She might get to fight alongside the boys, like Teela in He-Man: Masters of the Universe, but she’d still be a love interest. Still, she’d certainly be the team’s emotional center, or the uptight, responsible member who called out the boys for their shenanigans. There were times when the sole female character’s personality was not just Being a Girl, and she would get to be a significant part of the story, though that was usually reserved for action-adventure cartoons. If you were a young girl in the ’80s, ’90s, or ’00s, so many popular shows and franchises told you had to fit this mold: someone lesser than the male counterparts, someone stuck in pink or reduced to being a love interest, someone who never got to lead the adventures, but was tagging along as a nuisance. Guess which one is the girl dog? Image: Nickelodeon series Paw Patrol, who is outfitted entirely in pink, even though her fellow rescue dogs wear outfits that relate to their specific occupations. And even more recently, there’s Skye, the sole female dog in the ever-popular Nick Jr. (That’s since been rectified, with recurring characters like Abby Kadabby and the monster Rosita.) Looney Toons and Disney toons alike rarely bothered with female characters unless they were the girlfriends or backgrounded female counterparts of their male characters, from Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck to Lola Bunny, who wasn’t introduced until 1996’s Space Jam. Even though Sesame Street’s cast of humans balanced male and female characters, the show failed to retain a popular female Muppet until 1993, when pink-tutu-clad Zoe came along. There’s Miss Piggy, the fashionable, ego-centric diva and only major female character in a large cast of loveable male buffoons. This trope isn’t limited to the past, though certainly older films and shows are more guilty of it. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. As Pollitt wrote, “Boys are the norm, girls the variation boys are central, girls peripheral boys are individuals, girls types. At other times, she’d be the stick in the mud or a distraction, some sort of disruption to the boy’s club, and a hindrance to the mission at hand. Sometimes that meant she was the object of desire, and the boys would compete to impress her. Her presence undermined the male camaraderie. She was a glaring exception to the masculine norm. At worst, her femininity was seen as something grating, something other, a weakness, a shallowness. At best, it was superficial characterization, aesthetic choices that had nothing to do with personality. While the boys in a typical cartoon cast had distinct personalities - the leader, the smart one, the edgy one, the comic relief - the token girl’s personality was usually “is female.” She’d have a hair bow, or wear pink, and she’d usually be focused on comparatively petty concerns like popularity or fashion. While cartoons certainly haven’t been the only source of restricted, stereotyped female characters, they turned it into a particularly noticeable and persistent problem. The phenomenon of one girl character in a cast was dubbed the “Smurfette Principle” by writer Katha Pollitt in 1991, named for the European cartoon that for many years featured a cast with a hundred male characters and a single anomalous female. Image: Cartoon Network There was usually only one girl 19, dives into their romance’s past, present, and future, marking a new chapter for these characters and their relationship, one that’s already overcome decades of expectations tied to female character archetypes. The special, which launches on HBO Max on Nov. The new Adventure Time special Adventure Time: Distant Lands - Obsidian focuses specifically on Bubblegum and Marceline. The two were originally supposed to have a simple friendly rivalry, but writers on the show pushed for that to evolve into a yearning, centuries-spanning romance. The two women have clear, distinct personalities unrelated to their own femininity, but they also share a meaningful and surprisingly complex relationship, one that was absent from the show’s original pitch. But shows for “everyone” (meaning shows marketed to boys) usually shoehorned in one girl to attract potential female viewers.Īdventure Time could’ve easily reduced its central female characters to outdated tropes, but instead, creator Pendleton Ward and his team broke the mold with Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen. There were exceptions to that rule, usually in shows meant specifically for girls, which generally only featured one or two boys. Girls in cartoons weren’t exactly rare, but most of the exciting, popular cartoons and children’s shows only had one token girl character to choose from. For people of a certain generation, growing up female meant it was hard to find characters like yourself on screen.
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