there’s this specific brand of lazy media criticism seen on tumblr and twitter that I like to call “checklist criticism”. it is called like this because it consists on checking for the presence of superficial signifiers of a Bad Trope™ (as if going through a static checklist) in a given piece of media and declaring said piece of media to be, therefore, bad, without taking into account factors such as context, nuances, the handling, the framing, and, most importantly, what makes this bad trope bad in first place, and if the harm it usually causes is still being perpetrated in this particularly story given the aforementioned contextual variables.
an example of checklist criticism that happens a lot is the common “[x] this tv show has a female character [x] who dies before the show is over, therefore = Woman In The Refrigerator™, show bad!” Okay but, how did she died? What were the circumstances around her death? What purpose did it serve in the larger story? Did she die just to advance someone else’s story or she died fulfilling her own arc? Did she had any agency in the way she went or was she a passive victim of circumstance? Was her death dignified or unnecessarily violent? Are there any other important female characters that make it to the end? The Woman In The Refrigerator™ trope is not bad because women dying in fiction is inherently bad – if no female character were ever allowed to die, even in war or crime or post-apocalypt fiction, there’d be very low stakes for female characters, and low stakes mean very little reason to care about them. The WITR trope is bad because it’s about treating female characters as more expendable than male ones, banalizing violence against women in fiction, and cutting short female representation from pieces of fiction – which, most of the time, is already low. A female character whose death has an actual point in her own storyline, who’s afforded the same weight and dignity as male character’s deaths, and in a story where there’s no shortage of other female characters that survive the end of the story, is not a Fridged Woman, she’s just a female character who dies.
Another example – and here I’m taking an example from my own identity, so I don’t get accused of stepping on anyone’s feet – would be something like “this book has a [x] latina character, she’s [x] loud and spontaneous, she likes to [x] flirt and sleep around. Spicy Latina™! Book racist!” Okay, is she a caricature of a loud and spontaneous latina or is she a fully realized human being with a fully rounded personality, including dreams and wishes and opinions and vulnerabilities and agency, who just happens to be spontaneous, like so many people across multiple ethnicities happen to be? Is being flirty and spontaneous her only character traits or does she have more (that may go against other stereotypes about latinas)? Is her flirtness and sexuality framed in a fetishistic way that favors a (white) male gaze or it is framed in a nuanced way that prioritizes her pov and her agency and her pleasure and her happiness? Did the author really give her those traits because they’re a lazy fuck that couldn’t think of other traits to give his latina character other than spontaneous and flirty or do those characters traits have an actual point in the context of this particular story? Again: keep in mind why bad tropes are bad in first place.
We live in a time where reductive criticisms are an easy source of clout over actually thoughtful and deep analysis that don’t easily lend themselves to the type of short and snappy hot takes for twitok format and I’m exhausted.
Like, this lack of understanding of what makes certain bad tropes bad is how we ended up with a plethora of male writers patting themselves in the back for creating a ~deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope~ by writing stories where the male protagonist has to learn that the girl they assigned as their personal MPDG is not interested in fixing him, while still making it all about their male protagonists POV and their story and their arc. The MPDG is not bad because women being quirky is bad or because people helping their partners grow is bad. The MPDG is bad because it’s about women being narrative tools with no inner life helping the growth of the male protagonist, and if you write a story where she still has no personhood and is still pretty much defined by your male protag’s view of her you’re not changing anything just because the dude has to learn by the end that his view of her was wrong and she never wanted to save him. you still wrote a story about a flat female character that helps the pov male protag learn a lesson, only this time it was a different lesson, you just changed the window dressing.
it’s easy to assume that because ‘smart’ people see flaws in things that ‘dumb’ people are happy with, the more flaws you can spot, the smarter you must be!
and that’s not how it works. deep analysis takes time, effort, thought, learning, and curiosity, and not everyone–even ‘smart’ people!–are up for digging that deeply into everything they see.
the point of media analysis shouldn’t be to be the smartest guy with the most correct answers faster than anyone else. the point is that the process of engaging deeply and thoughtfully with things is its own reward. you are supposed to enjoy stuff. you’re supposed to enjoy thinking about stuff. you’re supposed to enjoy learning about stuff. it’s hard work, but it’s good work! and it’ll get you a lot further in life than trashing shit just to look good.
