A few days ago, I wrote a post on why critics tend to dislike the trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or the quirky female who raises a male protagonist’s mood through wacky antics so that he could stop being so gloomy. I said that it was because the MPDG, for all her flaws, nonetheless satisfies a man’s emotional needs, but any woman written that way is largely considered sexist by mainstream critics and creatives.
As it so happened, the Literature Devil came out with an hour-and-a-half long video talking about how heroism and villainy are portrayed in modern popular culture.
In summary, modern mainstream creatives prefer villains to heroes because villains have fewer constraints on their behavior, allowing them to take whatever actions they want, irrespective of whether such actions are moral. By contrast, heroes are constrained by their virtues and have to take action while maintaining virtue, for if they break those virtues, they can easily slide into self-indulgence, and ultimately, villainy. While there’s substantially more in the video, this is the most important point he makes.
But what do superheroes and supervillains have to do with romance? Everything.
Just as modern creatives shun the hero and embrace the villain because the villain is more free, they shun the devoted wife or girlfriend for similar reasons. If the female must emotionally satisfy her boyfriend, this limits her behavior; she is not free to do whatever she pleases, since like the hero and his virtue, she has her own virtue to uphold, which she values more than total freedom. Not for nothing is the female protagonist of a romance called the “heroine.”
Look at virtually any “how to write women” guide online, and note what is almost always attacked: female devotion to a man, especially if he is the hero of the story. Just as the virtuous hero is saddled with the “cookie-cutter uncomplicated good guy” stereotype, the devoted girlfriend is also branded a stereotype and is therefore considered Bad Writing™, as a way of denigrating virtue generally.
Not femininity. Not girlish attire like heels or skirts. Not sex and sexiness. Devotion to a man is regarded as the cardinal sin for a female character written by modern-day creatives.
Heroes must be motivated by selfish drives, not morality, while heroines must be free-floating people who don’t care about their man, if they have one to begin with. Virtue sets unrealistic heroism standards and unrealistic devotion standards; it’s easier to just be a jerk.
Thus, virtue must be abolished.
As we see here, everything wrong with modern pop culture is connected.
