RE: gender ratio
I'm reminded of a famous study on classroom participation that found that the dudes in the room thought they were getting drown out when like 30% of the hands called were women. So this comic is approaching a gender ratio that about 97% of all other media/games/stories/etc have, but on the opposite end. And there's some rumbling in the direction of wanting to "balance" the cast out.
It's one thing I got over very quickly becoming a fan of My Little Pony. I mean, back in 2011, when there wasn't a fanbase yet, before we get into that kettle of fish. I am purely talking about the show itself in isolation here.
I showed it to a very 'woke' friend of mine, to ironically non-ironically use the word, and he got a bit disgruntled; "Why are males presented so poorly?"
"Spike, Big Macintosh, the sea serpent in the first episode is spectacular, Mr Cake, Braeburn, the bison chief" in the first season was my reply. Later, Shining Armor.
And he went "... huh."
We both talked about how unusual it was as a property to see something that was both
1) Well written
2) So predominately female leading cast
That the brain's natural reaction, even when you go into it knowing that, is to revolt and buck against it. We analyzed why it feels so weird and out of place. It's fine. It's fine to dudes. There's more good male characters than bad ones. So why the hell does it feel, weirdly, misandrist, at first exposure? It's because it's such a stark contrast to how male-dominated we kind of take everything else, that in isolation it's
fine, it just appears that way in comparison.
I wish it were less uncommon, and public perception hadn't turned so thoroughly against MLP that I could continue to use it as an example. Because it's honestly a huge experience to see the difference between believing gender represntation should be more of a thing in your media, and actually being exposed to it and seeing how subtle and different it really is. It's huge! It's amazingly huge.