Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

QC and the Bechdel test

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pwhodges:
Queerphobic: "No poo-poo on the pee-pee".  Well actually, not, but that's possibly what was thought of. 

Sexist?  It's probably possible to interpret many single sentences or even of any cartoon or book as sexist if taken in isolation; but that's neither interesting nor useful.  An example would be helpful in this discussion rather than throwing out an assertion like that.

ReindeerFlotilla:
By the logic that QC passed the Bechdel test so end of discussion. QC has said some queerphobic things and some sexist things. It happened once, so it must be a defining trait.

Obviously not. So if it doesn't work there, it doesn't work wrt the Bechdel test.

But those things also did happen, and unlike the first rape joke they weren't unhappened. So they are a part of what QC is. You could argue that they should not count, and in someways I would agree--Pintsize once had an owners manual and it was implied that his life began when Marten took him out of the box. But the post Singularity QC retcons this to imply that Pintsize agreed to form a relationship wit Marten, which makes the out of the box thing confusing, at the least. (it's not that you can't make a case to patch the hole. It's that Occam's razor suggests the simplest explanation is that AnthroPCs were property when the former strip was written and became people by the time the latter was written. And that's okay.)

I happen to subscribe to the theory that QC is not what it was and won't be what it is in the future. So to say it passes the test or is sexist is nonsensical. One can point to a strip and make a claim, but another could point to a different strip to make a different claim. Both could be right, wrt their chosen strips. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

pwhodges:
It seems clear to me that we agree, and are expressing it differently.

It's simply that a developing strip by a developing artist/author has changed over the more than ten years its been running, and so it is not reasonable to judge it as a unity in respect of the Bechdel test any more than, say, its artistic style.

Is it cold in here?:
In case anyone wonders about ReindeerFlotilla's absence, he came up with the idea of taking a break voluntarily. His login still works. He and his interesting ideas are still welcome.

Mlle Germain:

--- Quote from: ReindeerFlotilla on 13 Mar 2015, 11:11 ---And here's the reason I am not happy with this thread.
There's an actual metric that is absolutely fair, and an actual logic to why I find the question interesting. I have stated it, and I recall a mod post about repeating the same statements over and over, so I invite you to look up thread.
But between the fact that this is a snipped thread, unavoidably missing context, and the the generic title, the subject keeps roaming down the same path.
You can't have everything, a wise man once said. Where would you keep it?
On the other hand, it's not under my name any longer.
It seems to me that the objections to applying the test in any interesting manner boils to "but we know QC isn't sexist."
But of course we know that. Is it sexist isn't an interesting question, IMO. That's not interesting because QC is sexist. And queerphobic.
These are things that totes happened in the strip. It got better.
So, do we judge the strip based on a handful of examples where sexist evaluates to true, or do we assume that some of those things are character and others are the result of things Jeph didn't know?
People want a litmus test. They want a simple thing that they can point to and say "see?" But the questions the Bechdel test tries to resolve are too big for the test. There's a reason Bechdel isn't find of her own test.
But the fact that a hammer is terrible at carving turkey doesn't make it useless. Even everyone thinks it's a turkey carvers. Even if the inventor thought it might be a good way to carve turkey.
It will still drive a nail.

--- End quote ---
I am really confused by this post. Of course the question of whether there are sexist or queerphobic scenes in QC is a valid and interesting discussion topic and I don't think anybody was denying that.
It's just that the Bechdel test says nothing whatsoever about whether a single work of art (be it one strip of the comic or the whole of QC) is sexist or not -- there are a ton of really sexist and problematic narratives that pass the test, and a lot that are not in themselves sexist that don't. This is one of the points that has been made in the discussion! Saying that a certain test/tool is inappropriate for the task at hand does not mean dismissing the issue altogether!
I think if we want to discuss whether certain scenes in QC are problematic or not (not sure this would be a fertile discussion; I think a lot of these things have been discussed to death in the forum) we should thus do it without resorting to a test which has little or no bearing on the matter.

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