I wasn't originally going to comment on this post because, to be brutally honest, complaining about pathos in Gotham is like complaining about idiocy in Green Lantern. Still, this comment, and how it relates to a pet peeve about comics, stuck out at me:
So apparently, Babs can't be a strong woman who wants to try to help make gotham a better place, she's merely trying to connect to the men in her life. Right. That's us told then.This is a natural turn of the character of Babs Gordon, yes, she has always had very strong paternal ties. But it still is an underlying problem with a lot of superheroines. This particular one, the daughter fixation on her father wouldn't be a problem if Batgirl had been created with a substantial maternal presence in her household.
As it is, I can think of very few heroes (Black canary II, Wonder Woman) with mother fixations, and quite a few (Zatanna, Power Girl, Oracle, Stargirl, Cameron Chase, Manhunter, Black Canary I, Arisia) with father fixations. That's not to say I don't like the character, or the dynamic, but damned if the imbalance isn't sending a nasty message about the value of motherhood.
It gets even worse when you try to think of male characters with female role models, or even mothers who had nearly as much of a positive impact as their fathers did. I can't think of any, actually. Maybe the new Zatara in teen Titans, if his mother is Zatanna (I hope it is).
And then, look at the hero-villain couples that produce a child. How many of those are heroic/semi-heroic fathers with villainous/semi-villainous mothers? Arsenal and Chesire? Batman and Talia? Alan Scott and Thorn?
Hell, one of the reasons I like the very same writer that the linked comment is complaining about is because he took Hal Jordan, a character with standard superhero father issues, and added a strong maternal influence (I think his mother's death has been referenced in three storylines since the last series restarted? And I'm sure it'll lead back to his romance problems). He couldn't make her a role model with the setup, but at least he made her count which is more than the previous writers had.
And I know that DC Comics is generational, and that First Generation of Heroes was overwhelmingly male. However, it doesn't help that the few women in that generation have been killed off (Hippolyta, Dinah Lance I), aged (Red Tornado, Sandra Knight), pushed to the background (Sandra Knight), and not many heroes have picked up their legacies, and everywhere I look I see the overwhelming important of Fatherhood over Motherhood even the newly created characters tend to have Father issues or Fathers to live up to or Absent Fathers they constantly angst over (though the ones with Absent Mothers barely bring them up) and are just inspired by their Fathers while their Mothers bake apple pie in the background--
And that's when the fledgeling thought pattern descends into inarticulate blind rage...
0 Yorumlar