Gendered Acculturation: Do Girls Love Anything As Much As Boys Love STAR WARS?

I have this theory that certain cultural objects/phenomena get their hooks in little kids before they have enough of a knowledge base to judge what's good or bad, and consequently they grow up with an almost pre-rational love for those things that is impossible to break. Things (movies, TV shows, records, etc.) that, when seen through adult eyes, are obviously garbage nonetheless retain a passionate and obsessive fan base of people who were first exposed to them in childhood.

Examples:

Star Wars movies
superhero comic books
professional wrestling
the music of Kiss

Obviously, there are male and female fans of all this stuff, but I think it's possible to agree that the examples I've cited are primarily marketed to little boys. So, my question is: Are there female equivalents? Things that are marketed to little girls, and that catch them at a vulnerable age in similar ways, so that they grow up and, as adults, are still as fixated on whatever it may be as many adult males are on Star Wars or wrestling or comic books? (Kiss is a separate case, because Kiss fans grow up and listen to lots of other different kinds of music, and the only real damage they suffer is their continued belief that Kiss are a good band.)

Thoughts?

I get what you're saying about SW being primarily marketed towards boys, but two of the most insane SW fans I know are 40 year old women. Full cosplay + convention attendance and shit.

horses

More on point, though, I think boy bands are the little girl version of the little boy Star Wars. New Kids on the Block fans I knew in middle/high school are still ride or die for them dudes.

Do girls still like Titanic?

Horses are garbage cultural objects/phenomena?

why not

I'm not commenting on the quality or anything but I've noticed a lot of girls fixated on Disney and videogame characters, particularly Ariel from Little Mermaid.

^ Definitely a thing.

I remember a lot of guys oddly gloating about male fanboy behaviour being particularly sad, as if there wasn't similar girls but that illusion has mostly disappeared. I don't know if the girl geek community is more intense or if it's just became more visible.

I get what you're saying about SW being primarily marketed towards boys, but two of the most insane SW fans I know are 40 year old women. Full cosplay + convention attendance and shit.

― Johnny Fever, Saturday, 1 August 2015 22:57 (Yesterday) Permalink

There's a woman like this in my office, although it's her second love and her first is Disney. So maybe Disney?

there's always the pre-rational love of believing oneself to have more sophisticated tastes than other people

Wonder if all those Naruto and Bleach fans will still be crazy for that stuff in 20 years.

But I don't think they'll get into it in their earliest years so maybe that doesn't count.

Horses are garbage cultural objects/phenomena?

under advanced capitalism everything is garbage cultural objects/phenomena sure

they shoot garbage cultural objects/phenomena, don't they?

wild garbage cultural objects/phenomena couldn't drag me away
wild garbage cultural objects/phenomena: we'll ride them someday

Lol

Well played

in my experience the fandom of most of the stereotypical 'male' interests is way closer to 50/50 than people ever want to believe and even in the face of actual attendance at related events/concerts people just shrug "i guess a lot guys dragged their girlfriends here huh"

fuck horses

Some guy who fucks horses (sexy horsepics)

You're looking for things that are marketed to girls that remain popular with adult women? Madonna, Hello Kitty, unicorns?

do you know any adult women

Me? Yes.

Horses seconded / thirded

a friend in college threw herself a my little pony themed birthday party

i'm settling in. i know you people too well...

http://www.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20121028/634.MoviePopcornBox.mh.112812.jpg

barbie?

When he was still doing stand-up in the pre-SpongeBob years, Tom Kenny had a bit about going to see Titanic and noticing the reaction that the teenage girls in the audience had to it. As he put it, Titanic was their Star Wars

Also, Kelly Sue DeConnick would take issue about only boys being _really_ into superhero comics & Kiss.

The answer to this question is Frozen

New Kids on the Block fans I knew in middle/high school are still ride or die for them dudes.

All my friends at middle school age were totally into Take That and pretty excited to get their reunion tour tickets a few years back, but in a kind of ironic/"lol guilty secret" way, whereas some of the Star Wars dudes I know are still, you know, wearing SW t-shirts in regular rotation and will tell you that it really was the greatest film ever.

As yet I can't think of a girl equivalent that doesn't develop that patina of (feigned?) ironic distance with age but maybe women are just socialised to become embarrassed about liking childish or girly things whereas nostalgic dude stuff gets more "still totally the most important cultural product of the last 40 years" articles. (I dunno. "women do this and men do this" statements make me uneasy but I make 'em anyway.)

Not entirely related but I was thinking abt it recently: I work in IT. The sysadmin likes to quote Red Dwarf with the men on the team, but never with the women, and if I join in on a reference I get totally ignored. I think it might not make sense to his worldview that when I was 11-13 and at an all-girls school my best friends and I were totally into RD, watched the videos together, bought the merchandise, quizzed each other about RD trivia. But I haven't revisited the series much as an adult so I can't compete and don't particularly want to just for the sake of trying to be "one of the boys" when I clearly can't be.

what are you doing in this thread? get out

a second thought wouldn't have gone amiss there lj

maybe women are just socialised to become embarrassed about liking childish or girly things whereas nostalgic dude stuff gets more "still totally the most important cultural product of the last 40 years" articles

this is the thing, isn't it

Little Women.

what are you doing in this thread? get out

well I did wonder that but I didn't want to make assumptions about the 2 or 3 posters whose gender I am not sure-ish of...

tbf qualx codes female too, motion retracted :)

anyway get with the program: girls like pink things, boys like blue things. a pink transformer set would sell to girls, a blue barbie would sell to boys

How are you still 15 tho

constant diet of blue breakfast cereals

-horses
-Harry Potter
-Boy bands on a spectrum, starting with Beatles/Stones on through to 1D
-Wonder Woman

I remember someone suggesting 'figure skating' as an answer to a similar question?

xp Harry Potter is a good answer I think (although I am a bit older than the Harry Potter Generation so icbw)

horses/cats too but not sure if natural real-world animals count - although there may be collecting of horse/cat-related trinkets e.g. figurines and paintings as well as photos so yeah, I guess those are totally culturally mediated

not sure why I never got into superhero comics as I loved newspaper comic strips, Beano/Dandy, Asterix, Tintin... perhaps the rippling muscles or indeed cleavage were offputting to me where a less physically detailed, more cartoony male character was more of a blank slate to project myself onto?

(I loved Mighty Mouse but neither Superman nor Mickey Mouse! I'm not sure what that says except maybe I was just a weird 5y/o)

Oh yes! My sister was the skater and I was the horse person. And the answer to girl film obsessions that linger on into adulthood: Grease.

-Figure skating
-Gymnastics

If will be interesting what the more 'democratic' social media spaces for discussing culture will do to 'girly' things like Taylor Swift or One Direction. If it will become culturally coded as 'bad' as so much nineties stuff was, or if it will be kept alive.

Anecdote: In a podcast on TheDissolve, one of their - female - reviewers talked about seeing the One Direction film with an audience, which consisted mostly of tweenage girls. She said, that whenever there were one of - many - scenes where one of the boys took off their shirts, it was almost as if there wasn't enough oxygen in the room, as all the girls gasped at once. I completely honestly think that's awesome if that's true.

I was going to say Grease but then I wondered if it was originally marketed to young girls, with all the sexual references.

(My over-30 fiancee has a bunch of unicorn stuff, if that was the thing that prompted qualx's comment to me.)

Grease and Saturday Night Fever both marketed to young teenaged girls in the same way Seventeen magazine was most popular with girls in middle school.

in my experience the fandom of most of the stereotypical 'male' interests is way closer to 50/50 than people ever want to believe and even in the face of actual attendance at related events/concerts people just shrug "i guess a lot guys dragged their girlfriends here huh"

― FLOPSZN (some dude), Sunday, 2 August 2015 03:21

Yeah, this is what I was talking about. Even on the old Comics Journal forum you'd get these indie comics guys acting like women were far too superior to be into anything like that.
Cosplay exploding probably changed things a lot. I think the mostly female audience for Yaoi and scary Lolita gore comics has changed perceptions too but even a lot of highly sexualised western comics that so many people assume only lonely guys like. Lots of fanart of Link from Zelda boning his way through Hyrule.

suddenly
Johnny
gets a feelin'
he's being surrounded by
wild garbage cultural objects/phenomena
wild garbage cultural objects/phenomena
wild garbage cultural objects/phenomena

secrets
romance
not cultural products themselves but secrets and romance are the simmering core of manufactured girlhood iirc

Never seen the original Star Wars and don't want to either

you are in good company

https://thefreshprincessofbelair.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/ive-never-seen-star-wars.jpg

secrets is a really good answer imo

How about princesses?

Like a lot of kids I seen Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Willow, Ninja Turtles, Batman and lots of other standard things loads of times but they never really took hold of me. I just watched them because they were put on in front of me. What I really wanted to see was 8 hour long films about battles between skeleton and rat armies, before I knew the bleak reality that such films didn't exist.

Same

One of my best friends worships all those Indiana Jones things but they just weren't as popular at our school. We were more likely to talk about Hitchhikers Guide than Star Wars.

Anyway I answered the question correctly up thread.

If you're talking about Disney's Frozen, it hasn't really proved itself yet but I wouldn't be surprised. Personally I didn't like it much, although it did have some funny bits.

yr nuts frozen is an epidemic

but I'm not sure its as gendered as to qualify for the question tbh seems to have landed across the board

I feel like Hello Kitty & Barbie are on point

It's interesting that Harry Potter came up: there's an old Zompist.com/Bob's Comics Review review of Sandman that touches on the part of A Game of You where Gaiman talks about the differences between boys' & girls' fantasies (iirc, boys' = being the fastest, strongest, smartest, etc.; girls' = being chosen or secretly destined to become a princess). The reviewer points out that Harry Potter manages to fulfill both of these different sets of desiring trajectories at the same time...

*zompist/Bob's Comics

LOVED BUT DONT CARE ABOUT NOW: Street Sharks, Power Rangers

LOVED THEN, STILL LOVE: Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, Mighty Max (love the monsters but couldn't give a fuck about Max himself now), Monster In My Pocket

TOLERATED THEN BUT LOVE NOW: GI Joe Animated film (type of thing I'd normally dislike but it's hilarious, grotesque and genuinely quite good), Pinocchio (Disney), Boglins

HATED THEN BUT LOVE NOW: Fairy Tale art like Rackham and Froud.

NEVER GOT WHY ANY KIDS LIKED IT: Tintin, Arthur, Barbar, Wrestling (slooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, you had to wait hours and hours for anything vaguely cool), James Bond, Mr Ben, The Racoons, Duck Tales, Sharkie And George, Biker Mice From Mars (guess they were the same as Ninja Turtles and Street Sharks but they just didn't seem as cool), Blue fucking Peter, Winnie The Pooh (the cartoons)

Superheroes were a massive phase for me(age 9-20) and I assumed it was for life but I only have any lingering love for stuff by Ditko, Kirby and Gene Colan.

^^post just sent me down a rabbit hole that ended with me watching vlogs where a guy reviews WereBears

If you're talking about Disney's Frozen, it hasn't really proved itself yet but I wouldn't be surprised.

I want to live in your world.

Troll dolls were mainly aimed at girls, yes? looking at wikipedia there seems to have been a line specifically marketed to boys called 'Original Battle Trolls' ("big haired dudes...with bad attitudes!"), I don't remember them being very successful, though.
don't know if affection for Trolls tends to last into adulthood but GIS for 'troll dolls' brings up lots of photos of women dressing up in troll costumes to go out on the lash

I want to live in your world.

― ailsa, Sunday, August 2, 2015

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-D-X2esnd9RI/VLaGegPK_BI/AAAAAAAACjg/v6W2OxZ44JA/s1600/ariel_part_of_your_world.gif

Judy and the dream of garbage cultural objects/phenomena

My friend once described Flowers in the Attic as Star Wars for girls.

White manchildren who've never struggled for anything end up growing up and becoming the editors/writers/thinkpiecers of the world that create the illusion that greasy kid stuff like Star Wars and superhero movies and Mad Max and TV shows and Pearl Jam need to be pseudo-intellectualized and perpetuated as opposed to either A) realizing that the contemporary version of all that is Pewdiepie and EDM and covering or B) Actually growing up and discovering like John Luther Adams or w/e

All of which is admittedly hardman talk from the dude constantly mounting a campaign to appreciate the first Korn album

Who will witeman the witemen

George Lucas on How His New Film Is Like Star Wars for Girls
Nora Ephron: Star Wars for Girls
[Dirty Dancing's] popularity has also caused it to be called "the Star Wars for girls."
The Hunger Games is Star Wars for girls
Sex and the City is like Star Wars for girls
I do agree that twilight is a Star Wars for girls
No no no, Star Wars is Star Wars for girls
Star Wars for Girls. A nest-of-ants retreat. A bee in my inviolable hand, preparing to sting. An unexplained phenomena, surging momentarily before ducking back

"Pretty In Pink" and other 80s relationship drama-comedies

"Heathers" and "Clueless" for more alt/90s version of same.

Love john Luther Adams but lol at middlebrow signifiers of maturity

All of which is admittedly hardman talk from the dude constantly mounting a campaign to appreciate the first Korn album

― dick wet with chickenshit (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, August 2, 2015 11:56 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol classic. life is peachy>>> tho

when i was a kid i would wait in the car when we went to mcdonalds and ask my mom & dad to get me a happy meal with the barbie figurine (which they give to girls) and not the toy car (boys). i wanted the barbie cause i liked playing with action figures and didn't gaf about cars but i knew (as, like, a 4 year old!) that ppl at mcdonalds would think i was gay if i asked for a barbie

there's an old Zompist.com/Bob'sics Review review of Sandman that touches on the part of A Game of You where Gaiman talks about the differences between boys' & girls' fantasies (iirc, boys' = being the fastest, strongest, smartest, etc.; girls' = being chosen or secretly destined to become a princess). The reviewer points out that Harry Potter manages to fulfill both of these different sets of desiring trajectories at the same time...

turns out luke isn't a peasant, he's a knight (and a prince). turns out clark kent isn't a peasant, he's a prince (and superman). turns out the protagonist of every pulp fantasy book ever fulfills the ancient prophecies--<i>but it couldn't be me. it couldn't!</i> he thought--and/or has a secret royal dad (and knows nothing). simba matures by accepting that it is very important that he is a prince. aladdin wants to be a prince, pretends to be a prince, accepts that he is not a prince, and becomes a prince. boys fuckin love being princes. but something just sounds right about "boys are active, girls are passive"--some obscure satisfaction, somewhere inside, some sense that i am placed as i should be. also worth noting that hermione is the smartest.

aw man fucked up tags again and ruined my authentic fantasy prose

we all wanna be prince

now i'm wondering why Hermione wasn't in Ravenclaw also what has my life come down to

simba matures by accepting that it is very important that he is a prince. aladdin wants to be a prince, pretends to be a prince, accepts that he is not a prince, and becomes a prince.

Never thought these were marketed primarily to boys.

Maybe culturally peripheral, but fandom for literary erotica is overwhelmingly female. Slash fan fiction too.

Xo to dlh: I agree with this...it's been forever since I read A Game of You so I don't necessarily ascribe that "boys active/girls passive" reductivism to him when it could be my garbled memory just fucked up the nuance therefore making his thought processes seem more pat than they actually were...

Star Wars has the secret prince destiny theme and thats the archetypal boilerplate boys consumerist-garbagey myth so yeah: dlh is right

Predates consumerist garbage by quite a bit fwiw

horses

the oj simpson trial was my generation's star wars

SW is arguably the progenitor of modern day consumerist garbage in terms of both cinema and merchandizing.

oh don't get Peter Biskind on us

Does Flashdance qualify?

My older cousin took me to the theater to see it when I was like, 8 or something which is crazy now bcz it was an R-Rated movie

I dont think I understood really any of it except "welder wants to do ballet"

HOWEVER I have watched this movie recently and it is a horrible leering sexist garbagefire. Like, almost unwatchable except for the actual dancing scenes & Lee Ving. Which, I mean know it's common knowledge that its a shitty movie but I didnt grasp HOW shitty it was bcz of nostalgia-colored glasses.

From IMDB trivia page:
The role of Alex Owens was originally offered to Melanie Griffith, who turned it down. Executives at Paramount Pictures wanted an unknown for the part. A nationwide search for a young actress was narrowed down to three finalists: Leslie Wing, Demi Moore, and Jennifer Beals. Reportedly, a Paramount executive took pictures of the three actresses to a group of construction workers on the studio lot, asking them "Which of these women do you most want to fuck?" and being given the answer "Jennifer Beals".

8 year old me just shrivelled up & died

But all of the girls my age in primary school were coming up with Maniac dance routines at lunchtime & cutting up our sweaters it was a tooootal thing, so insane that such a horrible movie could consume us all. Amazing soundtrack tho, maybe that saves it idk. But insaaaaaane that this movie is any kind of touchstone at all. It makes me angry that I liked it at all!

I mean, still get teary over the themesong ffs.

Best thing that movie gave girls was how to take off yr bra without removing yr shirt <3

-end rant-

I definitely remember the tidal wave of cut-up sweatshirts at my school. (I was 11 when the movie came out, but that trend lasted at least into the following school year, which would have been 7th grade.)

Best thing that movie gave girls was how to take off yr bra without removing yr shirt <3

lol otm

Predates consumerist garbage by quite a bit fwiw

ya “(s)he is the One” secret destiny hero (or prince/princess) myth(s) obv pretty archetypal
(which obv stars wars etc playing on, capitalizing on)

at least 2 intertwined/ overlapping strands here:
(pop) culture artifacts beloved as child/adult, like on aesthetic & sociocultural level, involved in self-identity as a ‘fan’
(pop) culture artifacts involved in imaginative & mythopoetic formation of personal ego/ self & sense of life/ world (on conscious & not so conscious levels)

as adult you might grow out of (or even repudiate) certain things 'consciously' that are still at work somewhere in yr psyche

also star wars isnt garbage

kiss def qualifies but *clutches star wars trilogy tearfully* leave sw alone

In case I even need to qualify it at this point, I have a deep and abiding love of garbage (and, although I can't personally say I've loved SW since my age was in single digits, I would never begrudge anyone their SW love).

In case I even need to qualify it at this point, I have a deep and abiding love of garbage

likewise!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esEdC0c3YI4

Star Wars is like, the martyr of garbage pop culture. The Jim Morrison, the Kurt Cobain, the 2pac, the Amy Winehouse. Changed everything, then was killed by it's own creator, and only exists as inferior copies, that continues to proliferate to this day. I have no idea what I think about Star Wars these days, because I can't stand the horrendous digital manipulation that's been forced upon them.

Going back to the OP for a sec:

I have this theory that certain cultural objects/phenomena get their hooks in little kids before they have enough of a knowledge base to judge what's good or bad, and consequently they grow up with an almost pre-rational love for those things that is impossible to break. Things (movies, TV shows, records, etc.) that, when seen through adult eyes, are obviously garbage nonetheless retain a passionate and obsessive fan base of people who were first exposed to them in childhood.

This is actually a really interesting phenomenon to me, inasmuch as people get older and see the crass and commercial side of the pop culture garbage they grew up on and denounce it on those terms, but the fact remains that this is culture and that it's clearly formative. That doesn't mean it's above critique or that people's tastes can't mature as they age, but it's always seemed a bit of a strange expectation on the part of some people that adults should dispense with childish things altogether when it seems wholly understandable that the artifacts and stories one is exposed to at such a young age would continue to be impactful even into adulthood.

As applied to the thread topic in general, it seems reasonable to assume, if the pop culture marketed to girls hasn't historically been as compelling or had the staying power of that which was marketed to boys, that the cultural artifacts that have generally resonated with girls and continue to resonate with them as women aren't necessarily pop cultural artifacts and may be a bit more nebulous. LL's suggestions of secrets and romance seem pretty OTM from what I can tell based on women I know or have known. Horses and unicorns, too. I get the feeling that beauty rituals take up some of that same space, too, but would definitely encourage the women itt to shoot down or back up that idea.

Not sure Star Wars is objectively any more garbage than 'adult' media like SVU, Dancing With the Stars, or Monday Night Football.

Nope, not at all imo.

What makes it adult is you swap out prince/princess with a lawyer or crime scene investigator.

In the end it's all authority worship.

privileged American boys of the last two generations are allowed and encouraged to be manchildren, privileged American girls of the last two generations are supposed to self-actualize, grow up and have fulfilling careers as well as make babies and encourage the manchild behaviors of the boys. Also men control the media, even though the female brain is vastly superior. There I said it.

not otm but whatever

xpost otm

it's not

is so

i am sorry sleeping bag, but your brain is obviously inferior and thus you don't recognize the otm-ness of my post. Also, make that 3 generations, plenty of baby boomer manchildren out there.

Hell, it was the Baby Boom generation that started the cycle. (Well, their parents, who created the pop culture that was marketed to their children.)

there has been pop culture marketed to children well before the baby boomers, however, it was that generation that created the first siginficant manchild epidemic

History is filled with lots of adolescent kings and pharaohs and rulers who controlled almost all literary and artistic output so the manchild stuff in the media goes way back.

Any Babar cartoon fans who can explain their enjoyment? I suspect it might have been good but it used to seem like one of the dullest things imaginable.

not going to dive into this silly thread but as an official member of The Harry Potter Generation i can say it was not at the time any more of a 'girl' thing than a 'boy' thing, aside from Books in general being more of a girl thing at that age. boys still fucking loved hp.

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1248486592l/1996409.jpg

These books were my bible, my solace, the world I inhabited for, ahh, grades 5-8 at least and maybe more. It was a better alternative than the real world with God and Evangelical Christianity in it. I couldn't be free in this life, but I could spend all my time in a reality where Christianity and its demands didn't exist.

at this age though it is definitely not taken nearly as seriously by boynerds as SW is

xp to myself

I was into KISS when I was a little girl, fwiw. I'm not now though, they were some hot garbage.

Suzy otm about skating and gymnastics, I think. For me personally, the only enduring thing I can think of is stuff like the Goodies, and the Young Ones.

I've never seen much Doctor Who or been involved in the fandom but it seems to me from a distance that the number of female fans overwhelmed the male fans?

i knew a lot of girls who loved Who growing up, myself included :)

Dr Who didnt have that "fandom" in its 70s/80s incarnation tho, really. Did it? Everyone just joked about how the shitty effects scared them and made them hide behind the couch.

Then again now I think about it, I did have a crush on Adric...

Enid Blyton may qualify

fairies magic etc was always a big deal for me

oooh! Yes, nice one. And May Gibbs.

Sorry, I meant to say that the female Doctor Who fans really came in huge numbers with the revival.

xpost omg i forgot abt May Gibbs, def otm

On Babar: I have no feelings about the cartoon, but I read the book a lot, I think. There's one page, where one of the old elephants has died, and he's lying in state, and is a grayish green color, iirc. That page has stayed with me after I grew up, but I'm not sure it's quite the same thing.

This page:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vcwks7fu7pA/Uzi_McaU3XI/AAAAAAAAA5w/cEkEk0vafaw/s1600/babar-mushroom.jpg

Brr, that green color.

My impression was that original Doctor Who was more male-embraced, and yeah, the revival was where the female fans came on board (but not during the Christopher Eccleston season, ha ha).

that wasn't true of my experience w Dr Who

why are we talking about Babar of all things

Robert Adam Gilmour asked. Someone else mentioned it as something he or she didn't understand, I think along with Tintin. I'm guessing French/Belgian drawings might be a continental thing?

cool

musicals just as huge as star wars for a lot of women. my sister loved grease, godspell, evita, jesus christ superstar, annie, the wiz, etc for her whole life pretty much. le miz and cats were religion for lots of people well into adulthood.

the sound of music alone! people watch it when they are kids and then play a part in high school and then go see it with their kids and watch it every year and on an on. the cult of maria.

annie
sound of music
wizard of oz

yep def

Tintin and Babar seemed sophisticated and mature but also very inaccessible. Every time I watched it, seemed like they were in the middle of a huge saga. I just wondered how young kids ever got into it.
Winnie The Pooh was kind of similar but I watched lots of that and never knew what was happening. Mr Ben and Wombles were just too mellow and domestic, like they were really made for tea sipping old people.
I didn't like Bagpuss and Magic Roundabout either but I appreciate those now.

It's just really hard for me to imagine kids being really engaged in those things. There was a feeling that this is what adults wanted children to like. Especially Blue Peter (probably never seen outside Britain).

winnie-the-pooh the books are still some of the funniest things i've ever read honestly. just the fastidious deadpan prose. sometimes break them out in deep depression.

i got into tintin via indiana jones--sought out more stuff with biplanes/professors/redlines-on-maps.

with babar the main problem was the font.

wait the font in that image above is unproblematic. mine was in, like, cursive.

partly the shows are for different age groups, and partly i think pre-1980s kids were a little more chill and contemplative than their younger Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour counterparts

or to save silly binaries and throwing more wood onto the bonfire of stupid, i don't believe that "all rude, crude 'tude, all the time" is/was any less a product of what adults wanted kids to like than wholesome depictions of niceness with shonky non-animation are/were

Dirty Dancing is almost definitely one, right? My partner, who would hate the idea of being called a 'girly girl', loves it unequivocally. Oh and Labyrinth, that too.

With Tintin and Babar it's all about the books. Those are some of the first books I've ever read. So many friends I visited had Babar or Tintin books laying around, school library had all the Tintins. It's not about the shows at all. I do agree that Tintin is very complicated, I still don't get what half the plots are about. It's about jokes and cool 'ligne claire' drawings.

Winnie the Pooh is different, those cartoons were on every friday night when I was a kid, along with Ducktails, on public service tv, so that is what everyone has watched, even homes without cable. But I've still probably read the books more times than I've watched any episode.

I'll never forget the first time I saw wrestling. Everyone was into it, it was at the height of Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior's fame, I could never see it because I didn't have the right channels.
Rented a wrestling video and was utterly horrified by the glacial slowness and that the height of the action looked like capering at best.
Tried to watch it in high school (Steve Austin and The Rock era) and it wasn't much better. Was forced to watch it with friends many times for many hours.

I feel bad because the wrestlers mostly seem very nice and lots of pain, suffering and work goes into it but it's rarely entertaining.

what is this thread about today

if you're a true 90s kid you'll remember video games, scrofula, and cartoons that didn't have endless plot arcs that are really hard for kids to follow

Scrofula?

not a true 90s kid clearly

I'd like to read Moomins (which also had a strange mellow cartoon), Winnie The Pooh and maybe even Babar someday. I know Herge's Tintin is supposed to be a masterpiece but I've never been attracted.

Prince Valiant cartoon seemed confoundingly wistful back then.

Sorry, getting back on topic
https://youtube.com/?#/playlist?list=PL2kosbNKPHJCXUw7xDtgTky9Tj82e85pH
Just look at most of Nostalgia Chick's topics.

i think i'd like to know more about moonins. found the cartoons genuinely unsettling as a kid.

wait the font in that image above is unproblematic. mine was in, like, cursive.

― playlists of pensive swift (difficult listening hour), Monday, August 3, 2015 7:34 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Earlier (maybe only first?) editions of Babar books had cursive writing. I think my dad still has Babar the King from when he was a kid, and in addition to cursive, there are a handful of untranslated French words.

So many versions of Moomins. Even the original creator did 3 versions in text, picture books and comic strips.

women love the hell out of star wars

dreamstone.

What I've seen of the moomin comic strip is amazing. There is one instance, where they're walking towards a ship in a storm, and the kid asks 'dad, can I steer the ship?' and the dad answers 'no my son. I've got so few joys in my life.' So Finnish...

there have been some good articles on moomins writer tove jansson recently, e.g. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/09/a-right-size-dream/

What a strange thread. That said, I can't really think of an equivalent because, yes, I love Dirty Dancing and Labyrinth something fierce but I'm not going to sit around claiming they're cinematic masterpieces. It's purely the nostalgia factor. And Bowie's package. Obviously.

The Last Unicorn?

Dirty Dancing otm, I remember it being the first movie I heard about from a girl. The title made it sound super grown up and scandalous.

boys like star wars, girls like horses and bowie's package, some basic cultural certainties we can all live by

I had a horse. I hated him.

I don't think he was a particularly nice horse though tbh.

I haven't thought about the Last Unicorn in years but I watched that movie over and over again. If I watched it today I bet I'd still remember some lines.

I really liked the movie The Last Unicorn as a kid but it was only ever on the matinee on the local station that later turned into a Fox affiliate

I made me parents record it for me so I had it on VHS. I remember being super creeped out when at the end all the unicorns that the red bull had herded into the ocean came back to shore by riding in on the waves.

it's on amazon prime atm, i might rewatch

sarahell otm

there's also tamora pierce books, sailor moon, shoujo anime in general, miyazaki films, wicked (the musical), and period dramas.

a lot of the cultural artifacts mentioned itt just seem like things that women might have a lingering fondness for, as opposed to the passionate obsession into adulthood that the OP was referring to. horse girls are a separate topic, imo.

Yeah I really can't think of an equivalent passionate obsession at all.

Ugh period dramas. I knew so many girls who were so into them whereas I can think of few things I'd want to watch less.

(whispers) i am one of those girls

i blame anne of green gables

My cousin had a horse, the previous owner named it "Booby".

I think I would have like my horse better if it's name was Booby.

its not it's

has anyone mentioned books about illness and other forms of human misery? i read a lot of those when i was like 8-10
as i've mentioned, SYBIL was my favorite and i do maintain an interest in the strange and convoluted story that swirled around the movie and the book and the women involved. that's about as close as i could personally get to star wars.

x-post - lol aw! I could just never get into them but I'm sure that means I missed out on some great stuff.

x-post - lol I was obsessed with Sybil and read it multiple times. I also read Alive at least 10 times. These might be things that strange girls were obsessed with though cause I can't remember any of my friends reading those.

and by "strange" I clearly mean superior and awesome ;)

sarahell otm, women generally have 'lingering fondness' for things because they also have to Get Shit Done. I think this is changing in younger generations - with predictably shitty responses from boys/men.

This thread is much better when it veers towards the anecdotal.

Thinking about it now, I don't know that I was ever as obsessed with any particular cultural object as I was by the broader worlds hinted at by those cultural objects. I was always about smooshing those disparate worlds together with whatever crazy shit I came up with in my own head.

xpost Yeah, I feel like the key to understanding what drives the manbabies behind like gamergate and the female Ghostbusters backlash lies somewhere itt.

who cares about those losers or what drives them?
they do not deserve to be dissected itt or anywhere imo

The only thing I ever really obsessed about in my youth (besides childhood movies like The Neverending Story) was U2. I was freaking nuts about them. Now I look back at younger me with sadness because of how he'd be continually disappointed by them as years went by.

last unicorn is absolutely amazing btw, the harpy section (angela lansbury as curiosity-collecting witch throwing her arms wide in ecstatic anticipation of being disemboweled by her escaped immortal harpy because she knows she too is now immortal in the harpy's memory: "i HELD you!") -- depressed christopher lee imprisoning and destroying what he loves via fiery red hallucinatory manifestation of rage+aggression that belies his own passive dessicated look -- alice-esque encounter with cackling drunken skeleton -- really strange and melancholy stuff. also: ORIGINAL SONGS BY AMERICA, for the consideration of those who still have the dumbass glenn yarborough songs from the hobbit stuck in their heads. and animation by topcraft, which would become ghibli!

xxpost I have a weird drive to understand people whose viewpoints make no sense and/or are abhorrent to me. I certainly don't expect anyone else to be similarly driven.

i understand the impulse i just find it a poor use of my (personal) time and energy because i get nothing out of it aside from an understanding of how awful people think, and even worse what they think about me

this is knowledge i dnw

last unicorn is absolutely amazing btw, the harpy section (angela lansbury as curiosity-collecting witch throwing her arms wide in ecstatic anticipation of being disemboweled by her escaped immortal harpy because she knows she too is now immortal in the harpy's memory: "i HELD you!") -- depressed christopher lee imprisoning and destroying what he loves via fiery red hallucinatory manifestation of rage+aggression that belies his own passive dessicated look -- alice-esque encounter with cackling drunken skeleton -- really strange and melancholy stuff. also: ORIGINAL SONGS BY AMERICA, for the consideration of those who still have the dumbass glenn yarborough songs from the hobbit stuck in their heads. and animation by topcraft, which would become ghibli!

― playlists of pensive swift (difficult listening hour), Monday, August 3, 2015 1:24 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OK, woah. I didn't know most of that!!!! I absolutely have to watch it again now.

i know those details because my entire history with it is adult, had never heard of it before being introduced a couple years ago by a girlfriend who had a whole dating-from-childhood ritual surrounding it with her sister. would never have watched it on my own obv, cuz girly.

I remember cackling drunk skeleton so clearly. Schmendrick gives him water he's tuned into wine so that he'll get drunk and tell him a secret or something like that, right? It must be over 25 years since I've seen that movie and I can picture that scene so well. The skeleton is sitting on a mantel or something? I could be wrong.

i think maria is actually reading the last unicorn right now. she loved it when she was a kid.

that rick springfield documentary on netflix that he made about his fans is an eye-opener. as far as obsession/fandom goes.

http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/2014-04/enhanced/webdr08/14/12/anigif_enhanced-10065-1397493393-1.gif

la lechera, my people :)

illness/human misery otm
go ask alice, second star to the right by deborah hautzig, the girl in the box story, yes yes i was all about this

(still am)

I was going to say that I thought his cheeks got rosy after he drank but I figured I was imaging that part. Ahhh! I'm totally going to watch this v v soon.

x-post I was also super into go ask alice and the girl in the box book but I've never heard of the star one. When I'm bored at work I read about missing or unidentified people and famous kidnap/murder stories. For fun.

also

anything & everything published on the pan horizons imprint ie judy bloom (forever) lois duncan (stranger with my face) norma klein (just friends omg)

Thinking about it now, I don't know that I was ever as obsessed with any particular cultural object as I was by the broader worlds hinted at by those cultural objects.

Yeah, I probably liked the Star Wars universe more than the actual movies. I liked reading background info on various worlds or characters. I wanted to know the history of that universe and how governments, economics, etc. worked. Before I saw the phantom menace, when I was reading random bits of stuff online and heard that the whole things starts with trade disputes, I was actually pretty excited about that.

Similarly to this, I think I actually got more enjoyment out of reading the Silmarillion than out of any other of the Tolkien books.

These days, I read actual history books. Why it never occurred to me to do that as a teenager will remain a mystery (most likely because I had shitty history teachers in school).

wait, was anyone here a rocky horror obsessive? that pre-dates star wars mania too, i think. and mostly female-driven.

Man alive, I should really give The Last Unicorn a rewatch. Haven't seen it in like 30 years, and only barely remember really liking it and how sad it was.

x-psot - *whispers* Uh, me? I still know every word of the movie and the entire soundtrack but I don't know if I'd compare that to the Star Wars thing. Hmmmmmmm.

(well, the rocky horror movie came out before star wars. but i guess the actual mania for the movie took longer to get going....)

(yeah, i was just thinking of extreme female fandom for a movie and that one certainly created a culture around it for decades...)

star wars thing litmus test: are women getting excited about sharing this thing with their kids? are women saying "now that you're a little more grown up, i want to show you something that was really important to me as a kid and i hope you like it" and then showing them SYBIL?

lol (this is what my mom did but she is one of a kind)

^Not a Rocky Horror person but so many of my theatre/punk/new-wave friends were.

In addition, the junior starter kits for 'go ask alice' et al are basically Anne Frank/Helen Keller, and let's not forget the Little House books read concurrently with the TV series. Half the girls in my second/third-grade classes had SUNBONNETS and LUNCH PAILS ffs (and I was Nellie Oleson for Halloween one year).

my mum introduced my friends & i to rocky horror when i was 15? she rented it from the video store for us to watch at my birthday slumber party

at first i was moooooortified like MUM HE IS WEARING LADYS UNDERPANTS WHAT ARE YOU DOING

but we all already loved tim curry so we got over that pretty quick

one of my friends was v uptight & told me afterwards that my mum was a pervert lol
she didnt like it at ALL
two of my friends who were shy & quiet came riiiight the fuck out of their shells after that which was amazing

mum even took us all (except the uptight friend) to see the live australian stage show a year or two later :D

xp (and it wasn't important to her as a kid, she just thought it was interesting)

i think if i had kids Rocky Horror would be something I passed down

maybe i will show it to my niece

Before I saw the phantom menace, when I was reading random bits of stuff online and heard that the whole things starts with trade disputes, I was actually pretty excited about that.

otm, the crime of this movie is it doesn't live up to the allegedly symptomatic opening crawl. otm about the larger universe, even if every planet only has one biome. would camp out on a sidewalk if i heard the new movies spent a lot of time in nar shaddaa, the vertical city

(it's actually nothing that schmendrick gives the skeleton: an empty glass. he tries to conjure wine but it doesn't work; he's about to throw it away but the skeleton, thinking it is wine, shouts "give it to me if you don't want it!" and shmendrick says "but you can't taste wine" and the skeleton says "BUT I REMEMBER" -- then after tipping back the empty glass, as in gif above, sighs "ah, the real stuff!")

(then he becomes drunk)

i def got my love of musicals, and period literature from mum

and rocky horror

AND star wars

so you can make of that what you will

"second/third-grade classes had SUNBONNETS and LUNCH PAILS ffs"

http://www.maran-ata.net/minihearts/images/HH-6.gif

two of my friends who were shy & quiet came riiiight the fuck out of their shells after that which was amazing

lol aw

i would love to read a book of essays by women about Little House. the books and the show. the show alone had the power to change your life/traumatize you/make you question everything you think you know about life.

yeah if I have them I would totally show it to mine but not until they were maybe 16/17. I first saw it at around 13 and that was a little too young, I think.

(it's actually nothing that schmendrick gives the skeleton: an empty glass. he tries to conjure wine but it doesn't work; he's about to throw it away but the skeleton, thinking it is wine, shouts "give it to me if you don't want it!" and shmendrick says "but you can't taste wine" and the skeleton says "BUT I REMEMBER" -- then after tipping back the empty glass, as in gif above, sighs "ah, the real stuff!")

― playlists of pensive swift (difficult listening hour), Monday, August 3, 2015 1:56 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ahhhh, yes!!!

Ah, yes!!

my wife recently checked this out of the library. There are 50 holds on it:

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F2982-presscdn-29-70-pagely.netdna-ssl.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F11%2Fpioneer-girl-laura-ingalls-wilder.jpg&f=1

xxp

lol I only meant to yes that once but ok

i say i will

I know a few women who are into the Chalet School stories and things like that - for at least one of them it's not just "Here are stories about girls by women" but also (er, in my impression) a worthy obnoxiousness about "Why should't I be as Into Things as men?"

i think if i had kids Rocky Horror would be something I passed down

a couple of twins at V's preschool came dressed as Rocky Horror characters one year (they were around 5). Granted their dad was an old school gay HIV activist dude going way back but even then I was like uhhhh how much of this movie made any sense to them at all. But whatever. San Francisco!

xp

oh yeah little house was HUGE for me

mum put me onto the books as a kid & i was so into them & the show

I think most of my friends loved Prince as much as boys loved Star Wars but I can't say because I didn't know any boys at the time. Most of them probably still like Prince today even though they would probably not let their kids watch Purple Rain the summer between 3rd and 4th gr like we did.

Weirdly, we didn't get into Holly Hobbie, although you'd think we would be swimming in the merchandise? But no: Breyer horses took all our spare cash.

The bits of Little House we basically cosplayed through the entirety of 1977 were, fortuitously, all set in places about 100 mils from where we were. The sunbonnets and lunch pails came from school trips to Fort Snelling, where there was a good shop onsite that sold pioneer paraphernalia like chalk slates and horehound candy (which we wanted because it was described in the sweetshop bits of Laura Ingalls Wilder).

Pioneer Girl is kind of interesting actually - she couldn't get it published on its own but both her and her daughter ended up mining the material and repurposing it for subsequent books

xp

I definitely had a Rocky Horror obsessive phase but it was much later than the age range being generally discussed itt.

I'm trying to remember any pop cultural stuff my parents passed on to me that actually stuck. Mostly just music (Monkees from my mom, Sabbath from my dad).

i learned to love so much stuff via my sister. she was such a superfan. the carpenters, the osmonds, musicals, judy blume, flowers in the attic, stephen king, soaps. on and on. we watched general hospital every day for years together during the primo L&L years. and she turned me on to the edge of night. loved that show. i did not share her love for barry manilow though.

I never really got into Little House obsessively. I watched it and remember crushing on Albert and being scared when Mary went blind.

I was, on the other hand, totally obsessed with Beaches but I realize that was entirely just me. lol.

VC Andrews! I learned so much about (incestuous) sex from those books but again, it's not like I'd try to defend them now.

has anyone mentioned books about illness and other forms of human misery? i read a lot of those when i was like 8-10

wow, yeah-- this had receded in my memory
taking me back to school library bookshelves
especially into books about 'schizophrenia'

One of my college classmates was part of the rank-and-file of schoolhouse kids in the Little House cast and she brought Matt Laborteaux with her to one of my seminars when he was visiting for a week. It was all we could do not to call him Albert, and was so embarrassing.

https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6531439-M.jpg

otm

albert <3

remember when he got hooked on morphine

i wonder what my kids would make of old paul zindel books. there were always some lying around our house growing up. the pigman, pardon me, you're stepping on my eyeball, my darling, my hamburger.

not going to dive into this silly thread but as an official member of The Harry Potter Generation i can say it was not at the time any more of a 'girl' thing than a 'boy' thing, aside from Books in general being more of a girl thing at that age. boys still fucking loved hp.

How did boys play out (act out? express?) their HP love? I spent the last several years in the HP fandom, which seemed predominantly female. (Although HP was a phenomenon that probably will never be repeated, because the rise of HP coincided with the general rollout of Internet access and the emergence of "digital natives.")

Related to this: Through fandom I have met females who are deeply into Star Wars, the Marvel and DC comic book universes, and just about every fandom previously listed. But they're not as visible as the manchildren hanging out at the comic book store, because they make fanfic and fanart, or hold deep meta discussions on online forums. There's a general sense that these fandom activities shouldn't be made too public.

i loved paul zindel books!

Doll and teddy collecting? My mother is a huge collector of all that and fairy tale ornaments.

Some of the books remind me of reading about Japanese fandom of "beautiful suffering" and "suffering beautifully". Also an old British thing. Stories about miserable orphans and servants, women married off and traded around like property,

there's a general sense that men will treat you like garbage and crowd you out of real life interaction about your fandom among women who love comics, I think

one of the first big popular literary rages in the u.s. were captivity narratives. some things never change.

Always loved the imagery of stuff like Secret Garden, ballet schools, Black Beauty, Lassie, dramas about posh all-girl schools from old england. Makes me quite envious somehow.

I had a brief time of trying to track down beautifully drawn girls comics and sadly they're very hard to find and mostly pretty crap. But I posted some lovely Ron Embleton stuff here years ago..
http://idemandreprints.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/ron-embleton.html

Through fandom I have met females who are deeply into Star Wars, the Marvel and DC comic book universes, and just about every fandom previously listed. But they're not as visible as the manchildren hanging out at the comic book store, because they make fanfic and fanart, or hold deep meta discussions on online forums. There's a general sense that these fandom activities shouldn't be made too public.

― Charlie Chaplin Challenge (j.lu), Monday, August 3, 2015 1:29 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm way into comics (largely Marvel stuff, which I'm sure isn't news to anyone who's spent time on ILC) and I have pretty much zero irl interaction with other fans because I've found the general fandom off-putting. I'm glad the female and POC fans have been more visible of late, and their increasing presence would certainly encouraged me to dip my own toe in, but I unfortunately totally understand why they/you feel the need to maintain a distance.

These days, I read actual history books. Why it never occurred to me to do that as a teenager will remain a mystery (most likely because I had shitty history teachers in school).

YES! I've been reading medieval history this year and it has been a thousand times cooler than any fantasy book could be.

issues is the best korn album

Thanks Merdeyeux for the Tove Jansson article.

How did boys play out (act out? express?) their HP love? I spent the last several years in the HP fandom, which seemed predominantly female.

tbh i don't really remember anyone acting out their fandom until high school. it was a mega phenomenon that everyone was reading but when i was 11 it was still just a book (or a couple of books); when you're 11 and you're reading a book about characters who are also 11, it isn't really a huge deal because there are a lot of books for 11 year olds about 11 year olds. it was high school where people were really treating it like a personal/cultural touchstone, something that was 'grown up' with. a lot of self-awareness and sentimentality over the connection to youth -- it was an ongoing thing and a nostalgia thing at the same time. my high school was a pretty chill place compared to most public schools so maybe there was less insecurity or w/e, but boys were generally pretty open (if still boy-ish) about being into it.

but also like there was a ton of merchandise and stuff when HP first blew up but think of the leg up something like SW had over young brains; me and my friends were all HUGE SW nerds but there was the accumulation of 3 decades of fandom already there for us to dive into. it wasn't until some time had passed that HP felt like something that could truly be nerded over. much like a lot of fantasy/sf book series i'd imagine.

so probably someone a few years younger than me would have more to contribute to the thread

but yeah thru and especially after college, just going by my facebook wall, hp is way more likely show up in my female friends' statuses. i'm sure that has something to do with facebook+buzzfeed/general clickbait meme culture. not talking about like fanfiction-level fandom though. i think my most die-hard friend just watches the movies and rereads the books a lot. my gf meanwhile was never a huge fan but has been reading hp fanfic forever.

Dogs and cats

yes you are a dog

Star Wars played a massive role in the first half of my life but I love my cats much more. Don't know what that says about the gender angle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-z7bAfDBNo

; )

i love making fun of star wars as much as boys love star wars

UK millennial girls love the spice girls more intensely and reliably than (UK millennial) boys love star wars ime

I have much better memories of spice world than of the rereleased first star wars which I thought was just the dreariest thing. hated luke, hated the world, never went back

Oh that's easy, there's crossover there too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axevtHLseMg

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51xmNQYbxGL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

The notion is that the fangirls are doing LOTR wrong (at least in the fanboys' eyes).

BILL AMEND FOR PRESIDETN

He took down that ornaldo bloomps thing HARDCORE. DAMMMNNN.

Dogs

Gendered Acculturation: Do Girls Love Anything As Much As Boys Love STAR WARS? ...

Dogs and cats

― calstars, Sunday, 4 June 2023 19:03 (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

cats have fallen out of favour since june huh

Oops

other girls

I’m sure this has been commented on multiple times upthread, but the premise of the question is weird. The two biggest Star Wars stans I know, by miles, are my sister and daughter. I don’t think they are unusual.

Of course, the films have become much more representative since the 70s. Retconning Leia as the brilliant general was a good move. I suppose it started with her strangulation of Jabba the Hutt, which was surely the highlight of the third movie.

I've now tried Andor twice and shit's boring. Star Wars sux, Star Trek forever.

It does feel like with Star Wars and Doctor Who that the gender poles reversed between my childhood and today... a few weeks ago I eating at the bar at a restaurant and the bar staff, 100% women, were to a person talking about how excited they were to get off work and play Baldur's Gate 3. For me, surreal (and nice).

RPGs were always popular with women afaict. i remember my introduction to baldur's gate 1 as a kid was because my friend's mom had it and got him into it.

Star Wars sux, Star Trek forever

otm

both suck but there are some good star wars

My youngest, who is 13 (and a boy), steadfastly maintains that it is Disney, not Orlando Bloom, that has ruined everything.

there are some good star wars

Holiday special is fun I guess yeah.

I’m sure this has been commented on multiple times upthread, but the premise of the question is weird.

I dipped out after Caravan Of Courage came out in the cinema — what marketing was aimed at your daughter’s age group before 2015?

Ugh so sorry I started this dumb ass dialogue

i keep calling star trek "star wars" completely by accident

it sounds like i'm trolling, but it's just a persistent "oh! i always get those two mixed up!". like how i get "right" and "left" mixed up.

this thread kind of ties in a lot, to my mind, with the "quirky music made by women" thread, where the differences are mainly due in large part to, well, misogyny

the "bechdel test" isn't and never was meant to be a measure of "feminism", but seeing other women meaningfully represented in media is kind of important to me, and star wars failed to do that.

leia strangling jabba is ok i guess but making her a slavegirl in chains and a metal bikini in a scenario pretty, uh, strongly inspired by the racist "arab slaver" fantasy, uh, i'm not really a big fan of that whole thing.

both star wars and gaming _are_ hotbeds of entitled nerd misogyny, and with younger generations perhaps that's passing, but for older generations it was very much a thing. for a lot of trans women getting to play as a _woman_ in a video game was really important but it was _so_ fucking rare. (for me it was the original Phantasy Star, Alis Landale, fucking legend.)

doctor who's fanbase is interesting because for most of my life it's been pretty strongly queer. when i was young the fanbase was kind of like the film print collector community - overwhelmingly gay men. sometimes that can be problematic. john nathan-turner, ian levine, gareth roberts, john barrowman. none of them people i look at in a positive light. it does...

i mean honestly a lot of the appeal to me of doctor who was that he wasn't always trying to get with women. that can appeal to a wide range of demographics, you know? for me, i'm asexual, so i thought that was nice. it's also nice that he wasn't always trying to get into heteronormative relationships, though.

also, despite itself, doctor who in its most popular form _did_ have strong female character. this is in large part down to the actors. katy manning's character was supposed to be a stupid ditz. lis sladen's character was supposed to be a straw feminist. in both cases though they brought so much more to the characters - so for the six years when the original show was arguably at its peak and at its most widely-seen, it did have strong cross-gender representation. i think that's important because it, along with strong characters from the novels like ace and benny summerfield, were a pretty big inspiration for russell t davies when he rebooted the show. in his version of the show, the companion isn't somebody the doctor explains the plot to, but basically the central character the show is built around, i'd argue.

Phantasy Star is really underrated, probably because nobody had a Sega Master System

and even if you did, it cost 70 dollars! in 1988 dollars! the flipside is that there weren't any other games for the SMS worth playing, so i guess you might as well.

we swapped our nintendo and all the games we had for it with the one family whose parents bought a sega master system. phantasy star was fucking amazing. it was one of those games where you needed graph paper to map out the dungeons tho. also the game misgendered noah (lutz in the japanese version) - he was a healer and wore a cloak so the game kept using she/her pronouns for him. it confused the fuck out of me as a kid.

yeah, it was very pricy at $70 which is why I shoplifted it from Circuit City! coming from playing PC games I already was an old hand at mapping dungeons on graph paper (once you learned how to map the maze in Zork I these grid-based dungeons were a breeze)

Japanese RPGs on consoles were so random we just sort of rolled with whatever gender assignment popped up, them drawing upon an entirely different mythology (or their own interpretation of Western mythologies making the trip back here) plus haphazard localization was probably ultimately beneficial in some sense?

yeah the western influence on jrpgs is pretty fascinating. particularly with phantasy star you see this desire to do 3D dungeons like in _Wizardry_, which was the CRPG that had the biggest influence in japan. also, ultima did some stuff for japan where the original programmers did, like, voice acting and video. here's lord british introing ultima 1 for the fm-towns:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVeEEGjkEE

and here's an ad he did for an ultima game in japan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DEz3iDkBeY

this stuff is big goofy fun. 3d dungeons were a goal a lot of the early RPG folks had, but you couldn't really do it on the NES... that it worked as well as it did in Phantasy Star, a lot of that was down to lead programmer Yuji Naka, who went on to be the guy behind Sonic the Hedgehog.

how would you say the haphazard translation was beneficial? i'm thinking of games like lufia ii and breath of fire ii that got translations that were just... bad. the appeal for me of phantasy star wasn't that noah got misgendered, haha.

I dipped out after Caravan Of Courage came out in the cinema — what marketing was aimed at your daughter’s age group before 2015?

Pre-2015 would have been the prequels. I don't remember the marketing being strongly "gendered" one way or the other. Amidala was certainly a more affirmative character than the original Leia.

leia strangling jabba is ok i guess but making her a slavegirl in chains and a metal bikini in a scenario pretty, uh, strongly inspired by the racist "arab slaver" fantasy, uh, i'm not really a big fan of that whole thing.

Sure, that was present, but it kind of got turned on its head.

Sometimes there’s a gaggle of girls on the street and a puppy comes along and it’s like a new Star Wars sequel to the prequel had just been announced

Are there female equivalents? Things that are marketed to little girls, and that catch them at a vulnerable age in similar ways, so that they grow up and, as adults, are still as fixated on whatever it may be as many adult males are on Star Wars or wrestling or comic books?

Considering the marketing angle of the OP question I think 'horses, cats and dogs' don't really fit that criterion. otoh, Disney princesses, Hello Kitty, My Little Pony, Barbie, troll dolls, or multitudes of stuffed animals would all fit the 'marketing' requirement very nicely.

But do girls remain fixated on them into adulthood? I don't have any recent experience to draw on for that, but my sense of it is that very few girls hang onto such interests beyond late teenage at the latest, and those few are very much desperately clinging to those signifiers of innocence like a piece of driftwood that is keeping them from drowning.

They do. Not all of them, but a lot of them.

The amount of adult, childless people outside the LGBTQ+ community who ride hard for classical Disney stuff would blow your mind.

And the thing about youthful fixations on domestic animals or horses is that it kind of does apply in this era of "Dog Mom's" etc. It's a big money industry.

wow some rudeness being spouted here

xp huh? how does LGBTQ+ connect to do with Disney adult standom?

and yes, I definitely have known some obsessive Disney adults, no judgment, everybody deserves to have hobbies that make them happy

I was trying to not say "straight" as a qualifier for "Childless," but what I did say looks worse, and I apologize to anyone I offended.

I don't think anyone is trying to be rude. these replies are by nature broad generalities that will never apply universally, so that if you don't dismiss the question entirely as invalid, then answering it puts one at the mercy of anecdotal personal experience, because what else can one turn to?

so LL, what answers to the question do your experiences and observations lead you to? we'll listen respectfully.

i don't think there is a non-offensive answer to this question tbh

My point (directed at Aimless) was that there are lots of entertainment/cultural properties fandoms that women carry with them as more than "Driftwood" into adulthood. One of things I liked about the Barbie movie was how that was addressed.

my objections fall under the categories of
* gender reductionism
* unnecessary focus on reproductive status
* not understanding what is wrong with a love of animals!?

Since the Barbie movie was cited, I think there is a difference between having a personal link to Barbie through the memory of having an important childhood relationship with that doll and all it meant (past tense) at that age, and remaining "fixated" on Barbie as an adult. My answer was intended to be read in the context of "fixation" and the sort of attachment that implies.

it’s incredibly not great when uninformed dudes opine on their theories about gender and stuff. Please just shut the fuck up.

this literally is like, a question to be asked by 9 year olds and that’s it

my objections fall under the categories of
* gender reductionism
* unnecessary focus on reproductive status
* not understanding what is wrong with a love of animals!?

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera)

co-sign on all of these, particularly gender reductionism. "gendered acculturation". i hear that sometimes as "socialized male". i grew up with the boy stuff. star wars, superhero comics, transformers, all that stuff. baseball. i grew up _loving_ baseball. couldn't play it worth a damn, but i loved the idea of the game.

like the entire premise of "boys love star wars" is faulty. when i was a kid, i had the tat, i had the star wars bedsheets and jabba the hutt t-shirt and some of the "action figures". it was fine. they told me i was a boy and that boys liked star wars and ok, fine, i liked star wars. if i'd been assigned female at birth they would've told me that i should like barbie. barbie seemed alright to me but i didn't like barbie because only girls liked barbie. do i feel like i missed out on some essential feminine experience because i had star wars action figures instead of barbie action figures? no, not really.

i don't see why girls wouldn't like star wars. i don't think star wars is "obviously garbage". fine most of them don't pass the bechdel test, but that was never meant as a serious criterion on which the worth of movies should be evaluated. lots of women were fans of the original star trek, which is just a _terrible_ show when it comes to representing women. people get to like what they like, that's my position. if somebody's a really big fan of star wars, i don't see anything wrong with that. i could roll my eyes and say "Ugh, STAR WARS fans" like i used to when i was snobbier but honestly i don't have an issue until or unless fans start telling me what i am or am not supposed to like. people arguing with me about how _the last jedi_, a movie i really liked, was an Objectively Bad Movie. that irritated me.

i guess i would say that when it came to being a boy, i was a bit of a filthy casual. i'm not a huge star wars fan, but i could imagine myself having a deep and abiding love of "star wars" regardless of my gender. there are corporate media properties that i relate to, that mean more to me than whatever "boyhood" was supposed to mean. "do you like boys or do you like girls?" "i like... watching television." does that make sense? is that weird?

i don't think anyone's premise was that all boys love star wars or that girls could not like star wars. if one goes back to the OP the major premise was that star wars was primarily marketed to boys, but that (quoting OP) "obviously, there are male and female fans of all this stuff".

they told me i was a boy and that boys liked star wars and ok, fine, i liked star wars.

this kind of supports the OP's major premise

These days Minecraft may have replaced Star Wars.

Sometimes there’s a gaggle of girls on the street and a puppy comes along and it’s like a new Star Wars sequel to the prequel had just been announced

You can include me (masculine male) as someone who would react to a puppy in that way too. WTF, how could you not, unless you're a cold, heartless lump

ewok costumes for dogs is a pathway to cuteness some consider to be unnatural...
https://barkpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/test.gif

Yeah but then come the years of videos and blog posts about how much the puppy sucked

this kind of supports the OP's major premise

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

like the post is right there at the top. i can read the post. i mean i guess you can read my post in a way that supports the original premise, despite the fact that i said quote "like the entire premise of 'boys love star wars' is faulty", but honestly, that says a lot about you and very little about me or anyone else in this thread. i don't mean to be rude, but what are you _doing_ in this thread, other than disagreeing with people who have lived experience that you don't?

more star wars pup photos plz

Women, eh? What’s that about?

With two weeks left of school, I decided to let the kids sit wherever they want.

The boys put all their desks in one big group and named it Fart Island.

The girls made a similar group and named it The Tortured Poets Department.

— KD 📚🌎🌊🇺🇸 (@kdnerak33) June 3, 2024

can we lock this thread and the “pictures of men who look like lesbians” thread