed in an accident and they bring in an outside specialist neurosurgeon to examine him. The neurosurgeon is female, as is Dr. Crusher, the ship's chief medical officer. These two doctors have several long conversations about Worf. Technically that makes the conversations fail the test, since Worf is male. However, the conversations have nothing at all to do with the fact that Worf is male, or the fact that both doctors are female - it is entirely two physicians discussing (and frequently disagreeing about) proper treatment of a patient. The gender of the physicians and the patient are both immaterial; you could change the genders of everyone involved and not have to change anything in the script except a few pronouns. That, in my opinion, is the way it should be done - the women aren't there as romantic prospects for the man but as the actual protagonists of the episode (Worf is arguably a secondary character in the episode even though its events revolve around him.)
TRVA123:
That is a good point, but the bechdel test isn't just critiquing how women are often written to be focused on men romantically, but to showcase how often the focus of a story is on a male, period.
How often do two women discuss another women in stories? how likely is it that a woman would be injured as Worf was and treated and discussed?
I'm not saying that it never happens, but it is rare enough to be remarkable.
How often do two men discuss another men in stories? and in a context not related to jealousy because that man is the romantic partner of a powerful or desirable woman?
LeeC:
Wait, so the conversations where Faye and Dora talk about Penny looking like pizza girl, drinking on the job, pursuing an art career, or talking about pint size cause the comic to fail the bechdel test?
ReindeerFlotilla:
--- Quote from: LeeC on 10 Mar 2015, 10:01 ---Wait, so the conversations where Faye and Dora talk about Penny looking like pizza girl, drinking on the job, pursuing an art career, or talking about pint size cause the comic to fail the bechdel test?
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I don't follow the logic. The only failing conversation in that list is about Pintsize (yes, he is a man).
By the simple rules of the test QC passes because there has been one conversation between two women that was not about a man. QC earned the Bechdel test seal of approval at comic 46.
The interesting question isn't pass fail (it never was in the case of the test itself, IMO). The interesting question is "how often does it pass verse how often would it be expected to pass, all things being equal." That applies to film in general and can be applied to serial fiction because it comes in countable packets
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