Anyways, today's video is brought to you by a donation from Michael. He wants me to cover how female film characters in recent films are effecting teenage girls. This is what he has to say: "I'd like you to say something about how our media is brainwashing teenage girls. Please take a look at Hunger Games, Twilight, or Divergent..I'm sure you'll find some similarities and inspiration..." Thanks for your suggestion Michael. The first thing about these three film series that stands out to me is that they were all written by women. Stephanie Meyer wrote the Twilight series, Suzanne Collins wrote The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth wrote Divergent. I remember growing up and watching Dystopian films that were written with male characters in mind. Films like Brazil, Dark City, The Matrix come to mind. And then all of a sudden about 10 years ago dystopian films started appearing that have young women as agents of change. Female characters are being written in these types of works in popular culture where they are either rescuing society from evil men and/or they have a band of merry men aiding them in their goal or reshaping society or fighting the system. Historically, revolutions have always been the domain of free thinking men. Women did not participate in violence unless they used men as their proxy agents. And now we are seeing female authors write female characters that are increasingly stronger and have more agency over society. In my opinion this is mostly mental masturbation on the part of these authors. JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter trilogy and she had Hermione as one of the three lead characters in the series. If you watch the films you'll see Ron, her eventual husband as a weakling. Harry Potter is more of an alpha male and protagonist, but even then you can't really say that. He still looks like a spaghetti armed weakling and wuss. Hermione is a tough cookie and appears to be the most strong willed of the three. And for a while After Harry Potter we had the Twilight series take the lead. And unlike Harry Potter which had an implied love triangle in the twilight series the love triangle is more apparent then ever.
